THE FIRST TIME
CHAPTER TWELVE - WHY CAN'T WE BE FRIENDS?
"The color of your skin don't matter to me
As long as we can live in harmony
Why can't we be friends?
Why can't we be friends?
Why can't we be friends?
Why can't we be friends?"
WAR (From the album "Why Can't We be Friends?" (1975))
The time since Jen came to Capeside to live, had been a time of many firsts. Living with a senior citizen, trying to be a good student, trying to not make a mess of her life on a daily basis, just to name a few. That she would ever wish that she'd been given more homework, however, was a new experience that she'd never been able to foresee coming! Having homework meant that she had something to do in the sometimes long feeling afternoons, after school had ended and before her friends got off from their after-school jobs, so she could hang out with them in the evening. Usually, if she didn't have plenty of homework to do, she'd have Abby to hang out with and that would help to fill the time, but with her and Joey hanging out on this day, it was time for a plan C to be formed.
If there was one thing, she could say that she'd always been horrible at, it was being alone. She gathered that it had something to do with all of the hours she'd been left alone at home growing up, while her parents were out improving their social standing (instead of doing any actual parenting or trying to do what they could, to repair their rapidly deteriorating relationship with their daughter). When she was little, they'd provide a babysitter for her, but from age seven to twelve she'd spent most of her evenings in their giant Manhattan condominium alone, with orders to stay there and not go anywhere. It shouldn't have been any wonder to them then, that the girl they'd made to feel unloved throughout her most formative years, would go out in a desperate search for it elsewhere. To make it worse, her parents seemingly exonerating themselves from her enormous fall from grace during her early teen years, only made her feel even more removed from them mentally than she was physically, with the two warring sides now living in two separate states.
Grams and herself had slowly started to become better at communicating and sometimes Jen would get a feeling that they were starting to connect, but then Grams would start quoting bible verses at her and she'd feel like they were right back, where they'd started four months earlier. She loved the elderly lady for how kind and patient she was being with herself and was grateful beyond belief that she'd been saved from having to go to some nightmarish boarding school somewhere by her. As far as her being the perfect confidant though, there was still a generational gap there that it would be hard to entirely traverse, even in time. On occasion, she'd have a chat with Dawson's dad, when they ran into one another and would often be left feeling a little jealous, that her dad (the complete opposite of Mitch Leery) couldn't have been more like him. Hell, if she'd grown up a dad like Mitch and a mom like Dawson's mom Gail, she'd probably be the most well-adjusted girl the entire world now! Certainly, not some huge mess, that's just made out with a girl, who was now probably in love with her, and she didn't want to be more than friends with, not to mention falling in unlucky love more with every day, with her best friend's boyfriend!
Speaking of said boyfriend, she saw an opportunity to make her afternoon and evening a little less on the lonely side, when she happened to see him coming out of Dawson's house, just as she was returning home.
"Shouldn't you be working?" she asked him, as they approached each other.
"With all of the hours I've had to spend working alone in that store, now that Dawson is too busy sucking face with Mary-Beth to come to work? Ah, ah, not today, Miss Lindley! Today, I'm taking the day off while he gets to train the latest employee at "Screen Time", the owner's snot-nosed fourteen-year-old son, whom I've met once and instantly didn't like. So, good luck with that, Dawson!" he quipped, and she couldn't hold back her nervous giggle anymore. Dear Patti Smith, he was slowly turning her into Capeside's version of Marcia Brady!
"Serves him right, I guess".
"As long as he's off your hands now, you're so over the moon ecstatic, that it's putting Julia Roberts at the end of "Pretty Woman" to shame. Am I correct?" he asked her, while staring into her eyes with those eyes of his, that it was like she got completely lost in, every time they made eye contact.
"I'm pleading the fifth on that question and just saying that I'm happy for both of them. If anyone is living proof of how hard it can be to find love, you're looking at her" she stated sadly and it made him look sympathetic with her, like she'd hoped it would.
"Jen, if I can somehow manage to find someone here, then you can too".
"Like who? All of the time I've been here, I've been asked out by three guys. There's Dawson, who instantly smothered me and got possessive. Cliff, who was nice enough, but could only talk about himself and I had zero in common with. Oh, and finally there's Chris, who I've turned down numerous times already and still somehow seems to be too thick-headed to get the message!"
"Yeah, I totally get why you don't want to date him!" Pacey agreed with her, while shaking his head. "I've never personally had any kind of major problems with the guy, but he looks at girls like they're his playthings. Whenever he does sleep with one of them, he'll usually be found soon after loudly bragging about it the hallways to all of his buddies, while everyone can hear. I don't even know most of those girls that he talks about and even I can't help feeling a little sorry for them".
