THE FIRST TIME

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - VENUS

"Goddess on the mountain top

Burning like a silver flame

The summit of beauty and love

And Venus was her name"

SHOCKING BLUE (Single from 1969 (made far more famous by Bananarama in 1986))

"It´s just a few hours of your life and after this whole obnoxious celebration of outdated beauty ideals, that no normal thinking girl could, or for that matter, would ever want to live up to, you´ll be five grand richer, have won yourself a trip to New York and you´ll get to call yourself officially the prettiest girl in town. How does that sound?" Jen tried to reassure Joey, whom here a mere few minutes prior to the competition beginning, also looked a whole lot like she was about to make a run for it.

"Like you took a few tablespoons of "Who am I kidding?", added an ounce of "Yeah, right!", before you mixed them up into one big bowl, that was already nearly full of "Not in This Lifetime!" Joey sarcastically answered her. "I´ll never win this thing! Even if we ignore the fact, that I look about as natural in this dress, as my long-deceased great-grandpa would have, you have lots of girls here, who fit infinitely better into what those stuck-up yacht club women think that a proper girl my age should be like. Hannah Von Wenning is in this contest!" Joey stated, as if that name should mean something to Jen.

"Who´s she?" Jen had to ask, since she genuinely didn´t know.

"We went to school with her, until her parents sent her off to some fancy boarding school in Connecticut. I´m sure that you´ve heard of the Von Wenning family, while you´ve lived here".

"Should I have?"

"It´s no secret that they own over a quarter of the biggest businesses in town, including a large majority share of the sponsor of today´s event, the Capeside Yacht Club. No one in their right mind out of those judges, would dare to vote against her. This thing is as rigged as ... a sail ship. Sorry, I couldn´t come up with a better metaphor!" Joey apologizingly told her.

"You could still win second prize!" Jen tried to cheer her friend up by saying.

"A free day of beauty at "Betty's Hair Barn", also known as the birthplace of the worst haircuts, that used to roam the streets here in the 80´s? FYI, I´ve had the same haircut since I was six and it suits me, so if you don´t mind, I´ll pass on getting the giant Whitney perm!"

"But you would be spreading laughter and joy to the children, everywhere you went! If that doesn´t do wonders for your karma, I don´t know what will!" Jen jokingly suggested, while trying to hold back a giggle.

"The last time I checked, my karma was on the up and up, so that´s still a big, fat no! Why did I even bother with thinking, that I´ll ever be more than an afterthought around here? Like everyone else in the Potter family, I was born to be a faceless nobody and that´s just something, I´ll have to live with" Joey defeatedly said, with the stench of failure already on her, long before it had any logical reason to be there. Seeing this, Jen knew that she had to spring to action with positive reinforcement of such enormity, that even a born cynic like Joey couldn´t do anything to withstand it´s powers.

"Joey, you´re not a nobody!" Jen said so assertively, that it made Joey raise an eyebrow at it.

"I´m not?" Joey surprisedly replied.

"I´m the nobody here, out of the two of us! Seriously, I know like, ten people in this entire town, so if I´m not one, who is?" Jen stated, as Joey nodded along in agreement.

"Good point! I´ll still never win!"

"Not with that attitude you won´t, young lady!" Jen started, before having to stop herself for a moment. "Wow, I just had a flashback to myself with my mom at one of these things years ago!"

"It´s the first sign! You´re turning into her!" Joey teased.

"I´ll be throwing myself off the Empire State Building, before I allow that to happen! She was right about one thing, though. Did I really just say that? Anyway, as the story goes, I was just like you, back when my mom first entered me into one of these things and I didn´t think, I stood a chance of winning either. I still did and guess what?"

"You´ve spent every hour since trying to repress that memory?"

"It´s one of the better ones, sad as it is to say so! Just like my mom said it would, it actually gave me a shot of self-esteem to win that thing and you! Yes, I´m talking to you, Miss Josephine Potter! Don´t take this personally, but I´ve never met anyone, who needs one more than you do!" Jen said inspiringly and again, Joey nodded along in full agreement.

