You Were in Eighth Grade
…Because if you were, then you would be able to actually have a decent conversation at lunch with Sunny and her friends, instead of walking past a table of Cro Mags who STILL call out, “Do you have a flower for ME, Ducky?” and throw you kisses, which makes you vow to drop your milk shake all over them someday even though it may cost you your life, and you’re supposed to meet Jay, but he’s not there, so you end up sitting with Alex, who is reading a horror novel and not eating. And he doesn’t look up, so you ask him how it is, and he says, “Okay. I don’t really know what it’s about.” And the only response you can think of—“then why are you reading it?”—seems nasty so you shut up and eat.
And that’s when you see Jay, halfway across the room with a hot-lunch tray.
You wave to him and shout, “Over here!” but he just glares at you.
And you finally have a conversation with Alex the Silent. Something along the lines of
D: “What’s with him?”
A: “He won’t sit here if I’m here.”
D: “You guys have a fight or something?”
A: “Nahh, he’s just a jerk. You can go sit with him. I want to be alone anyway.”
D: “That’s okay.” [Start eating. Notice Alex’s lunch bag is on the seat beside him.] “You had lunch already?”
A: “Nahh. Not hungry.”
D: “You feeling all right?”
A: “No.”
D: “Sick?”
A: “No.”
D: “Bad mood?”
Alex tunes you out and continues reading. And you have that weird feeling again. Only this time the feeling tells you something is seriously wrong. But you’re so frustrated and insulted and confused, all you can say is, “Hey, don’t mind me, I don’t exist.”
A: “I didn’t ask you to sit here.”
D: “Right. You didn’t. I’ll just leave, okay?” [Stand up. Sit down.] “Okay, what is wrong, Alex?”
No answer.
D: “Talk to me, will you?”
A: “Why should I talk to you? You’re not my therapist.”
D: “You’re seeing a therapist?”
A: “Maybe. None of your business.”
D: [Chew, chew, chew, swallow.] “You know, there’s nothing wrong with that. A lot of my friends have seen therapists.”
A: “Yeah?”
D: “Ted used to see one—not anymore, but back when Mom and Dad first started going on long trips. He was pretty young. Fifth grade, I think.”
A: “I started way before that.”
D: “When?”
A: “I don’t know. When I was five or six. I don’t remember NOT having a therapist.”
Five or six.
This is news.
Big news.
You feel like you’ve been hit in the stomach.
Your mind is flashing back to your childhood. To the Old Alex. To the one big friendship of your life. To the person whose mind you could read. The guy you knew inside and out.
You were wrong.
He was keeping something from you. All those years, he was seeing a shrink. Going to appointments. Pouring out his problems to someone else.
And you didn’t even notice.
WHEN? When did he go? Those times his mom would pick him up early on Saturday afternoons? She always said they were going shopping. You just assumed they shopped a lot.
And WHAT problems?
Except for those few months after the divorce, he always seemed pretty happy.
Or maybe he was just a good actor. Covering up his sadness. Fooling you. Completely.
You didn’t know your best friend after all.
So you’re thinking about this and not saying anything, and Alex is looking at you weirdly, and you’re thinking maybe he can still read YOUR mind, and you’re embarrassed as hell, and all you can think to say is, “Why?”
Which is not the right question, because Alex looks like he wants to cry, and he grabs his lunch, says, “Because I’m a psycho, I guess,” and leaves.
You should run after him, but you’re too stunned or something, which is too bad, because who should sit next to you but Jay.
He’s grinning, and a shy-looking girl is with him.
Her name is Barbara, and he’s told her all about you….
Midnight Musings
You WILL tell him off.
Again.
You were too chicken to do it over lunch. Not that you COULD anyway, with BARBARA standing right there, smiling at you, and your mind still on Alex and his secret life. All you could do was smile and say hi and try to act normal because she seemed like a nice enough person, as you watched Alex disappear down the hallway.
But you will tell Jay off, when you get the chance. If you have to yell at him a hundred times, you will.
DUCKY, YOU WILL NOT BE DUMPED ON.
But first things first.
The Alex department.
Some progress.
Talked to him after school. A little. He seemed in a hurry to get home. Maybe he had a shrink appointment.
Here’s what I learned:
He’s depressed. He’s been depressed his whole life. It gets better, then it gets worse. That’s why he’s in therapy.
WHAT is he depressed about?
HE WON’T SAY.
The divorce?
You asked him that. He said no. He’s handling that fine. Or so he says. Besides, he was in therapy BEFORE that.
Is it Paula? YOU wouldn’t love having her for a younger sister. But PLENTY of people have bratty siblings. They don’t have to go to a shrink for it for a whole lifetime.
School? Girl problems?
Is ANYTHING so serious that a person would need therapy for so long?
Therapy is supposed to HELP. You have a problem, you go, you talk, you get better. Like going to the doctor. Like what Ted did.
But this is different. This is almost a WHOLE LIFE.
A whole life with YOU in the middle of it. You, his best friend. His IGNORANT best friend, thinking you knew everything about him but not knowing a thing.
Why DIDN’T you know?
Why didn’t he tell you? You could have listened to his problems and helped him. Maybe he’d be better off now.
His shrink sure hasn’t helped.
Was the problem YOU?
Did you do something wrong?
Okay, you once squirted him in the eye with a water pistol and he said he wanted to kill you. That was in third grade.
You made Dad rent that horror movie when Alex and you were seven—and no one checked the rating, and it was so scary that Alex had nightmares for a week and his mom lectured you about unsuitable images. That was your fault.
You convinced him to sneak into Mrs. Kennedy’s yard and she caught him but not you, and when she threatened to call the police and Alex was shaking with fear, you did nothing to help him.
My god, YOU WERE A LOUSY FRIEND. And what did you do during the Snyders’ divorce? Nothing. You never wanted to talk about it. You didn’t understand it, and you figured it wasn’t your business.
How would YOU feel if you were a kid in the middle of your biggest life crisis, and your best friend just abandoned you?
You’d lose it.
You’d probably be just like Alex.
DUCKY. CHILL.
You are making a big deal out of this. At least he’s talking to you. At least he’s confiding something.
After a lifetime of keeping secrets from you.
Idea Over Breakfast
Here’s a thought:
Alex is quiet and miserable.
Sunny is loud and miserable.
They might actually get along.
Maybe they should meet.
Upon Further Reflection
Over Lunch
What are you, nuts?
In Which
Christopher Discovers
That He Is Still Enrolled in School
You should have given Ms. Patterson TWO ca
rnations on Valentine’s Day, Ducky.
Maybe you wouldn’t have flunked the math test.
But you didn’t. And you did.
You are in deep doo-doo.
A Passage of Several Days
…And you are still alive.
You even know the difference between a cosine and a sine. Possibly. Your brain is fried from math study, which is why you haven’t written.
Ms. Patterson knows you write in this journal during class. If you open it again in math, she confiscates it.
Which is why you are spending lunch period hunched in the corner of the cafeteria, scribbling away.
LOTS TO TELL. WHERE TO BEGIN?
Okay.
Part One. Jay.
Just when you think it’s safe to make him your enemy, Jay surprises you.
He comes to your house with a brand-new chess set and asks if you want to play. CHESS! By the time you pick yourself up off the floor, laughing, he looks like a hurt puppy. “I thought you LIKED chess,” he says. So you reassure him that you DO like it, and you invite him in to play, and he’s the worst player in the world but he LOVES it, and you teach him a defense or two and he calls you a genius, and all of a sudden you think he’s an okay guy after all.
