“Yeah, well. I’m all messed up too,” he said. “But thanks for the explanation.”
He hiked his bag over his shoulder and walked down to the parking lot without offering me a ride.
1 I swear, I am the only person at Tate who doesn’t have a cell phone. Even the fifth graders have them.2 When I think about it, this is both true and not true. I have talked a lot of trash about people. Meghan. Hutch. Katarina. I really have. But throughout this whole horror, I never said one mean thing about Kim, Cricket or Nora to anyone, even when all that stuff was up on the bathroom wall.
So am I a bad person or a good person?
13. Jackson (Yes, okay, he was my boyfriend. Don’t ask me any more about it.)
By now, you know everything about Jackson Clarke, probably way more than anyone on earth wants to hear. This is all I have to add:
I still think about him every day.
When I see him, my heart jumps up in my chest.
I long for him to talk to me, and whenever he even says hello, I feel a thousand times worse than I did before.
I wish he was dead.
I wish he still liked me.
When I got home from talking to Shiv, Hutch was on my deck. Again. Wednesday and Sunday afternoons, he helps my dad greenhouse the southern deck. Especially now that the weather’s good, the two of them are always huddled together over a peony bush or a broken window-pane, the boom box blasting cassette tapes of Hutch’s retro metal.
The sunlight was starting to fade; it was maybe six o’clock. “Hey, Hutch. Hey, Dad,” I called, waving as I came down the dock. The two of them were staring up at the greenhouse, which I had to admit was coming together. “You guys taking a break?”
My dad had taken to hiding Popsicles in the way-back of the freezer, so that he and I could get enough calories in the macrobiotic nightmare of our life. I popped inside and got one for me, one for my dad and one for Hutch, too (my mother was out, needless to say). Then the three of us sat on the edge of the deck, leaning forward so the Popsicles didn’t melt on our clothes, watching the boats sail across the lake.
I actually felt happy for the first time since Jackson broke up with me.
Now don’t go getting excited that I’ll suddenly notice Hutch in the soft pink light of the sunset and fall in love. He’s
“Roo, good to see you looking cheerful,” said my dad. “Isn’t it nice to see her cheerful, John? It’s been taking her a while to process her feelings about the breakup with Jackson. He was her first serious boyfriend, you know.”
“You’re better off without that guy,” said Hutch, his mouth full of Popsicle.
“You think so?” I said. “I don’t.”
“He’s a jerk.”
“Huh?”
“Not a nice guy, Roo. He’s mean inside.”
“Why do you say that?”
Then Hutch told this story. I’m not sure why he told it, except that he and my dad had been doing some heavy manly rocker bonding. Or maybe he felt sorry for me, even though I was such a bitch to him most of the time. Hutch said that he and Jackson had been friends in sixth grade—the year when, at Tate, you start moving from room to room for each class instead of staying all day in one place with one teacher. Jackson was a year ahead, but they had gym together, and French, and the same free periods—so they started hanging out. As a sixth grader, Hutch was friends with all the cool seventh-grade boys: Kyle, Matt, Jackson and a few others. They played kick-ball after school. They had their own table in the refectory. They made a lot of noise in the hallways. Jackson and Hutch were friends in particular: Hutch used to ride his bike over to Jackson’s house on weekends, and Jackson stayed at Hutch’s when his parents had to go to Tokyo on business one week. When the two of them were bored in class, they’d write funny rhymes about the teachers and stick them in each other’s mail cubbies.
That kind of thing. That’s the one he recited for us. Anyway, summer came, and Hutch went off traveling for most of it with his family, and when he got back in seventh (when Jackson was in eighth), he found himself frozen out. “I got zits over the summer,” he said to me and my dad, staring down at his Popsicle stick. “I looked like hell, and I was still completely short. And they’d all been to sports camp together while I’d been away.
“First week of school, I trailed after them, sitting on one end of our table, not much part of the talk. Still showing up for kickball. Something seemed off, but I couldn’t tell what. These guys were my friends, you know?
“Then one day, I wrote a rhyme about Mr. Krell—remember, the middle-school gym teacher? And I stuck it in Jackson’s cubby like we did the year before.”3
“Oh man,” said my dad. “I can see it coming. Children can be so cruel.”
