Part Four

So, Joe, let’s talk about him.

It’s like I said before, I did think about breaking up with him. Except I didn’t.

And a bunch of other things happened.

He’d collected a couple of creepy friends that were into the same kinds of demented videos as him. And this is a part that I’m too embarrassed to really tell the whole thing. I’ll tell as much of as I can.

He had one friend, Kevin, and it started with him.

We were over at Kevin’s house and we used to hang out over at Kevin’s house a lot. Kevin lived in an apartment that shared a parking lot with a pizza place. There was almost nothing you could order in rural NH except for pizza. Well, the pizza places didn’t deliver to the town I lived in, only the town the school was in.

So remember I said the high school I went to was shared by two towns? One town was slightly more built-up than the other. Joe and his friend Kevin lived in the slightly more populated town. Because the less populated town, the one that I lived in, there was not even one restaurant. There was one convenience store, a dairy farm, and two farms that grew produce. You could go there and pick apples in the fall and they had corn mazes. I’m sure they grew other things too. The apples were all I ever bought though.

I’m painting a picture because the pizza place sharing a parking lot with Kevin’s apartment is sort of important. That’s why his apartment was a gathering place. People hung out there even when they didn’t like him. The proximity to the pizza place made him popular. It doesn’t take much in rural NH.

Kevin was kind of off too. Although not quite as off as Joe. Yeah, they got along really well.

When we over at Kevin’s house, either just hanging out with him or some of the other guys who came around a lot, Joe would try to get fooling around started with me. Like in the living room, in front of everyone. He would talk a lot about sex. He would tell these guys about any of the interesting things he’d gotten me to do. Well, I’d tell you why I put up with all of this if I really knew. I don’t though.

Joe had a proposition for me one day. Kevin had never seen a girl naked. Kevin had never seen a pussy. Kevin was super horny. I should go in the bedroom with Kevin and Joe, take my pants off, and let Joe finger me in front of Kevin.

And I won’t tell you what I did next, but I think all my behavior up until this point should be a clue.

There were more propositions after that.

I wanted to make him happy. I wanted him to love me. I thought everything would be better if I did everything he wanted. That’s why I started trying to be more like his friend Jackie and that’s why I reacted the way I did to the propositions.

To be clear, I didn’t give the answer that I did right away. I had a few things to say. But then, so did he. And I was very easy to convince of anything back then. I still sort of am. I can never tell if an idea or belief I have is one I had on my own or one that somebody else put there.

There were a couple of other memorable events before we get to the end. The end of the dating anyway. There is a lot more that comes after that. But yeah, before the dating ended, there was the time he took me to the laundromat-his dad’s apartment didn’t come with a washer or dryer-and I helped him do his laundry. While we were there, a friend of his showed up with a bearskin. His friend hunted with his dad. All the boys hunted in rural NH. All the boys had guns. Don’t ask me why they killed a bear. Everybody else killed deer. It’s not like there weren’t enough bears around, but who goes out and shoots a bear? At my grandparents’ house we always had to turn the floodlights on before going outside at night, because our house was surrounded by woods and bears would trek right through the field behind the house on the regular.

So, this kid sold Joe a bearskin and Joe had a bunch of wood glue in the trunk. While I folded his laundry, he and his friend glued this bearskin to the hood of his car. Not long after this, Joe and I drove the hour and some odd distance to visit my mom and sisters.

My mom liked Joe and told him the bearskin on the hood of his car was neat.

My sister Carly pulled me aside and said, “He’s weird.”

“Okay.”

“Not okay. You gotta get rid of him. I can tell. I have a bad feeling about him.”

Carly was barely 16. I brushed her off.

“Mom likes him.”

“Yep. Mom is like you: an idiot.”

I remember I said something nasty to her, but I don’t remember what. And she didn’t get mad. Carly was like that. She was very good at letting things people said to her slide right off. She had anger issues too, but it was like she stored them all up before exploding, whereas I was like a handful of sparklers, constantly fizzing but never doing much.

So Carly just stared at me until I was done going off on her.

“You like everybody who is nice to you, Jen. Even if they’re nice like once. I always have to fix you when you go crazy. This guy is gonna make you crazy. Maybe you could do me a favor and believe me? It’s the least you could do, considering you’re super fucking annoying when you go crazy.”

