Run, Jonah, Run

by Jonah Black

“No, I didn’t,” I said.

  “You did!” Posie cried. “For crying out loud, Jonah!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It was just a mistake. It was just something I—”

  I was blushing hard, and stuttering. Posie was staring at me as though she suddenly saw something in me she hadn’t seen before.

  “You really do love her, don’t you?”

  “Posie, this is stupid, I don’t even—”

  “Jonah, come on. We’ve known each other too long to lie to each other. Tell me the truth. Do you still love her?”

  I didn’t answer right away, which in a way was worse than anything I could have said.

  “Oh, my God,” Posie said, leaning back against the pillow. “Oh, Jonah.”

  “I don’t love her,” I said. “Really, it was just a mistake.”

  “Shut up,” Posie said, and she hit me in the chest. She got out of bed suddenly and turned on the lights and blew out the candle and went into the bathroom.

  I lay back in the bed for a moment feeling like the biggest creep in the world. I couldn’t believe it! Here I was, about to have sex for the first time with my best friend Posie, this totally amazing girl, and I screwed it up by calling her Sophie. This mystery girl I hardly even know. What’s wrong with me? Am I totally stupid?

  YES YOU INCREDIBLE MORON YOU’RE STUPID.

  After a while I got up and I put my boxers and jeans back on, although not my shirt, and I went to the bathroom door.

  “Posie?” I said.

  “Leave me alone,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Can you come out? So we can talk?”

  “I’ll come out in a second,” Posie said, and I could tell from her voice she was crying, and that she was embarrassed that she was crying and was trying to both cover it up and stop.

  “Okay,” I said. I went back to her bed and lay there for a while. I picked up a magazine by her bed—WAHINE: The Girls’ Guide to Surfing and Watersports, and I read it for a while without understanding any of the words. Although I noticed that a lot of the girls in the magazine were pretty incredible-looking.

  At last, Posie came out of the bathroom. She’d put her clothes back on, and I felt bad that I hadn’t put my shirt on. She sat next to me on the bed, and I put the magazine down on top of the still-unwrapped condom on her bedside table.

  “Jonah, what are we going to do?” She took my hand, and for a second I looked at it. Posie has cool fingers—long and slender and brown.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Stop grunting at me,” she said. “You’ve been grunting at me all night. I need you to talk and tell me what’s going on in that head of yours.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on in my head. Honestly. That’s why I’m being so weird. I mean, I know I love you, Posie.”

  “I love you, too, Jonah.” She sighed, and let go of my hand. “But tell me. How are you going to get her out of your system?”

  “She is out of my system. Honestly.” Even as I said it, though, I knew I was lying. I knew Posie could tell, too.

  “She isn’t,” she said.

  “Come on, Posie,” I pleaded. “I just made a mistake. It’s not that big a deal.”

  “Jonah,” she said, and her voice sounded tired. “I don’t care if you’re still obsessed with this chick. But you have to at least admit it. You have to get your head clear. Do you want to be with me or her?”

  “I want to be with you. Of course I want to be with you.” I was saying it, but I wasn’t sure I meant it. “I mean, how could I be with her? She goes to school in Pennsylvania, and she lives in Maine.”

  Again, I realized I’d made a mistake even as I said it. Posie answered me in this very small voice. “So—you’d be with her if she lived near here? If she lived in Florida?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know. Of course not.”

  “Jonah, what is it with her? What happened up in Pennsylvania? You never told me the whole story.”

  I really didn’t want to go into it just then. All I really wanted was for Posie to take her clothes off again and for us to have sex. But I guess it was starting to become clear to me that that wasn’t going to happen. It might not ever happen.

  And then I realized I was talking to my oldest friend. Posie is the one person in the world, besides Thorne, that I could talk to about it.

  So I told her the story of Sophie. How I’d always been obsessed with her, but I wasn’t sure she even knew I was alive. Like I’d see her standing by herself on a snowy day, just looking out over the cornfield behind the football field. Or she’d be up in the bell tower, looking down on everybody going past. She had this kind of distant serenity or something, like she was removed from everything, just watching. Really watching. It was the way I felt about the world sometimes, and I had this feeling that Sophie, whoever she was, maybe saw the world the same way I did.

