THE FIRST TIME

CHAPTER THREE - ONLY HAPPY WHEN IT RAINS

"I'm only happy when it rains

I'm only happy when it's complicated

And though I know you can't appreciate it

I'm only happy when it rains

You know I love it when the news is bad

Why does it feel so good to feel so sad?

I'm only happy when it rains"

GARBAGE (From the album "Garbage" (1995))

Jen was already in a foul mood, by the time she got to school that morning. One thing was that her beloved grandfather, a man she loved ever so dearly and had been the one person in her entire family, she felt like had understood where she was coming from, was now clearly on death's door and there was no turning back, when it came to him biting the bullet sooner, rather than later. Just seeing him in that vegetative state every day would be enough to make anyone feel miserable inside. On top of it, there was also the situation that she'd managed to get herself into, in what (even for the very high bar, she´d set so far in her fifteen years on Earth) felt like record time to her. Not only did she have a guy pining after her, that she really couldn't see herself in any sort of romantic relationship with, but she'd also begun to fall for her new bestie's boyfriend and there were little to no signs, that she would have any chance of this ending with anything, except for the usual huge disappointment for her, whenever it came to love and all that other romantic stuff.

Did she really like Pacey though, or was it just her (as per her usual) getting jealous over another girl she knew having found, what it seemed like it was impossible for herself to find? When she lived back home in NYC, it would happen way too frequently. As much as she hated to admit it, she'd knowingly sabotaged several budding romances among her those in her old social circle, even if she'd already known before doing it, that she would end up feeling a hundred times worse afterwards (which had happened without fault every single time). It wasn´t even like she could say why she´d done it exactly, except that misery loves company and she´d wanted those around her to feel even worse, than she did, if that was at all possible.

"That was the old Jen, though. This is the new Jen, who´s starting fresh without any of that old baggage weighing her down! A rational and even-tempered girl, who´ll make all of the right choices, go to college, get her fancy education, make her parents proud and all of that other gooey stuff, she used to laugh at being a possibility for herself in the future", she kept repeating as a mantra in her thoughts, so that maybe, just maybe, she would start believing that it could happen for real.

Then again, could a leopard with an incredibly shady past like her own, really change its spots from day to day, on a pure inner desire to change and nothing else? Sometimes, she wondered if it was at all possible, but the realist in her knew that she didn't have other options, than to try her absolute hardest. This was, when push comes to shove, her last realistic chance to avoid ending up as yet another screwed-up rich kid, destined to end up either dead or in jail before she turned twenty. If this didn't work out, she would no doubt find herself in an even worse situation, than she was in now, living in a small town, she didn't feel like she belonged in at all and most of time not feeling like she was at home there, having her feeling homesick every day. Her parents (in another of their many misguided attempts at parenting) had already threatened more than once, to send her to the strictest boarding school, they could find, if she got caught drinking or doing drugs even once again and she wasn´t in any doubt, that after how incredibly low she´d sunk during her last utterly depraved drinking binges back in New York, they meant business this time.

All it would take was the slightest word of her causing trouble reaching either of her parents´ ears through Grams, or any of their "Spies" among Capeside´s rich elite (some of whom she knew her folks were in regular contact with) and she would be sent her off to what on paper at least, sounded like her own worst nightmare come true. She wanted with all of her heart to change too, it wasn´t that and to be honest, she´d grown to despise the girl she´d turned into by the end of her wild and crazy party girl days. The days of her hating herself all the time and doing dumb things like drinking and filling her head with mind-altering drugs, just so she could forget about how completely miserable, she´d constantly felt inside, weren´t days that she felt like ever revisiting again. On the other hand, she didn´t feel like she constantly had to put on this sugary sweet "Good Girl Act" all the time back home and at some point, her new friends were almost bound to find out what the real, truly messed up inside Jen Lindley was like. Would they be able to take the sight of it however? That was the big question.

There thankfully had been one enormous bright spot, who went by the name of Joey, and while Jen had all her life been nothing short of terrible, when it came to making friends with girls, she'd found a kindred spirit in the tall brunette, who had a past that was almost as troubled as her own. What they had begun to develop was the kind of wholesome friendship, she´d only ever seen other girls have with each other and always envied them for. Just because she was having these stupid feelings for Joey's boyfriend, didn't mean that she was ready to do anything to ruin what Joey had found with Pacey, or their own blossoming friendship for that matter.

