Standing in the shower, frigid water pulsating his flesh, Paul Jackson imagined the pressure forcing him down through the drain cover, into the rusted plumbing, swirling him to oblivion.
Awake almost as long as he had slept, the persistent shock of the water creaked his eyelids open, like the roll-top door of a long-neglected Hoosier cabinet resurrected from a forgotten corner of some ancient barn. After a few more moments of his self-imposed torture, mind as sharp as an eraser, Paul stepped out of the shower to dry off and prepare, as best he could, for the day ahead.
Once again, he had spent too much of the night on top of the covers rather than beneath them. Except this most recent sexventure, a term he had begun using the very wild summer before his senior year of high school, had more strings attached than he liked. Of course, strings of any kind were always a bitch, but these particular strings, he knew, would be more like a motherfucker. He just hoped he could avoid having to deal with it all today. Forever sounded fine, too.
His thick curtains lingered the morning darkness inside his room as Paul finished dressing by feeling his way around the familiar space. This inconvenience far outweighed the harshness of incandescent, or natural, light on a morning such as this one. Pulling on his left sock, always the last item of clothing to fit, he heard his phone begin to wail from atop the nightstand. Still virtually invisible in the deep dark, just enough glow creeped around the edges of the closed Razr to allow him to grab it with uncanny precision, the kind of unthinking motion his ancestors might have used to skin a squirrel or ring a chicken’s neck before supper.
Taking a deep breath, to clear his sleep-deprived brain as much as to drive the demons away, Paul gripped the phone tightly before flipping it open to answer the call, putting an end to the brief clip from “Poker Face.” He did not have to look at the screen to know who was on the other end of the line. Lady Gaga was reserved for one person only: his best friend, Henry Jacobs – The Third, to be exact. But look he did as the letters “BFF” danced rhythmically across the small screen to the cruelly catchy tune. There could only be one reason Henry would call him this early.
Damn, he found out fast, Paul thought. What the fuck am I going to tell him?
The last thing he wanted to do was take this call, but the choice was Hobson’s, much as his choices last night had been.
Paul flipped the phone open and said with a sleep-thickened voice, “Hey man. What’s goin’ on?”
He did not know what reaction to expect from the guy who had been his best friend since the seventh grade, but whatever he had imagined, whatever terrible slander he wanted to hear (it would serve him right, he knew), or whatever he might have to plead to in order to save the friendship, the sound coming through the phone was the last thing he expected. His heart sank into his feet when he realized Henry was sobbing.
Nice. He’s crying. Why can’t he just yell at me? Why can’t he tell me he hates me and that we’ll never speak again? Why does he have to cry? Paul thought.
“Hey, Henry? You okay? What the hell? You wanna talk or what?” Paul said. He knew it sounded rougher and less sympathetic than it should have, but his friend had caught him off guard. He was supposed to be yelling when instead he had chosen to play dirty and cry. Just the thought of it was beginning to make Paul angry.
“Paul? It’s Ashleigh. Twenty minutes ago. Her parents called. She hadn’t come home when they went to bed.” Henry stopped – talking, anyway. Paul could still hear him crying – deep, uncontrolled sobs broken by wet snorts which sounded to Paul like someone trying to slurp the last bit of chocolate shake from a Styrofoam cup.
Okay, so here it was. Already. Hard as it was to believe, the piper must be paid. He had made a man’s mistake and would pay a man’s price, whatever that might be. His years of friendship with Paul meant too much to lie, not to come clean.
His English teacher, Mr. Cooper, might call this dramatic irony. “Hey, man. Listen. Let me talk a minute okay? I know this is bad, but it is what it is, you know? We’re friends-”
Henry interrupted, “She’s dead, Paul. Last night.” Clearly, he had not even heard his friend speak, or if he had the words meant nothing. “A car wreck. On the highway. About a mile from her house. What was she doing out so late?” The last sentence was a question, but Henry had screamed the words. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. Ashleigh is dead. My girlfriend is dead. Oh God, I love her so much.”
Paul’s early morning haze, brought on by a grueling baseball practice after school and a particularly energetic (and unfortunate) encounter with a cheerleader which had ended only a couple of hours before, burnt away immediately as the glaring reality of his friend’s words burst through. Paul had never been more awake.
“Are you screwing with me? Don’t joke about this shit, dude. You tell me you’re joking,” Paul replied.
“Why would I joke about something like this? Her mom called me. Just now. It’s all true.” Speaking the words to his best friend seemed to calm him, if ever so slightly. The crying had stopped but the sniffling had not. “She didn’t say much – I’m not even sure she knows it all yet. But I think maybe she fell asleep at the wheel. She went off the road and the car flipped. That’s all I know. She’s dead.”
By all rights and rules of high school relationships, Ashleigh Freeman should never have been involved with Henry Jacobs III, other than a little flirting to get help with her homework. She was leggy and blonde, popular and outgoing – a girl invited to the best parties and hit on by every straight male in the school. As well as by many who had graduated years, sometimes decades, earlier.
She and Henry had met in photography the year before. Art classes often act as the great social equalizer in the rigidly hierarchical structure of public education. This one proved no different. Neither were exceptional at the work behind the camera or in the darkroom, but both were adequate and enjoyed the creative opportunity denied them in almost all other subjects. With a lot of down time, when the labs were full or when they were between rolls of black and white film, they talked. Nowhere near outgoing, Henry often displayed a sharp wit and did not take himself seriously.
For a girl like Ashleigh, who was used to spending time with boys who competed with her for a space in front of the mirror or flexed their biceps every time they picked up anything larger than a pencil, Henry seemed, at first, like he must have come from a different planet. He listened when she talked, asked her questions about the things that interested her, and did not try to prove his manliness by drinking developer or trying to lift the tables to demonstrate his new personal max.
A couple of months into the semester, she hitched a ride to school with one of her friends rather than driving her own car so she could ask Henry to take her home. In truth, Henry was not that interested in her – not that he did not find her attractive. He was a man, after all. But her reputation with the boys contrasted too greatly with his inexperience and the lessons he was taught weekly in the Free Methodist Church senior high Sunday school class.
Against all the laws of high school dating, Asleigh Freeman, cheerleader and social queen bee, chased Henry Jacobs until he agreed to take her on a date.
And now, at six-thirty in the morning, Henry was calling his best friend to tell him his first and only girlfriend had been killed in a car wreck.
“What do you need me to do, Henry? Right now? Anything. Name it. You want me to come over?” Paul asked.
After a short pause, Henry answered, “No. Nothing. Just go to school. Thanks anyway. I appreciate it. I really do. I’m not coming today, but I’ll call you later. Thanks for waking up for me. I love you, man.”
At those words, Paul wished, for the first time in his life, he would die. Put a pistol to his temple and jerk the trigger until…nothing. Of course, this was not an option. “No problem, bro. That’s what I’m here for. Get some sleep. I’ll talk to you later. When you’re ready.”
Closing his phone to break the connection, Paul laid his head back on the pillow considering whether he could leave the house today. Less than an hour of rest after a very long day should have meant almost automatic slumber. Instead, his mind raced around the innumerable ways this situation could play out. He thought about Ashleigh, cold and lifeless in a drawer at the hospital – body broken from the tumbling car. He tried not to, but he also thought about that body when it was still warm and alive. And he thought about Henry.
***
The two high school seniors had gotten to know one another on the first day of junior high, their friendship forged in the fiery logic of the alphabet. Jackson, locker 312 – Jacobs, locker 313. Oliver P. Morton Junior High School followed the tradition of all public educational institutions before it – it was probably a law or something – and assigned lockers based on last names. On that same first day, they also realize they had health and English together, Paul placed exactly one seat in front of Henry in both. While a person or two inserted themselves between the boys and their respective lockers once they moved on to ninth grade and the Morton kids merged with students from two other junior highs, they remained close. The greater impediment to their bond came with the inevitable stratification of social classes high school imposed upon most of its prey.