  Then I told Posie about my awful roommate Sullivan the Giant, whose father was a trustee at Masthead, and how Sullivan had access to everybody’s files, and how he blackmailed girls into going out with him. He went through the alphabet, hooking up with each girl in the class. By the spring he’d gotten around to Sophie, whose last name starts with an O. I told Posie how my friend Betsy Donnelly and I made a plan to stop him, except that there was kind of a weak link in the plan, which was that I can’t drive all that well. Instead of going over to this motel to rescue Sophie from Sullivan, I drove the dean’s Peugeot through the wall of the motel and got expelled. I saved Sophie though. She ran off into the night before Sullivan got to her.

  “What did Sullivan know about her?” Posie asked me.

  “What?”

  “You said this guy Sullivan had information he could use against all these girls, to make them go out with him. So what did he find out about Sophie that was so terrible she’d rather hook up with Sullivan in some motel than have everybody know?”

  I just sat there speechless for a second, because I didn’t actually know. I’d never thought about that before.

  “Does she know what you did for her?” Posie asked. “Does she know it was you?”

  “Everybody knew I drove the dean’s Peugeot through the wall of the Beeswax Inn,” I said. “That wasn’t exactly a big secret. But nobody knew why. At least not until last month, when Thorne called Sophie up and told her.”

  “Told her what?” Posie said.

  “That I was trying to save her.”

  Posie smiled. “Good old Thorne,” she said.

  “He wanted to do me a favor,” I said.

  Posie nodded. “So what are you going to do about her?” she said. “Are you going to see her?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Yes, you do,” said Posie, and the two of us just stared at each other, hard.

  “You’re right,” I said finally. “I do.”

  And it struck me at that exact moment: Posie and I are breaking up.

  “I think you should go home now,” she said, and I could tell she was about to start crying again.

  I reached down and put my shirt on, and then I tied my shoes. “Posie,” I said. “You know I lov—”

  “Shut up,” she said. “Just go.”

  And I left her room and went outside and got on my bicycle and rode home. As I lay in bed last night, staring at the ceiling, all I could think was, Maybe I just made the biggest mistake of my life.

  Dec. 10, 6:15 P.M.

  Haven’t felt like writing for a while. I guess I’ve been kind of depressed about the breakup with Posie. Depressed in general.

  I’m sitting in the living room with MTV on in the background, and I’m just lying here pretending I’m doing something other than being a veg. Swim practice today was pretty brutal. Mr. Davis really wants us to beat Ely this Friday, but I can’t see how it’s ever going to happen. Mostly because we SUCK.

  I’ve been trying this new dive, a back two-and-a-half somersault with a one-and-a-half twist, which is the dive Ely’s star, Lam
ar Jameson, used last time. He’s good, but he’s not that graceful. The main thing he has is this huge physical strength. That means he can put more power into his dive, but as Mr. Davis says, that doesn’t necessarily mean he can put any “poetry” into it. Mr. Davis is trying to get me to put more “poetry” in my dives, but I’m still not sure how to do this unless I go out on the board in a tutu. Actually, Mr. Davis seems to think I have a fair amount of “poetry” in my routine already. I don’t know what that means, but whatever it is, he says I’ve got it.

  A sort of cool thing happened with Wailer during practice. Actually, I have to admit that I can’t keep disliking Wailer. He’s not a bad guy, really. And of course we have something in common now. Wailer and I can both be classified as “Posie’s ex-boyfriends.” It’s something I wish I didn’t have in common with Wailer, but I do. Oh, well.

  Wailer is trying this new dive, a double somersault with a one-and-a-half twist—which is way too hard for him, but he seemed determined to figure it out. Again and again he tried to do the dive, and every time he pretty much just fell off the end of the board like someone had shot him, and did a bellyflop. But the amazing thing was that he didn’t get discouraged. He just kept getting out of the pool and trying it again and again. Finally, he sat down on the bench next to me.

  “I think I’m getting the hang of it,” he said, although he definitely wasn’t.

  And then he gave me this pathetic look like, I’m never going to get the hang of it, and I suddenly realized Wailer—Señor Bellyflop, Posie’s ex-boyfriend, Mr. Cement Shoes—is asking me for advice.

  I wanted to tell him exactly how I’d do the dive, but then I stopped myself, because if I did that he’d just get depressed and think, sure, it’s easy for you. So instead I said, “It’s a hard dive. It took me a long time to figure out how to do it.”

  Wailer thought about that and then he said, “Yeah? It did?”

  “Oh, yeah, like three months maybe,” I said. “I think the hardest thing for me was getting any height off the board.” Which was Wailer’s problem. He was basically falling straight into the pool like a dead weight without getting any spring from the board.

  “Yeah, well, that’s definitely a hard part about it,” Wailer said.

  “You know what I thought about when I first started doing it? I pretended I was like a little kid on a trampoline and I was trying to touch the sky with my hands, you know?” I stood up and stretched my arms up over my head like you’re supposed to. Wailer nodded.

  “Yeah, that’s the secret of it all right,” he said.

  I got my swim cap and said, “Well, anyway, that’s great. It’s cool that you’re figuring it out.” And then I walked toward the board, but as I did I saw Mr. Davis looking at me as if he’d heard everything I’d said, and he kind of nodded at me approvingly. I had this weird thought like, diving coach, I could be a diving coach when I grow up. It was the first time I’d ever thought about having some kind of job that I wouldn’t hate after I get out of college, and that sort of gave me this picture of my life spreading out in front of me and I had this very good feeling, like anything was possible.

  Later, after I’d done a few routines, I sat back down and watched Wailer practice his double somersault with a one-and-a-half twist. Wailer stretched his arms up toward the ceiling and then fell like a bag of stones into the pool. I can see why Mr. Davis sometimes looks like he could use a drink or two.

  After practice, my buddy Thorne was waiting for me outside the natatorium, leaning against the hood of his Beetle.

  “Jonah, dude,” he said, and raised one hand to smack against mine. It feels good to be friends with him again, especially after things were so weird for a while, when he was going out with Posie. Actually, Thorne and Wailer and I all have something in common now. I remember how out of it Thorne was when Posie dumped him for me. Now I totally get how Thorne felt. Of course, getting dumped doesn’t really mean the same thing to Thorne as it does to me. I’ve still got Sophie, who I think might be the love of my life. But for Thorne, girls are like buses—there will always be another one in a few minutes.

  “What’s shaking?” he said. “I never see you around, man.”

  “Maybe that’s because I’m in the friggin’ eleventh grade, Thorne. You’re living the senior lifestyle.”

  “Lifestyle, right. Like sending out a million college applications is a way of life.”

  “Did you get them all out?” I asked.

  “Actually, I’ve got a whole new angle on the college thing.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  Thorne is definitely going to need an angle to get into college. His parents are like, totally broke. Plus, he’s not exactly at the top of his class, so he’s not going to get in anywhere remotely cool unless he comes up with some amazing scheme. Still, if anybody can hustle his way into college, it’s Thorne. He’s definitely had a lot of “angles” over the years, like starting his “Love Rendezvous Connection” dating service on the Internet, or borrowing my clamshell collar after I hurt my neck so girls would think he’d been hurt, or even wearing a pair of clear glasses so he could seduce this girl bookworm he had the hots for. Thorne is definitely the most resourceful guy I know.

  “Yeah,” Thorne said. “You know how like, Mr. Woodward put together like, this whole list of lame-o schools for me to apply to, like Cheesemore and Boring U? All these joke schools? Well, my mom meanwhile has this list like, Harvard, Yale, Connecticut Wesleyan, Ohio Wesleyan, Nebraska Wesleyan, et cetera. So it’s like I’ve been going nutso because there’s this one list Woody put together, and there’s this other list Mommy put together, and the schools on Woody’s list I don’t want to go to, and the schools on Mommy’s list I’ll never get in to. Right? Okay, so I finally figured it out. The answer to all our problems. You ready, Jonahboy? Two words: business major.”

  “Business major?” I repeated.

  “Definitely. Like, you can go to these schools and instead of majoring in like, Shakespeare or calculus or whatever, you can major in stuff like Making a Gazillion Clamolas. Which is something I’m actually interested in. And get this. All of my little ventures over the last couple years—like the Love Rendezvous Connection and the venture capital stuff—are exactly what they’re looking for. All my little moneymaking hobbies will actually help me get into these schools. I’m serious, I’ve got it nailed! I’m gonna major in money!”

  A second before, I’d been feeling sorry for him, thinking about how maybe he was never going to be able to pull off the college thing, and now I was thinking, Well, maybe he has a shot. The “ventures” he’d set up over the last year or two probably would impress some business school. About the only thing I couldn’t see him talking about on his application was his weekend job on his father’s fishing boat, the Scrod. But knowing Thorne, he’d have an angle on that, too, like he’d call himself an “oceanic studies consultant” or something.

  “So where are you applying?” I said.

  “Babson. Thomas. Vicksburg. And the University of Central Florida.”

  “UCF?” I said. “You want to go to UCF?”

  “Well, not really,” he said. “But they’ve got this special program in Internet business. They called me—can you believe it? I’m being recruited!”

  “Hey, how ‘bout that, Thorne? You might be in Orlando next year,” I said. But I was doing worse than that. I was imagining Thorne going to college with Sophie. Going to football games together. Frat parties. No parents. Sex whenever you wanted. It made my palms sweat just thinking about it.

  “So what happened to Cecily?” I asked. “You guys still tight?”

  “Definitely. I’m tight with her. I’m tight with Cilla. I’m tight with Elanor Brubaker,” Thorne said.

  “You’re dating all of them?”

  Thorne laughed. “Jonah, dude. You’re the only person in the whole state who uses the word dating. You’ve got this whole retro thing going.”

  “Dating is retro?” I said.

&nbs
p; “The whole monogamy thing. It’s like you’re going to go out with some chick and then like, give her your pledge pin or something. Go to the prom. Have triplets.”

  I couldn’t believe him. “Cilla and Cecily and Elanor are okay then, about you dating all of them?” I said.

  “Man, you think I sit around discussing the whole situation with them?” Thorne said. “Jesus, Jonahboy, what’s up with you? You been drinkin’ the Stupid Sauce?”

  “So you’re going out with all of them at once, and they don’t know you’re doing it, and you feel all fine about it?” I said, incredulous.

  “Fine, of course I’m fine! It’s awesome! It’s like having cable, except instead of channels, I got girls,” Thorne laughed.

  I shook my head. I guess I’ll never understand. “How’s the old man?” I said, changing the subject. “How’s the Scrod?”

  “The Scrod sucks. I can’t wait to ditch that thing.” He looked sad, at least to the extent that Thorne ever looks sad.

  “My old man’s gonna be screwed, though. He can’t run the boat himself. He’s going to have to fold unless he finds somebody to help him.” Suddenly Thorne’s face lit up like a flashlight. “Hey, Jonah man! You’re going to be around next year! How’d you like to take my gig on the Scrod?”

  “Me? Forget it. Thanks, but no thanks.” I really didn’t want to wake up at the crack of dawn on a Sunday morning and net and gut stinking fish. Delivering pizzas and videos for First Amendment is just fine with me.

  “Think about it, man. It’s a cash cow. Haulin’ in sea anemones and selling them to the Japanese! You can make five hundred bucks a weekend, no kidding.”

  Judging from the way Thorne is always trying to raise more cash, I had a pretty good idea that I wouldn’t be making anywhere near five hundred bucks a weekend—maybe more like fifty, maybe.

  “You think I want to spend weekends floating around with your dad on the Scrod?” I said. “No thanks, Thorne. Really. I got a job.”

  “I’ll tell him you’re interested,” Thorne said.

  “I’m not!” I protested.

  “Whatever, I’ll just mention it.”