THE FIRST TIME
CHAPTER THIRTY - THE BITCH IS BACK
IT´S HARD TO BELIEVE THAT WE´VE REACHED THIRTY CHAPTERS OF THIS STORY ALREADY! A BIG THANKS GOES FROM ME TO ALL OF YOU LOYAL READERS OUT THERE IN INTERNET-LAND, WHO HELP TO KEEP ME MOTIVATED TO CONTINUE IT. THIS CHAPTER AND THE NEXT ONE WILL BE A LITTLE DIFFERENT, SINCE WE´LL BASICALLY FOLLOW A CHARACTER AROUND IN EVERYTHING THAT THEY DO DURING A WHOLE WEEK AND IN THIS FIRST ATTEMPT TO DO SOMETHING LIKE THIS, WE´LL BE FOLLOWING PACEY´S POV THROUGHOUT THE CHAPTERS.
I HOPE THAT YOU´LL ENJOY IT!
"The bitch is back!"
ELTON JOHN (From the album "Caribou" (1974))
Sent: February 12th, 1999
From: ThatWitterGuy
To: AGirlNamedJoey
Subject: What a week!
Hi, Honey. I hope you´re doing well over there in the land of baguettes and fine wine. Over here, I´ve had a week to remember, it´s safe to say! Where do I even begin? It all began on a boring Sunday evening, where I was at work at Screen Time ...
"How does this sound to you? The twist is that the romantic interest girl, who you´ve been building up to be your main protagonist´s perfect girlfriend for the entire movie, turned out to have been a robot all the time! It´ll be the perfect bittersweet ending and best of all, no one will see it coming!" Pacey threw out there to Dawson, during what had become quite the drawn-out evening at Screen Time. They rarely worked together anymore (thanks to Dawson now preferring to work the day shift, so he could spend his evenings with Mary-Beth and Pacey usually studying with Andie in the afternoons after school), so Dawson was using this rare opportunity to pick his brain on ideas for the script, he was trying to write. Given the groan that his latest idea had gotten out of Dawson however, Pacey suspected that this was an idea that his oldest friend was beginning to regret coming up with.
"It also has zero build up to it! How are you going to logically explain to the audience, that she was a robot?" Dawson protested.
"Isn´t that your job to come up with, since you´re the one who´s writing this movie?"
"Next idea, please!"
"I´m all out! Man, is this a dead evening or what? Ten bucks says that nothing interesting happens before closing time?" he offered Dawson, who only replied with a headshake.
Maybe, his friend should have taken that bet though, because soon after something interesting did happen (or more accurately, what Pacey would be willing to count as interesting on an evening like this), when a customer whom he´d never imagined seeing in their little store, came in.
"Look who got lost on her way to Park Avenue, Dawson!" Pacey quipped to his buddy, as Hannah Von Wenning came up to their counter, looking as smug as she´d ever done.
"This store must really be in dire straits, if they have you working here, Pacey!" Hannah jokingly fired back, as Dawson just shook his head at the both of them and their never-ending bickering, that only ended whenever Hannah left town again.
"If you need me, Pacey, I´ll be in the back doing inventory. Anything is better than listening to you two!" Dawson stated, before doing as he said he would and heading to the same backroom, that Pacey himself had such fond memories of spending naked time with Joey in.
"I see that Dawson still has the same stick up his butt, that he did when we were kids!" Hannah remarked with a sly smile.
"He´s switched it out a few times over the years! You can´t be here of your own volition, so what´s the story?" he asked, getting a sigh in response.
"Can´t a girl just come down here to rent a movie, without getting the third degree from the eternal underachiever behind the desk?"
"They can, just not when it´s you! Tell me the truth, or your chances of renting a movie are the exact same as me someday becoming president of this great country, we live in".
"I got kicked out of my high-end private school for cheating on a test, okay? Now, can I rent a movie, please?" she pleaded very insincerely and if it had been anyone else, he would have let them off the hook. It just wasn´t in him, when it came to this particular girl.
"And?"
"It wasn´t the first time! I also ... might have sold the copy I had of that test to a few of my classmates".
"Your parent´s generous allowance wasn´t enough for a shopping spree every day, huh? I feel your pain, I really do, poor little rich girl!" he joked sarcastically, as she rolled her eyes at him. "Go on, if you´re really that desperate to rent one of the many fine movies, we have in stock here".
"Do you make every customer, who wants to become a member here go through this, or do I have to have a talk with your store manager over this sorry excuse for an interrogation, I´m being forced to go through right now?".
"To answer your questions, I strictly reserve these interrogations for special cases, where we´re talking about "questionable types" like yourself. If you want to tell the manager, feel free to. I don´t have a clue where he lives and neither does Dawson. We only know that he doesn´t live here in Capeside and we´ve only each seen him once since he hired us to work here last year, so I wish you good luck with finding him!" he smugly told off his childhood nemesis. After another sigh and an eyeroll, she continued on with her story.
"Of course, one of them just had to grow a conscience all of a sudden and sell me out to the principal! The next thing I knew, I was packing my bags and being forced to take first a train and then a bus with all of the, to be honest, rather smelly common people, up here, because my now royally angry at me parents, were so mad that they refused to send a car to pick me up. The honest truth is that I´m stuck back here with a pair of parents, who keep me on the tightest leash that they can, and this was the closest I could find to having anything interesting to do tonight, so have a heart, Pacey! Let me at least rent some kind of entertainment from you, so there´s a slight chance that I don´t go crazy in that huge house, where´s no one´s talking to one another!" she confessed to him in what he had to give her, was a extremely convincing acting performance, if it wasn´t true. He couldn´t help himself from laughing a little at her predicament, even if it was a bit mean of him at that moment and after she´d left the store, he couldn´t help feeling a little bad inside over having done it, either.
"I guess, this proves that karma is a real thing after all!" he teased her, while she rolled her eyes at him.
"I have to start back up in public school again tomorrow, can you believe that? Just saying it out loud makes we want to gag! Then again, it´s the grave I´ve dug for myself!".
"It´s nice to hear that you´ve become so much more self-aware with time, than you were the last time, I knew you, Hannah. Alright, I´ll let you rent a movie, but don´t think it´s because I´ve all of a sudden taken a liking to you! It´s only because I wouldn´t put it against you, to use your family´s untold number of connections, to find out where my boss lives and tell him about this incident. Even if you are a walking pain in the you know what, I´m still sure that if you introduce the element of a small wad of cash into the proceedings, he´d fire my sorry butt for refusing to serve you, without thinking twice about it".
"Aren´t you the eternal charmer, Pacey?" Hannah quipped dryly, before paying for a membership card and the movie, she rented that evening: "Dangerous Liaisons".
During his bike ride home, he kept thinking back to the last time, Hannah had lived in town. When Pacey had been a kid, teasing the girls his own age had been his favorite pastime and none of them had been more fun to tease than Hannah, because he always knew that she´d come up with some kind of creative way of getting back at him. With Joey in a strong second place, it should be said, but Joey would just give him the silent treatment and that wasn´t nearly as amusing to his unruly and very immature young mind, as having to mentally prepare for whatever it was, that Hannah was cooking up for him. Of course, he would never have told her back then, but he´d actually been very disappointed when his favorite nemesis had left town in grade five. As little as he wanted to admit it, he´d missed having her around to mess with for a good while there, until the formerly far too shy Joey had stepped up her ability to come up with the perfect comeback and she (for a few years, until their relationship had developed into something much more interesting) had taken up Hannah´s old spot.
Anyway, it wasn´t like he was expected to be some sort of welcoming committee for her and from what he gathered, they probably wouldn´t end up talking more than him occasionally giving her movie advice at the store and her reminding him of what a loser, he´d always been and forever would be.
The next day hadn´t started off smoothly, with him oversleeping by twenty minutes, and he already knew on the way out of the door that he would be at least ten minutes late for the first day of school that week. That he also had to stop and put the chain back on the bike, he´d gotten for his thirteenth birthday and wasn´t as reliable, as it once had been, didn´t help matters either and by the time he stepped through the door to his social studies class, it had been a good fifteen minutes since the last attendance bell had rung.
When he came in, it felt like everyone´s heads turned to look at him, one of the things he´d learned to hate the most from the many times over the years, this had happened.
"Sorry, that I´m late. I had a problem with my bike" he excused himself with, even if he knew that it was a lame one and an excuse, he´d probably used once too many in high school already.
"Again, Pacey? You can´t convince your parents to buy you a new bike?" the teacher joked, getting a giggle here and there from his students and making Pacey feel like he wished that he´d stayed home in bed.
"I wish!" he wise-cracked back and took his seat. It was then that he saw what was written on the blackboard: Home Economics.
It was only seconds later that the door opened again and who should come barging in, looking a mixture of frustrated and annoyed, than Hannah von Wenning herself.
"I couldn´t find the right classroom. It´s my first day here. You really should have better signage here! I know this school isn´t rich but come on!" Hannah, in a way that did nothing to endear herself to anyone there, explained to their teacher and Pacey could tell that the few laughs he heard, felt far more humiliating to Hannah, than they would have to herself.
"I take it then, that you must be Hannah. Just remember, that you only get to use that excuse in my class once! And I´ll be sure to pass on your suggestion to the principal!" their teacher lamely quipped, just before Hannah took an empty seat, that was as far to the back of the classroom, as she could find it.
"Since everyone else have already been paired up for our next assignment, Pacey and Hannah will have to make up our last couple" the teacher continued, immediately making a small shiver run down Pacey´s spine. "Since you two weren´t here when class began, I´ll explain it again. You have to make out a household budget and Pacey, you´re a mechanic, who makes twenty-four thousand dollars a year. Hannah, in our little game here, you´re a receptionist and you earn twenty-two thousand. The pair of you have two young children, who are in pre-school, so you´ll have to factor that into your budget as well. Other things, you´ll all have to factor into your calculations ..." the teacher continued, but Pacey had long since stopped listening by the time they got around to talking about the average prizes of car insurance, house payments and the like.
He already had enough to get done with going to school, studying with Andie afterwards and not the least his job, that was all that was keeping him in enough money, to at least not feel like the biggest failure in all of Capeside. That he now had to factor in having to do an assignment with the most annoying girl, who´d ever walked the streets of their fair and cozy little town, sounded about as appealing to him as watching a bunch of hardcore porn movies with his mom and his older sister did. It didn´t matter how he tried to twist and turn it in his head, he just really couldn´t see any way that he could fit it into his already too tight schedule.
Speaking of Andie, she unknowingly came up with the solution, when she told him right after class was over, in the nicest and most polite way possible, that she had to blow off tutoring him for a few days, so that she could concentrate on making her own household budget. She´d been paired up with a boy named Ty, whom Pacey had to admit was arguably the one guy in their entire class, he´d spoken the least to so far. Mostly because he couldn´t imagine what he would have in common with a bible pusher like Ty was rumored to be, but also because the guy seemed stuck up and like he was looking down on everyone else to him. Andie seemed thrilled over the possibility of getting to work with him though, so he let her off the hook as gently, as he could and sincerely wished her the best of luck with her project. It wasn´t like he had any major tests coming up in the next weeks and with how much he´d begun to care for that adorably perky and always upbeat sweetheart of a girl, he knew that he would have felt guilty, if he´d been the reason that she´d gotten anything below an A-plus and soiled her so far unblemished academic record at her new school.
At lunch, something happened that he wouldn´t have expected. He began feeling sorry for Hannah, when he saw her sitting by herself in her far fancier clothes, then anyone else was wearing and looking as much like fish out of water, as he would probably have felt, if he´d been thrown right into "her world" with practically no time to prepare for it. Without a friend in the world, the formerly so fearsome looking Miss Von Wenning looked fragile and lonely and to the part of him, that had a natural in-grown hatred of seeing a girl in her state of mind, it tore him up a small bit inside too. It crossed his mind for a moment, if he should ask his friends, if it would be okay that he offered her to sit with them but knowing that they´d probably think that he was joking and were likely to laugh him off, kept him from it.
He´d avoided Hannah for nearly the entire school day, just like he guessed that she´d been avoiding himself and the subject, they would at some point have to discuss, too. It couldn´t be put off forever, however and seeing as he had the next two afternoons off from his usual tutoring service (named Andie), it also meant that he had to make the most of them. His chance to talk to the princess of the Von Wenning business empire came when they literally bumped into one another, when they both happened to be turning the same corner at the same time, coming from opposite directions. The "impact" made her drop her books and he had no doubt that hearing some girls nearby laugh at her misery, only served to make it that much worse.
"Thanks, Pacey! For making me even more of a walking joke, than I already am around this place!" she sarcastically told him off, as she bent down to get her books off the rather filthy looking floor. Being the gentleman, that he could be on occasion, he helped her of course, and she actually looked a tiny bit appreciative that he cared enough to.
"Hannah, do you think that you´re the only one, who feels like a joke around here? Just be glad, that you´re not the one, who´s on academic probation and will get held back, unless he keeps up what feels like an impossible GPA for the rest of the year!" he dryly told her, making no qualms over how frustrating his own predicament was to him.
"It sounds around as fun as having your parents monitor your every little move, until it makes you feel like a prisoner in your own home!"
"You have my sympathies. I actually mean that". he told her more or less sincerely and it brought a small smile out of her.
"Thanks, I guess. I´m sorry that you got put on academic probation, but then again, I can only guess that it was all your own fault?"
"And no one else´s! I stopped feeling sorry for myself weeks ago, but it doesn´t mean that it doesn´t still suck!"
"You´ve managed to move on to acceptance, then. I´m still in the denial phase, I´m pretty sure. Pacey, my old school was awesome, and I was the princess there! I hadn´t worked my way up to becoming queen bee yet, but I was getting there and here, I´m just a nobody. I can´t even say that it´s like starting over, because half of the girls here still hate me over how I used to behave, when I was still just an immature kid and the other half just plain dislike me, because I grew up privileged. It isn´t like I asked to be born into a family like mine, you know? Trust me, being rich sounds great, but it isn´t all a walk on roses, like they apparently think it is!"
"You don´t think it could just be yourself being paranoid over something, that´s all in your head?" he asked, and it looked like she conceded, that he could be at least somewhat right in his observation.
"I guess, we should come up with a plan for that study project, huh? I can´t believe that our teacher made me a receptionist! That seriously sounds like most boring job in the entire world!"
"Do you think it´s a coincidence, that I was made an auto mechanic? That like saying "Sorry, Pacey. I know that I´m supposed to pretend that there´s a chance you´ll go to college, but we both know that there´s no chance of it!" So, are you free after school? I have to work at the video store in the evenings, now that I have to spend my afternoons studying to somehow, hopefully, avoid getting held back a year!"
"Yeah, sure. There´s no reason to put it off, I guess. Hey, look at us, standing here and having an actual normal conversation without insulting one another in every other sentence!" she joked, and it made him nod along with her, given that this was the first time, he could ever remember it happening before.
As little as he would have expected it too, they actually ended up having a quite pleasant study session that afternoon at her family´s house, the largest in the entire town and without a doubt also the residence, there´d been the most amount of money spent on turning into the envy of everyone else in Capeside, who came anywhere close to bringing in the kind of dough, that the extensive Von Wenning business empire brought in. That said, it still had a cold sort of feeling to it, like you would get in a museum or a hospital, more than the warm feeling from a loving house, that had people living in it. If he had to be honest, he wouldn´t have wanted to live in a house like that and although, he hoped to one day have a house that was slightly bigger than the small one, he´d grown up in, he wouldn´t want it to be too much larger either. Just as long as it felt cozy to him and he had Joey there with him, he would be perfectly fine with having far less.
It didn´t take long for him to understand what Hannah had been telling him, when she´d told him that her parents were watching her every move. Aside from having to study with the door open, it was also pretty obvious from how either one of her parents or a member of their household staff would pass by the door and sneak a peek in every few minutes, that they didn´t trust her further than they could throw her anymore. In spite of this, they still got an unexpectedly productive start to the project, helped by them agreeing on most things and both being willing to bend in the interest of getting the best grade, they could. Seeing as it was all make-believe anyway, he came into it with a distinct "Who Cares?" attitude, when it came to which house and car they should get, that she seemed to share with him.
By the time he headed off to work, he had to admit that he´d enjoyed himself in Hannah´s company. Not in an "I want to date her" way or even in a "Would advise someone else to ask her on a date" kind of way (at least not, if it was someone that he didn´t dislike), it was more in an "I guess, she isn´t that bad after all" sort of way.
His evening shift was spent working with Jen and as it always was, working with her was a calm and chilled out experience, since she would always be right on it whenever there was work to be done, leaving him with the chance to catch up on his homework at the same time.
"So, tell me about Hannah. Has she come onto you yet?" Jen semi-jokingly asked, right after he´d put his last book away, putting an end to his slacking off at his job to do his other, more important, work for the day.
"No, of course, she hasn´t! I seriously doubt that she´s into me that way and even if she was, I have more than enough in the one, I already have!" he replied in a much more denying tone, than how he´d intended it to come out.
"I wouldn´t be so sure, if I were you! Here´s a "Jen Lindley Fun Fact" for you: My first date was with the boy, who used to tease me the most, when we were little. If you ask me, I think than when a little boy teases a little girl or vice versa, it´s just because they´re too young to either accept or say out loud, that they like one another".
"Look, Lindley. I won´t deny that you could be right, when it comes to most little kids, but A; Her and I aren´t little kids anymore and B; You weren´t here back then! She was a tiny version of a literal pain in the ass, that girl! No one liked her, not even the girls who sucked up to her, all because she was the only one out of us, who could call herself rich! She loved to rub that fact in too, whenever she had the chance to, so don´t think that I liked her in any way, shape or form! The short of the matter is that I couldn´t stand her, just like none of my friends could stand her either!"
"You´re so full of it, Pacey! I´ll bet you every cent that I had to my name, that after she left town, you missed her! Maybe not for all that long, but you must have at some point. And don´t try to lie to me, because when you lie, your nose does this small involuntary twitch thing, that gives you away" she told him, while mimicking the supposed twitch his nose made, whenever he said something that wasn´t true.
"Aren´t you the ever observant one? Okay, so I missed messing with her after she was gone, but it doesn´t change that there isn´t a single cell in my body, that wants to get caught up in any kind of romantic entanglement with Hannah Von Wenning!"
"What makes you sure that she doesn´t want to?"
"Just because ..."
"Before you answer me that, allow me to ask you one more question. Who was the girl you teased the second-most, while you were growing up and how was it that turned out for you, exactly?" she (in an annoying "better-knowing than himself" kind of way) asked, while looking him dead in the eyes. Seeing as he refused to answer any more questions on the subject, that closed the topic as well, but it still kept lingering in the back of his head for the rest of the evening, if his new favorite co-worker (Dawson would oftentimes complain, whenever he slacked off and Jen never did, so that made her by default his favorite), could be right about Hannah having some kind of deep-rooted romantic feelings for himself, that perhaps Hannah herself wasn´t entirely aware of either.
How he hoped that she never would be!
... and already this was turning into a week full of unexpected surprises. Look, my wonderful darling of a girlfriend, I´m sorry to do this, but I have to end it here for now. The second attendance bell has just rung, and I don´t want to be late for any more classes in the near future. I´ll write you a follow-up e-mail tomorrow, telling you about how the next part of the week went, I promise.
I love you so much, Honey!
Your very own Pacey.
Sent: February 12th, 1999
From: AGirlNamedJoey
To: ThatWitterGuy
Subject: Damn you, Pacey!
You can´t just leave me hanging like that! Did that bitch hit on you? Because if she did, then I have a right to know about it and there´ll hell to pay for her!
Waiting eagerly for your next e-mail and for the next time, she´ll get to hold and kiss you
Joey
END OF CHAPTER THIRTY