And after you’ve beaten him a second time, he agrees to buy you dinner for no reason at all. And when you get to China Wok, you ask him why he’s doing all this stuff—the unexpected visit, the chess, the food—and he says he’s just trying to be friends again. And he tells you he’s worried about you, because you look mad all the time. “Aren’t we still buddies, Duckeron?”
And you have to admit, this makes you feel pretty great, even though you have to tell him you HATE his nicknames.
You explain you’ve been a maniac lately because of the math. You haven’t really BEEN mad, you’ve just LOOKED mad. Which is kind of the truth, but kind of not, because Jay Adams has not exactly been on your list of top ten favorite people these days. Not even top thousand.
Anyway, he seems relieved, and he offers to help you with homework but you say no, because HIS help is likely to REALLY sink your grades. And now that you’re talking like human beings, you finally unload how you feel about his matchmaking—calmly, rationally—and he’s sort of getting it, sort of not, asking you stuff like, “Well, what kind of girl do you like?” when Sunny walks in with Dawn.
End of conversation. Jay acts like he has never seen a more beautiful sight in the world than Dawn Schafer. Dawn and Sunny sit down with us, and Jay asks Dawn a million questions. She’s acting really friendly, probably just humoring him, but they’re having a great time.
And you’re thinking, hmmm, Dawn and Jay? You wouldn’t have predicted it, but maybe opposites do attract. And in a funny way, you are jealous, McCrae. Because life seems so easy for Jay. Even though he can be a pigheaded goon, people like him. Girls like him. And why not? He’s out going. He’s friendly. He’s funny. When you get past all the stuff that makes you crazy, you find a sweet guy. But that’s not the WORST part. The worst part, the thing you really envy, is that it takes SO LITTLE to make him happy.
The Secret to Contentment, According to Jay Adams: Meet a Girl.
The Secret to Contentment, According to Ducky McCrae: worry about how you look in the morning, because even though you can’t bring yourself to wear boring conservative clothes, you don’t want to risk setting off the Cro Mags. And make sure you don’t bounce too much as you’re walking into school, because Marco the Cro Mag king will say you’re flitting, which makes everyone laugh. If you survive THAT, you’re off to a good start, and IF YOU’RE LUCKY you’ll have a few laughs with your 13-year-old friends, the only ones who seem to appreciate you, and when you go home, you’ll find that your brother has not left the milk out of the fridge all day and has actually bought a few groceries and maybe run a load of laundry with some of your stuff in it. THAT’S contentment. And that’s pathetic.
So you’re thinking this, and you’re getting mad and frustrated at yourself for being jealous, and your friend Dawn, who otherwise has always been pretty sensible, seems kind of fascinated by Jay, kind of attracted to him, and then…
We all order food, and he asks for spare ribs and sweet and sour beef.
Of course, he has no idea that Dawn is the World’s Number One Health Food Nut, who eats absolutely NO red meat.
Her face clouds over. Her eyes narrow. She mutters, “Ew.”
Does Jay leave it alone? No. He asks questions, finds out about her eating habits, and looks at her like she’s from Neptune. Then he says things like “How can you NOT like a juicy red steak?” and “Aren’t you HUNGRY all the time?” and Dawn doesn’t want to make a scene, so she’s trying to change the subject, but you can see her getting angrier and angrier.
You no longer feel so jealous. But is that right? Should you be GLOATING because Jay is under attack?
Why not?
Finally Sunny manages to get us all talking about movies—only Jay is chewing the spare ribs lovingly and saying, “mmmmm” while looking straight at Dawn, who is not amused, and you realize your 8th-grade friends are much more mature than some of your OLDER friends, and before you know it, everyone is serious—including Jay—because Sunny is talking about her mom’s cancer.
This sure doesn’t brighten things, but Jay has stopped his doofus act and is listening intently. He comments that Alex’s aunt had lung cancer, and you remember that. You remember how Jay and you comforted Alex when she died, and how Jay cried, and you feel this pang in your chest for the old days, when we were all so close.
It’s a pretty intense dinner. Afterward, you drive Jay home, and one of the first things he says is, “She’s perfect!”
You explain that if he even THOUGHT about asking Dawn out, he would probably have to abstain from meat-eating for a few months first, before she’d even look at him again.
But no. He’s talking about SUNNY.
He is saying that she’s perfect for Alex.
And this, finally, leads to
Part Two. Alex.
But it is almost time for next period and you haven’t eaten anything yet, so you sign off temporarily.
No Longer Hungry
Just Bored With English Class
…So you pretend to be writing the great American essay, when in reality you are going back to where you left off.
Yesterday. Okay, you’re home from the China Wok. You’re thinking about Jay’s comment.
Matching up Sunny and Alex. It’s so JAY. So mind-bogglingly WRONG. But just the fact that he showed concern for Alex is a good thing. And THAT’S what you’re thinking about. Maybe the three of you are NOT on three different planets. Maybe you can all be best friends again.
And really, there’s something about the idea that isn’t so stupid. It might be good for Alex and Sunny to know each other. Not in a dating sense, just in a hanging-out-as-friends sense. Sunny’s the ONLY person who would understand the kind of depression Alex must be having.
And Alex might be just the one to reach Sunny when she gets into one of her dark, angry moods.
So you figure you’ll invite them both to hang out with you at the beach Saturday. You call them. Sunny doesn’t sound thrilled that Alex is invited. Alex says he’s sick of the beach and he doesn’t like meeting strangers.
It’s not easy, but you twist their arms.
You tell them both, “It’s important to me that you come.”
Which is true.
And they agree.
Another good deed by Ducky.
Saturday at Venice Beach
You picked up Alex first. He looked about as happy as he would be if he were going to an all-day math fair.
He complained about how early it was.
He complained that it was too cold for the beach.
He complained that he was tired.
You were surprised he even got into the car.
But he did, and you drove off, singing along with the radio, and when the station played an oldie
that you and Alex used to love, you shouted out, “Remember this?”
But he was slumped in the backseat, eyes closed. As you pulled up to the Winslows, Sunny BOUNCED out the front door. In such a good mood.
Then she saw the corpse in the backseat.
“Oh, uh, hi, is he…?”
You nudged Alex awake. You introduced him to Sunny.
He just grunted.
Sunny climbed into the front seat, and you covered for Alex. You said he was probably up late studying, or something stupid like that.
Sunny is so cool. She just took over the talking:
S: “I am JEALOUS. I could use some sleep too.”
A: “Mmmph.”
S: “I was up all night. My mom’s home from the hospital. She has lung cancer.”
A [Finally sits up.]: “Oh. Wow. Too bad.”
S: “Thanks. It’s hard. She’s really bony now, and she has these bedsores from the hospital bed, which is made out of, like, marble or something. So she gets these pains, and then she wakes up, and I haven’t been sleeping well lately, so if I hear her, I am up!”
A: “I know what you mean. ANYTHING can wake me up.”
For that moment, you thought you were a genius.
They were talking. CONNECTING. Sunny was going on and on about cancer and chemotherapy and radiation treatments. You could see Alex’s face in the rearview mirror. He was actually interested. Concerned.
A: “My Aunt Wendy? She had lung cancer too. And she’d given up smoking when she was young.”
S: “My mom too!”
A: “And Wendy had chemo and stuff. She lost her hair.”
S: “How’s she doing now?”
A: “She died.”
No.
No.
The air in the car froze.
S: “Oh. Well, you know, they’ve had a lot of success with combining the chemo and the radiation.”
A: “That’s what they told us too.”
S: “But nowadays they do it better. It’s not like it used to be.”
A: “My aunt died only a year ago. I mean, not that your mom’s going to die, I just meant it didn’t happen, like, way in the past.”
S: “Uh-huh.”
Finally, FINALLY, you had the brains to turn on the radio.
You listened to the top 40. And no one said another word until you got to the beach.