Epilogue
Jason
The Lone Star Lounge was busy on a Friday night, but I had no trouble locating Lucas Stevenson. He was sitting at a table with several people, and right next to my ex-girlfriend, Wendy.
I suddenly found myself unable to breathe.
Wendy was here? In Austin?
I wondered if Wendy had her EpiPen handy, because my airway felt like it was closing up. When I did get a breath, it burned in my deprived lungs. But not as much as the sight of Wendy burned in my deprived eyes. I could barely believe that she was real.
The last time I saw Wendy, she’d been crying.
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” she’d told me back then. “I don’t care about where you’re from. I only care about where you’re going.”
I’d used her words in one of my first hit singles.
She was still so incredibly beautiful. Her face was heart-shaped, with wide eyes, high cheekbones, and a full, pink mouth. Gold ringlets hung loose around her face, cascading over her shoulders and down her back in loose bundles. She had the golden blonde hair that girls on Instagram would kill for, complete with natural highlights of platinum and white. Nobody real had ever looked so much like an angel, and no one mortal had ever been closer to behaving like one.
Which begged the question of what the fuck she was doing in this bar.
Had Lucas Stevenson brought her here? I guess I’m gonna’ have to kill him.
I started to stalk forward angrily, but I caught myself again before I made it two feet. No, he was dating some woman named Rae. Victoria had bitched about her endlessly and she’d even shown me pictures. They were sitting a normal distance apart from each other at the table too, more like acquaintances than lovers. That was good. I didn’t want to hate Lucas. He really did seem like a solid guy and had let me crash at his place for two days after Victoria and I crashed and burned. We’d talked a few times since then and really got along.
It was really nice to have a normal, real friend for once. The music business tends to throw a lot of phonies at you. Guys that want to be your friend because they want something. Lucas was a bit of an odd duck, as well as being a huge nerd, but he certainly wasn’t phony. The guy was as genuine as they came.
As my adrenaline faded, my rational side decided to show up. Wendy had every right to be in a bar. We were the same age, which meant she now had no reason not to drink a beer on a Friday night. Wendy also had a good reason to be in Austin, her grandparents lived here. In fact, I was fairly certain they owned a bar here. Maybe this bar. That would make sense. And finally, Wendy had every right to do whatever she fucking wanted because she wasn’t mine.
I never deserved her. I knew it then and I know it now. She’s so much better than me in every way that matters.
With a massive effort, I made myself man up and walk over to Lucas instead of being a gigantic pussy and slinking away before anyone saw me. To my surprise and relief, Wendy got up and walked away before I made it over to the table. She didn’t even see me.
Maybe she won’t notice I’m here? Do I want that? Do I want to leave without speaking to her?
“Hey Lucas, here are your keys.” It wasn’t the politest of all openings, but I was distracted, to say the least.
She’s going to be back any second. What will I say to her when I see her? What could I possibly say that won’t sound stupid?
Lucas smiled at me. “Hey man. Thanks. I really appreciate you feeding Bob and Moxie while I was gone.”
“No problem. They’re great cats. I really enjoyed hanging out with them.”
Lucas pointed to the empty chair next to Wendy’s vacant seat. “You wanna join us for a drink real quick? These are my friends, Cole, Kate, Ward, and Emma.” Lucas’ friends stared at me in total surprise and disbelief. Each one of them was wearing a look that said, ‘holy shit that guy is famous, I thought he only existed on tv’. It was a look I was used to seeing, but it still made me uncomfortable.
Despite the awkwardness of being the mythical celebrity version of Jason Kane while I wanted to be the ordinary human version of Jason Kane, I would have said yes. Lucas’ friends were probably cool. However, I didn’t get the chance. Behind me, I heard a familiar voice was gasp in surprise. I turned around. Wendy was two feet in front of me, carrying a pitcher of beer with both tiny white hands. Now that I was closer, I noticed that her fingernails were painted a bright red and that she was wearing some light, tasteful makeup on her face.
I guess she’s allowed to wear nail polish and makeup now. It looks nice on her.
“Jason?” She blinked her enormous blue eyes several times, maybe to make sure I was really standing there. “What are you doing here?”
I’m not sure. I seem to have forgotten everything about myself, including who I am and how I got here. I have amnesia. Who am I again?
Behind me, one of the two gigantic dudes that Lucas had introduced to me as friends was mumbling. “Does everyone know the freakin’ rockstar but me?” Something about those two seemed really, really familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe I’d met them before? Or seen them somewhere? I wasn’t sure. I also didn’t have the brain cells to figure it out.
Eventually, the guy’s words managed to percolate through my thick skull into my brain. Rockstar. Yeah. That was what I was. Except to Wendy.
To Wendy, I was just Jason. Not Jason the Rockstar but Jason the high school dropout. Jason the menace. Jason the kid who grew pot and then dealt it behind the gym when he wasn’t smoking it all himself. Jason the kid that lived in a run-down shotgun shack with two neglectful parents in the middle of a literal junkyard. Jason who could barely read and write because his dyslexia was so bad and untreated but his teachers all just thought he was an inbred moron. Jason who learned how to play the guitar because he wanted to write a song about his pretty girlfriend. Jason, who knew that girl was way out of his league from the first time he laid eyes on her in second grade. Jason, the guy that no one ever saw any value in except for Wendy.
