“I got my same note back with something scrawled across the top in Jackson’s writing,” Hutch went on. “‘Joke’s long over. Loser.’” He stood up and tossed his Popsicle stick in the trash can.
“That’s all it said?” I asked.
“‘Joke’s long over. Loser.’”
“Wow.”
“He never talked to me again. Like we’d never been friends. Like we’d never even met. And when Kyle and those guys filled my locker with ball bearings in eighth,4 and they poured out all over the floor- Jackson didn’t say a word. Just stood there, changing his shirt like nothing was even happening.”
“Jackson would never do that,” I said.
“Well, he did. Who knows?” Hutch shrugged. “He might have put the bearings in himself.”
“No way.”
“I’m just telling you what happened.”
“He’s not like that anymore,” I said. “If he ever was.”
“Dream on,” said Hutch. And then, like he was singing: “Dream on!”
“Dream on!”5 squeaked my dad, in a stupid rock ‘n’ roll falsetto.
Hutch joined him, and they kept squealing “dream on” like stuck pigs until, simultaneously, they yelled, “Dream-a make-a dream come true!”6 They both sang, and stopped for a little air-guitar duet.
With this additional evidence of (1) Hutch’s creepy tendency to make references to antique heavy metal songs that no one else knows about and (2) my dad actually knowing them and liking it and (3) a complete lack of dignity on both their parts, the moment was over. No more sharing was going to happen. My dad hit Play on the old cassette deck, and the entire dock of houseboats was bombarded with retro metal.
Was Jackson truly the kind of guy who would fill someone’s locker with ball bearings? Or even just stand there, saying nothing, when his friends were humiliating someone? Had he really written “Joke’s long over. Loser” on that poem? It didn’t seem like the kind of thing Hutch could invent.
But it didn’t seem like the guy I knew, either.
Maybe Jackson had done those things but wasn’t that way anymore. We all grow up and regret the mean things we did in middle school.
Or maybe I never knew him that well in the first place.
I grabbed my bike, rode to the nearest store (ten blocks) and bought two large bunches of basil, a box of pasta, walnuts and a wedge of Parmesan cheese. Then I boiled noodles and made pesto sauce in our blender, before my mom got back to tell me it wasn’t macrobiotic.
The next morning, in the Jeep, I asked Meghan if she wanted to go to the movies. I felt like I was inviting her on a date. A Woody Allen festival was playing at the Variety.
“Can I bring Bick?” she asked, honking her horn at some idiot driving an SUV.
“No. I think it’s a girl thing.” I didn’t want to be a third wheel with Meghan and her boyfriend.
“We’re supposed to go over to Steve’s house and shoot pool on Saturday.”
“Oh.”
“But I don’t want to go. Those guys are always drinking beer and nobody talks to me,” she said. And then to the drive-thru window: “Two vanilla cappuccinos, grande.” And then to me: “It’s not that fun. I usually go out on the porch by myself, actually.”
“So blow him off.”
She didn’t say anything for a minute. We paid for the cappuccinos and she pulled out into traffic. “Yeah. Okay. I can see him Friday.”
“It’s a plan, then?”
“Uh-huh.”
We might be friends.
1 Movies where the apparently hopeless dorky guy who’s been there all along eventually gets the girl:
