THE FIRST TIME
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - TO BE OR NOT TO BE
"To be or not to be
that's the question
but not to me,
because I know that very soon, we'll be
a happy family"
LEO "THE LION" MATHISEN (Single from 1941)
From: AGirlNamedJoey
To:ThatWitterGuy
Subject: Happy B-Day, my one true love!
Hi there, birthday boy! How does it feel to finally be able to call yourself sixteen? You know that I´d love to be there to celebrate it with you, but you´ll sadly have to wait for my present for you, until I come back home, and I can give it to you in person (here´s a hint for you: It´s worth the wait!). To do a little something to celebrate you, I´m holding a "Proxy B-Day" party for you over here, where I´ll be cooking my host family and Emma some of your favorite dishes (keep your fingers crossed for me, that I won´t completely mess it up lol!). I know that it´ll make me miss you even more, than I already am (not that it should be possible, in spite of the fun I´m having over here), but it didn´t feel right to me not to do something to celebrate the boy, I´ve given my heart to!
I love you so much, that it´s impossible for me to put it into words here, in case you didn´t know by now! Have an amazing birthday with all of your friends back home and try not to think too much about how I won´t be there with you on the day, where you officially take your first step into becoming an adult. Which I know you´ve always said is a swear-word to you but look at it this way: it had to happen sooner or later!
Your girlfriend, who spends far too much time thinking about you in ways that she could never tell her friends and family about!
Joey
From: ThatWitterGuy
To: AGirlNamedJoey
Subject: Thanks!
Hi, Sweetheart. Thanks for the birthday greeting. As you probably know by now, Dawson, Jen and Andie have been preparing a surprise party for me, which would have been surprising too, if they hadn´t been so terrible at hiding it! Seriously, you should have been here to hear some of the lame excuses they´ve come up with, every time they think I´ve come too close to finding out the truth! I´m just glad that we don´t all have to count on those three to be secret agents, or they´d all have their covers blown within a week lol! I try to play along though, even if it won´t be much of a surprise party anymore and I have to say, it´s kind of nice to know that they care so much about little old me. I don´t know who else will be on the guest list, but hopefully it should be a fun time, something I could also really use right now.
One thing is that thanks to the school´s driving teacher being away on paternity leave, I´ll have to wait a few days until I can get my driver´s license, which sucks, but since the prospects of me being able to afford a car of my own lies so far into the future, that I can´t even imagine when it will be, it isn´t like I´m in a hurry to get it. What I´m more worried over is what could happen, should my parents end up in the same room together and everyone getting to see how bad they can be, when they´re at their worst. For this reason and because it would give away that I know about the surprise part of the party, I haven´t told any of them about it and I´ve ordered Doug not to either, so I´m hoping desperately that no one else has. Gretchen is coming down from college to be my ally for the day and Doug´s even taken the evening off to come to the party, but with the ice wall between my parents still being in full effect, there´s no saying what could happen, should they come face to face with one another.
The boy, who loves you back even more, than you love him!
Pacey
Jen´s morning routine was the same every morning. Wake up an hour and a half before school began, press the snooze button on her clock radio twice (giving her a good twenty minutes for her brain to slowly wake up as well, before she had to open her eyes), hit the shower and brush her teeth, before dressing herself for the day and putting on her make-up. After this, she would have two slices of toast for breakfast (one with her grandmother´s homemade cherry marmalade and one with mild cheese) and a cup of hot Joe to go with them. She would then chit-chat a little with Grams over their respective days ahead, before finishing her routine off by going upstairs, to say goodbye to her grandpa. Even if she didn´t know for sure, if he could hear her, there was a therapeutic effect in it for herself. A feeling that at least, she was doing something for him, when she usually felt so helpless otherwise, in knowing that there was nothing anyone could do to save him from dying now.
"Hi, granddad. I´m off to school now" she told the more or less comatose man, before sitting down on the bed with him and taking his hand.
"Grams told me, that your vital signs are getting worse. That I should begin preparing myself for you dying soon. I don´t know anymore, maybe it would be for the best, if this is all you have to look forward to. Lying in this bed and only barely being alive, as it is. When i came here, I thought for sure that you´d wake up again and you could take me on walks out in the beautiful nature around here, like you used to do, when I came up to visit as a kid. Do you remember that?" she quietly asked him, as the tears began to press their way on again.
"I do. They were some of the best times, I ever had as a child. You never expected anything of me, except to just be a happy and carefree kid. If I´d been allowed to grow up here with you and Grams, who knows that kind of perfectly adjusted girl, I´d be by now? Oh well, I guess, we´ll never know! I love you, grandpa and I still believe, that you´ll push through this. Don´t you go and give up on me, okay?" she told him, before putting his hand back in a position, that looked like it would be comfortable.
One thing was that he was close to being a corpse. It didn´t mean that she was ready, for him to actually become one.
Pacey had found out that playing a new game, one that he´d invented himself and called "Pretending to be completely clueless, when it comes to his birthday party", could make for a nice bit of entertainment of an otherwise tedious school day. He had to pay attention in his classes now, if he was going to get away from the prospects of being held back a year, and with it not leaving much space for goofing off, he took whatever chances he could, to play that side of himself out. At this moment, where he was heading from one class to the next, his "victim" was Jen Lindley, who also happened to (surprisingly, considering the multitude of lies, that she had to have told her parents back in NYC) be by far the worst of them, when it came to keeping his surprise party that evening a secret.
"I´ve been thinking about going fishing tonight. Word is that old Hal caught a sixteen-pound rainbow trout down at the creek a few days ago and ..." he began, while trying to avoid looking too amused by the panic that quickly spread across Jen´s face.
"You can´t!" she blurted out, once again proving how terrible she was at keeping something like a surprise party an actual secret from the one, whom the party is being thrown for.
"Why shouldn´t I? I don´t have to work for once and it isn´t like there´s anything special going on tonight! Unless, you know something that I don´t?" he slyly asked her and could see her mind racing to come up with an excuse, that wouldn´t also give everything away.
"Because ... I heard that it´s going to rain tonight! You can´t go fishing, when it´s raining, can you?" Jen tried with, even if it was the feeblest attempt at playing innocent, he could remember seeing, since his older sister´s honestly terrible attempt at hiding that she´d come home drunk on a Saturday night, a handful of years before this, back when she was still living with them.
"Not according to any of the weather reports, I´ve read. Anyway, it isn´t like the fish give a damn what the weather´s like above the waterline!"
"You´ll end up getting sick and you can´t afford to miss any school right now, if you want to get those grades up!" Jen came up with and was obviously happier with this attempt, than she was with her first one.
"I guess, you´re right" he replied, deciding that he´d played with her young mind enough for one break in between classes.
They´d only just sat down for their next class, when a message came out over the school´s P.A.
"Jennifer Lindley, will you please come to the principal´s office?" a woman´s voice, that he recognized as belonging their school´s secretary, said over the P.A.
"Have you been channeling your inner Beavis again, Lindley? Or was it your inner Butthead this time?" he jokingly asked and only got a headshake in reply.
"And that´s coming from you, mister "I once hooked up with a teacher here?"
"That was in my dark past! Here I thought that we both silently agreed that all of extremely dumb things we did, before we began to smarten up on the ways of love don´t count!"
"Try telling that to my parents! Maybe ... the principal wants to congratulate me, on how I´ve turned into a model student!" she quipped back, as she got up from her seat.
"You, a model student? " He scoffed. "I see that happening at around the same time, they´ll start calling me one!" he joked back, as she made her way out of the classroom.
So, his life wasn´t a storybook adventure of him having a great time constantly or even anything resembling it! This one day a year, he had the right to play around with his friends, as he pleased!
Back home, there were seven words that Jen always dreaded hearing, every Monday through Friday, when she turned up for school. "Jen Lindley, come to the principal´s office!". They would always call her in there to about the same things, like her grades being terrible, her skipping school and never showing interest in her classes. It wasn´t like what they told her didn´t get through to her in some small way, it was just that her desperate search to feel loved would ninety-nine times out of a hundred lead her right back to the kind of behavior, that kept getting her in trouble over and over again. As long as nothing reached her parents´ ears, she could easily push it out of her mind, once she was out of that office again.
Living like that, day to day, like she didn´t have any future to think about or look forward to, was a way of living that it sometimes scared her to think back on, had been her life for so long. Now that she´d practically become a tea-tootler, she shuddered to think of all of the horrible things that could have happened to a young girl like she was, living mostly unsupervised in rough place like New York and as a general rule always acting first and thinking about the potential consequences later, if she did at all.
This time, she knew in advance, that she couldn´t have been called in there over anything, she´d done and knew that she shouldn´t have. While she may not have been a straight A student like Joey or Andie, she kept her grades for the most part at a respectable enough Low-B/High-C level. She´d been a pure and utter angel, when it came to not causing trouble anymore and so little had happened in her love-life for so long, that she´d almost begun to count herself as an innocent virgin again. In comparison to most of the other girls at their school, who obviously weren´t holding back in letting their teenage hormones run their wildest, the closest she´d come to anything happening since her last kiss with Dawson all of those months earlier, had been her "accidentally touching little fingers" with Jack a few days before this. So little had been happening in fact, that she figured there had to be elderly nuns out there, who saw more action, that she did!
"Jen Lindley, I´m here to see the principal" she told the secretary, a woman in her late fifties, who clearly dyed her hair at least once a month to keep the grey hairs out of sight, until she eventually would stop caring someday and learned to live with getting old. The secretary looked up at her with sympathy, which while it was welcome change from the stern looks, she used to get from the secretary at her school back home, also un-nerved her a little.
"He´s doing a job interview right now, but they should be done soon. Take a seat and read a magazine, if you feel like it" the secretary told her in the sort of kind way, that you use on someone, who´s about to be given bad news of some sort.
She took a seat and tried to push the paranoid thoughts out of her mind, with the help of one of the magazines on the table in front of her, but everything she read went in one ear and out of the other. It was only a few minutes until the principal came out with a fresh-faced young teacher, who looked rather pleased with how his job interview had gone. After the principal had shaken hands with him and he´d left, he turned his attention to her.
"Miss Lindley, thanks for coming. Step into my office, please" he told her and held the door open for her, as she entered.
"What´s this about?" she asked quickly, not wanting to drag this out any further, than she absolutely had to. The principal closed the door and sat down across from her, before looking her in the eyes.
"There´s no easy way of delivering news like this. We got a call from your grandmother, who I understand that you live with, around a quarter of an hour ago. She told us that your grandfather has passed away. You and your family, of course, have our deepest condolences and should you need some time off from school, to privately deal with the grief over this matter, it goes without saying that we´ll be accommodating with that too" he told her, although nothing after the words "Passed Away" registered in her mind.
After a day at school, that had actually for the most part been enjoyable for once (mostly since he´d milked the surprise part of his upcoming birthday party for all it was worth), another welcome surprise awaited him, when he saw his brother and his police cruiser waiting for him after school ended.
"Do you need anything from me, Doug?" he asked suspiciously, well aware that an act of kindness like this rarely came without a price, when it came to his brother.
"You´re lucky, that we´re having a particularly slow day, Pacey. Put your bike in the back and I´ll drive you home" Doug told him and didn´t have to do so twice, for Pacey to take his offer.
"Happy sixteen, by the way. Gretchen´s train should be arriving in an hour or so. I promised to pick her up" Doug said with a stiff facial expression, that also told Pacey that this ride wasn´t free after all.
"What´s up, Doug? There has to be something or you wouldn´t look like your dog has just been run over" he asked bluntly, and it brought a tiny smile to Doug´s face.
"You know, I have to give you one thing, little brother. I can hide all kinds of things from everyone else, but I´ve never been able to hide anything, when it comes to you".
"If you´re referring to your "secret sexual preferences", all anyone has to do is take one look at you CD and video collection! It´s my birthday, you can allow me one gay joke!" he quickly told his brother, who´d already begun to look annoyed with him.
"Just because a guy likes romance movies and isn´t afraid to hide his "Pop Sensibilities" doesn´t mean that he´s gay, Pacey! There are a lot of guys, who buy Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey CD´s!"
"So, they can give them to their girlfriends and hopefully, get "rewarded" for it, don´t you think? If I want to hear someone sing like a bird, I´d rather listen to an actual bird!" he teased his brother to ease the mood in the car. If he had to be honest about it, he actually liked some of their songs, but of course, he could never tell his brother that and give his CD collection that kind of validation!
"You really are a sad excuse for a human being, who´s completely devoid of any kind of culture, aren´t you?"
"And proud of it! So, are you ever going to tell me why you´re giving me a ride home in your police cruiser, or do I have to start guessing?"
"I tried to keep it from mom and dad, Pacey. You have to believe me, I really did! It was Gretchen, who spilled the beans, not me!" Doug tried to excuse himself, as Pacey tried to comprehend, what his brother was talking about.
"Spilled the beans about what, Doug?"
"Your surprise birthday party. They´re both coming!"
Never before had three words in the English language sounded scarier to Pacey´s ears!
Jen didn´t bother with going to the hospital, after she´d left school and instead just went straight home, without saying anything to anybody. None of them would understand what she was feeling either way and they would probably make her talk about it, which was just about the last thing, she felt like doing. She´d felt grief before, it wasn´t that and she´d already known that her grandfather´s life was hanging on by a thread. It didn´t make it any easier, though and she´d spent the first hours after she´d come home lying on her bed and letting the tears flow, as they may. Her friends didn´t need to see her like this and she certainly wouldn´t want them to see it either. Her softest side was hers and only hers, and one she only very rarely showed to anyone else.
She knew that Grams would be away for most of the afternoon, taking care of the various principalities, that you have to when someone passes away. Grieving or not, her grandmother wasn´t someone, who pushed something off for the day after, when it could be done today and that was a side of her, nothing could be done to change. When Jen heard the front door being opened, she hoped that she would be allowed to be left alone for a little while longer, but she wouldn´t be so lucky.
"Jennifer, are you in there?" her grandmother asked, after knocking softly on the door.
"Yeah, you can come in!" she answered just loud enough, that Grams would be able to hear it. Moments later, the door opened and her dear old grandmother came in.
"How are you holding up?" Grams asked with a voice full of kindness, as Jen gave not looking like a total mess a shot.
"I feel terrible inside and at the same time a little relieved. I don´t know, maybe it´s a mix of them".
"That makes two of us. You know that I will always love your grandfather, as much as I love life itself, but the former nurse in me has known which way this was heading, for a long time. He led a long and fulfilling life, Jen. It was just that his time had come".
"I know that, and I guess that a part of me is glad, that his suffering is finally over. I´ve been trying all afternoon to think back on the best memories, I have of him, but all I keep coming back to is him lying in that bed, unable to do anything".
"It´ll come to you in time, I promise. It took me a long time come to grips with knowing, that I would end up outliving him. Heck, I could end up having another thirty or even forty good years, before the lord comes for my soul too" Grams, in a very rare moment, quipped.
"Isn´t "Heck" still considered a swear word, among you God-fearing Christian types?" she joked back and forced a small smile for the elderly lady.
"Believe me, Jen. I´ve said other, much, much worse words than that one silently to myself, since your grandfather became sick! It´s only natural to feel angry, when you´re losing someone who´s as dear to you, as he was to me".
"As he was to both of us! You know what this means, don´t you?"
"What does it mean, Jennifer?"
"That you´ll have to keep yourself alive for at least the next forty years! I´ve already lost one of my two favorite grandparents today! I´m nowhere close to being ready to lose the other one!" she honestly told Grams, whom she could see had to shed a small tear at hearing her say so.
END OF CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I´m well aware that Jen´s grandpa died before this in the series, but I felt like I had to focus on getting other storylines off the ground first, which is why it was pushed to now.