Chapter 4: Jacky

I hate to bring this up, but there has been a thought that’s been swirling around in my mind, looping endlessly. I think that it might finally be put to rest if I share it here, in this confessional space that I’ve created for myself.

On our last real night together, you asked me if there was anyone I had ever truly loved. Not the kind of love you have for your family, you had specified. But the kind of love that you only share for someone that you choose for yourself. I didn’t understand at the time why you had asked that or what difference it made, and that was my mistake.

I told you no on that night, and I stick by that. But there is one boy that you should know about. People tried to call him Jack, but he always insisted that his mother named him Jacky, and therefore he expected everyone else to call him Jacky, too. I called him Jack-off, which he accepted much easier than he accepted anyone calling him Jack, believe it or not. Jacky was a scrawny, pale-white boy with red cheeks and shaggy, oily black hair. He was like a gross teenage boy version of Snow White.

And I loved him.

I didn’t love him in the typical way that a girl at my age might have loved a teenage boy, regardless of grease level. I certainly wasn’t attracted to him, any more than I was attracted to Bernard, the pet rat in our junior high science classroom. Bernard was fun, of course, but he was a rat. And as much as I enjoyed Jacky’s company, he may as well have just been a rat, since there just wasn’t anything between us.

Jacky was a grade above me, but my mother trusted him well enough to let him come over sometimes after Dad died. His mother had died several years before, so he knew what it felt like to lose a parent more than anyone else in the school. He understood that there were times that I would just cry, without provocation or reason, and he didn’t judge me. He didn’t try to comfort me either, because he knew the shame and guilt that came with expecting other people to make me feel comfortable. He would just pull out his phone and text, glancing up to me from time to time to make sure I was okay before pressing play on the DVD.

He was like you, in that way.

I told him one time that I was fine and that he didn’t have to worry about me anymore.

He told me, “you don’t have to be fine, but I’m happy for you if you are.”

I cried again. And again, he let me. He took a video of me crying and threatened to send it to the whole school if I ever said I was “fine” again when I wasn’t. I knew he wouldn’t actually do it, but the accountability was nice. Most people probably wouldn’t see that the same way I did, but that was just how Jacky and I were together. My Dad used to call me a “ball-buster” with boys, and it wasn’t until I met Jacky that I really understood what that meant, because he would bust my balls just as much as I busted his.

One time, Jacky confessed to me that he was in love with a girl in his Biology class. We had a tradition every year where students would send a valentine and a candy to a sweetheart in their grade for twenty-five cents. I was in charge of the event that year as a part of the Junior Business Leaders of America club, so it was my job to hand out the sweetheart candies to everyone. Jacky wouldn’t tell me the girl’s name, but he promised that I would know her when I saw her. I entered the Biology class with a bag of five sweethearts. I read the first four, and none of the girls seemed to be Jacky’s type. I scanned the room and realized that there were no other girls. My heart skipped a beat, and I knew what was coming. He’d written a sweetheart to me, and I was about to read it out loud. I panicked. I couldn’t break this boy’s heart in a Biology class I’d never been in. My sweaty hands trembled as I grabbed the last sweetheart candy out of the bag. I saw the letters on the small red tag and breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t me. I read it aloud:

M.F. Hurr.

It wasn’t until I said the name out loud that I understood what had happened. The class erupted in laughter, including Jacky. I was embarrassed, but I couldn’t even be mad about it. I was simply in awe of what he accomplished. I knew that I had to do something even worse to bust his balls sufficiently. That was also the last year that our school held the sweethearts event without strict adult supervision, for obvious reasons. Jacky and I became schoolyard legends in that school district, and I like to think that our story is still shared all these years later.

I never had the chance to properly bust his balls for that. It was a few weeks later that I discovered that we were moving, and there never seemed to be a time where I could emotionally manage the kind of sadistic motivation required to concoct an elaborate scheme to embarrass him. I needed him too much for that. The walls of irony and cool detachment were demolished, and I was left raw and exposed. Jacky never took advantage of that, and I came to really understand how great of friends we’d become.

When I told him that I had to move, he’d taken it well.

“I kind of figured it was coming. Your mom can’t possibly keep this place on what the hospital pays. My dad could barely afford the cracker-box house we had in town when we lived there on just his salary, and he’s a guy. Must be ten times harder for a mom to do that.”

I sprawled out on my bed with my father’s guitar laying across my torso. Jacky sat at the foot of the bed with the banjo in his hands and the strap slung loosely across his shoulder. Jacky picked at the strings aimlessly. He always said he was going to learn how to play it, but I knew he wasn’t serious. No one learns the banjo ironically -- not even Jacky. There was a tense silence between us, unfamiliar and unusual. I was usually the type of person to cut through the silence to get to the point, but I was afraid.

Without warning, Jacky tossed the banjo onto his back and crawled his lanky body over me. He pressed his soft lips against mine and I could feel the stabbing of his nascent moustache hairs against my mouth. With all of my strength, I pushed him off of me. My strength was far greater than I thought, though, and Jacky sailed across the room and into the sliding doors of my closet. The door ripped off the metal hinges and crashed onto the floor. I tossed the guitar onto the fuzzy blue rug on my floor and ran towards Jacky. The strings of the guitar and the banjo hissed threateningly in discord as I approached him. Jacky was crumpled in a sad pile, sobbing and crawling further from me.

“I… I messed up,” he sputtered. “I can’t believe I did that, I don’t know what --”

“Just get out. Please,” I said.

“My step-mom isn’t going to be here until after dinner, and --”

“Then get out of my room. Just … leave me alone please.”

Jacky crawled to his feet and slinked out of the room with only a whimper. I don’t know what he did the rest of the time, but I sat in my room and cried. I cried at the loss of my friendship with Jacky, with the perversion of the one person I could trust as myself. In 30 seconds, Jacky had torched what took years to cultivate. I buried my face in the pillow, afraid that he might hear my sadness and try to comfort me.

After what felt like hours of crying, I could hear the guitar start to strum softly. I refused to lift my head from the pillow. The banjo continued to play, and after a few moments, the strumming transformed into melody. Horror set in as I realized that the melody belonged to Glen Campbell.

“Go to HELL, Jacky!” I screamed as loud as I could into the pillow. I heard the door of my bedroom slam open. After a brief pause, I heard a voice call out.

“Skylar, what is happening? Are you okay?” It was my mother’s voice. I lifted my head and turned to face the banjo. To my surprise, Jacky was no where to be found. The banjo was on the ground where it had fallen, unmoved. I turned my eyes to Mom. She looked as though she was in the middle of getting ready for work. Her hair was pulled into a wet, brown bun and she had a towel wrapped around her waist.

“Where’s Jacky?” I sat upright and looked around the room, my eyes still blurry from the tears.

“He left awhile ago, Sky.”

“Did you hear the music?”

Mom approached me and looked at me quizzically. She opened her mouth to speak, but I interrupted her.

“The music, Mom. The guitar and the banjo? Both playing at the same time? You didn’t hear that?”

“Of course I heard it. Every time I’ve walked down the hall this week I hear you playing the damn thing in here.”

“I haven’t been. It’s been sitting on the stand most of the week -- I just got it out with … with…”

“Don’t lie to me, Skylar. I know what you’re doing, and it isn’t going to work.” Mom turned to walk towards the door, as if she thought she was going to make an accusation like that and then just leave.

“Oh, this should be good. What exactly do you think I’m doing?”

“I don’t want to leave any more than you do. Your father played that same goddamn song night after night for weeks -- you don’t think I know what it sounds like? I didn’t think much about it when he was here, but I hear it all the time now. Sometimes the washer bangs in a beat that makes me think of it, or the oven dings at just the right tone to remind me. You don’t have to play the song to remind me of him -- I think about him all the damn time! That’s why we’ve got to go. I can’t keep on living here with the ghost of him hanging over us. It’s not good, Sky.”

I said nothing for several moments. I didn’t know what to say. She’d snatched the rug out from underneath me. All this time, I’d thought that she felt the same way I did. I would have given anything to hold on to that house, but she couldn’t wait to get out of it. She wanted to move on from him, but I wanted more than anything to keep his memory alive. Then suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, I made a realization.

“I don’t know that song,” I muttered.

“What?”

“The song. The one you said that I was playing to torment you or whatever. I don’t know how to play that song. I can sing it a little bit, but I can’t play it. He never taught me how.”

“Son unas mamadas, Skylar. I heard you playing it.”

“Did you ever open the door? Did you ever look in my room and see me playing it?”

“I’m not doing this with you. That makes no sense.”

“I know it doesn’t. None of this makes sense. But I’m telling you that I wasn’t playing that song.” I collapsed back on the bed and turned my back from my mother. “You might want to try and bury him for good, but I’m not letting him go. I’ll spend every day of the rest of my life learning to play that stupid Glen Campbell song if it means he’s still with us.”

My mother drew in a sharp breath to speak, but she said nothing. She exhaled just as sharply. I could hear her tapping her foot against the hardwood floor like an impatient rabbit, anxiously torn between supporting her daughter and venting her frustration. Eventually, she settled on changing the subject entirely and nagging instead.

“What happened to your closet?”

I looked over to the closet where the door still lay off it’s hinges. I had to make up some lie -- I knew that if Mom found out what Jacky had done, she would never leave me alone with anyone else again.

“I was trying to move things out of my closet and I tripped. I was so pissed off that I just had to scream.”

“You look like you’ve been crying,” Mom said, her arms folded.

“I was … really pissed off.”

Mom sighed, accepting that she’d never get a true answer out of me. “I’ll just add it to my damn list of things to get fixed before the next open house...”

“I’m sorry,” I added feebly. Mom didn’t respond and left the room. The stress of selling the house was pushing her to her limits, and every day there was something new for her to snap at me about. To my credit, I was doing everything in my power to give her peace, quiet, and space. I organized the junk in the house to make moving easier, but nothing I did amounted to anything in her eyes. Everything I did that was good was a drop in the ocean compared to the tsunami of anxiousness she was swept up in -- but she always managed to find some drop of outrage for my screw-ups.

The Saturday before we were set to move, Mom took the day off to organize and run our yard sale. It was amazing to me how many people were willing to drive out into the foothills of the Ozarks just to visit our yard sale. Never underestimate the power of a newspaper ad, my mother told me. I don’t know if I believe her, but that sale was pretty good evidence.

Mom had picked out some last-minute additions to the sale and assured me that she would take the morning shift. I had my last FBLA meeting the night before, and I had planned to stay up late that night gathering more junk for the sale. I asked her to make absolutely sure that she didn’t need my help, and she insisted that she didn’t.

“Early morning is just going to be a bunch of old crows anyways. I can handle it. You can cover the last bit while I get dinner, and then we can close up shop around five or six. How does that sound?”

“Promise me you’ll let me know if you need anything.”

“I promise, Sky.”

By the time I had gone to sleep that Friday night before the yard sale, every last thing I owned was packed in boxes in the living room. Everything that I had planned to sell was squirreled away in cardboard boxes in the garage. Most of the items I chose to part with were books I’d read and didn’t like, dolls collecting dust, and video games that I’d beaten and had been hoarding in my closet. I figured that if I could get a McDonald’s meal worth of quarters out of my stash, I’d be content. It was just after midnight when I looked around my room and sighed -- it was bittersweet to see it so clear. There were parts of the floor I hadn’t seen since I moved in, and stains that my third-grade self had hoped would disappear over time -- but they hadn’t. I looked longingly at a movie ticket that’d fallen between the crack in my bed and the wall; it was my birthday and my parents drove 30 miles to the drive-in so we could watch some silly Jim Carrey movie together. Dad couldn’t stand him, but he knew that I loved his stupid movies and he agreed to go for my sake. A tear rolled down my cheek as I remembered him holding me, groaning and moaning at his “clowning” but every once in a while I caught him in a chuckle, and I glowed. He’s not so bad, I told him. He’s not bad, he grumbled, for a clown.

I was glad to be finished cleaning, but it meant that there was nothing left to do but move out. I’d spent so much time over the weeks collecting my thoughts as I sorted through trash, and now it felt as though I’d run out of material to occupy my mind. It turned out to be a blessing that my mind was finally allowed to rest, since I collapsed onto my bed, fully clothed, and passed out immediately. My mind was so tired that my dreams were allowed to flourish. My father came to me, as he did most nights, in The Right Folk. I never remember what we talk about, or what we sing together -- I always only ever remembered the feeling. I remember the warmth and the calm that his presence brought, just as it did on those nights I listened to him play on that stage. Each night, he drifted from the stage into the corners of the stage where shadows crept in like mist. I would run to the stage to find him, but he was nowhere to be found.

