THE FIRST TIME
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX - WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS
"What would you do
If I sang out of tune?
Would you stand up
And walk out on me?
Let me your ears and I´ll sing you a song
I will try not to sing out ouf key
I get by with a little help from my friends
I get high with a little help from my friends"
THE BEATLES (From the album "Sgt. Pepper´s Lonely Hearts Club Band" (1967))
Sent: May 15th, 1999
From: ThatWitterGuy
To: AGirlNamedJoey
Subject: It´s finals time!
Hi, Sweetheart. Can you believe that I somehow, someway made it through my sophomore year? Well, it´s only almost, since I have a bunch of finals, I have to take first, before it becomes official. Since I already know that I´ll be spending some time in summer school this year (not that it should be anything new for me!), I´m not sweating too much over what kind of grades, I´ll be getting. A stark contrast, I might add to most of those, you know!
Dawson, I thought that I´d never see being more stressed out, than he was during those final and hectic days, where we were shooting his movie, but I could swear that during those last minutes before our chemistry exam, it looked like one of the veins in his head was about to pop! Not that it should be anything for him to worry over, but when that dreaded "Stress-Monster" begins to rear its ugly head, it´s usually hard to make it go away again! Even Jen, who´s usually the one that keeps me "de-stressed", whenever I need her to, has told me that she´s had problems falling asleep, thanks to every thinkable nightmare scenario for how an exam can go, running through her head, whenever she closes her eyes. Andie (who´s honestly just being weird in the way she absolutely loves everything, that has to do with school as a whole!) is one of the only ones, I still see smiling most of the time. Then again, if I was ninety-nine percent sure that I´d be bringing home top grades (or close to it) in all of my classes, I´d probably be finding myself smiling more too!
One thing that keeps me from feeling sorry for myself, is every time that I talk to Abby. It just isn´t fair in my book, that she (through no fault of her own) should wind up having to go and live in Kansas, just when life here is finally starting to really look up for her. I´ve been wrecking my mind with how I can help her, but I keep drawing a blank, so if you have any brilliant ideas, now is the exact right time to put them out there!
Your (still longing for you, like there´s no tomorrow) boyfriend
Pacey
Sent: May 15th, 1999
From: AGirlNamedJoey
To: ThatWitterGuy
Subject: re: It´s finals time!
Hi, Honey. It´s great to finally hear from you again (she said, not at all passively/aggressively trying to make her boyfriend write back to her more often, than he has been!). Over here, finals has a lot of people at our school on edge too, so it doesn´t surprise me that the same is the case back home in Capeside. Luckily for myself and Emma, the first of our finals is English and seeing as all you have to do to pass, is to speak our native language at a reasonable level, if either of us manage to flunk that one, then it´s really looking bad for that girl, as far as the rest of our exams go!
I really wish that I could come up with some sort of magical solution to Abby´s situation. If you´d asked me a year ago, what I would do, if I was told that she had to skip town, I´d probably have wanted to throw the biggest party of my life so far (not that it´s saying much, if I have to be honest!), but now where I´ve found out that we´re not all that different and she´s become a friend in time, I feel the complete opposite way. If there´s any way, you can help her, then by all means do it. If you can´t though, then don´t feel too bad over it, okay? What´s happened isn´t your fault either, any more than it´s Abby´s, Bessie´s or mine.
Good luck on your finals!
Your (practically dying to see you again in five weeks´ time!) girlfriend
Joey
Abby usually hated having to take finals. One part of it was that she rarely felt like it had gone how she wanted it to (which was probably also why the best grade that she´d ever gotten in one was a very lonely B-minus), but it was just as much how some people got so worked up over it, that whether they happened to get an A or a C meant the difference between it being almost the best day of their lives, or practically the end of the world for them. Her mom (way back, before she´d started on her huge downfall, that had led her into the proverbial hole, that her life was in now) had sometimes bragged to her about how she´d been a straight A student in high school and had even been up for valedictorian during her senior year. At that time, when Abby still looked up to her mom, she´d seen it as something to be proud of. Now, all it proved to her was that how your grades were in high school, often only had a small impact on what your actual future would look like.
What mattered infinitely more to her, than whatever grades that the teachers at Capeside High felt it proper to give her, was what her future looked like, once the next school year began. She liked her aunt Lola, the only one who´d volunteered to take a "Lost Soul" like herself in and raise her as her own, it wasn´t that, and compared to what living with her mom for those last couple of years had been like, it was sure to be a veritable cakewalk. The only issue was how far Capeside and Kansas were located away from one another, and she knew that she´d be missing the life that she´d created for herself over the past half a year like crazy, if she had to leave it and her friends there behind. Not to mention Melissa, whom the mere thought of being without for the rest of her life, could make Abby feel physically sick.
Work had funnily enough become an escape from all of her problems. A place, where all she had to do was concentrate on keeping their customers happy and little else and a job, that if she had to say so herself, she´d become pretty decent at over the past months! It helped too of course, that she got along so well with everyone there, even Joey´s dad Mike, whom after them needing a few weeks to get used to working together, had started to take a liking to her too. Or at least, that was how it seemed to her.
"Order for table six!" she told Mike, who was busy working behind the hot plate. One advantage to them now having two chefs there, was that it gave Bodie and Bessie the chance to take some much-needed time off, before the tourist season began to truly set in by the middle of June. Plus, they couldn´t actually fire Mike, whose parole was based on the condition that he held onto a steady job and had a place to live.
"Thanks, Abby. Before I forget to say it, I have to speak to you after work. Bodie has made it my job to put together a vacation schedule for the waitresses" he told her back, as he looked over the paper slip with the order on it, she´d just brought him.
"It can´t be that hard, considering that there´s only three of us, and that´s if you count Joey!" Abby joked back, drawing a small smile from Mike.
"If you ask me, I think that Bessie feels guilty over how hard she´s made Joey work these past few summers, thanks to ... well, you know!" Mike answered, as the smile quickly ran away from his face again. "From what I can understand, she´s planning on making a few temporary hires, so neither you or Joey will have to waste your entire summers working here".
"I wouldn´t exactly call it wasting it".
"Abby, I know that it doesn´t always seem that way, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I still remember what it was like to be yours and my daughter´s age. From what I can remember, the last thing that I wanted to spend my summer on, was slaving away in a restaurant, while my friends were off enjoying being young and having one of the last of those summers, that feels like they last forever. It won´t be long after you leave high school, until that begins to change. Anyway, just let me know which weeks or days that you´ll want off and we´ll figure it out. Of course, if you can hold it off until the end of July, or the beginning of August ..."
"That´ll be kind of hard, considering that I´ll need a few weeks down in Kansas to get used to my new surroundings, before school starts" she explained and could see from the look on Mike´s face, that he had no idea what was going on with her.
"You´re moving?" he solemnly asked her, with a face full of guilt from knowing, that he was at least partly to blame.
"Not by my own choice, but with me having nowhere to live here next year and my aunt down there being the only one, who´s willing to take me in, it isn´t like I have a choice" she tried to explain to him as matter-of-factly, as she could, consciously leaving out anything that could lead to Mike feeling, like this was his fault.
"I´m so sorry to hear that, Abby. I never intended for my parole to be reason, why ..."
"I don´t blame you, Mike!" she reassured Mike, who looked pleased to hear her say so. "I blame my mom, who screwed up her own life so much and became so unbearable to live with, that I couldn´t in my right mind have gone back to living with her, even if she wasn´t about to be thrown in jail and my dad, who thinks that he can pay his way out of how he left me alone with her, when he should have known how it would turn out. They´re the only two people, that I, or anyone else, should cast their blame at!" she stated unequivocally, meaning every word of what she´d said too.
"If there´s anything, I can do for you, just ask, okay?" he said and for a moment there, Joey´s dad reminded her of her own dad, back when he still gave a rat´s behind about how his daughter was doing. It only made her all the sadder, that she would only barely get to know him, before she´d have to leave both the restaurant and Capeside behind, perhaps for good.
Dawson´s dad had a rule to live by, that his son had tried to take heart, as much as he could: Stressing doesn´t do anyone any good and will probably only lead you towards an early grave, so you should avoid it, if you at all could. They were words that made sense to Dawson, like most of his dad´s little "Golden Nuggets of Wisdom" to live by, did to him. At this time however, they´d become increasingly hard to live by!
For one thing, he had finals to worry over and unlike Pacey, who was already sure that he´d be attending summer school with Abby and Joey, he actually cared a lot about which grades, he´d be getting. And, even if he didn´t, he had his ever-worried mom constantly reminding him of it! To be honest, he was just looking forward to them being over and done with, so he could spend a week working on editing his movie (something, he´d had to basically put a hold on, until the school year was over), followed by a handful of days of enjoying having Joey home again, before he´d be heading off to Philadelphia, where he´d be spending the next month living with his aunt and taking the summer classes in movie making, she´d already signed him up for.
Before he got that far though, there were constantly more pressing issues, that he wanted to deal with, the biggest two of which was making up his mind on whether to apply for that grant, Hannah had told him about and coming clean to his girlfriend, about the things that he now knew, he shouldn´t have done, with the same aforementioned Hannah. He´d tried beating around the bush on the subject of moving on a part-time basis to Boston with Pacey, who was also the only one that he´d come clean to about his infidelities, but on the other hand, he also felt like this was a decision that could be so monumental, when it came to his entire future, that he had to make it on his own, without any outside interference.
Both options, staying in Capeside full-time, or going to school in Boston and only coming home on the weekends, had their advantages and disadvantages, and it was thinking these over, that he was doing, when Jen came over to him, while he was looking through his locker for the American history notes, he´d be needing for his next exam, scheduled to take place less than half an hour from then.
"Do you have minute to talk?" Jen asked him, just before he found what he was looking for. Now, that he had, he saw no harm in it.
"You can even have two of them! What´s up?" he asked Jen, who looked like she needed a moment to gather her courage.
"In private?" she quietly asked of him and seeing as it looked like she had something important on her mind, he followed her into one of the many empty classrooms.
"Look, I´m just going to ask you straight out, okay?" she began, after having carefully made sure that no one was listening in on them. "Have you and Hannah been doing something behind MB´s back, that you shouldn´t have?"
"No!" he said, almost like a reflex response. "What gives you that idea?"
"Several weeks ago, Abby and Pacey passed by a house, and she saw a couple, doing ... biblical things, up against a window. Naked biblical things, if you want to be exact!"
"And this concerns me how?" he asked, trying to look convincing, while at the same time remembering the one time, it could have happened, during the last of his and Hannah´s secret hook-up´s at the house, Jen had to have been taking about.
"She´s pretty sure that one of the participants was you. Which it was, wasn´t it?" Jen asked him, while trying to read his face. Right at that moment, he knew that himself and Hannah had been busted.
"I never meant for it to go that far" he tried explaining to Jen, who began pacing the room, as she tried to comprehend it all. "For what it´s worth and I know that it isn´t much, it was long before she hooked up with Chris. The first times, anyway".
"Why? You already have the perfect girlfriend in Mary-Beth!"
"Don´t you think I´ve asked myself that question a thousand times?" he almost began yelling back, before reminding himself of who and how many could be listening. "The only explanation, I can give you, is that Hannah made me feel wanted, in a way that Mary-Beth just couldn´t".
"Don´t you mean that she played you into making you feel, like she wanted her?" Jen asked back, again recounting another question, he must have asked himself hundreds of times over the past months.
"I wouldn´t put it against her. She clearly has more than her share of issues, when it comes to guys!"
"So do I, but you don´t see me playing around with their emotions, like they mean nothing to me, just to make myself feel like I hold some kind of power of them! That´s what girls like Hannah do! Take it from someone, who´s known more than enough for one lifetime of them! Have you had sex with her?"
"No, it´s the one boundary, we both agreed that we wouldn´t pass. If you think that I don´t feel like dirt over this, Jen, you couldn´t be more wrong!"
"Do you know what I believe, Dawson? I believe that you, just like Chris was, were just a pair unsuspecting flies, that walked right into a deadly spider´s web. The question is, do you want to help me take that deadly spider down a peg or two and expose her for what she is, as much as I do?"
He had to take a few moments to think over his answer, before he could give her one. After all, there were many variables to consider, that would in all likelihood have a large impact on his own immediate future.
"On two conditions. I get to tell Mary-Beth about what happened between myself and Hannah. Before I´ve told her, we don´t make move number one".
"That goes without saying. What´s the other condition?"
"You try talking to Hannah, without going in looking from the off set, like you´re wanting to go to war with her! Try it and you´ll find out that she really isn´t the devil, that you´ve made your mind up on her being. If you still, after you´ve had a heart-to-heart talk with her, want to do this, then sure, I´ll help out".
Jen didn´t look like she particularly liked his suggestion. Seeing as it was the best offer, she was likely to get though, her only realistic option was to accept it.
Before she´d experienced what it was like to live with her, Jen´s grandmother had just been someone, who´d always been there as part of scenery, when Abby was growing up and little else. She could still remember how, as a six-year-old kid, she´d been dared by a very young Belinda (with the carrot of the prospective earning of a dollar, if she completed her task), to sneak into Grams´ garden and steal one of her roses. Thanks to her six-year-old self having had the courage of a mouse though, she´d (in spite of her own far too big mouth, before it became time to!) completely chickened out, when it became time for her to actually do it, like every other kid, who´d attempted the same thing, also had. Sure, it meant that you got teased on the playground for a day or two, but it still beat the prospects of getting caught and cooked up for supper by the woman, that many little kids in town suspected of being an evil witch, who ate their kind. Of course, those were just crazy stories made up by little younglings with far too over-active imaginations, still there were those among them who believed it, although Abby had never counted herself as one of them.
Even after she´d gotten to know Jen, there was still a huge generational gap between them, that made it hard for Abby to think of anything to talk about, whenever her and Grams had a moment or two alone together. After just around a month of living in her house however, they´d slowly begun opening up to one another and there was a wiseness to Evelyn, as Abby called her (it just wouldn´t have felt right to Abby to call her Grams, when they weren´t related), that she felt like it wouldn´t be the worst thing for herself to learn a thing or two from. In any case, they were far better than the lessons, her mom had tried to teach her, most of which consisted of drinking tips (like what the perfect booze-to-mixer ratio is in a Gin and Tonic or a Tequila Sunrise), if they weren´t just drunken slurs about how unfair the entire world was towards people like them.
"How is it going at work?" Evelyn asked her, while they were getting plates out and preparing to serve the evening´s dessert, a three-layer chocolate cake that was Jen´s favorite, and had been baked only enough hours before, for it to have to cooled down to the perfect serving temperature.
"Alright, I guess. The tips that I got tonight, sure weren´t anything to write home about" Abby casually replied, while fighting the temptation to lick her lips at the thought of the delicious cake, she´d soon be sinking her teeth into and delighting her own tastebuds with.
"And you´re still getting along with everyone there?"
"Sure. Why wouldn´t I?"
"Abby, you can´t tell me that you don´t miss living with Bessie, Alexander and Bodie. It´s fine with me, if you do" Evelyn told her, as they shared a small smile. "I´d say that it´s only understandable".
"I know that it could sound cruel to my parents, for me to say so, but living with them was the first time, I felt like I had a family, I could always rely on" she answered Evelyn, as truthfully, as she could.
"And, that´s why, you can´t give up on hope, that you´ll be living with them again. I know that it isn´t "cool" for you young people to believe in the lord, but he has his ways of helping those, who need him to".
"You´re not going to start quoting bible verses at me, are you?" Abby had to ask, since she´d feared it happening, ever since she´d moved in.
"I wouldn´t dream of it. It does have some parts to it, though, that could make for useful reading to a girl you. The parts about forgiveness, in particular?" Evelyn slyly asked, as she looked her into the eyes and it was like, she was staring a hole right into Abby´s very soul.
"You mean, so I can forgive my parents, for the way they´ve abandoned me? Like all adults have a habit of doing, come to think of it!"
"You still have a chance to make amends with them, just like Jennifer does with hers. It won´t happen though, unless someone makes the first move. And you won´t have to worry about Jen or I ever abandoning you! Any friend of hers, who´s meant that much to her, as you have, is a part of our family and the same goes for you!" Evelyn (in the most grand-motherly way thinkable) explained, as the smile across Abby´s face had to have grown larger by the second.
"Does that mean, I can stay here with you and Jen?"
"It means that unless you, Bessie and Bodie can figure out a way for all of you to live together, there´ll be a bed to sleep in here for you, for as long as you need one. Now, shall we see if Jen has recovered enough after all of that Risotto, she ate for dinner, to have a piece or two of her favorite dessert?"
"I´m willing to bet everything single thing, I own, that she is!" Abby half-joked back, relieved that at least one of her main problems wasn´t one anymore. Could she make a final peace with her parents, however?
That part still remained to be seen.
Now, where Dawson had put pressure on himself, to finally come clean to Mary-Beth, it was like it had brought out a rarely seen sense of courage up in him. Knowing too, that they wouldn´t have much time to hang out together, before finals came to an end, he almost felt like this was a now or never moment for him, to do the one thing that he´d never wanted to do. Breaking the heart of the girl, he was in love with.
It had only taken a minute or two on the phone, to convince her to meet up with him, in a place where they were likely to be able to talk in peace: The same picturesque old orchard, where they´d shared their first kiss. With the early summer having set in, it almost felt like too nice of an evening to stay in as well and he´d arrived there in good time, so he could go over everything that he would say and exactly, how he would say it. Not that he didn´t know that he´d forget most of it, when the pressure was on, but as he saw it, in this situation it couldn´t hurt to be as prepared for any given scenario, as he could be.
When Mary-Beth finally arrived there, how she looked in her thin summer dress almost took his breath away, not to mention almost made him lose his newly found courage.
"You look ... wow!" was all he could say and it made Mary-Beth smile shyly at him, in that way of hers, that always seemed to make his heart race just that little bit faster, every time that he saw it.
"Thanks, I guess. Did you just ask me to come down here, so we could hang out, or did you actually have something, you needed to tell me? Because it´s fine with me, either way!" Mary-Beth shyly blurted out and once again, he felt himself wanting to do just about anything else, besides for what he knew that he had to do. After all, how couldn´t he, when all he wanted in a girl was standing right across from him and was still in this second, just as crazy about him, as he was about her?
"I´ve done something dumb" he began, as the option to not tell her, started sounding better by the second in his head.
"What?" Mary-Beth asked innocently, like an unknowing child, who´s about to be told, that their parents are getting divorced.
"I had an affair. With Hannah" he told her and immediately, was overcome with both a sense of fear of what was to come and relief, that he wasn´t lying to his girlfriend anymore. Seeing as he couldn´t bring himself to look her in the eyes, it was hard to say what her immediate reaction was, but he could only imagine it being one of disbelief, mixed with around a thousand different other emotions, many of which he was feeling too.
"What do mean "Had an Affair"?" he could only barely hear Mary-Beth asking, in between the sobs coming from her.
"We did stuff together. Kissing and touching".
"Do you like her, more than you like me?" Mary-Beth asked, this time so quietly, that he could only just make out what she´d said.
"It didn´t have anything to do with that! Mary-Beth, Hannah doesn´t mean anything to me! You mean everything to me!" he said from the heart, as he finally manned up enough to look Mary-Beth in the eyes.
When he did and all he saw was tears coming from them though, it would have been hard for him to feel like he was any lower of a life-form, than he did in those very moments.
"Mary-Beth, I´ll be the first to admit that when we started this romance or ours, I went into it hoping for the best and not expecting much" he continued, in a last-ditch attempt to save what was left of their relationship. "What I found in you was a girl, I could spend the rest of my life with, and I mean that with every fiber in my body! I don´t expect you to ever forgive me and neither am I sure, that I deserve to be forgiven. I just wanted you to know that".
If you´d asked him before Mary-Beth had been told, how he thought that she would have reacted, he would have told you that just about all options were open for discussion. That she chose to do what she did however, by leaving him standing alone there, without saying another word, only left him with dozens of more questions, than he had been given answers.
Still, as he made his way home again, it felt like a weight was off his shoulders, now that he had come clean to the most important person involved, about what was sure to be one of the worst mistakes, he´d ever end up making. The alternative, a lifetime of lying to her about it, would have ended up being far worse in the long run, but then again, maybe that had been the plan of the devious Hannah all along? She knew that from their first kiss, she´d driven a wedge between himself and Mary-Beth, that would always be there, at least until the truth came out.
If Mary-Beth didn´t take him back, that was quite simply the deserved price, he would have to pay. If nothing else, he was pretty sure that when enough time had passed, they could become friends again, like they started out as. With all of his heart, he still hoped though, that he would somehow end up having future with her by his side, through the best and most important parts of it.
Is that what you call truly being in love with someone? If it is, then Dawson was certainly guilty as charged!
END OF CHAPTER FORTY-SIX