"Isn't that the sad truth?" Joey answered, like this wasn´t news to her in any way.

"So, maybe you won´t win or even come second or third, but this is your chance to show all of those rich snobs, that you aren´t going to settle for just being some anonymous nobody, who gives up without putting up a fight first! I bet that there were plenty of boys, you knew growing up, who kept telling you that you couldn´t do something, because you´re a girl. Am I right?" Jen leadingly asked, knowing that if anything could bring up the fighter in her friend, it would be memories like those.

"It pretty much happened all the time" Joey answered.

"And what did you do in those situations?" Jen asked and could see the confidence slowly begin to creep up in Joey again.

"I showed all of them, that they were wrong! Well, except for this one time, where Pacey and I think it was Will, peed their names into the snow! I still tried, it just looked more like my name was "IO", spelled with a large I and a very small O. I ran out of pee too quickly".

"That´s a story, you should never tell anyone again! Now, what are you going to do tonight?"

"I´m still not entirely opposed to my "Run and Hide" plan!"

"Do that and it´s the same as saying that it´s okay, if we let the Hannah Von Wenning´s of the world cut ahead in line of girls like you, just because they happen to be born with the right DNA-strings and you weren´t. Search your feelings, Joey! You know it to be true!" Jen encouraged her friend, while partly stealing a line from "Star Wars" in the process.

Stolen or not, the line seemed to work on Joey, who was soon after to be found on stage with the other contestants. What Joey didn´t know of course, was that Jen had her own ulterior motive, when it came to getting Joey to stay in the contest.

Even if the "Windjammer Week" and especially, it´s highlight "The Miss Windjammer Contest", was seen by many townspeople as one of the highlights on Capeside´s yearly social calendar, this was only Pacey´s second time attending the event. The first time had been when he was eleven and his then fifteen-year-old sister Gretchen had entered it, in a plan to add some much-needed (in her, at that age, somewhat rebellious teenage mind) feminism and "Screw You Attitude" to the contest. He´d made a bet with her over doing the other one´s chores for a month, if she didn´t have the guts to go through with it and knowing that it would surely make her lose her nerve, he´d brought out the big guns and gotten their grandparents to attend, along with their parents and Doug, of course.

All he could remember from the evening, was how immensely funny it had been to him to see his older sister sweating buckets up on that stage and all the while having the joy of knowing, that she´d be taking the garbage out and emptying the dishwasher instead of himself for the next month. Now however, as a red-blooded mid-teen boy with all of the (sometimes unwanted) hormonal "Flutters" that entails, watching it made for an entirely different viewing experience! More than a few times, he´d had to think unsexy thoughts, all so he wouldn´t be cursed with getting an unwanted boner in public and even worse, getting one while sitting next to Abby, whom he was sure would notice (like she´d always seemed to have a habit of in the past).

Since it was females only backstage during the competition (with only exceptions for those who were rich enough, that no one at a boot-licker event like this would dare to refuse them anything within reason), he´d been relegated to being just another face in the crowd of onlookers. There, he was sitting in between Dawson (who had Mary-Beth sitting on his other side) and Abby, who for as cute as she was and as friendly as they´d become with one another, clearly didn´t excite him in the same way that Dawson´s girl did it for his buddy. One thing that he could say for his "Platonic Date" on the other hand, was that she really seemed to be enjoying herself and her doing so, also rubbed off in a great way on himself.

First up was the "Eveningwear Competition" and as far as himself seeing a bunch of pretty girls went, this was by lengths the biggest all-out Babe-O-Rama, he´d ever attended and then some! Joey, it almost went without saying, outshone all of them in his opinion and maybe it was just that he was rooting for her so much, but it sounded to him like she´d gotten the loudest applause out of the contestants. In second, he would have to and as little as he wanted to, put Hannah (his former nemesis from the early grades in school and at the same time, the absolute best adversary, he could have asked for at that age) and in third, he´d put Melissa (who, from what he could tell, had been Abby´s second favorite (after Joey, of course!)).

