Blue Rose (A Flowering Novel) (7 page)

12

For the biggest slut in school, I really never understood sex. All I knew about it was that it hurt, that it was awful, and that it made me feel violated. At first, when I let Jack kiss me, before
Jerry, there had been little stirrings. I remembered some of the things I had seen, some of the things my father had done, and it confused me. Because I remembered them and they scared me, but some nights, I couldn’t help but picture Jack doing them to me. I felt ashamed in the mornings, and I struggled the next day when we would be together. He just assumed I was moody and a little crazy, but he was nice enough to let the moods pass.

Right before Halloween, I had started to touch myself at night. I felt bad about it, but I’d looked online and people said it was normal. I didn’t know if it was normal for someone like me, but it felt good. Picturing Jack touching me, his body next to mine, I couldn’t help but get excited. I struggled with the guilt and I had no one to talk to about it. I certainly wasn’t going to ask Jack if he had ever thought about it. I knew kids still taunted him, still made comments about the things we did. I didn’t know if Jack was embarrassed. He never let on
if he was, but he also didn’t want to talk about those kids and what they said. I worried that he was afraid that people would think the things were true.

I didn’t know how to ask him. At lunch one day, I tried to bring it up, but it was so awkward. He was eating a stale bagel he’d found in his cupboard and I was trying to get my applesauce open. Jack was basically staring through me, out the window, but when I finally pulled the lid off, half
of the applesauce jumped across the table and splattered onto his gray t-shirt. He’d finally convinced his grandmother to buy plain shirts, and I made him leave his hoodie in his locker. They still picked on him and called him poor, but at least he blended better. I’d been trying to dress nicer, too, but mostly because I wanted him to look at me and I loved when he said I looked pretty. I heard it all the time, but Jack meant more than my ass.

“You can just ask me to take my shirt off, you know. No need to throw food at me,” he said.

I stuttered, “I… I wasn’t… I don’t…”

“I’m kidding.”

“Do you ever, um, think about…”

“Think about what?” he asked.

“You know. The stuff they say. About us, I mean.”

“The stuff they say is horrible, Alana. You’re better than that.”

“I know, but do you ever…”

“What are you asking?” His eyes were dark and he looked confused or mad, but I couldn’t tell which. He ran a hand through his hair and I noticed his shirt was ripped again.

“You have a hole in your shirt,” I said. “Maybe after school, we can go somewhere and…” I trailed off. What was I asking? Did I want to buy him a new shirt? Or was I asking him for something else? I didn’t even know.

“I don’t want you to think I think like that. I don’t look at you like they do,” Jack said, and that was the end of it. That was the conversation and clearly, he wasn’t interested. So I went back to thinking my impure thoughts at night, knowing I was only thinking them because I was a dirty slut taught to be that way by my father.

After Halloween, I couldn’t think about Jack like that anymore. I felt like I was being punished for wanting to do those things and my penance was that Jerry did them to me instead. All those nights, after Jerry would come home and be sweet to my mom, he would come to my room and I knew it was my fault. If I hadn’t been thinking those things, he wouldn’t be doing them to me. When Jack and I were alone after the first time with Jerry, I closed myself off. We were less physical. I rarely even let him hold my hand anymore, but he never asked. He still sat with me and, once in a while, he would try to kiss me, but he was distracted by his father’s trial and I let us fall apart a little.

I never told my mom about
Jerry. On Thanksgiving, after he passed out and my mom went to her room to cry, I broke into the liquor cabinet and stole several bottles of alcohol. I’d never been to Jack’s house, but I walked all the way there in the cold darkness, hoping that he would be home. He was; his grandmother was with his dad. That night, we got drunk together for the first time. He kissed me while we were lying on his bed, but I ended up puking into his trash can after, and then he just held me. We drank until we both passed out, and the next day, I went home. No one said anything. No one asked questions.

Jerry
just left one night that winter, with some girl whom he met at a bar. My mother cried for a while, and I let her. She began dating a lot after that. The guys all tended to be like my father or Jerry, but none of them got very far. My mother didn’t want to settle down, and I spent most of my free time with Jack anyway, so they didn’t get a chance to do much else. Like the guys at school, there were accidental touches, dirty remarks, but none of them lasted very long. They all told me that it was such a shame that I was so pretty – and that I wasn’t any use to them. 

We met Dave that winter, and he was a loser like me and Jack. The three of us started going to Dave or Jack’s houses after school. Jack and I would do homework, and Dave would drink. Then, Jack and I would also drink. At fifteen, the three of us were drunk nearly every night. Still, neither of them ever touched
me. Jack was so lost in his anger about his dad that he had even stopped kissing me, but it was okay, because I didn’t want to be touched. I knew what happened when I wanted that. Instead, I began stashing razor blades. At night, when I used to touch myself and dream about Jack’s body, now I would cut myself until I bled, hoping that I could feel something. Nothing ever came, though.