“I’m not gonna go nuts! I’m fine. He’s fine. It’s none of your business.”

And she just stared at me, her face blank. Carly’s face was always blank. From the time we were kids. Her face didn’t move much. She never seemed very sad or happy. She was just there, taking it all in.

“You are gonna go nuts and when you go nuts, Mom goes nuts, and Mary gets scared, and I’m the only one who is ever just calm and I have to deal with a house full of screaming people. You all run around like chickens with their heads cut off, squawking and it’s all pointless.”

“I don’t live here anymore,” I reminded her. “It’s not your problem.”

And she sighed and patted me on the head. It was a weird thing she started doing back when I twelve and she was ten, when she had the first growth spurt that made her taller than me. She kept on getting taller than me.

She patted me on the head a few times and said, “You’re always my problem. Whether you live with me or not. You crazy idiot.”

But that didn’t turn out to be true. Not that I can blame Carly very much. I do miss her though. Her and Mary. I have tried to get them to talk to me. But I always think, I am to them what Mom is to me. They need to be away from me to be okay. It makes me really hate myself. And I don’t know how I’m supposed to get over everything when I love and miss my sisters and they won’t talk to me. They might not ever talk to me again. There was no big final blowout. They just decided they were done. The way I did with Mom.

And you’ve only heard my side. You haven’t heard Carly’s. I might have had to take care of Carly and Mary when they were little, but Carly always took care of me. We fought, yeah, but she kept me together. “Crying is stupid. Stop crying. Everything is okay now. Let’s play Barbies.”

Mom locked me in my room for four days once when I was 14. I can’t remember why she did it. She let me out once a day to use the bathroom. She brought me food. Nobody get dramatic. She didn’t starve me. Anyway, Carly slipped notes under the door. She used to draw these comics. It was this whole ongoing series that she wrote for years. She made some strips of this comic for me. She folded them up and slipped them under the door. One of the notes said, “Go to the heating vent, I want to try something.” I went to the heating vent. I heard something very faint. I put my ear to the floor. She had found my ‘Return of Saturn’ CD in a pile in the kitchen. She put it in her boombox and put it to the vent. Carly was always like that. She took care of people without feeling burdened by it and never made a big deal about it. Nothing fazed her. It was like she was born expecting the world to be awful and people to cruel and when they were she just stared at it all like, “Yep. This is what I thought life would be.”

Carly was always exasperated with me. Carly always wanted me to calm down. If I could be like anyone, I would be like Carly. Carly is tough. She always was tough. Tough but kind. Carly is calm. Expect for those rare explosive moments she had, with Carly, everything was calculated. She thought everything through. And I was another unpredictable asshole she had to keep an eye on.

Carly was a good judge of character. She could size people up within minutes. Carly could sense when people were dangerous. She told me Joe was weird, and even though she hadn’t even turned 16, she knew that Joe would make me crazy. She was always wiser than she should have been. The first time my grandfather hit my grandmother in front of us, I gasped and went to get in the middle of it. I was eleven and Carly was nine. Carly grabbed my arm. She hissed in my ear, “Jen, please don’t. He’s done. Look, he’s leaving. You’ll make it worse. You make everything worse.”

When Carly said that Joe would make me crazy, she was only half-right though. I made myself crazy. I always do. If it wasn’t Joe, it would have been somebody else. There’s something in me that makes me beeline straight for the people that aren’t good for me. The people that are good for me, that love me and want to help me and save me, I spent a long time not wanting them, or keeping them around but not really connecting to them. I have no idea why I would sabotage myself like this. If I knew, I’d admit whatever it is.

I’m just starting to get over whatever that is. Just now. In my 30s. Better late than never, I guess. I’m noticing it now when I push away the kind people who really care about me.

Well, I was still an idiot back then. I was still an idiot six months ago. (I’m probably still one and just don’t see how yet). I didn’t listen to Carly. I didn’t believe her that Joe was off. I didn’t believe Macy or Tara. I didn’t believe my grandparents who both hated him. I didn’t believe anybody. But it’s only because I didn’t want to.

Back in 2020, some of my closest online friends tried to do exactly what Carly tried to do back in 2007. I didn’t believe them either. But it’s only because I didn’t want to.

The next time that people I know are good and care about me try to tell me that something or someone is bad and that I’m going to make myself crazy, I’ll believe them. