THE FIRST TIME

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE - A GIRL LIKE YOU

"I've never known a girl like you before

Now just like in a song from days of yore

Here you come knocking, knocking on my door

Well, I've never met a girl like you before"

EDWYN COLLINS (From the album "Gorgeous George" (1994))

Sent: February 13th, 1999

From: ThatWitterGuy

To: AGirlNamedJoey

Subject: The Continuation

Hi, Joey. Sorry about the abrupt way, I ended my last e-mail, but I thankfully just made it to that next class on time. To answer your question first and put your mind at ease: Yes, Hannah wasn´t shy when it came to putting the moves on me, but I hope that you´ll be glad to hear, that I turned her down. It happened the day after we´d presented our project to the class, which we got a B-Plus on, by the way ...

Pacey rarely spent an evening at the house, that had been his home since his childhood. With it only being him and his mom left there now and the two of them not having a whole lot to talk about, past the usual questions about how the day had gone, it had become like a tomb there, when it came to how much life there was left in the house. It still beat the thought of living with his dad, but he´d already made up his mind that he would be out of that house the day after high school ended and the likelihood that he´d spend a second looking back was practically non-existent. However, with a small mountain of homework to get through and only until the day after to get most of it done, what he needed was an evening without distractions and that was the one thing his room provided him with in plenty. As a general rule, none of his friends had ever come to visit him there outside of his birthdays, back when he was a kid and his parents could still put up somewhat of a front of being a happy couple, when they in reality probably couldn´t stand the sight of one another, even back then. Of course, rules are also made to be broken.

He´d been making solid progress during the afternoon and evening, with him only having taken a short break to eat dinner and otherwise kept his mind on his work. To his own satisfaction, he was actually so well ahead on time, that he´d even begun doing some of the homework that he didn´t absolutely have to get finished by the day after, when he´d heard their doorbell ring downstairs. Thinking that it was probably someone, who was there to talk to him mom, he didn´t pay it much mind, until he heard what unmistakably sounded like two pairs of footsteps approaching his door. His interest now piqued, he got up from his chair and opened his door, where he was as surprised, as he´d ever been to see anything, to see Hannah standing there next to his mom, wearing a stunning looking blue designer dress with a Gucci purse flung over her shoulders, that combined between them probably had cost at least twice as much as everything inside his room had, if you added the cost of it all together.

"You have a visitor, Pacey. She says that her name is Hannah. Is this who I think it is?" his mom had to ask, since this was quite clearly the WTF moment of a lifetime for her as well!

"It is, Ma. What I don´t have a clue about is why she´s here and dressed to attend a yacht club party" he asked leadingly, getting a small smile out of Hannah, while his mom still looked as confused as ever.

"This is just what I wear on a normal day, Mrs. Witter. I´m just here to talk to him about our school project, if that´s okay?" Hannah asked his mom in a way that seemed almost humble, like she was deliberately making it seem like she gave a damn what a woman like his mom thought about her coming there or about anything, for that matter. A neat trick in how to humanize yourself, when you´re hundreds of times richer than practically anyone you talk to, that she´d no doubt been taught from home. Or so, he guessed to himself in that moment.

"I guess so. We don´t have anything at home that I can offer you, that would be fitting of someone like, well ... one of your kind!" his mom got out nervously.

"It´s fine, Mrs. Witter! You have a lovely home here, you really do" Hannah continued to flatter his mom, who soon left them alone.

"Thanks" he more or less sincerely told Hannah, who was just about to sit down on his bed, while he closed the door to keep him mom from listening in (like he knew, that she´d probably try to, seeing as it was the first and very likely only time that a piece of Bonafide "Capeside Royalty" had or ever would enter her small and humble home).

"For what?"

"For making my mom think that your family gives a damn about the people, who keep you in money. You probably don´t know or care, but she´s been working for your family in one way or the other, ever since she was in high school".

"Is that so? Not that it means anything to me what you think about me or my family, but you really have an issue with rich people, don´t you?"

"Are you here to change my mind? If you are, let me be the first to tell you, that you´re wasting your time. Just so you know, it isn´t all rich people, I have issues with. Only those, who made their money off the misery of others" he responded bluntly. It wasn´t much of a secret around town, that Hannah´s family not only had been keeping the town under an iron grip for almost a century, but also hadn´t been above using dirty tactics to keep any competition to their own business empire out of their private little neck of the woods. Or, what some people would refer to as mob methods, but no one in Capeside would dare to use a phrase like that about the esteemed Von Wenning family, who meant so much to the town´s economy, that they´d practically become synonymous with the town as a whole over the many decades that they´d effectively ruled in it.

"Why should I care how we´ve made our money? If you have a problem with it, I suggest that you try bringing it up in the next town hall meeting! Look, Pacey, I´m not here to talk about our project, which we´ve finished anyway, or to discuss the differences between rich and poor with you. How´s that girlfriend of yours, who´s over on the other side of the world?"