I think that was the worst thing
Jerry took from me. He took what was growing between me and Jack, and he made it impossible. I still think that, if he hadn’t been around that Halloween, I would be a different person – and maybe I’d deserve to be loved like I used to imagine I did.

13

Of course, the week goes to shit. Melinda gave me a book before I left with coping strategies and asked me to practice them, and they were even working. Sure, it had only been a few days, but they seemed to be as effective as the Xanax at least. So I wasn’t surprised when Jack texted me for the second time this week, having some kind of breakdown. This one is incoherent, something about Lily, and now, I’m standing over his barely conscious body with his RA. Technically, they’re not supposed to drink in the dorms, but the RA just seems uncomfortable and I get the feeling he’s not going to report Jack if he can just go back to his room and let me deal with the mess.

“Wake the fuck up,” I tell Jack and I kick him. His eyes open, but they’re not focused.
What the fuck did he do?
I think, but I turn to the RA and tell him that we’ll be fine. Jack’s alive and he’s sort of conscious, so anything that comes next is going to be shit I’ve seen before.

The RA
leaves us and I bend down and shake Jack. “Get up, get your shit together, and tell me what happened.”

He starts rocking
and shaking, letting out some kind of agonizing moan. It looks like one of my panic attacks, but Jack doesn’t usually have the anxiety that I do. He’s more of a drunken stupor or wall-punching rage kind of guy. Not the fetal position seizure freak-out that I usually go for.

“Tell me,” I plead.

He slurs something about someone named Derek, but I get the rest of his incoherent rambling. They broke up. It hasn’t even been a week. I really thought she loved him. The way she looked at him, the way her eyes lit up when she mentioned him in the lobby, they made me think that she was going to be good for him. But this is a mess. I worry it’s my fault, that I scared her away, but then I figure that, if she was that scared of me, she’d be terrified of Jack’s past.

I get my arms under him and
I pull him up, leaning him against his desk. He’s hysterical and he’s shaking. I hold him and don’t say a word. I know exactly what these attacks feel like. I always have mine when I’m alone, like it’s an ironic reminder of my fear of abandonment, but I don’t think another person could help anyway.

He grabs a plastic knife from his drawer and snaps it in half, cutting his palm with it.
He bleeds a little, but then he gets pissed at the knife, in more typical Jack fashion. Probably for not being sharp enough. I think of all the times that I asked him not to ask me about my scars; maybe Jack and I have more secrets from each other than I’d thought.

He begins to hyperventilate and then he clenches his fists, punching the floor with all the agony that’s coiled in his muscles. I just rub his back and remind him to breathe. Eventually, his breathing slows and he leads me outside,
after snapping at some poor kid in the hall. We make it all the way to the parking lot before he speaks.

“I need to go for a ride,”
he tells me.

“Jack, you are in no condition to be driving. Get in my car. I’ll take you wherever you want to go, but you’re not driving.”

I don’t know what he was thinking, because he can’t even stand up without help. I manage to get him into the passenger seat, and then I get in the car. I turn the heat up, because I’m always cold and he can deal with it. I’m annoyed that he’s this much of a mess over Lily already. He’s been through so much worse, but this is what sends him over the fucking edge?

“Get your shit together
,” I tell him. “It’s been a fucking week. You can’t lose yourself like this over a fucking week. What if whatever you’d hoped would happen
had
happened, and then a year went by and we were here? How the fuck would you survive it?”

“It’s not Lily,”
he replies. “I know what it looks like, but it isn’t
just
her. I don’t know how to explain it. A few hours ago, I stood in the shower and I could actually
feel
tomorrow. I wanted there to be a tomorrow, and a next week, and a next year. I wanted to be present. I wanted to be alive.”

“And now you don’t? You don’t want to be alive because of a girl you fucked a few times?”
The words kill me. I knew a week ago that I’d lost him, but whatever he’s doing right now brings me right back to the hospital, to waiting to hear if he’d live, if he had gone too long without oxygen. I can’t lose Jack. I can lose
fucking
Jack, because that’s always been a separate extension of myself, but I absolutely cannot lose my best – and currently only – fucking friend on this whole stupid planet.

“Fuck you, Jack. Really. Fuck you.”

“Why?” he asks.

“You’re my best friend. You’re my
only
fucking friend. You call me all the time, needing me, and I run to you. I told you what it felt like to think I was going to lose you. And you just sit here and tell me it doesn’t fucking matter. That the last few years – all my sacrifices, all my putting you first – it means nothing because some girl fucked you a few times and got bored. You are such an asshole.”