Paul was a jock – football, basketball, and baseball. The big three. Henry, on the other hand, favored academics and did not participate in sports at all. He not only made straight A’s but found a home in the Science Club which met after school and did geeky things like turn old vacuum cleaners and cardboard into functional hovercraft. He also had a knack for English. And history. And math. Pretty much everything, in truth. Paul was smart in his own right, but he always made sure his studies did not get in the way of the truly important things, like lifting weights and pretending to shop for increasingly larger jock straps.
By high school, Paul’s parents both had been put on third shift at the local auto plant. Hearing rumors it would be closing in another year, Jeff and Karen Jackson not only worked their assigned hours but took on as much overtime as possible as a hedge against any possible future economic uncertainty. This meant they rarely crossed paths with their son. They were often not yet home when he got himself up for school, asleep when he returned. Having the house to himself at night also meant his social life was unencumbered by rules or prying eyes.
Paul had no idea if his parents knew how often he had girls over. He doubted they would care even if they did. As long as he could avoid announcing the impending arrival of an unexpected grandchild, he suspected they would barely raise one collective eyebrow, let alone one each, over his nocturnal activities.
They had not exactly been angels in their own youths. Paul knew this for certain. He was eighteen while they were only thirty-seven and thirty-six, respectively. In the sixth grade, he had done the math – it wasn’t hard – that told him his parents’ twelfth anniversary had come two months after his twelfth birthday. The social implications of this had not hit him for another year or two, but he had understood the biology of the situation quite well, even at twelve.
While Henry struggled to gain the courage even to talk to girls through junior high and high school, acting as though none of that silly relationship stuff mattered to him at all, Paul had taken to the game quite quickly and quite well. By the time he reached high school, his body had matured beyond those of many classmates, especially Henry, and only about a month into his freshman year, a particularly aggressive senior cheerleader had pulled him into the locker room, the building empty after practice, and given him his first blowjob. The whole event occurred so quickly, and with so little effort on his part, he was not exactly sure what had happened, though he certainly enjoyed the results. Moving forward, rather than encumber himself with a girlfriend, or even a series of them, he found he could use his looks and charm to work one girl at a time before moving on to the next. Maybe what kept them coming was that Paul never bragged about his exploits to his friends. Everyone knew Paul had a way with the ladies, but he never told tales on Monday about his weekend ladies. Girls understood, in some unspoken way, they could live out their star-jock fantasies with Paul and not risk seeing their names on a bathroom wall somewhere.
This silence extended to his conversations with Henry. If he did know what his more popular friend enjoyed doing in his free time (and Henry was about the smartest and most observant guy Paul had ever met), he never let on, never criticized or judged Paul for any of it. Perhaps this is part of what allowed the relationship to endure beyond its natural lifespan.
***
For the three days following the call, Paul did not see Henry but talked to him on the phone at least once a day. He wanted to see his friend, to hug him, maybe to cry with him. However, Ashleigh’s family had decided to include her boyfriend in some of the decision making for the funeral. Henry was the first boy their daughter had dated whom they liked, and the closest thing they would ever have to a son-in-law. This had kept him busy, occupied with her family and the arrangements for the service. Paul, on the other hand, had little to do but try, and fail, to sleep. He managed no more than a couple of hours a night, consumed by what to do and how to do it. If he needed to do anything at all. Maybe this was something better left buried with Ashleigh. Even if keeping the secret would rip Paul from the inside out, maybe Henry did not have to share in that pain.
***
The day of the funeral, Paul arrived at the mortuary as late as possible and sat in the back. At the end of the service, he passed by the casket to see his friend’s girlfriend one final time. He could stand to look at her for no more than a brief moment, his tears serving as a fine veil against his inner-most regrets. Most of his classmates were either crying or shocked beyond visible emotion. Nothing suggested his reaction differed from theirs at all. He then headed straight to his car to wait, alone, for the procession to begin.