"Fine. Not that it´s your business" he told her off sharply, while subconsciously beginning to back off from her, over to the open window.

"You´re right, it isn´t my business and I won´t even pretend that I care one way or the other, what happens to your precious little Joey" she began softly, as she began to get so far up close to him, that he could smell her perfume mixed with a light fruity fragrance coming from her freshly washed hair. "I´ve always been a girl, who got what I wanted, Pacey. If I wanted a pony or a new bicycle, all I had to do was use the right kind of sad puppy dog eyes on my parents and presto! Soon after, what I wanted was mine! You can imagine that going from that, to not having any of what I want, kind of blows a big one!"

"I´m sure that all of those starving children in third world countries would take one look at your life and feel as sorry for you, as I do!" he joked sarcastically and backed further off, to where he was now in actual danger of falling out of his own window, if he took one more step backwards. Hannah though, kept coming closer and closer to himself, to where she was lightly pressing her body up against his.

"I´ll be totally blunt here, Pacey. You were my first crush and there´s a part of me that wants to live that fantasy out, before I get back on my parent´s good side and I can leave this backwater dump behind forever. If I don´t die of boredom first, whichever comes first!"

"I´m sort of taken here, Hannah!"

"I didn´t say that I wanted to start anything serious with you! You don´t think that I would become the laughingstock of my entire family, if I brought you as my date to one of our family parties? I´m not sure that my parents wouldn´t disown me in a second, if I brought you home and presented you as my new boyfriend, so no one can know about it! Joey won´t have to know the slightest itty-bitty thing about it either. By the time she comes back to this sorry excuse for a town, I´ll be back where I belong, in a well-to-do private school that puts that pitiful Capeside High to shame and in a city, that´s worth living in, and you´ll never have to worry about hearing from me again. For all I´ll care, you and Joey can continue your wild and crazy romance, get married, perhaps even raise a few kids here and live happily ever after, with my fullest possible blessing. Heck, I´ll even send you two a great, big wedding present, if you want me to!"

"I´m not interested!" he tried telling her off, even if being wanted like this by an admittedly rather attractive girl like Hannah was involuntarily making the blood rush southwards in his body.

"You didn´t allow me to finish, Pacey. My family isn´t just rich, we hold a lot of power in this community, as I´m sure you know. Your dad is up for re-election for sheriff next year, am I right?"

"Yeah" was all he said, not liking where this was going.

"Our family has always supported him, in spite of all of those around here, who say that he´s a lush, who gets drunk on the job at least every other day and that ever since his wife, your mom, kicked his drunken ass out, he´s been spending practically all of his after-work hours making an ass of himself in the bars around town. It makes you ask yourself, if that´s really the kind of man that you want to be in charge of something that´s as important as our local police force, doesn´t it?"

"His job is all that he has left! Without it, he´ll fall apart!" he blurted out, even surprising himself that he felt the need to jump to his dad´s aid, when the way his dad had treated him throughout his childhood had done little to warrant it.

"Which is why I´m sure that having the support of the wealthiest family in town wouldn´t hurt his re-election bid. I don´t think that my folks care much either way who´s chief of police here, as long as they don´t stick their noses in our private business affairs".

"Have you been watching too many soap operas lately? Or were you born without a soul, like I´m willing to bet on is the case?"

"Let´s talk about you directly, then and how being my boy-toy for the next couple of months would be beneficial to you. Let´s be honest, Pacey, for as cute as you are, you don´t have close to the intelligence to go to college. It´s guys like you, who wind up doing the untrained jobs for the companies, that we own. When high school comes to an end, you´ll have to find yourself a career around here and should I feel like it, I could be very helpful in that regard. It´s all up you" she whispered, with her mouth only a few inches away from his own, as he stood there unable to move and not knowing how to react to being wanted in this way by a girl, who wasn´t his current and so far only ever, girlfriend.

"You can have a day or two to think about it, but don´t take too long. I´m a lot of things but known for my patience isn´t one of them" she told him on her way out of the door, leaving him there with both an unwanted quarter-boner and worse yet, the kind of dilemma, that you usually only heard about happening in movies, books or TV series.

Afterwards, he found it impossible to do any more studying that evening.

The weather on his bike ride to school the day after fitted perfectly with his mood, in that it was all grey skies with a slight drizzle, that was just enough of an annoyance to bring his mental state to a near rock bottom, by the time he arrived at the high school for the eight hours of mostly boredom that awaited him there.