"That's because he's a walking piece of human excrement and you're a through and through decent guy, Pacey! You make life for those around you better every day, just by being a part of their lives. To see you then get put down by your teachers for not being the best, when it comes to book learning, or hearing the way your dad and brother talk to you sometimes, just isn't fair on you! I'm sorry, but it's true!" she said truthfully and could see the pride starting to build up in him with every word.
"To be fair on them, I do kind of deserve it sometimes!"
"No, you don't! Just like Joey and I don't deserve to be treated like we're Hester Prynne in "The Scarlet Letter" by most of the girls at school, either because she lives with an unwed mix-race couple and has a dad in jail or in my case, because I didn't grow up here and for that reason alone, apparently deserve to be shunned by them!" she scowled, while he kept smiling to himself.
"You desperately needed to get that out of your system, didn't you?" he inquired, and it brought a small smile back to her own face as well.
"Kind of, yeah" she had to admit.
"Listen, since all of our other friends have commitments that don't include either of us for the rest of the day, why don't you come with me, and we'll hang out? I can be the filter that you channel all of your frustrations through, while you don't notice me letting most of it go in one ear and out the other. Trust me, after sitting through hours of listening to Dawson talk boring movie trivia, I've become a genuine master at it!" he offered and now, she couldn't help herself from laughing out loud. "Come on, Lindley. It's the best offer, you'll get all day and perhaps tomorrow counted in as well. Of course, I can't speak for the day after that just yet, but ..."
"Put a lid on it, Pacey! So, what are we doing on this our "Jen and Pacey Monday Funday" together?"
"You'll see. Can we call it something else, though? Because, calling it that reminds me of that episode of friends you're clearly referencing, and I don't need to be reminded of Janice's voice now, or forever more for all eternity and beyond, if I have to be perfectly precise".
"Note taken" she answered him and suddenly, this day had gone from "utterly dreadworthy and can't wait to get it over with", when she woke up, to "perhaps not so dreadworthy after all, but still not a day you want to remember" by the time school ended, to now "Looking like it could potentially become a pretty great day after all"!
If Abby had been a little worried that herself and Joey wouldn't have anything to talk about during their day together, then she would have been absolutely correct! After they'd gotten past talking about school, which they had extremely varying opinions on, their friends, another subject they couldn't agree on, and current events, which she had to admit at being terrible at keeping up with, they'd completely run out of things to talk about. The next subject they'd talked about was the weather and in Abby's opinion, when you've sunk that low, it's time to call time on the patient and try to move on. Why she'd then thought of inviting Joey over for dinner at her house, stood as a mystery a moment after she'd said it and Joey saying yes, even if it didn't really look like she wanted to, now meant that she'd brought a real problem on herself once again. One thing was that their house looked like a mess for the most part, she also didn't want Joey to start pitying her when she saw the empty bottles, that it would be almost impossible to hide from her former rival.
They caught a ride from downtown Capeside out to Abby's house on the outskirts (a grand total of two and a half miles) with Joey's brother-in-law Bodie, who seemed like a really nice guy to her and someone, it wouldn't be entirely bad to have as your replacement dad, while your own was in lock-up. She'd only ever had something resembling a conversation with Joey's dad once, when they were age nine and their "Feud" had gotten out of control and led to a fist fight between them in the school cafeteria. Afterwards, their parents had held a meeting, where they'd both had to sit silent and listen, while their parents discussed what to do about it, like they weren't there and she remembered herself and Joey sharing a short glance of understanding, that this wasn't something that either of them wanted to try again. All she could remember was that she didn't like him, but Joey's mom had seemed more reasonable to her and thanks to reason prevailing, they'd shaken hands and agreed to try to stay away from one another from then on. That felt like ages ago now, where Joey had no parents to live with and she had a dad, she didn't even know where lived anymore and a mom, who was many times more liable to embarrass her, than she was of impressing any prospective friends.
Her mom wasn't home, when they got there, which could both have been a not too bad or very bad sign. She knew that her mom was filling in on the night shift at the hospital this week (to make a little extra to spend on more wine, booze or the cigarettes, she'd recently taken up smoking again, many years after she'd quit the first time) and as she'd come to find out, this was an advantage to herself as well. On those weeks, her mom didn't drink during the weekdays, with the exception of "Her glass of morning wine, just to fall asleep on" that her mom would be drinking, when she went to school. Even if she did have more, like Abby highly suspected that she did, she'd be sober when Abby got home and would stay at home and that way for the rest of the day, until she would eventually leave for work late in the evening. They had the agreement that Abby did the shopping for those days, but they had plenty in the fridge to choose from, so unless they were missing some key ingredient for her mom's dinner plans (an unlikely, yet not impossible option), there was no saying where she could be. Abby just hoped, that wherever it was, it wasn't at a bar somewhere.
"Sorry about the mess. It's the maid's week off" Abby immediately joked in an excusing tone, after they came into the wreck of a house, where she lived with her mom.
In the house Joey lived in, they had the Empress and ruler, not to mention hater of all messes, named Bessie and even if she'd eased up a little after becoming a mother recently, she still kept a tidy house for by far the most part. Dawson's house was always spotless, it seemed, and the only time she could remember being in a truly messy room, was the first time she saw Pacey's room at around age seven or eight. He was just a little kid though, so he was more than excused. To see how Abby and her mom were living however, was just plain sad. Clearly, Abby had tried to steer her clear of the worst looking areas of the house, but just from what Joey could see, it wasn't like anyone was doing much in the way of housework there. Their kitchen sink was full of dirty dishes, old take-out boxes filling up its share of space and then some, and dust visible just about everywhere. More frighteningly though, were the three filled plastic bags with empty wine and vodka bottles, none of which had a speck of dust on them.
In the living room, it looked and smelled almost worse. The air was foul and rank with a mixture of old cigarette smoke and various kinds of alcohol, that had been left to fill up the space with its leftover odors. Abby quickly cleaned up the coffee table, but not before Joey counted eight empty beer cans, an empty bottle of Vodka, what she assumed was an empty carton of orange juice and two empty bottles of wine. The ashtray was filled to the brink with cigarette butts, with spilled ash on both the sofa (a sad looking thing that was begging to be replaced) and the carpet, which had lots of small burn stains on it, right around the "sofa area".
"What can I say? My mom is a thirsty lady!" Abby dark-humoredly joked.
"I can help you clean up, if you want" she offered back.
"No, it's fine. I've become used to cleaning up after her, I've just had some busy days. Have a seat and I'll be back in a second" Abby said, before bringing a quickly filled garbage bag out to the rest of the garbage, she'd seen out in front of the house.
"The poor girl! How can anyone live like this?" Joey quietly whispered to herself before dusting off a section of the couch to sit on.
"Pacey, if I die today, know that I'll go to my grave entirely blaming you for it!" Jen exasperatedly said, as she held on for dear life to the sides of the speedboat, they were sailing WAY too fast for her liking in out on the creek!
"Weren't you an adrenaline junkie back in New York?" he asked back with a cocky smile, that said just how much he was enjoying the thrill of this.
"Not one with a death wish! Can we stop for a moment, please? I think, I'm about to puke all over Mitch's speedboat!" she asked, and he immediately slowed them down to a near standstill.
"Sorry about that, Lindley. I sometimes forget that sailing isn't in everyone's blood, like it is in mine" he apologized, before taking a seat across from her and handing her a half-full bottle of water. "It isn't vodka or rum, but it should help a little with the nausea".
"Who was the last one to drink from this?" she asked suspiciously, as she took the bottle from him.
"Myself. It's been in the boat for a few days, since I went out on this fine vessel's virgin ride with Dawson and Mitch, so don't expect it to be cold, but it's still drinkable" he told her assuredly and as he'd said, drinking it made her feel a little less queasy. It also didn't hurt that when she put her lips where his had been last, she could pretend that their lips were being pressed against each other's.
"Mitch just bought this, huh?" she asked in an attempt to keep the conversation neutral.
"Some guys buy fast cars, when they hit their mid-life crisis. Around here, it's just as, if not more common that they buy fast boats".
"If that isn't Capeside in a nutshell for you, what is?"
"You don't feel at home here yet, do you?" he asked in such a kind way, that it made her want to confess everything to him, her own giant crush on him included, right then and there.
"I'm trying to, I really am. Sometimes, I do and then there's other times, where it feels like I'll never fit it in or grow to feel like I belong here".
"I grew up feeling like that. Luckily, I had Dawson, Will and Joey to hang out with, but if I hadn't had them, it would have been miserable for me here".
"So, I've more or less taken this Will guy's spot?"
"Not really. Will was more of the boy, I could go fishing with, kind of type. I still stay in touch with him, but it's been a few years since he moved away. For a while there was a girl named Mellissa too, who was a friend of sorts with Joey, and we sometimes hung out with. Then, her and Joey had a falling out of their highest kind, and I haven't talked to her since grade seven" he explained, and it made her a little curious.
"Joey has never mentioned any of this to me".
"It's probably too painful for her. See, after Joey's dad went to jail, it didn't take long for news to hit the Junior High, we went to, whose father it was that had been supplying the town with weed. From day to day, there were lots of kids there, who suddenly started avoiding Joey. Melissa, according to my guess, not wanting to be considered guilty by association, started spreading rumors about Joey to win favor with the popular crowd. It worked for her too, when it came to becoming popular, although I seriously doubt that Joey has said a word to her, since they hurled those nasty insults at one another, during their very public last bust-up a few years ago". It took Jen a second to do the math and get which Melissa he meant.
"Melissa, as in Melissa Berry from the cheerleader squad?"
"Joey has come up with many other, much less flattering names for her over the years, however that is the name she goes by, yes".
"Interesting! Especially, considering that Melissa Berry is among Joey's competition in the "Miss Windjammer Contest".
"How's that for a clash of the titans? Really, Jen. Are you okay? Sometimes, I wonder if you're holding things back, because you're afraid that you'll lose your friends, if you say it out loud. I'm not like that, you should know that about me by now".
"Am I okay?" she wondered out loud. "Pacey, I came here to get my life in order and try to make some kind of sense of this crazy thing called my existence on this earth. I try each and every day all that I can, and it still feels like I take two big steps back, for every small step I take forwards. If it isn't one thing, then it's the other and at some point, I won't be able to take any more steps backwards, before I fall into some giant abyss again. I can't go back to that, I just can't!" she confessed to him and for the first time in a while, she allowed a few tears to start flowing from her eyes.
"Hey, hey, Lindley! You're no more screwed up than the rest of us are!" he assured her and put his arms around her for a comforting hug. As she pressed herself in against him, she took in his manly scents and soon after, all of her troubles began to fade away from her mind.
"Tell me how screwed up you are, Pacey. Make me feel better about my own life" she asked and for the next hours, she just sat there and listened to him talking, while the boat gently swayed in the water. When he was done, she didn't only know him like she hadn't before. She was now sure of three things. One: His childhood had been (in a completely different way) almost as messed up as her own, but only almost. Two: She really and truly wished that she could have grown up here with him and his friends, instead of the cold and loveless upbringing she'd had back home. And three: She was for the first time in her life, where she was one hundred percent certain about it, in love. With Joey's boyfriend.
Abby and Joey spent most of the afternoon up to the early part of the evening watching TV, while Abby kept increasingly worrying over what would happen, when her mom came home. This had now gone beyond any kind of usual behavior for a woman, who lived by her routines and her not having left a note, or called to say anything about where she was, left her downright scared for what was to come.
"I should get home soon. I have homework and my sister is expecting me not to be too late, so I can help with looking after my nephew" Joey said, after they hadn't said much for the past few hours by then.
"Sure, I understand. Look, I'm usually better company than this, it's just that ..." was all Abby got out, before the phone rang.
"If you'll excuse me" she said, before rushing to get to the phone.
"Is it you, mom?" Abby answered it with, knowing that very few other people ever called them anymore.
"Is this Abigail, I'm talking to?" a voice on the other end, that she recognized as being that of Pacey's older brother Doug, asked.
"It's she. Who am I talking to?" she asked back, just to be sure.
"It's police officer Doug Witter. I believe that you've become chummy recently with my little brother, Pacey?"
"Yeah, I have. He's a nice guy, your little brother".
"He can be, when he wants to. Abigail, I'm afraid that I have some bad news. Your mom was involved in serious car crash, only a few hours ago. She's been taken to the hospital and from what they told me, it's pretty serious, so if you need a ride down there, I can be there in five minutes" Doug told her, starting off what can best be described as the worst evening of her life.
Joey had planned on excusing herself from Abby's company and calling a day on it before dinnertime, but those plans quickly changed when Doug called to tell Abby about her mom's accident. In that second, she'd become the most important person in Abby life for that day and it also meant, that she couldn't bring herself to leave Abby's side. They'd tried to call Jen's house, only to find out that she was out on the town with "Dawson's friend" and with them making up all of Abby's social circle, there was only herself left to be there for her former "frenemy".
There wasn't much to do in the hospital waiting room and it was a depressing atmosphere there, which made keeping Abby's spirits up almost impossible. What she surprisingly found out however, was that talking about their multi-year-long rivalry was the best subject at doing the trick.
"Remember in grade four when I hid on you with a water pistol before school and sprayed your pants with it, so it looked like you peed them?" Abby asked, bringing up a memory that Joey had done her best to erase over the years.
"How did I get you back for that?" she asked, probably having blocked it out of her mind.
"You ... let's see if I remember, all of these years later ... a-ha, now I remember it! You sabotaged my chances of getting in with the cool girls, when you told them that my parents were brother and sister and they'd had another child, which was born misshaped, and we kept locked up in the basement. I have to give you points for creativity for that one!" Abby recounted with a wry smile of remembrance across her otherwise sad face.
"It can't have done your social standing any wonders, though".
"Oh, well. All is fair in love and war, isn't that what they say? Remember back in grade three, when I got Stacey Nicholl to believe that you were born with two sets of genitalia and your parents flipped a coin over whether to raise you as a boy or a girl? That was one of my proudest moments of the entire war!"
"That was you? So, that's why when Kenny asked me out in grade eight, he started out by asking if I was more one or the other! I've been wondering what he meant ever since that day!"
"Look on the bright side, Joey. Thanks to the dumbest boys still believing that you're half-and-half, you won't have to bother with them asking you out ever! If anything, you should be thanking me".
"Abby, we really need to stop doing those things and never do them again!"
"Yeah, I agree. It was sometimes fun, while it lasted though, wasn't it?"
"It had it's few moments of satisfaction here and there. But now, where we've grown up and have some dear friends in common, it's also time we started behaving like a pair of civilized adults. You can't be a child for your entire life, after all".
"What about Uncle Joey from "Full House"?" Abby asked and just seeing her smile, made Joey feel a little proud of herself for being there for someone like this.
"He's just a fictional character. Although, I do have a great-uncle Royston, who's forty and has never really grown up. It also perfectly explains why he's had three failed marriages already".
"With a name like Royston, did he ever really stand a chance?" Abby quipped and seconds later, Pacey's older brother Doug came in.
"Abigail. It's good to see that you have friend here with you and aren't alone. How are you holding up?" he asked concernedly.
"Worried. They haven't told me much" Abby replied.
"I have good news and bad news" he told them, before sitting down with them.
"The good news is that she's come out of surgery, and it all went according to plan. It'll take some time, but from what the doctor told me, she's expected to make if not a full recovery, then very close to it" he continued to explain and both of them drew a sigh of relief.
"That's something, at least. What's the bad news?" she asked for Abby, whom she was guessing wouldn't want to be told and therefore wouldn't ask.
"We ran a blood test on her, when she came in. Did you know that she was fired from her job as nurse this morning, for being caught drinking on the job?" he asked and from the looks on Abby's face, this was brand-new information for her.
"No, I had no clue" Abby dumbfoundedly answered him.
"Apparently, it wasn't the first time and she'd had co-workers covering for her on other occasions. Our theory is that she went right from there to "The Watering Hole", where the owner has told us that she drank until she was so drunk, that she could barely talk. They offered to call her a cab, which she refused and roughly fifteen minutes later, she crashed into another car in an intersection, where she ran a red light. Do you know what a blood alcohol level is?"
"They've told us in school" Abby answered for her very quietly, while staring a hole through the floor.
"Hers was measured at over six times past the legal limit for driving under the influence. I bet she hasn't told you about the other four times we've given her tickets for DUI, or the court ordered rehab, she still hasn't signed up for?". Again, Abby clearly wasn't in the know about any of it.
"I had no idea" she whispered.
"Abigail, I hate to be the one to tell you this, I really do. Is your dad a part of your life?" he inquired and only got a small shake of Abby's head as his answer.
"Any other family around here, that you can perhaps move in temporarily with?" he tried again, getting the same answer. "Abigail, this has become a very serious situation for your mother. She was driving while highly intoxicated with her legal history and that far above the limit, she ran a red light and right into another car, that from our findings were driving by the rules and where two people were rather seriously injured. It all adds up to a good while in jail for her, I'm sorry to say. All of that will happen in due time and for now, she'll have to stay here for a few weeks as a minimum, while she recovers from her injuries. After she's released, you can then decide on whether you want to go back to living with her or not and should she be convicted in a court of law, as I expect she will, we'll then have to start looking into a more permanent housing situation for you. The main thing right now is that we need to figure out a living situation for you, so this doesn't entirely uproot your life from one day to the next, more than it already has and will".
"I have no idea ..." was all Abby said, before Joey made a spur of the moment decision. One that it wouldn't be easy to sell to Bessie, but not impossible either.
"She can stay with us for now. If any family around here knows how to be accepting to the daughter of a jailbird, it has to be ours, right?" she offered and from the grateful smile on Abby's face, it became clear that what had been the unlikeliest of scenarios less than a day before, had just become reality.
END OF CHAPTER TWELVE