The second third consisted of a "Q&A" kind of deal, where the contestants were asked a bunch of generic questions and had to answer them, before finishing off with one question, that was only asked to them and none of the others. Needless to say, it wasn´t every answer to these questions that consisted of what you could call words of wisdom, and these were his favorite "So bad, that he almost felt bad for the unfortunate girl, who´d given it" answers:

Firstly though, he had to give an honorable mention to the girl, who got so scared that she couldn´t get a word out and after a few seconds of uncomfortable silence also ran off stage. While he´d never know what she would have answered to "If you had an hour to talk to the Governor, what would you tell him?", she still provided enough cringe-worthy entertainment in those seconds to get at least a mention!

Number 3 - When asked "What will you want to tell your children, when they become your age someday?", the girl who was asked it answered: "That money isn´t all that matters, but it´s close to it. That´s what daddy always tells me!"

Number 2 - When asked "How would you end world hunger?", they got the amazing answer: "I´d tell people here in America to eat less. In that case, we also wouldn´t have as many disgusting, fat people either! (Followed by, after an embarrassing silence and her finding out that she´d clearly said the worst thing, she could have) Oh, I didn´t mean the fat people in this room!"

Number 1 - When asked "Do you think it´s possible to achieve world peace?", the answer the girl gave was simply a gleeful: "Sure!".

All things said however, most of the contestants were pretty decent with their answers and although Joey´s answer to "What would you want to tell the generations of the future?" was a sweet and from the heart message about tolerance, there were others that gave just as good answers to their questions, if not better. After sitting through nearly all of them (and being kind of bored by the end of it), the last girl up was Melissa.

If there was one part of his childhood, where Dawson wished that he´d done something different, than what he did, it was when it came to the breakdown of Joey and Melissa´s friendship. Truth be told, he wished that he could have gone back even further than that and done a whole lot of things differently, like been the kind of friend to Melissa, that he should have been. Neither himself or Pacey having been one, was what had turned it into an event that forever would change things, for not only those two girls, but for himself as well.

When he was younger, Dawson would be first to admit that he´d been a stereotypical, slightly spoiled only child and that as a result of nearly always getting what he wanted, it had also created a rather selfish boy, who easily got upset when he didn´t get it. Probably for that reason, Joey and Melissa´s friendship and especially, how much time it was taking away from Joey spending (in his own estimation) enough time with himself, turned it into a thorn in his eye as time went on. While he´d never had anything against Melissa and they generally were always friendly with one another, he just couldn´t connect with her like he could with Joey or Pacey, and whenever Joey would say no to hanging out with himself, thanks to wanting to spend some "Girl Time" with Melissa, it had made him jealous every time without fault. As ashamed as he was now to had thought it, he´d once made a silent wish that something would happen to break them up and what´s worse, he´d felt satisfied inside when it had happened and the two of them had their big bust-up in front of their entire classroom.

While most of the townspeople (mostly those, who were like his parents) preferred to pretend that "No One Knew Anything to Make Them Suspect It", when it comes to Joey´s dad getting busted for selling drugs, the ugly truth was that there had been an untold number of rumors about him being involved in something shady, going back to long before Joey´s mother died. Of course, the younger version of Joey would tirelessly defend her dad, if anyone even remotely accused him of doing anything illegal and for that reason, it wasn´t something they ever spoke about. it wasn´t like the other kids at their school didn´t though, and the more stories that went around, the more the girls at school started avoiding Joey and in turn, Melissa too. The arrest itself, for as shocking as it had been to Joey and Bessie (the only two, who blindly believed in every lie that their dad told them), was only the culmination of months, if not years, of build-up to almost everyone else in town.

For Joey, it was nothing short of devastating to find out that had her dad been lying his butt off to them for so long and on top of that, would be spending the next long while in jail. Everyone´s thoughts had gone to her and Bessie, including his own, with too few of them going towards Melissa. When he´d had the chance to be there for her, his selfish-minded younger self had reacted in the worst way, he could and seen it as his chance to break hers and Joey´s friendship up for good, all so he could have Joey to himself again. After seeing Melissa become lonelier with every class that they sat through, until she was ready to crack, the final phase of the plan was to tell Joey who had been spreading lies about her and within a day of her returning to school, Joey and Melissa´s friendship was over.

At the time, he´d just been happy to have Joey all to himself again and it wasn´t until he began to see the deep-rooted psychological ramifications on her, in the way that she acted towards those of her own gender in the years afterwards, that his guilty conscience began to grow on him, when it came to how selfishly he´d acted back then. Now, where she had found a replacement in Jen and her being so downright scared of making friends with a girl her own age was quickly becoming a thing of the past, it also helped to ease his own feeling of guilt, every time he saw them laughing together and sharing things, in the ways that she wouldn´t be able to with himself. Still, he couldn´t forget how, for the longest time, he´d feared that it would never happen and that he could unknowingly have permanently "Broken" something extremely important within one of his closest friends. Every time he saw Melissa at school, it reminded him of it and if there was one wish, he´d want to come true more than all of the others, it was that her and Joey would find a way of patching things up. Up until this evening, all of that had felt like a pipe dream, though.

Joey was filled with relief, now that two thirds of the contest was over. All she had left was to sing her song from "Les Mis" and she´d be done with this once in a lifetime, extremely nervous display of how inadequate she felt compared to the girls, she was competing against. No matter how much Jen tried to tell her otherwise.

"You´re winning this thing, trust me! The judges all love you!" Jen assured her, while they were watching the rest of her competition go through their Q&A parts.

"It sounds more to me, like you need to be locked up in some kind of asylum for being overly delusional!" Joey quipped, moments before Melissa walked on stage.

"If it isn´t Melissa? You know, Pacey once told me the story about you two".

"Then you also know why this feels like the perfect time for a bathroom break!" Joey snarled back and was about to turn around, when Jen put a hand on her arm.

"You can hold it a little longer, Joey. This, you´ll want to see and hear for yourself" Jen said and her saying so was the only thing, that made Joey stay.

After going through the mandatory generic first questions, the host of the show asked Melissa her "special question": "What is the most important thing in the world to you?"

"I want everyone to be happy and safe and for all children to be able to grow up without fear of what the future brings them, that goes without saying" Melissa began.

"For me personally, it´s important that I´m comfortable with who I am and to feel like I´m doing good things for those less fortunate than myself, to help them through their struggles. The thing is, I wasn´t always like that. One time, I did something really bad" Melissa said, as a hush of expectancy went over the audience, whom after sitting through so many bits of these that were basically the exact same, were more than ready for a bit of scandalous slander to spice things up.

"Oh?" was all that the shocked looking host could think of answering, before letting Melissa go on.

"I had this friend, who was going through some of the worst times, anyone could have and instead of defending her, like I should have, I told some lies about her to some girls to make them like me. I was lonely and going through plenty of things at the time too, but there´s no excuse for what I did. I want her to know how sorry, I am, that I didn´t stand by her, like I should have and for how I made what already was a horrible situation for her, so much worse by what I did. Sure, it helped to turn me into one of the popular girls at school and whether I´ll still be after this little confessional remains to be seen, but along the way it also lost me the best friend, I´d ever had. I´d gladly trade in all of that popularity just to hear her tell me, that she forgives me, and we can try to be friends again. If she does, I think that I can finally say that I like who I am, because I don´t feel that way now, where I feel like a faker all of the time for pretending to be someone, I´m not. Oh, and one final thing. Belinda, you´re a total bitch and you can take your pom-pom´s and shove them up where the sun never shines, because I´m quitting your lousy cheerleader squad!" Melissa concluded her speech, to the loud applause of a surprisingly high number of teenage girls in the audience.

Whichever part of what Melissa said got the hardest to Joey is impossible to say, but by the end of it, she felt ready to at least try talking to her friend from years gone by again.

END OF CHAPTER EIGHTEEN