He knew that Hannah was probably right in saying, that he wouldn´t be going to college and while he didn´t exactly trust her to keep up her end of the deal, should he falter to her demands, there was no doubt that if she was telling the truth, it would mean that he´d never have any trouble finding work in Capeside again. As it stood now and with his dad not exactly being the most popular among the businesses in town (thanks to him having busted several of them over the years, either for doing some "creative book-keeping" or as it was in most cases, having illegal immigrants without green cards working for them), it wasn´t like any of them would be lining up to give him a chance. Doug was lucky that he had a job for life with the Police force to help him pay the bills, or he´d probably have trouble finding work here too, in spite of never having broken the rules a single time in his entire life. Considering Pacey´s own past of usually doing the opposite of what Doug would have done in any given scenario, what chance did he have of ever becoming anything more in Capeside than an afterthought, who worked his ass off for minimum wage and would always have the knowledge, that if he got fired, finding a new job would be harder than finding a needle in a haystack? There was the option of him moving away to perhaps Boston, or one of the other bigger cities in the upper North-Western corner of the US after school ended, and which choices Joey made would no doubt end up effecting his own as well. The last thing he wanted to be though, was a ball and chain to her and in the worst-case scenario, drag her down to the level that he was sure to end up at.

The school day had more or less gone by in a haze and most of, if not all of the conversations he´d had with his friends, had gone right in through one ear and out of the other. What he´d felt like most of all after it was done, was to go home and catch up on a few hours of the sleep, he´d lost out on the night before, with Hannah´s indecent proposal clogging his mind up too much for him to find much in the way of rest. He had a study session with Andie set up however and knowing that she wasn´t one to take no for an answer and that he needed her tutoring badly, if he wasn´t going to be a sophomore again after the summer vacation was over, made him decide to bite the proverbial bullet and try to make the most of it.

"So, have you thought about who you´re taking to the dance next week?" Andie asked casually, while they were getting their books out. She´d chosen a small, relatively newly opened cafe just down the street from the school for their study session, and clearly wasn´t the only tutor from their school, who´d gotten that same idea. The owner didn´t seem to mind one bit having his cafe overrun with a bunch of teenagers however, and while this new-found clientele of his were a bunch of light tippers, the service they got there was still more than enough to satisfy them, and one presented with a wide smile.

"I still don´t know if I´m going or not. I mean, who would I even go there with? Jen is going to it with your brother, Dawson and Mary-Beth will surely be so wrapped up in one another, that he won´t have time to talk all evening. Anyway, someone has to be there to work at the video store and if Jen and Dawson are both going, that only leaves little old me to take up the reigns in their stead".

"All I´m hearing is excuses!" Andie teasingly chirped back and sent him an adorable smile, that he couldn´t help himself from returning in kind. If Hannah was the spawn of Satan himself, then Andie was without a doubt his guardian angel, who was sent there to protect him from girls like the future heir to the Von Wenning family fortune. If there hadn´t been a girl on the other side of the world in their way, he would have asked that rather frail looking blonde cutie out long ago and if things had gone, like he suspected they would have, they´d probably be almost as in love with one another by now, as he was with the girl that he wanted to be with more than anything, only he wouldn´t be able to for a long time to come yet.

"So, did Ty ask you to be his date for this upcoming display of teenage hormones, when it´s at its absolute worst?" he asked her and the shy smile on her face told him that even if Ty hadn´t done so, it wasn´t because he´d gotten the feeling, that Andie didn´t want him to.

"He has a family thing that weekend, so he can´t go".

"You have my sympathies, McPhee! I wouldn´t worry too much over it though, if I were you. I´m sure that church-boy will eventually fall for your undeniable charms, if he hasn´t already" he told her, without considering how a compliment like that might have sounded to her ears.

"I have "Undeniable Charms"? You´re the first guy to think so!" she replied through a smile that couldn´t hide how flattered she was, that he´d said such a nice thing to her.

"I´m sure that plenty of others have too, they just didn´t tell you and you didn´t pick up on it. Listen, Andie. If Ty can´t see that he´s got the chance to haul in the biggest catch of the female variety around here, that´s available to him, then he isn´t worth wasting your time on".

"In case you hadn´t noticed, Pacey, it isn´t like the boys have exactly been flocking towards me, since I got here! I guess, I just don´t have whatever it is that the boys here are looking for in a girlfriend!"

"And what do you think that is?" he couldn´t help himself from asking, even if it was a little underhanded of him to put her on the spot like this.

"I don´t know! Cleavage? I can´t come up with any other department, that I´m lacking in!" she joked and for the first time all day, he let out an honest and heartfelt laugh.

"Andie, I know that you´re very inexperienced, when it comes to boys, so let me explain something to you for once, instead of it always being you who teaches me stuff. If a guy is only into you, because he likes your rack, all he´s going to care about is getting you in bed with him and girls like you, Jen, Joey and all of the other true catches among that strange species known as teenage girls, deserve so much more than that! It´s also why it´s so frustrating to see you make the wrong choices so often, but what can you do? They are still your choices to make, even if I don´t happen to agree with them all of the time" he explained to her, just before a fleeting idea entered his mind.

