by Nancy N. Rue
“Hey, before you guys go,” Lou said. “I want you to meet Jessie.”
They all turned to me at the same time, as if they’d rehearsed it, and said, “Hi, Jessie!” in one big loud voice and then laughed like we were all on Saturday Night Live. I didn’t get it.
“Get out of here, you bunch of Bozos,” Lou said. “And stay out of trouble.”
“I’ll watch ‘em,” Rocky said.
That clinched it. They’d all be calling Lou to bail them out before this day was over.
“Bye, Jessie,” a couple of the girls said as they all headed for the door.
“Nice talking to you,” one guy said. He punched Lou’s arm. “Like you even gave us a chance.”
I craned my neck to see if he was remotely cute, but Rocky was already wrestling him out onto the sidewalk. Who had stepped down and left him in charge?
I had a feeling it was Lou. Okay, one day at the beach with the guy was fine, but, hello, I needed some time with somebody under forty–preferably under eighteen. And evidently that wasn’t going to happen, because it sounded like Lou had given up whatever it was he usually did with all of them on a Sunday afternoon–go figure–to spend it with me. That one guy was kind of cute, and the girls didn’t act like I had leprosy, the way girls could when somebody new showed up.
But it sure looked like I was going to be locked up with Lou again. I loved the Harley and all that, but cut me some slack. Back at the house he packed sandwiches while I changed into my swimsuit and shorts, and then we carried a cooler and blankets and boogie boards down the wooden walkway through the dunes and set up a mini-camp in the sand. We had the lunch spread out on a blanket with a Harley Davidson logo on it, and I was squinting down the beach, hoping maybe some bronzed surfers would show up, when Lou said, “So, Jess.”
He unscrewed the top from a bottle of water and handed it to me.
“You remember yesterday I said I could help you.”
I felt my eyes practically squinting shut. So it was all a ploy to get me to “trust him” so he could come in and do a personality transplant. I took a long swig of the water and wished it were a Coke. I was having caffeine withdrawal, among other things.
I set to work on peeling the label off the water bottle. He took it from me and put it down and looked right at me.
“I want you to hear me, Jess,” he said, “because if you don’t, this isn’t going to work.”
“What isn’t going to work?” I put my hand up. “No, don’t tell me because I can already tell you that if helping me means you lecturing me about how I need to pay attention and try harder and do better, it isn’t gonna work. Been there, done that–didn’t want the T-shirt.”
I stopped to take a breath. Lou rubbed his chin. “If you could do that, you would have already,” he said. “And we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“Right–but I can’t do it, because I’m lazy and crazy and hopeless and stupid. Does that pretty much cover it?” Because if it did, I was going to go find some surfers myself.
“You can’t do it,” Lou said, “because I don’t think anybody has given you the right tools. I could be wrong–I’m not an expert–but there are some things we’re at least going to try.”
“Do I have a choice?” I said between my teeth.
“Yes, actually, you do.”
“Right.”
“You always have a choice between doing the thing that’s going to help you or doing the same thing you’ve been doing that makes you miserable. But since you don’t know what the thing is that’s going to help you, you haven’t been able to make that choice. Until now.”
It still didn’t sound like a choice to me. I nodded because I figured he’d do his thing and then find out it didn’t work, and by then the two weeks would be over. Still, I turned so that he had to talk to one of my shoulders.
Lou picked up a plastic knife and got on all fours in the sand. Now what was he doing?
YOUR ROOM, he wrote in the sand with the knife.
“We’re going to get you organized in there,” he said. “And then every morning before we leave for work, you’re going to put everything where it belongs.”
So that was where Weezie got it. He was trying to turn me into her.
“My mom tries that,” I said. “She goes in there and puts everything in baskets and color codes my CDs and then I just mess it up again. Not on purpose. It just happens.” I folded my arms. “I don’t see the point anyway. It’s my stuff.”
“It is your stuff, which is why I’m going to help you organize it, not do it for you. And the point is, can you ever find anything when you need it?”
“Sometimes,” I said stubbornly.
“And when you can’t find it, do you get anxious? Start freaking out?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“And then you can’t think so you lose something else or forget something important and everybody’s in your face.” He raised his eyebrows like he was waiting for an answer.
“Okay, yeah,” I said. “So?”
“When your environment is cluttered, so is your head,” he said. “Trust me.”
I didn’t. “I’ll never be a neat freak like Weezie,” I said.
“Nope. You won’t. Nor do I want you to be. But you can get some control over the chaos.”
As he bent over to write something else in the sand, I came as close to screaming as I had the morning before when I went off on the little Weezer. The first time I met him I was afraid he was going to get all fatherly and tell me what to do–and now he was doing exactly that. Only then, I could go home to my mother who only tried to run my life when she actually got out of bed. This guy was so in my business.
I looked down at what he’d written.
“NAME LABELS?” I said. “What–?”
“I’ll help you put your name on everything–your jacket, your helmet, your phone–”
I stopped in the middle of actually starting to stand up and leave this control freak in the sand. “What phone?” I said.
“The one I’m giving you so we can communicate when I lose track of you.” His lips did that twitchy thing.
“You’re giving me a cell phone?”
“It’s just basic; no bells and whistles.”
I smelled a bribe, but I bit anyway. “Can I call my friends in Birmingham?” I said.
“Yeah. But your name’s going on it so if you misplace it, it will have a better chance of finding its way back to you.”
A cell phone. Chelsea would freak. I was even about to.
“Jess,” Lou said, “stay with me.”
I glued my eyes to his sand list. Maybe this had possibilities.
ROUTINE, he wrote.
Or not.
“Everybody needs rhythm in their life,” Lou said, sitting back on his heels. “I know your body wants to stay up until two in the morning and sleep until noon, but the world doesn’t operate on that schedule. I’d like to see you in bed by–”
He started writing times in the sand–for going to bed and getting up and going to work and coming home and having supper. With every number that got etched into the beach, another hair stood up on the back of my neck. I was at full porcupine status when he said, “Jess.”
“What?”
He put his hand on my shoulder to stop me from rocking back and forth.
“Okay,” he said, “let’s go at this another way.” He drew a large square around the numbers he’d carved in the sand. “Inside here are the things that are pretty much set up for you because that’s the way it is. That’s the way it is for just about everybody. But–” he pointed outside the square. “There is plenty of time beyond the box when nobody’s telling you what you have to do.”
“What–like ten minutes out of the whole day?” I said.
He shook his head. “For example, when we get home you have three hours after supper before lights-out. Plenty of down time there. It’s a good balance–work, play, rest.”
“You don�
�t seriously think I’m going to sleep at ten o’clock.”
“Not at first. It’ll take your body awhile to get used to that. We’ll get you into a slowdown routine in the evening, which should help.”
In your dreams. I looked down to see my hands digging in the sand so hard I was already up to my wrists.
Lou tossed the plastic knife onto the blanket and smiled at me. “Okay, well, that’s a start. You want to try out the boogie board?”
A start? This whole I-have-your-entire-life-scheduled-for-you talk was just a start? What else could he possibly have planned to “help” me?
Cell phone or no cell phone, I couldn’t do it. Not now that I knew that the spend-the-day-with-Jessie thing yesterday had all been a setup for this–this–takeover.
I stood up and brushed the sand off the seat of my shorts and hoped some of it got into his sandwich.
“I’m gonna take a walk,” I said.
I turned to march off.
“Jess,” he said.
“What?”
“Take this with you.” He pulled a blue cell phone out of the pocket of his T-shirt and tossed it to me. “It has my number programmed in. And your mom’s.”
I looked at it and at him and wanted to scream for about the tenth time in the last hour.
“It’s okay,” he said. “This is a lot of change. No pressure– we’ll walk through it together. One day at a time.”
I took off down the beach, running until my side hurt, until I was far enough away that no one could hear me. Then I planted myself at the base of a dune and punched buttons on the phone until I found an entry called Mom.
She didn’t answer at first. The ringing went on and on until I was ready to throw the phone into the Atlantic. The thing looked prehistoric anyway…
When she did pick up, I thought it was someone else. Someone with a voice that was more breath than words.
“Mom?” I said.
Long pause.
“It’s Jessie,” I said.
“I know–Jessie–what are you doing?”
“Calling you.” I bit my lip. I couldn’t cry, not now.
I heard her switch the phone to her other ear. “What’s up?” she said.
“I just want to know–how you are.”
She sighed long and hard. I’d never known her to do that before. “I’m not good, Jessie. Look, I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to be talking right now.”
“Well, when?” I said.
“I don’t know. When I’m better than this. I’m sorry, Jessie. Are you okay? You sound okay.”
I sound okay? Or you want me to sound okay? I’m not okay!
“We’ll talk when I’m better,” she said. “When I get my mind around this.”
“Mom–”
“Bye, Jessie.”
The phone went dead.
I kind of wished I would too.
It wasn’t bad enough at home when I always felt like a flake? At least there my friends accepted it and liked me when I played it up. At least my teachers just told me to try harder and then gave up on me. At least my mother only cared about any of it when she was in a No-Bed Phase that was sure to end soon.
But here–here I had one kid calling me Crash and another one calling me Crazy, and I couldn’t get away from either one of them because they were both attached to Bio-Dad at the hip. And he–
I kicked at the sand and kicked at it and kicked at it again. He was trying to turn me into somebody I couldn’t be–and he was going to do it until he found out I was a loser-airhead-moron–and…
And who cared? So he had a Harley and a house on the beach and he didn’t mind saying he was sorry…
I stopped kicking, and I looked back down the shoreline where Lou was standing ankle-deep in the water, shading his hands against the sun like he was trying to find me.
Okay. Fine. I would try to do all the things on his list and he would see that he was wrong–that it wasn’t going to work because it never did. Then he would be sorry.
And I could go back to being the crazy chick I knew how to be.
I smoothed out the sand I’d kicked and strolled back down the beach toward Bio-Dad.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ten o’clock at night felt to me the way noon probably felt to everyone else. I was ready for a lunch-size snack, including something that didn’t have the word natural printed on its wrapper–although there was almost nothing in Lou’s fridge that even had a wrapper. And while everyone else was winding down, I was just gearing up to do–something. Anything. Except lie in bed staring at the ceiling and wishing for the thousandth time that I wasn’t cursed with ADHD. People could talk all they wanted about what a common “challenge” it was. They only said that because they didn’t have it.
I threw back the covers and sat up and looked around the room in the moonlight that made its pale way through the pink-and-green curtains. Lou said he’d already had it figured out before the Weezer opened her big mouth. Now it was like he’d googled it on the Internet and read all about what to do for the “victim” and was following it like an owner’s manual.
He didn’t own me–I was clear on that. But he sure acted like he did. We’d just spent an hour going through each section of the room and putting away my stuff. And then he’d given me hot Sleepytime tea–when I was ready to sell the cell phone for a supersize Coke–and turned on what he called “soft rock”–which sounded like geezer rock to me–and left me alone to do what I was doing right now, which was going slowly insane. I yanked off the big T-shirt, which now smelled like fabric softener, and threw it in the corner. He’d obviously bought it for me, like he had the helmet, to make me think he cared that he had another kid. I wasn’t wearing it.
I pulled on a tank top and paced around the room. I considered short-sheeting Weezie’s neat little bed but decided she wasn’t worth the energy, even if she did have a mouth the size of an Olympic-size pool.
I went to the table Lou had put on my side of the bed and opened the drawer and pulled out the cell phone “we” had decided I should keep there at night so I could find it in the morning. I looked at the screen, but Marcus hadn’t called, even though I had left him four messages. Chelsea hadn’t returned my phone call either. She was probably out with Donovan. Doing normal stuff. Not undergoing a treatment plan like me.
I flopped back down on the bed. Too bad you couldn’t just have an operation to take out your messed-up brain part, like they did when somebody had sick tonsils or something. Just reach in there and pull it out so the person–me–could be normal and not have to–
I sat back up. This was reminding me of that story in that RL book. The guy telling the demon to come out and it just did. That was what I was talkin’ about.
Where did “we” put the book anyway? Ah–“we” didn’t put it anywhere. “I” had stuck it between the mattress and the box spring so the little Weezer wouldn’t see it next time she came. For some reason, I wanted it to be private.
I slid it out and sat cross-legged on the bed and opened it. My stomach felt suddenly queasy. What if I couldn’t understand it anymore? What if it had just been my imagination and I really was nuts?
But when I opened it, the words came up to me again as if they were reading themselves to me.
So you came back. You’re hungry for more, aren’t you? You want to know if there’s any more of that demon freeing.
The usual chill went up my back, but I was starting to like it.
Check this out. That night at sundown, everybody who had anybody sick brought them to him–fever, paralysis, skin disease, you name it.
Brought them to who? The same guy?
Yeshua. He put his hands on every single one of them and healed them.
I had a quick flash of Big Shoulders’ hand on my head. But what about the demons?
There was a mass exit of those. All these people everyone said were out of their minds were sane again, which did not make the demons happy at all. After all, they didn’t have anyplac
e to go now. They left screaming because they knew who he was. He shut them up. He didn’t want them telling everyone.
Why not?
Keep reading the story and you’ll get it. Really get it.
I turned the page, but the words looked foggy. A yawn came up out of me and I couldn’t keep my eyelids from slamming shut. That happened a lot when I tried to read. With a sense of disappointment, I slid RL back into its place and conked out.
Rose did her usual bow to me when I got to the sushi restaurant the next morning. I bowed back, and that seemed to be all the conversation she expected, which was good because I wasn’t in the mood to chat–for once. After going through the check-list with Lou before we even got on Levi–phone, flip-flops, shorts, snack–and having to go back inside for the flip-flops, and having to admit to myself that now I knew exactly where they were–anyway, after all that, if anybody had said to me, “Do this,” or “Do that,” I probably would have had a serious meltdown and taken them with me.
I started to put on my apron, but Rose shook her head and picked up a cooler and nodded toward the back door. She bowed and smiled–the other thing she seemed to do constantly–and led me out and down the street. I couldn’t stand the suspense.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“Buy fish,” she said and, of course, smiled.
We wove our way among the early morning senior citizens out walking with their little yappy dogs and their to-go cups of coffee. It was all I could do not to grab one from a lady when she stopped to let her Yorkie sniff my foot. Speaking of sniffing, I didn’t have to ask Rose where we were going to buy fish because I smelled it long before we got there. I would rather have gone into the cool shop where they were selling shell jewelry or the bakery that had cupcakes with an inch of frosting displayed in the window, but she skittered into the cold, dark place that was lined on both sides with tanks full of creatures–moving creatures.
“Rosie!” said an almost-bald guy at the far end who stood behind a counter wearing an apron covered in…I didn’t want to know what. He had more knives on the wall than Bonsai and the Spanish Galleon put together.