Jesse.

My Uncle Chip married Jesse’s mom when I was six and he was seven. They divorced when he was eleven. Between then, if you’d asked me who my best friend was, I might’ve said Jesse. At least the first three years or so.

We had a lot of fun. He was an explorer type, a leader kind of kid, who was always looking for adventures. A lot of the time we’d just play Pokemon on our Gameboys together, but he always wanted to ride our bikes somewhere secret first. He’d say “Want to ride bike?” I thought that was so cool back then – such better phrasing than “Want to go on a bike ride?” or “Want to ride our bikes?” There was this pine tree in the woods behind my house that was hollowed out at the bottom. We’d sit in its stuffy shade and play our Gameboys on the pine needles. At his house, we’d ride across his backyard and through a little patch of woods in the middle of the neighborhood, to the side of an embankment at the edge of a neighbor’s garden – a spot in the middle of the development, but invisible from all the houses in it. There was a lot of riding bike to places that seemed exciting and hidden.

He seemed to know about secrets – where to find them and what they were supposed to feel like. He’d take toys with us in his backpack and then we’d make up stories about them – where they’d lived, what they’d done, how they’d gotten to us. That was how so many of the stories ended, about the toys – “and that’s how he got here.” He had a gift for making these backstories haunting and giving the toys so much life that sometimes I’d leave them out on the floor at night because it didn’t seem right to put them away in a box. I liked to be invited along to ride bike and play games and make up stories, and I think he liked having someone to be there.

He wasn’t always a nice person, even though he was mostly nice to me. He had a very hot temper, and he was the only kid I ever saw back at that age yell at his mom. One time he yelled at her and at Chip at Thanksgiving in front of the whole family. I don’t remember why he yelled at them, I just remember not wanting to watch. He was red and splotchy-faced and hysterical – I was afraid of him and embarrassed for him at the same time. I wanted to show him the leaf pile my brother and I had made, but he had to go have time-out in a bedroom after lunch. I asked Chip how long Jesse would need to stay in there, but then he started kicking the walls in the bedroom, and Chip and Cathy took him home with their new baby, Zach. I didn’t see him until Christmas, and by then the leaves were buried in snow.

Another time, when I was about eight, we were looking at each other’s Pokemon cards up in the hollow of the pine tree. He told me he’d trade me one of his best cards – a Charizard – for this Holographic Gengar I’d just gotten. I didn’t really know which cards were “good”, but recognized Charizard from TV and agreed. The next day, I told Bradley Foster about the trade. Bradley was on the swim team with me and was two years older and knew a lot of things, and he said Jesse had ripped me off. I asked if he was sure and Bradley nodded, and said I should ask to trade back. I can’t remember if I did. I just remember feeling sad and kind of stupid.

He was one of my only friends back then who didn’t sleep over at our house. I don’t know if it was because Chip and Cathy wouldn’t let him, but that’s my guess. My parents let other kids who had tempers and got into trouble sometimes stay over, but Jesse never did.

One time I was going to stay over at Jesse’s house – at Chip and Cathy’s. It was a fun afternoon. We built a K’Nex rollercoaster from an unopened kit he’d saved a month from his birthday so we could do it together, and then we played with this Nerf gun that shot rubber rings. But later in the night I had this feeling of not wanting to be there. I remember feeling almost sick when it was getting to bedtime, wanting to leave but not wanting to hurt his feelings, sitting on the floor in his room, deciding that I couldn’t stay. I remember he got up to go to the bathroom, and I decided to go ask Chip if I could go home. I started crying walking out to him and Cathy in the living room. I don’t know if it was to convince them I needed to leave or because I felt bad about needing to leave. Whatever it was, they called my house and I got picked up. While I was waiting to leave, Jesse came out and silently sat next to me on the couch. I was nine years old. It was the first time and the only time I ever went for a sleepover and had to come home. I didn’t know why I needed to so bad.

It seemed like we weren’t quite as good of friends after that. We still rode our bikes together and hung out when he’d come to Grandma and Pap’s on holidays and sometimes on Saturdays in the summer, but we didn’t go to secret places just the two of us so much. We’d always take my brother or my cousin Tyson too.

I barely heard a thing about Jesse the first few years after Chip and Cathy divorced when I was ten and he was eleven. I heard he played football in high school, which was good because he was pretty overweight as a kid. And I heard he had to take special classes because he had learning disabilities and wasn’t passing school. That surprised me, that he was failing high school – he was always so smart and imaginative to me. But the big news came when I was seventeen, at my Uncle Blake’s pavilion for a June cookout with the family – something Jesse would’ve been at a few years before. My Grandma told my Mom and then they told me together: Jesse had been arrested for possession of child pornography. He was sentenced to a year in prison. Chip told Zach, who was about nine then, that his brother was getting locked up for stealing.

After Jesse got arrested, I remembered some other things. I remembered that he often wanted to play truth or dare when we were with Isaac, who was two years younger than me, and Tyson, who was two years younger than Isaac. He’d dare them to put things in their urethras (“pee-hole” to us at that age) or to walk around naked. We’d look at each other uncomfortably and say no. I can’t remember if anyone did any of it. I don’t think so.

If they picked truth, he’d ask if they’d ever masturbated, or if anyone ever touched their penises. He’d pick truth and tell us we should ask him what he found in his Mom’s dresser drawer or ask him what a “blowjob” was. He said these things in the same tone as he’d talk when he was making up stories about our secret hiding places or making up backstories for our toys, but this made my stomach squirm.

I tried to remember if that was why I had to leave that night when I was nine and was supposed to spend the night at his house. Did I feel threatened? Did I feel Sexualized (though of course I wouldn’t have had a word for it)? I know it’s awfully suspicious – I don’t remember much at all between playing in the afternoon and the looming sense of needing to get out, in the bedroom with this boy who was quite a bit bigger than me and later got arrested for child porn – but I don’t think anything happened in that way, of him to me. I just remember sitting on the floor of his bedroom, feeling like the night was a pit I was dropping into, that was swallowing both of us, and I had to get out. It was more of a feeling of I need to leave him behind than I need to get away from him. I think that was why I felt so bad on the couch fifteen minutes later, sitting silently next to this boy I might have said was my best friend right up through that night.

Of course, all of this is me looking back almost two decades later, or looking back a decade later at when I first looked back almost a decade later. It could be I’m revising adult rationality, cause-and-effect, narrative, explanatory sense into the actions of a child. It could be I’m putting mind to what was really just a nine-year old kid in a strange house with an on-the-rocks marriage and an unstable son panicking as darkness came; what was really just a nine-year old who’d stepped too far into unfamiliarity by not really knowing what it had been that was familiar at his own home, and familiar in most of his other friends’ homes too.

Eighteen years old, and Jesse spent a year in prison for child pornography. He got out and within a month did what seemed pretty much the rational thing: He killed himself. Hanging, at home in his room while his mom was at work and his half-brother was staying with her ex. Chip told Zach that Jesse had a rare disease and had forgotten to take his medicine for it.

It was August when he killed himself. I was getting ready to go to college. Getting ready to be away from home for a while for the first time – I wasn’t worried, I hadn’t felt like I needed to go home or like I needed my parents to be with me as I went to sleep since that night when I was nine. And Jesse was dead. He’d spent a year in prison and then killed himself after three weeks back at his house. It almost made sense to me then – he was nineteen and his life was over anyway. At least that’s what it felt like. But now I’m twenty-seven, and nineteen seems so… so close to eleven.

I hadn’t seen him since he was that age. People freeze when you don’t see them a while, and he was frozen like that – this mischievous, temperamental kid who loved to ride bike and play Pokemon on his Gameboy with his back against a pine; who could be mean and coercive but mostly just seemed to want to make up stories with someone else in some secret little place, to make up the ways things got here. It had been so strange and surreal when I heard about his arrest. This person I remembered as a child – but still remembered as being older than me, as the leader between us – going to prison for images and videos of other children. Feeling like I should be upset at him for participating in such a horrible thing, the sexualization of children, but mostly just feeling like I’d felt that night I was supposed to stay at his house: vaguely sick, and like something was really wrong but I wasn’t sure what.

And when Grandma told me he’d killed himself, it was a feeling of blankness. This frozen person you sometimes visit in your memory, probably to remain frozen forever, and then someone tells you – “He’s dead in there. He’s dead inside the ice.”

It had been twice as long since I’d seen him as we’d known each other. It’s been even longer now since he killed himself. How quickly things get so far away. How suddenly they’re right back with you.

Just last week I went to my grandparents’ house. We talked about Jesse. It had been my Grandma who came and picked me up that night I was supposed to sleep over, she told me. I didn’t remember that. I didn’t remember leaving. She said they found out later – after the divorce – that Jesse had been sexually abused at a psyche ward where he was getting treatment for what was probably bi-polar disorder when he was six. A little before we’d met. I said that made sense. He had this fascination with the sexual as a kid. Maybe it was because he’d been yanked into it and then spit back out. He seemed to understand it as one of the main places where secrets form and lay wait.

I wondered about what he did then. About the thing that got him sent to prison. I thought of Jesse riding bike somewhere secret by himself, trying to figure out or make up how things got here.

I remember after he got arrested, the thing everyone was worried about was if he’d done something to any of us. To me, to Isaac, to Tyson, to Zach. Our parents asking us awkward, serious questions, trying to determine if we’d been victims, if we needed therapy. I wonder if anyone tried to determine if Jesse had been a victim; if he needed therapy. Because now, as I look back ten years after he was arrested, it seems like all the adults were making the bad thing make sense from what had happened before – remembering him as a bad kid who then became a bad person who did a bad thing – he’d yelled at his parents, been unstable, been a bully at times, been manic when he had too much sugar, been a bit of a liar. All these things that might’ve been said with a sort of rueful fondness if they’d been saying them about the childhood of some other eighteen-year old about to go to college, now saying them in these hushed tones, like when Jesse made up secret backstories for our toys.

Perhaps I’m being too apologetic for someone I don’t want to castigate – would not be a new accusation – but I don’t think he was a bad kid, whatever that means. I didn’t get to ever know the person he became at nineteen, or eighteen, or even twelve, for that matter. I don’t think the reason I needed to leave that night when I was nine was because I realized I was sitting next to someone bad and didn’t want to sleep in a room with him. I think it was because Jesse was, even then, deep in a maw. And as many of us likely know, the maw yawns itself so wide we can forget about it during the day, but when sleep is coming near, we feel its flat, uncompromising teeth start to bear down as we sink into ourselves and our pasts and our fears. I think I needed to go that night because I felt it just the slightest bit.

I wonder how that felt to him. To get up and go to the bathroom, sharing his bedroom with his friend, to have someone to make up stories and jokes with until those a.m. hours that feel so distant and mysterious when you’re ten years old, and come back to an empty room.

I don’t blame myself for leaving. I don’t blame anyone for what happened, except I suppose the person that abused him at the psyche ward. I don’t blame Jesse for not knowing how to say, “There’s something wrong here, and I need help.” I don’t think most people ever learn how to know that about themselves or how to say that if they do, and certainly most kids don’t. I just wish it had been different. I wish I’d known how to spot a person in a years-long crisis and knew how to say – know how to say, God, even now – “I’ll be there with you. I’ll be there for you.”

It would be solipsistic, I think, to wish I’d saved him, or think I could have, or anything like that. But the truth is, just having a friend – and it could be anyone – can make a big difference. It’s really easy to make friends when you’re a kid, and then suddenly it just isn’t.

I guess if I could go back, I’d just ask Jesse if he wanted to ride bike. Even after the divorce, I’d call him up and ask if he wanted to ride to some hidden place where all the secrets are the ones you make up yourself.

God, it’s so long ago. Zach’s nineteen now. The last age Jesse was. I wonder if he knows.

What happens to the kid you were? Twenty years after you were sitting in the hollow of a pine tree at your new friend’s – your new cousin’s – house, playing Pokemon Blue next to each other. What happens to the kid you were after you got abused in a psyche ward, the place you’d gone because you were “hyper,” as they said back then, and left with some alien-abduction flash into a world of secrets you weren’t the least ready for? What happens to the kid you were after a year in prison for being one of the most hated things a person can be, eleven years after you personally experienced the very reason for that hate? What happens to the kid you were when the noose tightens around your throat after your mother leaves for work without looking you in the eye?

We carry ourselves with us. Like aging hermit crabs with larger and larger shells, dragging along our most intimate homes. What happens to the shell when the thing inside it dies?

All I have is this memory of a person who can’t say anything back, like a toy on my bedroom floor that I don’t want to put away. How did he get here? I wish he could tell me; he was so good at saying.