Acting on instinct would have been what the old Jen would have done and would no doubt have led to Joey hating her guts. In turn, it would surely lead to her ending up yet again hating herself and in all likelihood acting out and doing something self-destructive, like she always used to in the past. The new Jen would be a constantly supporting friend, who had nothing in her life to be ashamed of and was someone, that could say that she was proud of the one she´d become, or at least so she kept telling herself. In the back of her mind though, there was also still a constantly lingering fear, that the bad Jen would rear her ugly head again and ruin something great for her good self, before it had a chance to get properly started.

Whatever was to happen in the coming weeks and months, she was sure that it would be a case of her feeling damned in advance, no matter what the outcome would be. Such was the plight of being Jennifer Lindley.

"You, entering a beauty contest? Thanks, Jo, I really needed a good pick-me-up laugh after those sleep-inducing morning classes!" Pacey grinningly said, which only got a scowl for him from his girlfriend, who was standing right in front of him.

"Is it that you don't think, I have a of chance winning?" she asked him back, while trying to sound annoyed at him. Not that she really was, of course, but she figured that if she made him feel bad enough, it could pay off in the form of him wanting to spoil her (even more than he usually did) as an apology later on.

"You know, I didn´t mean it like that! Of course, you can win! I believe that you can do anything, you set your mind to. Thoroughly!" he apologizingly told her back and it would have been another sweet moment, if it hadn´t been for Abby´s mocking laughter coming from nearby. Whatever sadist had decided to place Abby´s locker only four lockers down from her own had better be gone by the next schoolyear, where their lockers would hopefully be on opposite sides of the school. Or preferably in diametrically different parts of the world, but even Joey knew that was probably another pipedream of hers.

"You, win a beauty contest? It isn´t a charity, where they choose the one with the best sap story, Joey! You actually need to have style and elegance, two things that are as foreign to you, as eating slugs is to the people of Capeside!" Abby said half-laughingly, in that way that just made Joey want to punch her lights out, right then and there, damned the trouble she would surely find herself in afterwards!

"They don´t eat slugs in France, they eat one kind of snail. Anyway, who asked for your opinion?" Pacey tried defending Joey with, even if she wished that he hadn´t, since he´d clearly put Abby on the warpath yet again.

"Just because no one ever asks for it, doesn´t mean that it would hurt them to hear it!" Abby snarled back at them.

"Doesn´t it bother you, that no one cares what you think about anything ever, Abby?" Joey retorted and from the look on Abby´s face, this meant that the fight, whatever it would end up consisting of, was on!

"Okay, I´ll make you a bet. We both enter that beauty contest and if I finish above you, I get one French kiss from your boyfriend, right in front of your eyes!" the little harpy suggested, as the stare down between them grew into such intensity, that it even began to make Pacey uncomfortable.

"Okay, but if I finish above you, you have to kiss my ass! Literally! In front of all of my friends! And I get to have a picture taken of it for my own future enjoyment!" Joey fired back her, while hoping desperately in the back of her mind, that her honestly ludicrous suggestion would make her enemy stand down.

"You´re on! Like there´s any way, I could lose to a human disaster zone like you! I´ll be looking forward to that kiss, Pacey!" Abby grinningly said, before heading off to class.

It didn´t take many moments for Joey to feel like trash over what had happened and Pacey´s look of disappointment in her didn´t help either.

"Next time, do me the favor of asking me before you start making more bets, that involve me potentially having to kiss girls, that make the thought of having an all-out tongue tango session with an especially vicious Electric Eel, sound like a pleasant alternative!" he scolded her. She knew very well that she deserved it, this one time at least, so she tried to look as apologetic, as she could.

"I´m so sorry, Pace! She just gets to me every time, that bitch!" Joey groaned annoyedly.

"You don´t think that she only riles you up, because she knows that you´ll fall for it and react like this and she gets her Ya-Hoo´s that way?" Pacey suggested and it honestly hadn´t dawned on her before, crazy as it may sound. Of course, Abby was only doing this to get a rise out of her and like the complete and utter dumbass she´d been a few moments earlier, she´d walked right into that Banshee´s trap! Now, she actually HAD to enter that contest AND finish above Abby, at any cost! Just thinking about the alternative was enough to make the bile rise up in her throat.

