The History of Jane Doe

by Michael Belanger

  “I’m actually thinking of his cousin Pete,” I said. “Kind of like”—I attempted to make the same noise—“but with a goatee.”

  She slapped me on the shoulder. “You’re funny.”

  For some reason, Jane had chosen me as her Burgerville emissary. I felt everyone in class watching as Jane and I talked. At one point, Jane leaned in to draw a picture of the two of us journeying through history on what looked to be a pterodactyl. I smelled her hair in a completely non-creepy way and our arms touched. That, coupled with our shoulder touch at Beddington’s statue, had been the most female contact I’d had since Mrs. Romano hugged me before summer vacation the previous school year. I imagined everyone in class holding their breath.

  Raymond Green, the dork who loved history, hanging out with the mysterious new girl. Not even the best historian could have seen that coming.

  The Burgerville rumor mill had been speculating about Jane ever since her first appearance in school. She didn’t fit the Burgerville mold, but that only made her cooler.

  “Her parents are in witness protection,” one source said.

  “She’s going to be my best friend,” a popular girl said. “My parents are gonna hate it.”

  Jocks like Tommy Beddington, the resident football star of Burgerville and grandson of the late Earl Beddington, had reportedly already called dibs on her, as if dating in high school was as easy as calling shotgun.

  “Beddington,” Simon said, balling his hand into a fist when I brought him up at lunch.

  “You’ve got to let it go,” I said.

  Simon and I had never really fit in, but it wasn’t until freshman year that people really started bullying us. That year, Beddington smeared chocolate pudding on Simon’s chair—right before he had to introduce his grandfather the Korean War antihero to the entire school. The principal had gotten involved and made Beddington promise to leave us alone. After that, we’d been even more aggressively ignored.

  But Simon still hadn’t forgiven Beddington for what we’d come to call “Puddinggate.”

  “I’ll let it go when the debt has been repaid,” Simon said, taking a sip out of his carton of milk. Not the ones sold in the cafeteria, but a half-gallon his mom packed in his lunch every day. He wiped his milk mustache.

  “You’re scaring me,” I said.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  The rumors didn’t stop with Jane. Simon and I also found ourselves the subject of discussion around school, as people speculated why the new girl was hanging out with us. We were just as confused as everyone else. I remember this miraculous moment when the tables parted and Jane threw her stuff down on our lunch table and sarcastically asked, “Is this seat taken?” To which Simon gulped and replied, “Sometimes the lunch ladies eat with us.”

  Some kids assumed we were blackmailing Jane, or at least paying her to elevate our social status.

  Jennifer Robinson was less kind and also embarrassingly misinformed about world history: “They ordered her online from the Soviet Union.”

  Others thought our odd group must be some sort of social experiment: “It’s like one of those anti-bullying campaigns,” said an undisclosed source.

  “Maybe she’s after our money,” Simon said.

  “What money?”

  Simon shrugged, as if he hadn’t thought of that before.

  “Maybe she just likes us,” I said.

  “Be serious, Ray.”

  Before Jane, we’d existed in a world of our own, an empty lunch table where we’d trade stories about history all the while dreaming of the future—a time when girls paid attention to us and, in Simon’s case, the mullet came back in style. But Jane completely flipped the script.

  The story of Burgerville had changed.

  125 DAYS AFTER

  JENGA

  I’ve been telling Rich a lot about those first few weeks—meeting Jane, the way she made me feel, how for the first time in my life I actually cared about the now. Rich always smiles and waits patiently, then says something like, “She’ll always be an important part of your life, and it’s important to remember that as we take some little steps forward.” Then he’ll suggest one of his challenges, maybe “Three Things You’re Thankful For,” or one of my favorites, “Two Weeks to Make a New Friend.”

  At our last session, I got so tired of hearing all his clichés that I kind of snapped at him.

  “Do you and my mom have the same book of motivational phrases?” I asked, my voice slightly raised.

  He looked surprised by my sudden outburst of emotion.

  I collected myself. “It’s not like I can just choose which parts to remember and which parts to forget.”

  He nodded, waiting for me to continue.

  “It’s like a game of Jenga,” I told him. “I don’t know which pieces I can take out. If you take out the wrong piece, it all comes crashing down.”

  I was pretty proud of my metaphor, so I let it breathe, let Rich soak it in.

  “I’ve never heard a better metaphor about Jenga,” Rich said. “But what happens when everything comes crashing down?”

  “You start over.”

  “So if you never try, you’re just stuck playing the same game.”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  I guess it wasn’t as good of a metaphor as I thought, because I could tell Rich had already found the loophole.

  “Maybe I should have chosen a different game,” I said, “because you’re missing the point.”

  “Which is?”

  “I don’t want to start another game. That’s the point.”

  “Sometimes you don’t have a choice.”

  I’m not one of those people who becomes a puddle of emotions at the drop of a hat. I don’t cry during movies, pictures of puppies don’t warm my heart, and I’ve never written a poem about the sadness of the moon. But something about this conversation bothered me. It felt like a lie.