After the graveside service, Paul hung back. He had not crossed paths with Henry at the funeral home, by design. Leaving without speaking to his best friend felt wrong to him, and likely conspicuous to others – even to those, like Henry, so entrenched in the grieving process. No matter, he simply could not face him.
While the final attendees were paying their respects to Ashleigh’s parents and to Henry under the blue tarp, Paul found a rather large headstone announcing the life and death of a couple named Mary and Roger Zimmer. He half sat, half leaned against the stone and opened a pack of Marlboro Reds. Lighting the first cigarette of his life, Paul waited for Henry to finish his duties and make his way through the maze of monuments to where he was inhaling and coughing with equal frequency. He still did not know what he was going to say; he simply hoped he would be able to say something.
Three partially-smoked cigarettes later, Paul could see his buddy peel away from one of Ashleigh’s out-of-town …somebodies, spot him in the field of stones, and begin to shuffle towards him. The distance between them was only about fifty yards, but Paul’s internal clock felt like it passed twelve at least twice before the other boy finally reached him.
“I know it’s been a long few days, but when did you start smoking?” Henry asked.
“About twenty minutes ago. I think I just quit, too. That’s a lot for one afternoon, huh?” Paul said, stomping out the butt on the final resting place of the Zimmer family. Paul reached out to hug his friend. “I’m so sorry, man. I just don’t know what else to say.”
Paul could feel Henry’s body shudder under his embrace. As he pulled away, Henry wiped his eyes on his suit sleeve, and to Paul’s surprise, laughed. “Dude, you smell like a biker. I hope you did just quit. I can’t handle the stench.”
“I promise. You gonna be okay?”
“Yeah.” He paused. “But there’s something I have to tell you. And I don’t really know how. I just don’t know what to do with this.”
Paul said nothing.
“Because Ashleigh died in an accident, they had to do an autopsy. By law.”
“She wasn’t drunk or anything, was she?” Paul knew the answer perfectly well, but he felt like he had to say something.
“She didn’t drink. Anymore. At least, I don’t think she did. Not around me. There’s so much I don’t know right now. The thing is, they said she’d had sex. That night. The test didn’t show trauma. And you know we’d never done it. I only talked to her for like a minute after she got out of cheerleading practice. Around five. She said she was going to Wal-Mart and then home. I had a calc test I was supposed to take the next day and wanted to get to bed early. She asked to come over for a while, but I told her I just wanted to rest. Why did she lie? How many times had she lied to me, Paul? How many times?”
Paul wanted to tell his friend she hadn’t lied, not really. When she talked to him, her intentions were exactly what she had said. He wanted to say, “This was the first time she ever did that to you. The only time. I swear it.” But the words did not have the courage to risk the long sojourn from his brain to his mouth.
Instead, he pulled the pack of Reds from the inside pocket of his suit coat, shuffled one out of the hard pack and offered it to Henry, who declined. He slid it between his lips, lit it, and inhaled. This one was smoother than the first. Much. Quitting indeed. Through the hazy cloud which separated them, he looked at the downturned face of his Best Friend Forever.
Forever. That’s a really big word. He took a another drag or two off the butt before dropping it, along with its recently deceased brothers, onto the Zimmer’s heads. With no small amount of trepidation, he put his arm around Henry and began to tell him a story – a story that began with what was to be a quick stop at the store to pick up some deodorant and a pack of gum. A story whose resolution had not yet been written. But Paul figured by the time he got there, he would have some kind of ending to tell.
About the Author
Brian Hawkins lives and works in southern Indiana with his wife, Lacy. Brian’s work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Barcelona Review, Strangest Fiction Anthology – Vol. 2, Jelly Bucket, The Brussels Review, and Cowboy Jamboree.