"Please tell me, you didn´t just do that, you retarded, braindead moron!" Abby thought to herself, as she slumped down in her chair, ready for yet another hour of mind-numbingly boring school to be taken out of her youth. She´d already known before the words came out of her mouth, that there was no way she would beat Joey in that contest and even if she did, it would still mean that she would have to kiss Pacey, of all people! Just the thought alone, that she would be getting it on with Joey Potter´s sloppy seconds, was enough to make her gag and that was presently the best possible outcome! Sure, he was attractive and no doubt in her top ten, when it came to who the hottest guys (based on looks alone) were at school but knowing that her first kiss would be her sticking her own lips where Joey´s had probably been just before her own was barf inducing, to say the least!

Who would have thought that Joey was actually mad enough at her, to take up a stupid bet like that? Abby thought for sure that she would have backed down, because let´s be real here. Joey Potter in a beauty contest? For the life of her, she just couldn´t picture Joey in that kind of situation, any more than she could picture herself in it. And now she actually had to enter one! And not only that, one where everyone she knew from school would be there to undoubtedly see her make a total ass of herself? She had to think of some way out of it and it needed to happen ASAP!

The only alternative, as she saw it, was to apologize to Joey and she couldn´t do that either. It would throw the entire power balance between them off and now that Joey had a boyfriend, that Abby was far too aware that lots of girls at school envied her for, it would put herself below Joey in the school pecking order among the girls, meaning that she would be at the absolute bottom! With nowhere lower to fall!

When exactly had she turned into this friendless loser, who repelled everyone with her constant acting out, because of her constant frustrations over her own life? These last years of first her parents constantly fighting and then her mom sinking into a depression (after her dad had left them high and dry with herself getting no more than an "I don´t know when we´ll see one another again, Abby", before he was out of the door (still yet to be seen again btw), the one thought she could count on to cheer her up, was that if nothing else, Joey´s life was worse, than her own was. The way things looked now, her rival was doing all sorts of great and all she had was her mom, her mom´s stupid depression and her parents´ stupid divorce, that she wished would just go through, so they could all try to go back to some kind of normal!

She had to deal with one problem at a time on the other hand and right now, the biggest one she´d inflicted on herself, was getting out of the disastrously terrible bet, she´d just made with a girl that she knew better than anyone, had less than zero love lost for herself. Just when she was thinking of alternative ways to get out of it, into her classroom walked a potential wild card, who could prove herself to be a useful ally. That girl from New York, she´d had Saturday detention with a few months earlier.

Jen had started to like school more than the afternoons that followed them, strange as it may sound. At school, she now had friends around her, who were constantly there to offer her their moral support, when she needed to hear it and now that she had the right motivation to try to be the best student, she could be, some of the classes had begun to fascinate her as well. Not all of them, it goes without saying, and the teacher standard at Capeside High was clearly very uneven, still all in all, she couldn´t deny that it had become the highlight of most of her weekdays.

The afternoons were a different story. Basically, she had four alternatives. Go to the video store and hang out with Dawson and Pacey, which after the boring evening she´d had there a few days earlier, wasn´t an option she would be seriously considering, for the next short while at the least. She could go home, of course and be constantly reminded of her grandfather´s imminent death, if she wasn´t getting schooled by Grams again on why it was important that she started going to church and studying the bible. This was why she usually wouldn´t come home until right before dinnertime and then try to be out the door again, as fast as humanly possible, after they were done eating. She could go down and hang out with Joey at the restaurant, but she could tell from the way Bessie had looked at her the last time, she´d kept Joey away from her work, that unless she was there to be a paying customer, she would be best off in limiting her number of visits.

The final option, as she saw it, was to find a private spot down by the pier and do her homework there, before she headed back to the depressing place, she called home. Today was a nice day for it too, seeing as the weather was still quite nice and most of the tourists had left town. She managed to find a bench with only a few people in sight around, overlooking the water, and had just gotten out her math homework from her school bag, when she heard a voice coming from behind her.

"Is there room for two on that bench?" Abby asked and Jen turned around to see the girl, she´d only really ever talked to once before, smiling back at her and with her own bookbag slung over her shoulders.