  “Are we done yet?”

  “We still have—”

  But I was already on my way out the door. “I’ll see you next week,” I mumbled.

  People, especially adults, just give up. If something goes wrong, they move on. Get over it. Stop looking in the rearview mirror.

  I think they’re just lazy.

  222 DAYS BEFORE

  TOWN HALL

  The Friday after our Never Have I Ever game, we decided to head to Town Hall, the first spot on the list.

  Simon agreed to pick Jane and me up, which meant he’d be driving his mom’s brand-new red minivan. “Watch this,” he said proudly in my driveway as he opened the sliding doors with the click of a button.

  “That would have been much more impressive if this wasn’t a minivan,” I said.

  Simon clicked another button. “For that, you’ve lost window privileges.”

  We drove on to meet Jane at her house. She gave us only a street name, which happened to be all the way on the opposite end of Burgerville. We were instructed to text her once we found her street.

  “You sure this is a good spot for our first date?” Simon asked on the way over. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it makes one hell of a field trip, but maybe we should start with coffee first.”

  “We’re not going on a date, Simon. I don’t even think I’m going on a date.”

  “And you’re positive this isn’t just a ruse for the popular kids to throw eggs and toilet paper at us?”

  “Jane wouldn’t do that,” I said. “She’s like us.”

  “Do you know us?”

  Simon pressed a button and the top of the car peeled back, revealing a gigantic moon roof with a panoramic view of the sky. “It’s sort of like a convertible,” Simon said.

  “Exactly like a convertible,” I said, hoping to win back my right to roll down the window.

  As we drove, the houses gradually got bigge
r and farther apart. By the time we reached Jane’s street, we were in a part of Burgerville I’d only read about: the New York Strip, so named because it was a vacation destination for many city dwellers. The houses sat on the edge of the Lost Woods, a gigantic nature preserve, and cost millions of dollars. Those who lived in the core of Burgerville—in the Marrow, if you will—could only hope to be invited over by one of their wealthy acquaintances to see what life was like for Burgerville’s elite.

  “I’ve never been this far before,” Simon said.

  “It’s too late to turn back now,” I said.

  Simon unlocked my window.

  “It’s been an honor to have you as my copilot.” He glanced at me uncertainly, then slowed to a crawl, trees on either side of us obscuring the castle-like mansions.

  “We don’t belong here,” he said.

  “This is our town,” I replied.

  “No, this is their town, we just live in it.” Simon stopped the car. “Text her,” he said.

  As soon as I took out my phone, we heard a knock from the back. Simon and I both jumped.

  “Open up, Dad,” we heard muffled through the door.

  Simon pressed a button and the minivan doors opened like an alien spaceship.

  “That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” Jane said, hopping in the back.

  Simon gave me a satisfied look before closing the doors and launching toward our final destination.

  * * *

  • • •

  Burgerville’s Town Hall looms over Earl Beddington’s statue. Designed by an architect named Edward P. Delaney, it showcases a style called Absurdist Imperfectionism, based on displaying the human condition through strange—and sometimes dangerous—designs.

  There are the revolving doors that take you right back outside, the slightly different-sized steps, and my favorite, the door that opens to a four-story fall, only boarded up when Mayor Elmer Stanton plunged to his untimely death in the early eighties. Depending on who you talk to, Delaney was a mad genius or just a shitty architect whose designs were always a little off. I like to believe the former.

  On the ceiling of the lobby there’s a mural of Burgerville, depicting the entire history of the town from the Mohegan people who originally lived on the land all the way to the current mayor, a man by the name of Albert Tomkins who’d been elected on his promise to give a free fanny pack to every eligible voter—two if you found a way to vote twice. The mural was basically an alternate history that ignored the truth of Burgerville’s past. According to the mural, Burgerville’s elders had bought the land fair and square from the Mohegan people. Instead of hiring substitutes to fight for them in the Civil War, they’d bravely marched into battle. For the section on World War II, Burgerville’s important manufacturing contributions were highlighted, while the mass conversion to Quakerism to avoid direct service was entirely missing.

  The three of us stood inside the lobby, tracing the town’s version of its history while I explained what actually happened.

  “It’s like they just made stuff up,” Jane said after we’d gone through all the lies it included.

  “Exactly. But it’s just true enough to trick people. That’s why Roger Lutz started a petition to have it changed.”

  “Who’s Roger Lutz?”

  “You don’t know Roger Lutz? He’s Burgerville’s preeminent historian. Everyone knows Roger Lutz. Right, Simon?”

  “The old guy who used to come to our classes? Didn’t he do your birthday once?”

  “That’s him.”

  “Must have been some party,” Jane said. “So I take it the petition wasn’t successful?”

  “He could only get about a hundred signatures. A little while later, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.”

  “That sucks,” Jane said.

  I shrugged. “He’s still in the archives every day. He said that just because his past is disappearing, it doesn’t mean he’s gonna let that happen to Burgerville’s.”

  We made eye contact. I tried not to look away, but there was something so weird about the moment, like I was living it and remembering it at the same time. I became aware of my blinking, my palms sweating, the need to swallow. Jane finally saved me by looking up at the ceiling.

  “What’s next?”

  “The roof. That’s where—”

  Before I could finish my sentence, Jane was walking toward the stairwell, pulling me along. We collected Simon, who was taking a picture of a bench dedicated to his great-grandfather, and then made our way up the stairs.

  The sun was just beginning to set when we opened the door to the roof. Burgerville spread out around us, the leaves beginning to change, trees shining in the fading sunlight. Jane walked toward the middle, stopping in front of a stone fountain that resembled a gigantic birdbath.

  “What’s this?” Jane asked.

  “The reason we’re here. The Edward P. Delaney Memorial Wishing Well. In honor of all the debt he’d left Burgerville in. His design had so many little flaws that the town needed to find a way to make renovations. So they started planting stories in the newspaper about wishes mysteriously coming true. People being cured of diseases, winning the lottery, getting promotions. Suddenly growing a few inches. After a while, people started coming from all over the place, making their pilgrimage to Town Hall.”

  “How much money could you make from a few coins?”

  “It wasn’t the coins,” I said. “It was the ticket to get onto the roof. But I’m sure they used the loose change too.”

  “I can’t tell if you’re making this up,” Jane said.

  “It’s all true,” I said proudly.

  I reached into my pocket, passed a coin to Simon, kept one for me, and gave a small handful to Jane, my primitive way to show her I liked her. Me give you lots of metal.

  “What are you doing?” Jane asked, looking down at the pile of change in her hand.

  “Giving you wishes,” I said.

  Jane rolled her eyes. But smiled a little too.

  Simon stood over the fountain. “I’m debating between ending world hunger and a trampoline,” he said, then threw the coin in.

  “What’d you decide?” Jane asked.

  “I can’t tell you that. Otherwise it might not come true.”

  I threw my coin into the fountain from a few feet away. I wished for things to actually work out for once. For Jane to like me. For her to be my girlfriend.

  Jane was next. She stood over the water, eyes moving from me to Simon and back again, before letting the change slip out of her hand.

  “The problem with wishes,” she said, “is that no one ever tells you what they wished for. So you never know if it came true.”

  “You’re saying it’d be nice to have some data on the effectiveness of wishing wells?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Jane said. She peered into the fountain. “I mean, look at all those wishes. People hoping to fall in love, get divorced, become dictator of their own private island.”

  I followed Jane’s lead and stared down at the murky water, coins gleaming beneath the surface. “People wishing they could erase the past.”

  “Or change the past,” Jane said.

  “Or become a vampire.”

  Jane and I gave Simon a funny look.

  “Let’s make a deal,” Jane said. “If any of our wishes come true, we have to tell each other about it.” Simon and I agreed. We formed a circle and put our hands in the middle like a team getting ready for a game. I felt Jane’s hand beneath mine. My heart started racing. We looked at one another, trying to figure out what the next step was, the proper way to seal a pact.

  “Clearly none of us have ever played team sports,” I said.

  “Don’t we throw our hands up in the air?” Simon asked, sounding unsure.

  “I’m pretty sure th
ere’s some sort of pumping motion,” Jane said.

  “On three?”

  As we kept discussing, the circle slowly disintegrated, until we all just agreed to a verbal pact.

  “We’re not huddle people,” Jane said.

  After that we walked to the edge of the roof and watched the sun go down on Burgerville, and I felt Jane’s hand brush against mine. Then miraculously, our fingers clasped. I took a deep breath so I wouldn’t freak out and then attempted to calibrate the proper amount of squeezing. Was my pinky properly placed? Were my palms too sweaty? But after a while, I let myself relax, and it felt like a moment that had to be.

  “One spot down,” Jane quietly said. “Four to go.”

  Which to me meant I’d already guaranteed at least the next four dates.

  138 DAYS AFTER

  THE CARROT AND THE STICK

  Now it almost feels like that night happened to someone else, one of those memories where you see yourself from the outside, peering through a doorway at another life. I can’t believe that was me.

  The stairs creak. “Ray, dinner!”

  “Not now,” I yell. One of the problems with being in high school is that your parents tend to think of you as a plant that needs watering.

  My mom remains standing on the stairs. I imagine her holding the railing tightly, trying not to blow up at me.

  “Take a deep breath,” I say, trying to annoy her, then kind of hating myself for it.

  I hear her begin walking again, the footsteps becoming louder as she approaches my room. Picture the T. rex scene in Jurassic Park, where the water in the glass starts to ripple.

  She knocks on the door.

  “I’m not here,” I say.

  “I’m coming in,” she says, more forcefully than usual.

  “I’m naked!” I yell.

  “No, you’re not. You’re sitting at your computer.”

  “Do you have cameras in here?”

  “That’s all you do lately,” she snaps.

  I see the doorknob turn just as I remember that I forgot to lock the door. My mom bursts through, a scowl on her face. “Ray, this is getting ridiculous.”