“I
never
want to be alive,” he says. “I’ve learned how to get by, except for once in a while like the other night. But I never want to be here; I just don’t want to leave you behind. I don’t want you to feel like I do all the time.”

“What are
you saying?”

We
’ve never really talked about his suicide attempt. Like everything between us, we keep the hardest parts of our pasts, of ourselves, hidden, and wonder why no one can save us. I realize, looking at him, that we need to stop. We need to open up, to each other and to others, because we’re both going to destroy ourselves. Together, we’re just a disaster waiting to tear the world apart.

“
I love her,” he admits. “I fucking
love
her. And I was going to tell her tonight.”

It hurts, but I know, and now I know that, somehow, he needs to be able to love her. Maybe not
her
, since she appears to have left him to fall apart, but he needs someone who isn’t me. Someone who can make him feel like he belongs to a world he always thought he deserved. Jack is far from entitled, but I think he always wondered what he did wrong to earn such a crappy draw. And I don’t really know the answer. I don’t know what I did, either.

I hold him close to me.
Jack and I have grown into two fairly hardened people, who hide our pain and survive in spite of it, but I will never look at him and not see that boy with the train shirt. I’ll always see the kid in the rain, or the guy who made love to me like I was a work of art when we finally had sex for the first time. I know that he’s a desperate mess now, but before the trial and the aftermath, before his suicide attempt, Jack was still the man I’m holding right now. Those things didn’t break him, as they would most people. They just changed him a little.

He sobs and I just keep on holding him. At least once a week, I wish I could reset my life. I would take Jack back to that summer afternoon, to our first kiss at the town common, and I would freeze time there forever. I would always be the girl with hope, and he would always be the boy who gave it to me.

“Where do you wanna go?” I ask him.

“Take me to see my mom,”
he says.

****

We go to his mother’s grave, but I give him space. He doesn’t like being here
with
anyone and I don’t really blame him.

The trial took up most of our sophomore year and it was terrible. It was on the news every night, so even though he’d moved to a new town, it wasn’t hard for people to place the name. Sure, Connelly is a fairly common name, but our town wasn’t that big, and the media kept saying that
the son of the victim as well as the suspect was local and had recently changed schools. So basically the media was just asking for the few kids who didn’t know already to jump on the bandwagon. Jack was never given a chance.

People would come in every day and ask him things like, “Did your mom scream when she died?” or “
Does Alana know the guys in your family get off on killing women?” He never said anything. I don’t know how he stood it. He would punch the hell out of the walls as soon as they left and his bedroom had started to become more plaster than drywall, but he never said a word to them. Until one day, when some guy came over to our lunch table and made a comment about my dad fucking me. It wasn’t even about the trial, but Jack lost it. He slammed the kid’s head into our table, and they needed three teachers to pull him off. There was blood everywhere and he was suspended for it. The guidance department got involved and actually got him a tutor during the suspension and made the principal remove it from his record, in case it would interfere with Jack’s college plans. But that was the only time I ever saw him go after someone else. He apologized to me for weeks. But I was so fucked up that I just thought it was kind of sweet.

Watching your dad kill your mom, even if she was a junkie, isn’t something people get over, but Jack has always been the kind of guy who turn
s it on himself. He still does and I watch him crying at her grave now, because he still blames himself somehow. He really believes he was a bad kid. That if he was less worthless that she wouldn’t have been on drugs, that his family would still be intact. All he’s ever wanted was a family; all I ever wanted was not to have one.

“You ready?” he says when he’s done and we walk back to the car.

“Jack, I’m staying with you tonight,” I tell him.

He shakes his head. “No. I need to be alone. I need to be good enough for her.”

I kiss him. It’s stupid, because he loves her, and there is nothing good that can come from this, but I don’t know how else to love someone, how else to be there for someone. He leans into the kiss, his hands sliding down my arms, moving into my shirt and up my back. His tongue swirls against mine, and even though the car is freezing, the windows fog up. He groans and I lean back, wanting more, wanting him to be with me one more time, but as I go for his zipper, he moves back into his seat.

“I can’t,” he says. “I love her.”

“But you’re not together,” I remind him.

“I know. But I want her to know that I love her, that she was enough for
me, that I didn’t fuck it up as soon as I got the chance.”

I nod and pull my shirt down
. I can still feel his hands on my skin, and I hate that I’m so physically desperate for him. We drive back to the dorm and he holds me in a spooning position as we fall asleep, but his hands stay around my waist and he doesn’t let me kiss him again.

“I love you,” I tell him, but he’s already asleep. And it’s already way too late.