by Jack Parker
"Do people hallucinate when they're in severely drunken states?"
Shirley scowled and swatted at Jake in annoyance. "You be serious, or I'll ship you back across the street to your nitwit grandparents." Jake straightened in his chair agreeably, since he didn't doubt the seriousness of her threat. Shirley studied him lengthily. "How much bribery would one have to do to help you notice how Hannah acts around you?"
"Now you sound like Isaac." Jake rolled his shoulders, working the kinks out of them from sleeping on them oddly. "He says—"
"He's a smart kid." Shirley took a sip from her coffee cup and frowned. "I'm serious, Jake. Hannah admires you. I'd be willing to bet that whatever you say to her…she considers it greatly."
Jake almost smiled. "Would you bet your brandy on it?"
"You couldn't prove me wrong if I did." Shirley laughed for just a second and then leaned toward Jake seriously. "Hannah needs you. And I need you to help Hannah. At least think about it. If you really tried to help her, I know that she could remember. You could help her find herself again."
Highly uncomfortable, Jake picked up his orange juice glass and drank from it slowly, wasting as much time as he could. It was way too early for a lecture, which was one of the reasons that he wasn't going home where his grandparents were. But Hannah's grandmother wasn't giving him the break he'd expected. In fact, he had half the mind to tell her off for suggesting that he—that he what? Hadn't he already tolerated Hannah as graciously as he could? He'd been nicer to her than he ever had been in his entire life. What more could he do?
"So…what you're saying is… What the heck are you saying?" Jake frowned in his bemusement. "How am I supposed to help her out? I don't know all that much about her. Like you said, we didn't get along."
Shirley smiled. "Just…talk to her friends. Find out everything you can about Hannah. Then help her find it out too." She paused then and seemed to be reconsidering. "Just don't…mold her to your will. Don't make her who you'd want her to be."
Newly pensive, Jake's eyes went to the kitchen tabletop. He wasn't too sure that Shirley was correct, but if she was…and if Hannah got her memory back…Jake could have his life back. There would be no more babysitting Hannah or even putting up with her outside of family functions. That was enough motivation right there for Jake to collect funds for experimentation on amnesia recovery.
"Hannah!"
Following Shirley's gaze lazily, Jake glanced behind him, where Hannah was squinting in the light and rubbing at her neck. "Hi," she murmured sleepily. "Merry Christmas." Without hesitation, Hannah sat beside Jake as Shirley got her a glass of orange juice as well. "What time is it?"
"Apparently late enough for the dead to wake, from the looks of you," Jake quipped, smirk in place. Though doubtful that his usual meanness would help Hannah out much, he couldn't resist. Who could be for sure that some cruelty wouldn't trigger her memory? As a wise person once said…don't knock it until you try it. That said, Jake could at least test it out.
Hannah returned his smirk tiredly. "I appreciate that."
"No problem." Jake stole a glance at Hannah and watched her take a long drink of juice. Eyeliner from the previous day was smudged on her left eyelid, while her right eye was lacking almost all of the previous day's makeup; it was nearly comical. In fact, if Shirley hadn't been in the room, Jake would have let the insults fly from the tip of his tongue. Instead, he questioned as politely as he knew how, "Where's that Christmas present you promised me?"
"I gave it away. To someone more deserving."
"More deserving? Than me?" Scoffing, Jake rolled his eyes. "I take that to mean that you're talking about Hudson. Let me guess—you've lost your senses and think he's better than me. Unless you finally fell for Ethan after Formal. I guess you found a muzzle after all? He's the only one who could need it more than me."
Hannah didn't respond, and when Jake looked over, he saw that she was staring at him, looking positively stricken. Forehead wrinkling, Jake inclined his head ever so slightly, further showing his puzzlement. Normally, that would have prompted an explanation from even the least intelligent beings, but—though Jake figured he probably should have expected as much—Hannah didn't take the hint to speak; she just kept looking at him like a deer in headlights.
Finally, Jake couldn't take it anymore. "What?" he asked, none too nicely. "What's your problem?"
"Nothing," Hannah answered, tossing her head pointedly. She avoided his gaze. "I didn't give your present to Greg or to Ethan." Jake raised his eyebrows at her, and Hannah shrugged. "It's in my room. Come on."
Though he'd let Hannah pull him to his feet with an icy hand, Jake scowled all the way to the stairs in the living room. "Can't you just bring it down here? I don't want to go up there."
"Don't be a lazy ass."
Jake laughed on impulse and continued following behind Hannah. Her crabby response was too classic for her, and he'd almost…missed…her hatefulness, as weird as that was to think. Jake could easily reason that Hannah's meanness made him grateful that she might be returning to herself, even though he couldn't exactly pinpoint why she'd really amused him.
Hannah opened her bedroom door and went in, leaving Jake to hesitate for a second in the hallway. If he knew anything at all about the old Hannah, it was that she didn't like him in her bedroom, and if he was truly going to help Hannah find herself, then he should probably be upfront about that.
"Come on, Jake!"
Brow furrowing, Jake thought about how telling her that he was a persona non grata would mean confessing about their hatred for each other. Shirley hadn't mentioned blabbing about that, and Jake suspected that if he told Hannah that they hated each other, she would be less interested in listening to what he had to say. So lying it was.
"I'm coming. God." Jake stomped into Hannah's bedroom, closing the door behind him, and glimpsed her pulling her strawberry blonde hair into a messy ponytail. Messy was about the only thing she could pull off well, in Jake's opinion.
"Okay, so it's kind of cheesy," Hannah declared, smiling rather excitedly as she turned around to face Jake. He noticed that her eyeliner smudges had been wiped away. "But you should just be proud that I listened to you so much. Okay?"
Jake flinched obviously. Talk about mind reading. "Uh-huh…"
With flair, Hannah jerked a box, wrapped with red and silver striped paper, from beneath her bed. Grinning, she laid the gift on her bed, clumsily sat beside it, and looked at Jake expectantly. After a moment passed without a reaction, she sighed impatiently. "Well. Go on. It's yours."
"I know. I'm just adjusting to the fact that you really bought me a present."
As she rolled her blue eyes, Hannah lifted the top of the box off, revealing white tissue paper. "Can you adjust a little faster?" She flipped her hair saucily over her shoulder with a coy smile. "Or should I just do it for you?"
Sighing, Jake sat down on Hannah's bed and picked up the box. "Cheesy…as in rotten, moldy cheese?" Hannah just looked at him, so Jake placed the box on his lap and pulled away the tissue paper. Speechless, he stared down into the box's depths.
"Tada!" Hannah laughed. "Now, the next time you decide to pretend you're in Jurassic Park or whatever exactly it was that you pretended, you won't have to have imaginary lava boots!"
It was true. Beneath the tissue paper rested a pair of ridiculously tacky, gray rain boots that would probably come up to Jake's knees. Uncertainly, Jake rubbed behind his ear and offered Hannah a smile. "Uh, thanks."
Hannah watched Jake in apparent amusement. "You're welcome." She paused and was silent just long enough for Jake to look up at her. "Did you really not get me anything for Christmas?"
"Aren't you supposed to give without anticipating what the other person will get you in return?" Jake asked, his eyebrows raised.
"Sure, and I did. I'm just asking."
"Then I'll just answer." Jake put the tissue paper back over his new boots and settled the box's top back on it. "No. I didn't get you anyth
ing."
Hannah's mouth dropped open, surely in an attempt to make Jake feel guilty. "Hey!"
"Don't you 'hey' me," Jake groaned, making a face at her. "I told you that I wasn't getting you anything, and I meant it."
"Then in return," Hannah began, scowling, "I'm going to mean it when I say not to take my heys away from me because hey, you're a big jerk!"
Jake smirked. "I love taking hey from asses."
"Only because bigger asses need more hay," Hannah snapped back.
After blinking, Jake could only stare at Hannah in wonder, amazed by her quickness. So maybe he shouldn't have expected her wit to be gone, but hearing it certainly caught him off guard, particularly when he hadn't expected her to understand his play on words in the first place.
Seemingly oblivious to Jake's stare, Hannah yawned and lied back against the pillows on her bed. "I'm exhausted—thanks to you. It's impossible to sleep peacefully while sitting upright."
"Mm." Growing restless and more uncomfortable being on a bed with his enemy, Jake looked to Hannah's alarm clock and decided that he should probably get home. Isaac wouldn't wake up for at least another three hours, and he didn't want to be stuck with just Hannah. Clearly, being her helper-friend-thing was going to take some major adjusting. "I should go. You're tired, and my grandparents will bawl me out if I miss breakfast with them."
Hannah smiled sleepily. "True. You'll be back later, right?"
The question put Jake on the spot, and it gave him a funny feeling. That was the kind of question that a girlfriend would ask. True, a friend might ask it also, but the way Hannah was looking at him… If he didn't get out of there in a hurry, he'd either puke on her or end up killing himself from the horror of it all. It was definitely going to take seeing a dead dog to get the mental image of Hannah smiling at him like that out of his head. Ugh.
"You better," Hannah murmured on seemingly mindlessly, wiggling against her pillows and closing her eyes. "Might as well go through the Christmas torture together, eh?"
"Uh, yeah, I guess," Jake muttered as he picked up his box and made for the door in a hurry. Fortunately, the genuine sickness in his stomach was going to allow him to beg off of Christmas dinner with a legitimate illness, although he doubted his mother would let him off the hook anyway. It'd be worth a shot though.
"Are you sure that this tie matches my suit, Elizabeth?" Jonah Allen asked for the fifth time, peering into the bathroom mirror later on that Christmas Day. Since Jake's bedroom was directly across from the bathroom, he had the misfortune of hearing his grandparents talking, since both doors were open. "I feel as if I'm mismatched. Maybe I should wear my green tie instead of the red."
Elizabeth's fingers rolled through her tight perm. "You look fine, dear." She sashayed around her husband and started down the hall, calling over her shoulder, "Hurry and don't make us late."
Jake sighed so loudly that he missed his grandfather's response, though his grandma could have been talking to him. Lying across his bed, Jake had been listening to his iPod until his grandparents' fussing became louder than his music. Then he'd taken to texting a few of his friends, and now, as he waited for responses from Brent and Kirk, Jake had nothing to do.
"Are you wearing that to Christmas dinner?"
Slowly, Jake raised his green eyes to his grandpa's face in the doorway. Even slower, he looked down at his outfit—old blue jeans and a brown polo with white stripes. It seemed fine to him. "Yeah."
Jonah scowled angrily. "You shouldn't be such a slacker on Christmas, Jake. Is it so hard for you to dress up on occasion?"
Knowing that it would anger him further, Jake shrugged lazily and flipped his cell phone open, ready to even fake sending a text message. Dimly, he heard his grandfather lecturing about ignoring him, but Jake was fascinated by an incoming call—from Hannah. She'd never called him before. In fact, they only had each other's numbers in the first place because, back in their middle school days, they tended to prank call each other anonymously when they were with their friends.
"—and, furthermore, Jake, I don't appreciate it when—"
"I've kinda got to take this call," Jake interrupted as politely as he could, though his mouth was quirking with a dire need to smirk his classic smirk. "It's pretty important." Muttering angrily under his breath, Jonah surprisingly left, and Jake resisted the urge to throw his cell phone at Jonah's retreating back. Easily, he instead accepted the call from Hannah. "Hello?"
"Hey…" She sounded glum. "What are you doing?"
Brow furrowing, Jake sat up, listening cautiously. "Um, not much. Why?"
"Can we skip Christmas dinner?"
Surprised by Hannah's longing to skip any meal, let alone a big one like Christmas dinner, Jake's jaw dropped. "What? Why? Is that even allowed? There's got to be some law written somewhere that—"
"Shut up, you pansy, and meet me outside in five minutes. You're driving."
It took a few moments for Jake to realize that she'd hung up on him. Miffed, he considered ignoring her, but two thoughts came to him. One, Shirley wanted him to help Hannah get her memory back through friendship, and that also benefited him. And two, skipping Christmas dinner also meant skipping out on the grandparents, which really benefited him. So ultimately, it was not a hard decision to make, and Jake found himself sitting outside in his ice cold truck, cranking the heater on full blast, in less than three minutes.
God help him for obeying the Hannah Ayers.
As he sat there, Jake pondered Hannah's motives. There was a certain emotion in her voice that he didn't recognize, and it unnerved him. Obviously something had happened if she wanted to blow off dinner, but what could have been so bad that she'd want to give up turkey with all the trimmings?
The passenger side door opened then, and Hannah, bundled in a thick blue coat by The North Face, climbed into the seat. "Thank God you didn't put up a fight," she greeted, jerking her seat belt on. "Drive, please."
"Oh no." Faux-befriending Hannah was one thing. Letting her boss him around multiple times—especially in one day—was something different entirely. "Not until you give me an explanation for this."
Indignantly, Hannah tucked her hair behind her ear, haughtily proclaiming, "If you don't drive, I will. That's perfectly okay."
Jake glared at her, fondly imagining hitting her with something, preferably hard. Still, he put his truck into drive and backed out of his driveway. "I don't know why you have to be such a bitch," he griped. "I mean, I know it's in your nature and all, but jeez—"
"I'm starving. Therefore, I'm allowed to be bitchy." Hannah sighed and tipped her head, sending a wave of strawberry blonde hair flowing into the heater's reach. "Did you see that commercial last night? Walgreens is open on Christmas Day. Let's go there and binge on whatever they'll sell us."
"You'd think that if you were so hungry, you'd want to go to Christmas dinner."
"And you'd think that, since it's shocking that I don't, you'd understand that you should go to Walgreens faster."
Jake scowled. "Boss me around one more time and see what happens."
Instead of fighting with him, Hannah offered what almost looked like a sympathetic smile. "It's not like you want to go to a big family dinner anyway. So I'm kind of doing you a favor. Will you please drive faster?"
Since Jake couldn't respond to that with an argument, he didn't respond at all. Instead, he drove to their local Walgreens without saying a single word, despite that Hannah was muttering to herself about what she wanted to eat. He heard her name different brands of chips and candy, but Jake refused to give her the satisfaction of conversation. No, apparently, he'd be stuck with her for awhile, and the time for talking would undoubtedly come, so he figured he should save his patience for tolerating her until then.
Ten minutes later, Jake found himself in the snacks aisle, sighing impatiently at his enemy's slowness. Now was the time for conversation. "For the love of God, Hannah, pick something!"
Hannah beamed at him saucily. "I thought
you'd turned mute on me."
Jake strangled the air in front of him, mimicking with his hands what he'd like to do to Hannah's neck. "Five more minutes, and then I'm leaving you here. And don't think that I won't."
"Fine, fine." Hannah wrinkled her nose and grabbed two bags of chips, a package of chewy chocolate chip cookies, and a bag of Twizzlers. Pausing, she also grabbed a bag of marshmallows. "Do I eat a lot when I'm nervous?"
"You eat a lot period," Jake answered, giving her a gentle shove toward the cash register. Then he realized what she'd said. "Why? Are you nervous or something?" Hannah shrugged enigmatically, and Jake sighed again, though he preoccupied himself with paying for their food.
Back in his truck, Jake turned the heat back on full blast and backed out of his parking space, planning on finding somewhere somewhat normal to binge on junk food. Hannah seemed mysteriously silent as he drove, and every time that Jake opened his mouth to question her, something inside him prevented him from doing so. Fifteen minutes later, he'd parked in the parking lot of Helke Park, where he had taken a walk with Hannah recently. It seemed like a good place to hang out, at least to him.
Chewing on a marshmallow thoughtfully, Hannah tipped her head at Jake and swallowed. "I haven't told anybody what I'm about to tell you." Pausing, Hannah seemed to reconsider. "Well, I mean, I sort of talked to Tisha about it, but I asked her to drop it, and we haven't talked about it since."
The relevance of this information was totally lost on Jake. "Uh-huh." Briefly scowling, Hannah sent a specific finger in Jake's direction, and it made him laugh a little. "Okay, okay. I'm listening. What?"
Hannah popped another marshmallow into her mouth and chewed slowly, watching her lap thoughtfully and maybe even hesitantly. "You remember when…when Greg and I broke up?" Jake nodded uncertainly, but Hannah didn't look up. "He told me that it was because I didn't want to go to Formal, but Tisha swears that I was really excited about it. And, I mean, I even had that dress altered and everything, so—I don't know. I feel like he lied to me. You think I changed my mind at the last minute?"