"I guess so" was all Jen replied and moments later, Abby had sat down next to her.

"You do this too, huh?" Abby asked her.

"What do you mean?" Jen tentatively asked her back, remembering the many times Joey had warned about Abby in the past.

"You don´t have any friends to hang out with either, so you try to avoid crowds, where you´ll see them with their ever-so-annoying in-jokes and doing all of that other fun stuff, you wish that you could be a part of. You aren´t a part of any after school activities either, because like myself, you hate it there and from the second you arrive, you can´t wait to get out of there again. Only, there isn´t really any joy in that either, because besides having no friends to hang out with, it´s so depressing at both of our homes, that it makes you want to either climb the walls or take a head dive out of the window, whichever comes first. Am I right, or am I right?" Abby asked, while looking Jen in the eyes and for the first time, since she´d gotten to Capeside, Jen felt like she was with someone, who was as irreparably damaged inside as herself. If not entirely, then at least to some extent.

"You´re frighteningly right" she admitted to Abby.

"My mom is a nurse at the hospital, so I know about your grandpa. I lost my last surviving grandparent last year, right before my dad skipped town. Sure sucks, doesn´t it?" Abby asked candidly and all Jen could do was nod along with her.

"My homelife is such a mess right now!" Abby continued. "My mom thinks that I don´t notice the wine bottles, she has stashed away around the house or the slur in her voice, that always magically seems to get more noticeable, as the day goes on. I would say that on an average day, we say twenty words to each other and on those few really special days, we can maybe stretch it to fifty. My dad clearly doesn´t give a rat´s ass about me, or he would have at least called sometime over these past eight months, since he left us. You´d think that at least on my birthday, that son of a bitch could have managed to find a phone and give his only child a call, but according to my mom, that´s apparently too much to ask of him right now! I´d be so through with the pair of them, if they weren´t my parents!"

"Do you think your mom is ..."

"An alcoholic? Yeah, and in complete denial over it. She´s become so pathetic, compared to how she used to be. Believe it or not, but there was a time, when I didn´t just look up to that woman, I had a whole lot of good reasons to. When I was a kid, she was always this strong and confident figure all of the time, you know? Or at least, that´s how it came off to me at that age. These days, she´s turned into a daily reminder of everything, I don´t want to become, when I´m her age someday" Abby told her sadly and in spite of Joey´s warnings, Jen felt like opening up a little too.

"With me and my parents, it´s like a wall has been put up between us, that I have no clue how to tear down." Jen confessed. "They´re on their side and I´m on mine and as it stands right now, I don´t see that changing for a long time to come, if it ever happens. My grandmom wants me to live like it´s fifty years ago all over again and then the moment I get here, I get myself mixed up with a guy ..."

"Let me interrupt you there, so I can get a pressing question out of the way! What in the holiest of holies do you see in Dawson Leery? He´s so clearly not your type!"

"How would you know what my type is?"

"Because you clearly have a functioning brain and can see that boy needs a "Beginner´s Girlfriend", before he´s ready to move up to someone like you? Trust me, the two of you as a couple wouldn´t last a month!" Abby stated, which made Jen think "Try a week!" in her own head a moment afterwards.

"He needs to find someone, who´s as much of a rookie, as he is. Someone, who´s starting at point zero with up as the only way to go! Someone like ..."

"Yourself?" Jen couldn´t help herself from asking and to her slight surprise, it didn´t make Abby angry or annoyed with her in the slightest. Only a little defensive.

"It´s by my own choice! If there were any guys my own age worth dating in this sorry excuse for a town, I would be dating them. Since there aren´t, I´m stuck being single, okay?" Abby replied, but Jen could easily see through the other girl´s act.

"Answer me honestly, Abby. How many guys have ever asked you out? And don´t try to lie, you´re not that great of an actress!"

"Presently, as of this moment, the count stands at none" Abby admitted to her.

"How many guys have you kissed?"

"Sadly, the exact same amount! The closest I´ve come to it was holding hands with a boy in grade four and even that was only because our teacher made him hold it, after he was finally done protesting!" Abby sadly felt like confessing to her.

It was at that moment, that a plan began to form in Jen´s head. A plan, that if executed correctly could get her out of the whole Dawson situation, without anyone getting hurt or mad over the outcome.

END OF CHAPTER THREE