On the day of the yard sale, I bolted awake at the sound of roaring laughter. I clawed my way out of the blankets that I’d wrapped around myself like a cocoon and stumbled to my bedroom window. Outside of the window, I had a bird’s eye view of the whole sale. There were about five different elderly folks browsing the furniture and kitchenware, a mother with three children combing through my old toys, and Jacky. My cheeks reddened and my heart pounded. What the hell, Mom, I muttered to myself as I slipped on my shoes. I stormed down the stairs and burst outside into the blinding afternoon light.

My mother rushed over to me, as if to try and shove the high tide back from the shore, but it was too late. I weaved past her and stormed up to Jacky, who shriveled back from me. His beady eyes grew wide. I saw the strap of my father’s guitar slung across his shoulder and it was all I could do to keep from ripping his arms off.

“What are you doing here,” I snarled, every inch of my body aching to strike.

He said nothing, his eyes darting as he frantically tried to find the words for his excuse. My mother gripped my shoulder and pulled me away from him, and I tossed her hand off of me.

“Skylar, what is your deal?”

I scoffed. “My deal? No, what is your deal? Why does he have Dad’s guitar?”

“Your mom said that you wanted to sell it,” Jacky interjected. “But I can see that … uh… maybe that wasn’t the case. So you can have it back if you want.” I snatched the guitar from him before he had even finished pulling his arm out of the sling. “You can keep the ten bucks, too. I don’t need it.”

“Oh wow,” I said. I could feel the eyes of all the customers on me, but I didn’t care. It only fueled me more -- I knew there was nothing my mother hated more than “making a scene”. She could call me the Bard because I was determined to make one hell of a scene.

“I’m sorry about before,” Jacky said, “I just wanted to know how it felt before --”

“Shut up,” I snapped. “You shouldn’t even be here.”

“Don’t take it out on him.” Mom stood between the two of us, her arms folded. “I asked him to help. I knew this was going to be too hard on you.”

“Yeah, selling my dead father’s guitar for ten bucks behind my back is not exactly an easy thing to get over.” One of the women set down the vase that she had been inspecting and walked towards her car. Another woman scoffed and looked down her nose at my mother.

I know that it wasn’t this way in reality, but in my memories, I cannot see their faces anymore. Their shriveled, pale raisin faces are dark, distorted shadows. It’s as if someone has gone through my memories and scrubbed these faces from my mind in black Sharpie. I can assure you that it’s a waste of ink -- these women weren’t worth remembering anyhow. But I have to admit -- the sight of these faceless women sends a chill up my spine.

“You really want to do this here, chica,” my mother whispered threateningly, “in front of all these people?”

“Why not? We won’t see any of these old hags again after tonight anyways, so who cares? Plus you thought it was a good idea to invite Jack-Off over here to try slobbering on me one more time before I leave, so I can tell you all off at the same time!” One of the ladies, a shriveled old bag of a receptionist at the dentist’s office we went to every year, stood at the table of Grandma Helen’s tacky jewelry. She looked up at me when I said “Jack-Off” and rolled her nonexistent eyes. “I can get you in on this too if you’re feeling left out, Barb. I’m on a freaking roll and I’m feeling generous.”

“That’s enough.”

“No, it’s not enough. I’ve had enough of you trying to act like nothing happened. I’m sick of you trying to pretend that things will ever go back to normal. And I’m sick of you thinking you know what I need when you so clearly don’t.”

“I do know what you need. I’m your mother! And what you need is to move on. I’m sick of living with this guilt -- with the fact that no amount of grieving will ever be enough to make you happy. We’ve been over this. I miss him too but I can’t watch you hanging on to him like this. It’s not healthy.”

“I don’t need a lecture about health from the world’s most scarred liver.”

“Wow,” she laughed incredulously. “we’re really doing this, huh, Skylar?”

“I don’t get to drown my sorrows in a bottle of Jack. The most I can get is the Coke, and it just doesn’t quite do the trick.”

“I’m not going to sit here and get lectured by a child about what adult drinks I choose to have.”

“Choose? I thought you just slammed one of each.”

“Enough!”

“Enjoy your junk sale. Half of this shit is Grandma’s anyways, and you know it’s cursed.” I looked around at the couple of seniors still left circling the tables and shouted at them. “You hear that? This shit is cursed. Just thought you should know that before you spend your money on it.” I stomped back into the house as my mother shouted more things at me. I don’t remember what she said, but I know that it was meant to hurt.