"You are hopefully aware that girls aren´t a species onto our own, Pacey? Because if you aren´t, then we really need to get cracking on those biology textbooks!" she joked back, although he could easily see that what he´d said meant a lot more for her to hear, than it had meant for him to say it.

"I´m not that much of a hopeless case, I assure you! Here´s an idea: Why don´t we go to the dance together as friends? We´ll dance a little, have some punch and after we´re done dancing, we can make fun of all of those hopeless dancers, of which there´s bound to be many more, than you´ve seen in your life at the same time ever before! Believe me, the standard for what they call dancing here is extremely low! What do you think?" he asked her and the wide ear-to-ear smile and small nod that he got from her told him that he´d at least done something worthwhile that day.

"Pacey, Pacey, Pacey! You really haven´t learned the first thing about us girls yet, have you?" Jen scolded him, while they were helping one another with putting the multitude of returns away, that they´d gotten in at Screen Time, over an incredibly short amount of time.

"What did I do now?" he had to ask, since he truthfully had no idea!

"Andie has had a crush on you, practically since she moved here! It isn´t hard to see why, with how nice you´ve been to her and Jack, but how could you not have seen it?" she asked and as if by reflex, he started shaking his head.

"Lindley, I know that your highly well-developed radar when it comes to those things is usually right on the money, but it isn´t me that she has her eyes on. It´s that Ty guy, although I have no clue what she sees in him. I wouldn´t have asked her otherwise!"

"Pacey, try putting yourself in Andie´s very small shoes. She can´t just tell you that she likes you, so of course she´ll make up some crush on some other guy, so you won´t suspect it! Playing these games is a very teenage girl thing to do, in case you didn´t know!"

This was just what he needed, another girl who wanted to get it on with him! Why couldn´t this have happened half a year earlier, before he´d hooked up with Joey and still felt hopelessly single?

"Is this a pheromone thing, that girls are suddenly into me, now that they know that they can´t have me? It can´t just be that they all want what they can´t have!"

"Who´s the other girl? You said "Girls"?"

"I meant ... girls in general" he replied quickly, thinking on his feet, the best he could.

"It´s Hannah, isn´t it? Let me venture a wild guess here, she made a pass at you and wasn´t apologetic over it in the slightest?" Jen asked him and once again, he had to be thoroughly impressed with the sixth sense, that girl had been born with!

"How did you ..."

"I knew far more than my share of Hannah´s back home in New York! Stuck up, completely spoiled rotten girls, who have never heard the word "no" being said to them before and because of that, they wind up thinking that there isn´t anything, they can´t have! To know that I was one step away from becoming one of them is enough to send shivers down my spine! The sad part is that they usually get what they want and here I am, almost four months past my last date and I´ve been crushing on a guy for weeks on end, who still hasn´t shown the slightest interest in getting anything on with me! Sorry, that last part was just me letting out some of my own teenage frustrations!"

"You´re entitled to them, all things considered! And yes, you´re right. Hannah made a pass at me, but I also gave her a hard pass back!" he told Jen, more or less truthfully.

"Good for you, Pacey! What you have with Joey is way too important to throw away over some fling with a girl, who we both know will use you up and spit you out!"

"I couldn´t agree with you more" he answered and thanks to their little conversation, his mind was finally made up on what to do about his "Hannah Situation".

Turning Hannah down had turned out to be relatively easy and he´d done so the day after at school, where he´d left a note in her locker, telling her to meet him in the gym during the lunch break. She didn´t seem to him like she cared a whole lot one way or the other, although she did warn him on her way out, that whatever happened from now on, would be all on him.

An ominous warning for sure, but at least she was out of his hair for now!

... I just want to be open to you about these things, Honey. Trust me, there´s no need for you to start sharpening your fighting skills over there in France, in anticipation for a fight with Hannah that won´t ever happen. With any luck, she´ll be far away at some private school by the time you get back and she won´t even have been a blip on our radar!

I love you so much and I can´t wait to see you again!

Pacey.

Sent: February 13th, 1999

From: AGirlNamedJoey

To: ThatWitterGuy

Subject: I´m sorry!

Hi, Pacey. I´m so sorry if my last e-mail made it sound like I doubted for a second, that you would stay faithful to me! Of course, I trust you indefinitely and I hope that you feel the same way, when it comes to me! I can´t wait to hold you again and for us to be in our birthday suits together again! At least once a day, I find myself thinking back to those evenings that we had together in the storeroom and when I do, it fills me with a warm feeling inside to know that the days are counting down rapidly to when we´ll get to do those (pleasurable) things to each other again.

I love you so much, that I can´t put it into words!

Joey.

END OF CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE