THE FIRST TIME
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE - WHAT I AM
"Philosophy is the talk on a cereal box
Religion is the smile on a dog
I'm not aware of too many things
I know what I know, if you know what I mean, do you?
Choke me in the shallow water
Before I get too deep
What I am is what I am
Are you what you are or what?"
EDIE BRICKELL AND NEW BOHEMIANS (From the album "Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars" (1988))
Sent: May 4th, 1999
From: JenRocks
To: AGirlNamedJoey
Subject: My very own personal spy, Jack!
Yo, Jo! Okay, I know that came off as just about the most "Lame White Girl Trying to Sound Cool and African American" way to get started on this e-mail, but thinking of new ways of writing "Hi, Joey" is becoming harder by the week!
So, what´s going on is this: After Hannah sort of accidentally confessed her adultery with Warren to me, my brain immediately went into overdrive trying to think of ways, I can get Chris to believe me. Which, considering how incredibly awful my last failed attempt at it went, will take something out of the ordinary! Then suddenly, in the middle of chem class, it came to me! I have to catch her on hidden tape, of course! With solid evidence like that to present, there´s no way that Chris won´t believe me, right?
This of course left the issue of who would go undercover, and with every other guy our age, that I know here, being a bad choice for one reason or another, I had to beg and plead with Jack, to get him to do it!
Actually, it wasn´t that hard to convince him and all it took was the promise of a lovely dinner at Grams´. She´s quickly starting to warm up to him too, by the way and I just know that you and him will hit it off instantly, when you come back to us.
Keep those fingers crossed for us!
Jen
Sent: May 4th, 1999
From: AGirlNamedJoey
To: JenRocks
Subject: Good luck!
Bonjour, Jen! Hey, if you can do it, so can I, lol! I have to admit that the more you´ve written about Jack, the more I can´t wait to meet both him and his sister! It´s a little weird to think about, that before you came to Capeside, it had just been myself, Dawson and Pacey hanging out all of the time, ever since Will left town and I had my falling out with Melissa. Now, when I get home, I´ll have this whole new "extended clique" of new friends, you guys have made, while I´ve been away! Not that it´s a bad thing, don´t get me wrong!
Sure, I´ll keep my fingers, toes and everything else crossed for you and your "Bo". It isn´t an idea that I ever would have come up with, but if you can expose Hannah for the liar and horrible person, that she is, that can only be a positive thing in my book.
What about Dawson, by the way? Have you found out anything, that could tell you for sure, if he´s cheated on Mary-Beth?
Looking forward to seeing you again soon!
Joey
"So, should I start calling you agent double-O six now?" Jack´s twin sister Andie playfully asked him, while the siblings were getting ready for school.
Whereas Jack himself was quite nervous over the prospect of pretending to someone he wasn´t, so he could get some girl to confess her sins to him on tape, Andie was finding the whole idea very amusing and this was just the latest in the line of many small jokes at his expense, that she´d made, ever since he made the enormous tactical mistake of explaining Jen´s idea to her.
"If you have more of those jokes, can we get them out of the way now?" he annoyedly asked his sister back.
"That was the last original one, I could come up with. Are you nervous?"
"Wouldn´t you be? Hannah will be onto me in no time, I just know it!" he said, as if he was stating the obvious.
"Maybe not. You were really good in our grade four production of "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers"!"
"That was in the fourth grade, Andie! All it takes for people to think that you did a good job, is to remember most of your lines! Hannah is already street-smart in a way, that I´ll never grow up to be and that´s just a simple fact! I have to try my best though, or Jen will be disappointed in me" he explained and saw a smile creep across Andie´s face.
"We can´t have that, can we? You really like her, don´t you?" Andie asked him and there was no point in lying to her. Yes, he did like Jen a whole lot and in reality, she´d quickly become one of the absolute closest friends, he´d ever had. It was just a crying shame for the both of them, that he couldn´t force himself like Jen back, the way that she and seemingly everyone else, he knew, wanted him to.
Pacey was rarely a guy, who got too stressed out over anything, something that he figured had a lot to do with growing up in a home, where you had an undoubtable alcoholic having the final word on everything. Living like that also meant that he grew up having to swallow a lot of pride and in comparison, to some of the worst times, he´d gone through with his dad, it took a lot for him to feel, like his whole world could come crashing down at any moment. This morning, however, was one of those rare occasions and Dawson, as his oldest friend, was quick to pick up on it.
"If you´re that nervous over potentially getting held back a year, why don´t you just go to the principal´s office and ask them, if you can´t get a straight answer?" Dawson logically asked him. "They told you that you´d get the final word today anyway, so what difference can an hour or two make?"
"What if he´s looking over my academic records and is making his final decision, as we speak? I should have joined an extra-curricular or two, to at least have something positive on them, I just know it!"
"Relax! I´m sure that ..." was as far as Dawson got, before a transmission came out over the school P.A.
"Pacey Witter, will you come to the principal´s office, please?" the secretary´s voice rang out over the entirety of the school.
"I guess, it´s showtime! Wish me luck" he said to Dawson, who did so, before Pacey made his way to the principal´s office, where his fate awaited him.
"This needs to be celebrated in style!" Pacey, whose smile had been glued onto his face for the past several hours said to Jack, who´d also managed to catch a bit of the happy bug off his best guy-friend in their small town. "It isn´t every day that a guy gets told, that he won´t get held back a year!"
"I wish, I could, but I have plans already" Jack shortly replied, seeing as Jen had wanted to keep what they were doing as low-key as possible, so Hannah wouldn´t suspect that anything was up.
"With Jen?"
"Sort of, yeah. It´s a long story, that there´s no reason for me bore you with!"
"To be honest with you, I don´t have the time tonight either. My sister is coming down for a quick visit, so I have to stay home for the evening. Apparently, she has some kind of big news, that she wants to share with all of us".
"Any idea, what it could be?"
"Knowing her and how she´s always loved to overuse words like big, enormous or monumental to the extreme, I´m guessing that it most likely won´t be anything worth getting too worked up over! It´ll still be nice to see her again though, so that´s something".
"Well, have fun. I have to meet up with Jen" Jack excused himself, seeing as he already knew that they would be off in separate directions.
"Okay, so this is how we´ll do it" Jen explained to him, as she held the small walk-man in front of him, that would be used as their tape recorder. "You press play and record at the same time and hide it in your inner pocket. Remember to speak clearly though, or the sound won´t get picked up. Don´t close your jacket either, or the only sound we´ll get will be a hint of whisper here and there".
"Yeah, I´ve got it!" he answered her back, trying to sound enthused over an idea, he was the complete opposite of. Jen must have picked up on this too, since she flashed him one of the sweetest and most adorable smiles, he´d seen in his life up to that point.
"Jack, I know that I´m asking you to go way above and beyond, what I have any right to ask of you. Just know that you doing this for me counts for around a million plus points in my book!"
"Only a million! Sounds a bit low, don´t you think?" he jokingly asked her back and got a kiss on as the first part of his "answer".
"Okay, so we can call it two million! You really are the perfect boyfriend in every way, do you know that?"
Once again, he didn´t know how to reply to a compliment like that and just smiled his way out of it.
Their plan was rather simple. Hannah and her parents came down to eat dinner one evening a week at the Ice House, that always being Tuesday, where the rest of the restaurant was mostly empty, before things started picking up again by the middle of the week. Knowing this, Jack would come down there to eat dinner with his sister and wait for the tension between Hannah and her parents to become thick enough, that she needed a short break from those who´d brought her into the world and would head outside to briefly cool off. Something, that according to Abby, who´d served them several times already, without exception had happened after they´d had their main course and at around the three-quarters of an hour mark into their dinner. When this opening came up, Jack would go out to join Hannah and make his intensions of wanting to sleep with her clear. Something, he had to severely doubt, if he was capable of doing even close to convincingly, but that was a different story altogether! If nothing else, it got them out of the house for an evening and the food at the Ice House was always second to none (and much better than their mom´s cooking), so if nothing else they would get that out of it.
Just as they´d been told, Hannah was already there with her parents, a strict pair of them, by the looks of it, and trying to make up her mind on what to order. With himself, it was easy, since he just had to have one of those awesome burgers again, that he´d had the first two times, he´d eaten there! The only question was which one to choose and, on this evening, he was feeling in an adventurous mood.
"I´m trying their Hawaii burger" he told his sister, who was still trying to make up her own mind on what to order.
"A burger, that has a slice of pineapple in it? It sounds all kinds of yucky, if you ask me!" Andie replied, making zero qualms about how unappetizing that combo sounded to her!
"Who knows, it could be delicious? I won´t know, until I´ve tried it though, will I?"
"Go ahead, it´s your own funeral!" Andie deadpanned in reply, just before they overheard the first of many comments, directed at Hannah by her parents, they would be unfortunate enough to hear that evening.
"You have to start shaping up, Hannah!" they overheard Hannah´s mom telling her daughter in a downright vicious tone, that in comparison made the mean drill sergeant from "Full Metal Jacket" sound like the cutest of the Care Bears! "Do you really think that any Ivy League school will accept a discipline case, who can only barely pull home a B average, into their school?"
"No, mom" they could only barely hear Hannah reply, in a meek sort of way, that was nothing like how she talked to those at school, where she was epitome of confidence. Or, perhaps in reality, the right words used should have been "Put-On Confidence".
"You´ve been a disappointment to this family, since the day you were born, Hannah. Don´t think that we won´t disown you, if things don´t change radically, because we will!" they could clearly hear Hannah´s father saying and with every disparaging comment that Hannah had sit through listening to for the next forty-five minutes or so, it made both himself and Andie a little impressed, that she didn´t just get up to leave and say to hell with it all. To be honest, if that had been himself, then he probably couldn´t have taken more than ten minutes of that kind of verbal abuse, and from his own parents no less, at the absolute most.
Almost on clockwork, just like Abby had said it would happen, Hannah took a (well-deserved, it should be said) break from her parents after the main course and stepped outside to get some air. Jack was just about to get up from his seat, when Andie grabbed his arm.
"Perhaps, you should wait for another time. Her parents ..." was all Andie had to say, that along with a headshake drove home the point, of what kind of a horrible display of parenting, they´d just been unwilling witnesses to.
"I know. Look, I have to try, for Jen´s sake" he told Andie, before heading outside.
When he got out there and saw the one thing, he´d never expected to see however, all of the last of his courage went out of him. Hannah, for as tough-shelled as she looked when he saw her at school, was crying her eyes out.
He was almost about to give up altogether, when she turned around to face him.
"I should leave you alone" he quickly said, before opening the door back into restaurant again. When she asked him what she did next though, the nice guy in him made it impossible to just leave this girl alone with her tears.
"Are your parents like mine are?" Hannah asked him and he led a little away from the doors, so her parents wouldn´t hear what they said.
"They´re not always a picnic to be around, but in comparison to yours ... wow!" was all he could say, and Hannah nodded along with him in agreement.
"Now, you know why Tuesday has become my least favorite day of the week! Please, don´t tell anyone at school, okay? Least of all Jen, even if I´m sure that she´d have a field day at the thought of me feeling as miserable, as I do right now!"
"I won´t and my sister isn´t the sort of girl, who´d spread something like that around either. Are they always behaving like that towards you?"
"It´s gotten worse, since I got kicked out of my private school. Since that day, where I had to come home and explain to them why, I´d been kicked out, it´s as if I´ve been treated like the black sheep of the family. They´ve never talked the way they do to me, to any of my older siblings, as far as I know".
"I can only imagine how much it only must make their words sting worse, knowing that you´re the only one of their children, they´re doing it to" he answered her, even if he knew that he probably couldn´t even begin to.
"Yeah, well, it´s the world that I´ve created for myself, so I have to live with it. For the rest of this schoolyear anyway, then I can get the hell out of here and never look back again!"
"In your situation, I´d say that´s perfectly understandable!" he told her, as they nodded along in agreement.
By the end of their little conversation outside of the Ice House, he´d all but entirely given up on Jen´s plan, fun as it could have been to try to carry out. With what he knew about Hannah now, on the other hand, it wouldn´t have felt right to try to deceive a surprisingly fragile girl, who had enough issues at home to deal with already, that she had to deal with on a daily basis, or for them to throw even more problems into her life.
Clearly, Hannah was a girl with deep-rooted parental issues, that it wouldn´t be easy to make go away again. Just like another girl, he knew, who had a whole lot more in common with Hannah, than she´d ever thought, she did.
Pacey´s evening had started with himself and his mom driving down to the train station to pick up Gretchen, who´d already called ahead to tell them, when she´d be arriving there. She´d been all smiles as usual, whenever she was reunited with them, but something had felt a bit off with her from the get-go, that he couldn´t quite put his finger on.
His mom, as she usually did whenever it was a "special occasion", had made pot roast for dinner, one of the handful of dishes that she´s cooked so many times that she couldn´t mess up anymore and was a sure fire hit with everyone in their family. Even Pacey´s dad, the only one of them, that wasn´t joining them. Doug only arrived just before dinner, after having had to do a bit of overtime down at the police station and was immediately greeted by a big hug from his little sister, another unusual occurrence that made Pacey suspicious, if Gretchen´s "news" for once was something worth getting worked up over.
"So, Gretchen. What´s the big news, you needed to share with all of us?" his mother asked her daughter, after they´d eaten and all had a handful of minutes to let the food settle in their stomachs.
"Well, you know that guy Nick, who I told you that I´ve been dating for a while now ..." Gretchen began, before her mother interrupted her with a big smile on her face.
"You´ve gotten engaged, haven´t you?" his mother excitedly asked, obviously hoping what the answer would be.
"Mom, you´re the one who asked Gretchen to tell us, why she gathered us all here! The least you can do is let her finish, what she was saying!" Doug told off his mother, who this time waited patiently for Gretchen to finish with her announcement, or whatever it was, she needed them to know.
"The thing is, we´ve broken up and the reason why we did is that ... I´m sort of pregnant with his child and he didn´t take the news all that well" Gretchen, who was by now close to tears, told them.
It would be over a minute after Gretchen´s announcement (which had felt like it was a lot longer than that), before anyone spoke again and when it happened, it was Pacey himself breaking the awkward silence, that had set over the dinner table.
"Are you planning on keeping it?" he asked Gretchen, who didn´t look any surer of what to do, than Bessie had been, back when she´d become pregnant with Alexander, at a time when the Potter family was still in a state of trying to repair itself, after losing two important parental figures in less than a year. Albeit, for very different reasons.
"I´ve thought about having an abortion, I just don´t think that I can go through with it, when push comes to shove. The option, I´m leaning most towards is giving my child up for adoption, unless by some miracle, Nick and I can work things out. I´m so sorry, mom. I know that this wasn´t what you wanted for me, when you sent me away to college" a now teary-eyed Gretchen told their mom, who responded with a warm hug and a promise, that everything would be okay, to the daughter who´d gotten herself into such a mess, as this was.
"Are you disappointed in me?" Gretchen asked him over a cup of hot chocolate later on, after Doug had headed home and their mom had gone to bed.
"What makes you think, I would be?" he asked back, drawing a small smile from his much-beloved older sister.
"Because I´m the screw-up of the family now?"
"I´d still say that we´re in tough competition with one another, for that title!" he joked and even managed to get a small laugh out of Gretchen.
"What could you possibly have ever done, that´s anywhere near this bad?" she asked him, before taking a soothing sip from her cup of hot chocolate.
"I only just found out today, that I won´t have to take my sophomore year over again. Can you imagine, how a piece of news like that would have gone down with dad?" he semi-rhetorically asked, as he shuddered just at the thought of it.
"About as well as him being told that his daughter was not just dumb enough to get herself knocked up and that she still hasn´t talked to the father of her unborn child, since she told him that she was pregnant over two weeks ago? Do you know what the last words, Nick said to me was?"
"Can´t say that I do".
"He basically shouted "You´ve got to be kidding me, Gretchen!" at me, like this was some kind of bad and twisted joke, he can just walk away from! It took two of us to create this tiny life, that´s growing inside of me, you know? I´m pretty sure that he just wants me to get an abortion, so he easily can wipe his hands clean of this whole big mess, we´ve gotten ourselves into. Please, tell me that you and Joey haven´t gone all the way yet?".
"That´s a little personal, don´t you think?"
"When you do it, if you haven´t already, make sure to use protection and that she´s on the pill first! Like I should have been, if I´d only had the common sense to!" Gretchen blurted out and for what little was left of the evening, they kept it to small talking about pleasant subjects, like the fun times they´d had growing up in the same house together, or which things he was planning on doing with Joey, once they reached that long and (hopefully) warm summer, where they could just enjoy one another as much as humanly possible.
END OF CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE