Me You Us (22 page)

I must repair my friendship with Jak. That's the most important thing in the world to me. But, should I get the chance, I also need to tell her how I truly feel. This may not be the perfect moment, but there may never be a perfect moment. I can't keep it inside any longer.

I spot Jak down the block, driving her dark gray Prius, and step out into the street. As she gets closer, I get cold feet. I want to run. But something keeps me in place, rooted to the ground, just like the tree.

Now Jak is close enough to recognize me, but I can't really see her reaction inside the car. I wave my arms. She could easily drive around me, or she could stop. Relief washes over me when I hear the electronic
whooosh
of the Prius decelerating. She pulls over and stops on the side of the road in front of me.

She gets out of the car and approaches, scowling.

“What are you doing?”

“I need to talk to you,” I say.

“How long have you been out here?”

“All day.”

“You're an idiot.”

“I know. That's what I wanted to talk to you about. Will
you give me a minute?”

She glances at her wrist and sighs overdramatically. She's not even wearing a watch. “Ugh. One minute.”

I take a deep breath. “Jak. I'm sorry I lied to you. I'm sorry I kept secrets from you. I'm sorry I hurt you. I really, truly am. Everything I did I did with good intentions. You know that. You know me.”

Her face doesn't change.

“Words.”

“Words are all I've got right now, Jak. But I swear to God, I will do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, to make it up to you.”

“If this whole Galgorithm thing was such a big part of your life,” she asks, “then why did you keep it from me?”

“I don't know.”

“Why didn't you tell me everything that you were really doing? Why did you have to have this stupid alter ego I didn't know about?”

“Everything just spiraled out of control. I should have told you.”

“That's not good enough, Shane. That doesn't make any sense. That's so dumb.”

“You're right.”

“I want to know what happened with Adam.”

I suddenly can't find the words.

“What did you do?” she asks.

“Umm,” I mumble.

Why am I so eloquent in my head!

A car zooms by and momentarily distracts us.

Jak resumes her focus on me.

“Who the hell do you think you are?”

“Jak, I can explain.”

I tread carefully, knowing that whatever I say next I cannot unsay. Once this is out of the bag, nothing will ever be the same.

“Why did you hurt me like that, Shane?”

“Because I love you.”

I have to catch my breath. I said it. I did it.

Jak looks more confused than anything.

“What?”

“I love you,” I repeat. “I told Adam I had feelings for you, and that's why he got weird. The truth is I love you. I'm
in
love with you, Jak.”

“Like . . . you
love me
love me?”

“Yes.”

“Is this a joke?”

This is not as romantic as I envisioned it.

“No! It's not a joke. I love everything about you. Your legs, your brain, your eyelashes with the split ends. Everything. That's why I got involved between you and Adam.”

Jak doesn't say anything. I take some solace in the fact that her expression has morphed from angry to befuddled.
It's a start, I guess.

“Where is this coming from?” she asks finally.

“I don't know, Jak. Where does it ever come from? All I know is that I love you and that's why I did the stupid things I did.”

“How long have you felt this way?”

“When we were in the bathtub together, after the party. That's when I first started to know. But a part of me thinks it was always there. Maybe even from the beginning. From the first bathtub.”

“No,” she says.

“No what?”

“No you're not
allowed
to be in love with me, Shane. We're best friends.”

“I can't help what I feel, Jak. The question is, do you feel the same way? Because I think you do.”

I'm looking for any change in her eyes, her breathing, anything.

“Shane, after what we just went through, how could you possibly ask me something like that? Our friendship is hanging by a thread.”

“I need to know.”

“I told you, years ago, after Voldemort, that we could never be together. You were a train wreck. I can't go through that with you.”

I shake my head. “I never got to tell you,” I say. “I saw Voldemort that day I found you hiding out in the gym. The
day everything went down. . . .”

“You did?”

“Yeah. At the mall. Even she thinks we should be together.”

“Why should I care what that skank thinks?”

Though it's not helping my argument right now, it does warm my heart to know that Jak is still defending my honor after all these years.

“Even the kids at school think we should be together,” I say. “They call us #Shak.”

“Shane, I don't care what other people think.”

The phrase “I don't care what other people think” gets thrown around a lot. But Jak actually means it. She walks the walk. It's another thing that, although it's working against me now, I truly admire about her.

“Jak, you never answered my question.
Do you feel the same way?
”

“No,” she says, finally. “I don't.”

She looks down at the ground so that she doesn't have to face me.

It can't be. Pressure builds in my sinuses and I feel like my head is gonna implode.

“You just don't want me to be mad at you anymore,” she says. “That's all this is.”

“That's not true!”

I'm still trying to search Jak's face for any clue that she might be holding back. But she has no
tell. I'm starting to feel nauseous.

“Well,” I manage, “
are
you still mad at me?”

She shrugs.

“Jak, you said you thought we had something special. We
do
have something special. It's just more special than friendship. It's even better.”

“We're going away to college in a few months.”

“I know,” I say. “And why do you think we like never talk about that?”

“You're with Tristen.”

“It's over.”

No reaction.

“You can come up with a million reasons why we shouldn't be together, Jak. But there's only one reason why we
should
: We love each other.”

“I don't know what you want me to say, Shane.”

“Tell me you love me too.”

She shakes her head no. Is she telling me no? Or is she trying to convince herself?

She looks away once more.

“I don't. Not in that way,” she says.

I stare at her. Try to make sense of what's going on in that big brain of hers. It's the worst possible outcome for me, but I think she's telling the truth.

I'm devastated. I feel sick. I sit down on the curb and hang my head between my knees. I can see Jak's white Chucks shuffling in the street in front of me.

After a moment she sits next to me on the curb.

After another moment she asks, “Are you okay?”

Her voice is steady. Her tone is concerned. She might even still be a little annoyed with me. But she's not mad.

“No, I'm not okay,” I say. “I'm in love with you. Don't you understand that? I'm opening up to you.”

I'm distraught. I knew this was a risk. But bracing for it doesn't change how terrible this is.

“I'm sorry, Shane. I can't change how I feel. Besides, this is exactly what I was worried about. One of us getting hurt. And things getting weird.”

“I promise that won't happen,” I say, to no avail.

I'm trying not to hyperventilate.

“I would be disappointed if I were you too,” Jak says. “I'm the bomb.”

This finally manages to elicit an involuntary grin out of me.

I look at her. My feelings haven't changed. I still want her more than anything. Maybe I don't blame her for rejecting me. Maybe I'm just glad she's talking to me again. If she hasn't forgiven me outright, she's at least softened her stance. And I have to be grateful for that. If and how we move forward from here, though, is anyone's guess.

“Come on, Incredible Sulk,” she says. “I'll give you a ride home.”

She stands up, using my shoulder for balance. Her touch sends shivers down my extremities.

She walks over to her car, then stops and turns to me.

There are three little words that I'm praying for her to utter.

“Are you coming?”

Those aren't them.

Jak is soldiering on. I can't believe this is happening.

I rise from the curb unsteadily and start to walk to the car, but not before glancing at all the hearts on the tree on the corner, and trying to accept that Jak and I will never share one.

I WAS A REALLY CUTE
little kid. Jak, not so much.

I'm sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop, staring at a scanned version of the picture of me and Jak in the bathtub as babies. I'm freakin' adorable. Jak's nose is scrunched up and her face is already sour like she hates the world. I smile every time I look at the picture. But now there is an undercurrent of sadness. It reminds me that this is as far as our relationship will ever go.

I search for #Shak on Twitter. There are a lot of posts about Shakira. Those hips don't lie. But if I scroll back far enough, I find a handful of tweets from Reed and his friends that reference me and Jak. Most of them are in the vein of “get a room.” But taken together they paint a poignant picture of how outsiders view us: essentially, star-crossed lovers in total
denial. Some are from years ago. I kick myself for being so blind. But I also realize that without Jak as a willing participant, the whole thing is futile anyway.

My one saving grace is that Jak is no longer giving me the cold shoulder. Our friendship is far from mended—she's still peeved at my duplicity, and my proclamation of love has not served to make things any less awkward—but at least we're communicating again. I wish that fact would do more to mitigate the excruciating pain I feel about getting rejected by her. What is the lesson I'm supposed to take away from all this? That when you finally let down your guard, shed your armor, and put yourself out there, you get screwed six ways to Sunday? I don't imagine you'll ever see that on a motivational poster of a kitten.

I stare blankly at my computer screen for a while, letting my mind wander into dark and depressing places, but snap out of it when I hear my parents arguing in the living room downstairs. They get into tiffs here and there, but they're not loud and vociferous like some of the other parents I've witnessed, so it's kind of disconcerting to hear them go at it.

Mom and Dad are on Facebook, so eventually they found out about the Galgorithm scandal. But I stridently downplayed it and was able to convince them that it wasn't that big a deal. Parents never want to believe that their kids are ever in any real trouble, and so I fed them the narrative that the whole escapade was just a bad joke gone too
far, and that it had blown over (which at least has a morsel of truthiness to it). I haven't told them anything about the situation with Jak.

I hear even louder shouting coming from downstairs, and now I'm starting to get a little nervous. Maybe the tenor of their arguments
has
been getting a bit more vitriolic over the past few months. What's gonna happen when I go away to college and I'm not here to keep an eye on things? I'm still not over the fact that Hedgehog and Balloon are finished. If there is even a hint of a crack in my parents' marriage, I'm just gonna give up.

I wander downstairs to discover that the shouting isn't coming from the living room, but the basement, which is one floor below that. I find my parents on their hands and knees, digging through a storage closet in the back of the room.

“Peter, I'm telling you, it's not in that box. I already looked in that box!”

“Did you
really
look, though?” my dad responds. “'Cause I'm ninety-nine percent sure that's where it is.”

“Yes, I'm sure, and I don't appreciate that tone.”

“Well, we've been at this for twenty minutes now, ­Kathryn, so I really don't know what kind of tone you expect!”

“Guys!” I interject. “What's going on?”

Mom pulls her head out from the closet.

“Oh, hi, honey!” she says.

She actually doesn't seem to be that upset at all.

“Dad and I were feeling a bit nostalgic, so we're looking for that album we recorded together in college.”

“Found it!” Dad says, emerging from the closet triumphantly clutching a CD.

“And was it in the box that I already looked in?” Mom asks.

“Nope,” Dad says sheepishly. “You were right. I was wrong. Don't get too used to hearing me say that.”

They smile at each other. All is not lost.

My dad also digs out an old stereo with a CD player. We set it up on top of a nearby dresser and pop in the album.

I hear a beautiful voice singing an a cappella rendition of “Motownphilly” by Boyz II Men. I've heard my mom hum around the house before, but never anything like this.

“Mom, that's
you
?”

“There were a lot of talented gals in that a cappella group,” Dad says, “but your mom was the best. I remember that day like it was yesterday.”

“It didn't hurt to have you staring at me from the sound booth.”

They make googly eyes at each other.

“But even after all that, it still took you guys five years to get together?” I ask.