- -
She knew it intimately. Like the taste of Root Beer sliding down her
throat; like the smell of stale popcorn from the previous night's movie
marathon; like the feel of an oar in her hand, or the weight of it
sliding through the water; like her mother's breath on her face as she
kissed her goodnight for the last time.
The feeling of the cancer, it spread right through her till her limbs
felt paralyzed and she crashed into her mattress without bothering to
put on the clean sheets fresh from the dryer. She could smell the years
of sleep in the pillowy softness, the remnants of the many night sweats
ever since her mother's illness started eating her whole family alive.
Joey's cynicism grew, raping her childhood of much of the innocence
previously held intact by the shuffled up Spielberg quotes swarming
about in her head. Her trust in everything faltered and fell near to
nothing as her mother, once so alive, faded farther and farther away.
--
Heartbeat pounding like a million drums; tremors as disruptive as an
earthquake; mouth as dry as the desert; posture rigid, tight as a
clothes line. All ready to cave in. Her body waited for her choice, but
she could not speak or move. She stood helpless, sandwiched between a
sister and a best friend who both felt too distant sometimes as her
mother's body was lowered into the ground. The grave.
Joey wanted to glare forever at the tombstone, her eyes marking any
symbols of her mother's passing with her bitterness, hating them and the
way they recorded the beginning and the end of such cancerous pain. In
chiseled letters that could start and win a staring contest to take her
under, and hold her there, where she couldn't breathe. But then she
wanted to hug it, that disgusting tombstone, and give it a kiss, for
Death was kind in one way: it took away her mother's misery. Mom would
never suffer again; she now had others to suffer for the loss of her.
Joey's share of that curse was now speeding in turmoil through her veins
as she dropped her amateur letters on paper into the deep grave before
the rich dark dirt was shoveled in to cover everything, and signal the
finality of what was gone.
The world is sorry. We'll remember.
Words like trinkets, sealed with the kiss of trembling young chapped
lips, fell under the top soil to ruminate with the graveyard bugs and
the bones of everlasting white. With the kiss on the page now dirty and
buried, she made a silent promise to the one who was dead.
--
Mom had always known what to say. Like when Joey explained her desire
to capture every word in the English language in her daily dialect once.
Mom had said to start by learning "a word a week".
So Joey did. And so she was. She was even doing something
constructive with it: she was writing Dawson a poem in exchange for the
way he had nearly brutally shoved her in the school parking lot at
recess.
You're so cynical,
Analytical...
You're a brute,
You make me puke
"Brute doesn't rhyme with puke," said Dawson, suddenly leaning over
her shoulder.
"Well," she said easily, "you would know."
"What's the poem called?"
"Dawson."
"Yes, that's me. What's the poem called?"
"No, that's what it's called, Dawson. Aren't you proud to know
that my writing will bear your name?"
Dawson sized her up, zeroing his attention all in on her. "You're
being vicious."
Vicious. So he was doing the word-a-week, too. He stole it from her.
How rude. Always before it was "mean" or "snide", and he always had
liked the term "ridiculous".
Joey shrugged. "Yeah, well."
"Joey, what have I done to deserve this?"
"Hello? Today? In the parking lot?"
Dawson gave her a dumb look, like a puppy that had just been shushed.
She almost pitied him.
"You pushed me," she clarified. "Hard."
"Tommy was going to tag me. I didn't want to be 'it'. Whenever I run
after them, everyone gets to make the jokes about my slow stubby legs.
Joey, you know this, why don't you understand?"
That was Dawson for her. Understand me, oh, understand me.
Like she herself didn't need to be more understood as she'd stood a lone
figure, the gap seeming a mile long between her place on the blacktop
and where Abby Morgan was lighting up a cigarette in the shadows of the
school yard's biggest Birch tree. Joey was all alone as she narrowed her
eyes at someone stupid enough to willingly invite cancer into their
bodies, sucking it in drags from a stick of poison in their hand. Not
knowing what their life's loss would indefinitely do to others who had
ever stood around, watched them, and counted down in their own heads to
the point of their forfeited sanity.
It wasn't enough to watch one person die. In this town with its
claustrophobia that choked her, she would be witness to every death that
would cover the world around her in darkness and that kind of pain that
comes with not feeling at home anymore. Would she ever find her home
again, in her mind haunted with her mother's sickly pale, gaunt face and
hair turned darker than midnight?
Why don't you understand? Dawson had the nerve to ask. She in
turn found the nerve to look him in the eye as she gave up on their tiff
in the classroom. "You'll be lucky to ever find someone who will
understand you as well as I do."
Dawson shrugged. "Thanks."
--
The police car rolled away, its red revolving light on the hood
piercing her eyes till they nearly felt blind, even after the light
disappeared.
She was crying. She never cried. She was tough -- she got scrapes and
blew on them, gulping back the tears in her eyes, absorbing the sting
with her inner strength. But now the source of that strength was gone.
She turned to the only one she had left.
"Sometimes I think... What would I do without you?" she asked him,
her voice a waver, her tongue feeling cut out and raw.
Dawson was there, and his hair was growing ever longer. "You'd live.
You would keep going, keep stumbling ahead, and eventually... you'd hit
your stride."
"How do you know that?" Joey wiped her nose with her sleeve, the
gesture sloppy from the empty girl.
"I know you."
--
She stood at the edge of cliffs in her dreams that morphed into
nightmares, her red tennis shoes sending rocks skittering into the black
oblivion below. Would it take her? Would it? Could she leave a world
like this, as her parents had done?
Mom had slipped over the edge of the rock cliff, and fallen to the
depths of a grave. And Dad, the one Joey had called Daddy that day when
they'd handcuffed him in front of the neighbors and led him off to
prison, had found his own way of plunging away from the light. Leaving
it to engulf little Joey like a migraine, the whispers in every harsh
wind snickering, You're alone, you're alone. Everyone leaves, yet you
know you must stay.
She felt that she'd never call him Daddy again, the name too
endearing to those who were no longer dear. She vowed never to trust him
again; to leave him to that police siren that called the attention of
everyone as he was taken away without a fight, and with a confession
that brought something grim to the brown of his youngest daughter's
eyes.
She thought of the promise she'd sealed with a kiss to her mother on
the buried note that wouldn't be read. She found some kind of resolve
after many aching analyzations and it was only rocks that fell into the
darkness of her nightmare that day.
--
Dawson wanted to know what it was like, in the far away place her
mind traveled to against her will, often in mid-conversation, snatching
her responses to his musings and tossing them too far away for her to
capture. She became quiet, where before she'd never been. Talking was
their thing, after all, and she found that she wasn't the only one
disconcerted by her newfound silence.
"It's like I'm sinking in water..." she tried to explain, her voice
coming out in a dry croak, "being pulled down by the tide, where the
jellyfish will add their sting to my misery until I'm stung to death."
"Joey, fight it. Don't just drown. Keep your head above water. You
can do it. You have to."
All she could see was death and drowning. Staring at a river clogged
with mud, a river that ran deep, that swept past your legs and caught
you up in the current at the bottom. A river, that looked so peaceful to
the rest of the town, the rest of the residents clogged in the theater,
The Icehouse, the various restaurants along the creek; a river that
would tear through your bones like jagged teeth, and give you that inner
chill; run with you, die with you. Bury you alive.
"I'm not going anywhere," she told him absently, a sheen of
disinterest in her own words glazing over her eyes.
She could feel his stare on her face for a while, and despite
herself, her cheeks found an embarrassing pink tint. Until he pulled
away from where his shoulder was touching hers, and found 'ET' to pop
into the VCR. She didn't bring up the lack of popcorn, knowing she
couldn't eat it without gagging and coughing it back up in pieces too
small to identify, yet big enough not to disintegrate and disappear.
Like wishes blown through a fallen eyelash held on the tip of a finger.
Superstitious nonsense fitting into descriptions of her made her stomach
bubble with acidic hate.
--
She doubted there would be many more times when they'd occupy this
swing set together, when the parks were abandoned for the promise of
after-school Twinkies and the burden of tedious homework never-ending.
She could hear Dawson's breath hitching as he kicked his legs to soar
higher and higher, coming too close for comfort to that heaven in the
clouds when Joey's swing held the opposite pattern, placing her behind
with the legs ready to re-pump while he got to climb into the wind.
Joey let her swing fade, the bottoms of her shoes sliding along the
dust below her feet to send it flying up around her body, and his. She
turned all of her attention toward Dawson, resting her sun-baked
forehead on the swing's chain. She asked him a question, in one of the
taboo subjects they always found ways to ignore. "What do you think
heaven is like?"
"That's something every screenwriter has to decide for himself
eventually," he replied, grunting with the effort to go ever-higher with
each forward momentum.
"You haven't decided yet?" she pressed, her tone dull to hide how
desperately she sought this information.
He peeked at her as his swing pulled back toward her and then past
her, until he was soaring forward again. "What, like you have? Where's
your heaven, Joey? It can't be anywhere near here, that much I know."
"This. Being here. With you..." When he chuckled just slightly, she
rolled her eyes. "Don't be an over-confident jerk." Even in the insults,
she knew she'd grown more eloquent as she'd aged. Dawson, too, though he
didn't always display it yet.
Hating the embarrassing silence she didn't know how to fill after
opening up, as she sometimes did to him, to find that he had yet to take
her seriously, Joey ran and kicked forward with the swing, allowing play
time to ensue. As her swing began to climb to his stride again, she
looked over at her smirking buddy and said, "If I see too much cockiness
in your strut on the way home, I'm gonna take it back. Everything I've
ever said to you to give you that look."
"What look?" he asked, as if naive to the cynicism he so often saw
within her.
"That one. That's it, everything I just said to you? Gone."
"No take-backs!" he flared, suddenly finding his passion for always
one-upping her again.
"Since when?"
"Since Spielberg was born."
There was a deep pause, one that the creek could run through to make
him as far away as his house was from her own.
"Fair enough," she managed finally, and the water between them dried
up in desert heat.
Dawson found his second smirk of the day. "Joey Potter, backing down?
Were there hallucinogenics in my cereal?"
"Well I'm trying to keep the peace, since apparently this is heaven.
You'd think I would've aimed higher with that one."
She was aware as he nodded, his swing slowing close to a stop. "You
only live once," he told her, as if she didn't know. The look she gave
him went ignored, and she continued to kick her legs forward and back
again to gain enough momentum to fly away from this world where one
lifetime was not enough. Not for those who deserved so much more.
--
The town's stares accompanied her every step along the pier. People
pitying her with their judgment that stretched a mile. She tried to be
proud. She didn't want their pity.
Tears, so many tears fell one night between Bessie and Joey.
Together, they hugged, like real sisters, with only each other left of a
family broken and criticized, in present and future. Hugs that held on
so tight and protected Joey, as she was dying inside. In Bessie's arms,
she'd wail, she'd scream, she'd choke in her abandon. Nothing would
console her, nothing. She was a baby again, with no comprehension of the
future and how it could be there with two parents who were not.
All she could see was that tear, that second, that agony. Breaking
free of the hug, she covered her ears. She couldn't handle any more
cries. She gulped and her whole body stopped, it couldn't handle the
cries... not even her own.
Her world gone silent as it could get, she fled to the corner of the
room and crouched down into a tight ball, closing her eyes. Her
considerable height she managed to shrink down, pulling her legs in
tightly like a spider trying to coil after being batted at with a fly
swatter. She was not here, this was not happening... behind her closed
lids, she faded into the shadows. Faded right away.
--
"If the world was a better place, we'd have even higher expectations.
Our world is an infinity we cannot reach."
Dawson was preaching again, about all he knew about life, when he
knew nothing of its beginning nor end. She felt like angrily slapping
the "stop" button on the tape player, as for once, he came to her, and
walked into her bedroom instead of waiting for her to climb into his.
She didn't want to hear that kind of crap, and she told him so, as their
song played from the tape she'd kept for so long.
Cheer up, Sleepy Jean;
Oh, what can it mean?...
He was there after accidentally slugging her from the opposite team
in dodge ball which threw her into the cement of the gymnasium wall. He
was diligent in pursuing her rapid steps home from school even though
she was strong afterwards, absorbing the sting and burying it with a
deep swallow of her throat. She might still be strong that way, but she
found him lost in a mess of worrisome anxiety. There was a small mirror
in her bedroom to reflect the bleeding from her hair line, where she
could need stitches to help keep her form bundled together.
She didn't say much, not knowing how to reply to his stunted
sentences that sought for her to accept his apology that wouldn't quite
come out. It would have been funny, seeing someone like him at a loss
for words, if anything were funny anymore.
When Bessie walked into the room to ask Dawson how things were going,
Joey moved to the bathroom, where she broke down and cried on her own,
sopping up the sticky blood with wads of toilet paper before it could
dry and become hard. She sobbed and sniffled quietly as she cleaned up
the mess that life had made, leaving her bleeding, again and again.
And then when she came out, her hairline wet from the light scrubbing
motions that only made it sting a little more, he was standing there,
awkwardly, in the tiny Potter hallway. He still didn't know what to say,
more so now than before. She figured he'd heard her release behind the
closed bathroom door, and she was ashamed of showing her grief that way
to someone that was labeled "best friend" but still also held back by
the "boy" also tagged to his bones.
But he was Dawson, and after enough silence and shuffling of his
feet, he spewed out all that was troubling him, his words blurring
together as emotion rose into them and took their enunciation away. He
was "sorry-that-he-didn't-know-what-to-do-or-what-to-say-anymore," sorry
that he was "as-lost-as" her, wanting to help her but always finding
that all he could do was "say the wrong thing, perpetually, and then let
a ball go before realizing" it was gathering speed to hit someone like
her and cause her more pain when already she was feeling more than his
"tortured want of fame" could ever match up to. He was "sorry", he was
"sorry", that he was breaking her further instead of putting her back
together. And he was "being stupid", something she thought he'd never
admit to. Something she didn't know how to react to when she'd never
heard it escape past his lips before.
He could be stupid. Sometimes he really, really could. But she
didn't find it stupid that finally the words slurred from too speedy to
incomprehensible babbling, as he broke down and became the crying
spectacle to match the insides of herself that she'd been working so
hard to hide from him.
There were grimy tears on his boyish face, his features squinted as
though against the glare of the bright sun. As if she was the sun that
he'd always been in her life. And then he hugged her, cooties since
childhood and all, biting into the cotton of her baggy shirt, perhaps to
keep from screaming as she did. She realized this was him, feeling her
transparent emotions that nary another soul could read. And she didn't
hate him for the crust of blood accompanying the line on her forehead
which had never sprouted bangs. She almost let herself love him as
completely as she could admit platonically, which she would another day,
when he wasn't being crushed under the burden of watching her live
beside him and suffer so.
Finding him finally here with her, the emptiness of trudging through
the world alone was absorbed as if with a sponge, and she closed her
eyes to inhale the mixture of sweat and pure Dawson in the smell
of his arms around her.
Oh, and our good times start and end
Without dollar one to spend
But how much, baby, do we really need?
--
As eighth grade ended, she began touching him more, hiding her desire
to cling to him in their tomboyish wrestling, in his bed and in the
grass before the ever-scrutinizing eyes of Capeside society. She let go
of everyone's pity, and blocked off their disdain with her defense
mechanism reflexes, sending all vibes back to attack their owners and
make them question their own lives, and not merely hers. She resolved to
be the spectacle, and vowed revenge on all who looked down on her.
As Dawson pinned her arms above her head, and laughed down into her
face that was starting to remember how to smile, she kicked at his legs
with her longer ones until he gave, and she was on top, the one pinning
him to place in that soft mattress of tumbles and springs gone squeaky
from all of the pent-up energy taken out on them. She didn't tell him
the way that he was beautiful as he struggled to upstage her in every
wrestle, but she let herself think it and hold onto it, and begin to
love him in a way that was softer than she'd known in the past.
She pretended not to notice the way their arms touched just barely to
send the hair on hers on end like warm melting goose bumps as they
watched and dissected movies, as always before. She didn't say so many
things out loud, but she could sense that he felt the changes that were
occurring inside of her. The way she was growing strong again, like the
girl who didn't used to care what anyone said, what anyone whispered
behind backs in tones loud enough to be heard.
She wore more short-sleeved tops in the summertime to get the rush of
that bare touch on his upper arm, sitting right next to him in a Queen
sized bed, staring at worlds where people overcame and it was celebrated
in Oscars, applause, and microwave popcorn. The bitterness that had
begun swirling in every Root Beer dissipated until they tasted like
always before.
And she could see the revenge she would have on this town. She could
see the way it would blow the spectacle of her life out of the water as
she would find a way out of the rut in this place and come back
successful one day. She'd throw it in their faces without having to know
every name that had looked down on her for so long. They'd have to
strain their necks to behold how tall she would be, and someday she
would be proud of it. She would recover to climb mountains of life's
obstacles, and they would no longer know how to call her filthy names.
It would be sweet. Sweet as the soft curls in Dawson's hair she
sometimes dared to touch while tackling him to the mattress where they
continued to play and came to know happiness and its steady path that
would lead to more and more.
Her revenge would make the narrow-minded rue the day their gossip was
spat in her face. It would be in the palm of her hand one day, just like
Dawson's curls, and when her fear had flown so far it wasn't so
frightening anymore, she would know recovery until her mother lived on
in herself for so many days to come.
It would be hers, and it would be bliss. Questions would be answered
and she would rise above it to be free, at last, heavy chains like those
from the angry swing set no longer holding her down, bit instead letting
her fly as far as wings would carry. High school and the better things
beyond called to her, and when she met them, she'd belong. She'd grasp a
hold of them and her vice grip would nary let go till she'd made it and
pain was nothing but the past propelling her forward into everything
else that was smiling and waiting for her.
- -
end