Wendy was still looking at me the same way now. Like I could hang the moon if I wanted to. Like I could move mountains. Wendy had always believed in me when no one else ever did. In fact, before I met her, I was as convinced of my own worthlessness as everyone else in our town. Her big blue eyes held all the softness and hope they ever had. It was like I was being transported back ten years and right back to where I came from.
“Hi Wendy,” I said, and the accent that I’d tried so hard—so fucking hard—to get rid of slipped right out. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”
The pitcher that Wendy was carrying slipped from her grasp. We both reached for it, but it was too late. It still seemed to fall in slow motion, and hit the floor with an audible, heavy, plastic kerplunk. The beer exploded outward in a wide arc, dousing both of our feet and a large patch of the floor in ice cold beer.
I wasn’t noticing. I certainly wasn’t minding. I’d been doused with beer more times than I could count. It had been a regular occurrence during the beginning of my music career. There are plenty of places where throwing a beer at someone is a totally socially acceptable form of feedback. I’d played at most of them.
But it wasn’t my familiarity with the situation that had me lost. It was the unfamiliarity of touching Wendy. As we’d both reached forward for the pitcher, our fingertips had found one another’s. My hands grasped hers and held them. I stared at the sight of her tiny hands in my callused ones.
So small and perfect. I remember these hands. I remember these hands touching me.
An electrical shock shot through me, painful and wonderful. It burned old synapses back open and old feelings stretched and started to stir deep within the buried memories that I’d locked them in. Like zombies, the feelings rose from the grave and started to advance across my consciousness, filling me with elation, guilt, gratitude, sadness, loss, joy, and lust. Love above all. All the hormone-crazed, helpless feelings that eighteen
-year-old Jason had felt for Wendy Paxton were alive in me again.
She pulled her fingers from mine with a little squeak of surprise. Her already huge eyes had gotten even bigger. They surely couldn’t get any wider. There was a slim ring of white all the way around the dilated, pale blue iris.
“You shouldn’t be here Jason.” Her voice was a breathy, reedy whisper. She was still looking at me like she was seeing a ghost. I knew that feeling.
“This isn’t the first time you’ve told me that exact thing,” I told her, remembering with a smile. “It probably won’t be the last, either.”
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Prologue Part 1 - Jason
“What did I do wrong?” I asked Ms. May. My eyes felt hot and they were stinging, but I wouldn’t cry in front of her.
““You didn’t do anything wrong Jason. You aren’t in trouble.” She shook her head at me but continued to walk me down the hall.
It sure felt like I was in trouble. I wished I could be better. I tried really hard in class. But it was never enough.
“I don’t wanna to go back to Mrs. Thompson’s class. I wanna be a third grader. How long do I have to stay there?”
“I’m not sure Jason. Everybody learns at their own pace,” Ms. May told me while we walked down to Mrs. Thompson’s room. She was smiling and walking quickly like she was excited. I tried to keep up. “We just want to see if this is going to be a better fit for you until you get all your letters straight and your phonics down.” Ms. May wasn’t always so nice to me. I knew she was only being nice because she was happy that I wasn’t going to be in her class anymore. “Don’t worry,” she added as we got to the door, “you can still play with all your friends at recess.”
What friends? All the kids say I’m stupid and my family is trash. I kept the thought to myself, even though it was true. Grownups always got angry when you pointed out when they were making things up. Especially teachers, and they made up more things than all the other grownups combined.
“Here’s your new student,” Ms. May said to Mrs. Thompson. Ms. May was happy. Mrs. Thompson was not. She was frowning so big that her bushy eyebrows made one long, dark line across her forehead. It looked like one of those furry caterpillars. My mom said those kinds of caterpillars were poisonous. Maybe Mrs. Thompson was poisonous. I bet she was. Ms. May took one look at Mrs. Thompson, patted me on the arm, spun, and disappeared out the door.
“Welcome back to second grade, Jason,” Mrs. Thompson said to me. “What are we going to do with you?”
I knew that she didn’t really want me to answer her, so I just stood there and shrugged. Mrs. Thompson hated me, and I hated her back even more. All summer long I’d been excited to have a different teacher. I thought maybe it would be different this year. But it wasn’t. Even though I tried really hard, Ms. May thought I was so dumb she put me back with Mrs. Thompson.
I wondered if I’d be in second grade forever. Mrs. Thompson looked like she wondered that too.
“Let’s put you in with the giraffe group reading circle,” Mrs. Thompson told me, drawing me over to a familiar corner of the room. “You remember the giraffe group from last year, don’t you?” She was using the fake-nice voice that adults used all the time on me. They thought I was too dumb to know the difference between real nice and fake nice.
I didn’t roll my eyes at her, but I wanted to. “Yes ma’am.”
The giraffe group was the stupid group. Mrs. Thompson used animal names, but it wasn’t hard to figure out her plan. She divided up the class into four groups. The lions were the smartest, the elephants were the second best, then the zebras, and last, the giraffes.
I didn’t know any of the kids in the classroom. They all looked smaller than me, though. That made sense. They were all seven and I was almost ten. At least that was good. Maybe they would leave me alone.
“Bobby, Wendy, Brett, Samantha, this is Jason. He’s going to join your group, ok?”
“Is he in our class now?” One of the girls asked.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Thompson. She still sounded angry. The girl didn’t ask any other questions.
“Does that mean one of us gets to be a zebra instead?” A boy asked hopefully.
Mrs. Thompson blinked. “Oh yes. You have too many now, don’t you? Ok Brett, you can go join the zebras.”
Brett looked happy. The other giraffe kids watched him go. They looked jealous. Once he was gone they stared at me, but I didn’t look at them. I just sat down on the carpet. The giraffe kids had been taking turns reading a book that I already knew from memory. But I didn’t join in when it was my turn to read. I didn’t even look up. I just stared down at the ground in front of me. After a second, the other giraffes started reading again, ignoring me.
Good.
I was learning that it was better if other kids were afraid of me or ignored me. I would be lonely, but at least they wouldn’t tease me. A tap on my shoulder almost started me. I shifted my gaze from my dirty sneakers to a pair of clean, pink shoes with lacey bobby socks. One of the giraffe girls didn’t get the message. The others kept reading, ignoring us both.
“Hi, I’m Wendy Paxton,” she said. “Your name is Jason?” She said her ‘s’ like it was a ‘th’. It sounded really funny and made my name sound like ‘Jathon’. I looked up at her in surprise.
My grandma had a Christmas decoration that she bought from the Hallmark store in downtown Lubbock. It was her favorite. She said it was real expensive and I wasn’t ever allowed to touch it. It was this little blonde angel with curly yellow hair and giant blue eyes, putting the star on a Christmas tree. Wendy Paxton looked just like that Christmas angel doll. She was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. Except that she was missing both her two front teeth.
I nodded at her. My mouth wasn’t working. My heart had started to beat really loud and hard. Wendy smiled at me with her toothless smile and that just made it worse. I felt dizzy like that one time I held my breath too long. All girls were supposed to be gross. Even I knew girls had cooties.
Maybe this is what cooties feel like. It was kind of a weird feeling, but it wasn’t exactly painful. I liked it. I felt light like a balloon and I wanted to laugh and smile. I wondered why everybody said cooties were so bad. I was pretty sure that I liked having cooties. A lot.
“It’s ok if you don’t like this story,” she said. “We can read a different one. But we have to read or else we’ll be giraffes forever. Giraffes are the stupid group, just so you know. But don’t let Mrs. Thompson know that you know. It makes her mad.” Wendy frowned.
I knew I shouldn’t talk to her. That she would only figure out I was dumb and poor and then not like me, but I couldn’t stop my mouth. I also couldn’t stop looking at her.
“It’s not that. The story is ok.” I wanted to keep from telling her the truth, but I couldn’t. “All the letters look the same to me.”
She blinked. Her eyes were a real bright blue. I’d only seen that eye color one time before when I found a pregnant Siamese cat under a car. My mom made us take her to the pound because she said we didn’t need more cats, but not before I named her. I named her Sky because of her eyes. I wished I could have kept her. She was a nice cat.
“I can teach you,” Wendy told me. She smiled big again. The gap between her teeth was funny looking, but one of her grown-up teeth was coming in on the right. It was a little, white stub. She would be even prettier when she h
ad all her teeth. “If you want.”
“You won’t be able to help me,” I said. My voice was sad. I wished I could be quiet, but I couldn’t. It was like she was using her cootie magic on me to make me talk.
“I can try. But only if you want.” She looked down at her book. “Maybe I’ll be a teacher one day. My dad says I should be.”
“You’re too pretty and nice. You shouldn’t be a teacher.” My mouth was out of control. I felt my cheeks turning red. It was true though. There were no pretty or nice teachers at our school. They were all mean, grumpy, and old.
Her cheeks turned pink. “That’s a nice thing to say.” She looked around to check that the teacher was on the other side of the classroom. “I don’t really want to be a teacher you know. I wanna be a princess.”
I nodded. That made way more sense. She looked much more like a princess than a teacher. I wasn’t sure how someone got a job as a princess, but I bet Wendy could do it. She was so pretty. Just like the Christmas doll.
“Do you really not want my help with the letters?” Wendy asked, looking back at her book. Her smile was gone. “It took me a real long time to learn, too. That’s why I’m a giraffe and not a lion. Maybe if I help you learn, Mrs. Thompson will like us, and we can both at least be zebras.”
I worried that she would think I didn’t like her if I said no, even though I didn’t think I could learn. I’d never be a zebra. I knew I was gonna be a giraffe all year, for the second time. “You don’t have to help me,” I told her. “But you can if you want.”
She smiled like she’d won a prize. I felt like I’d won something too.
Lie With Me Page 24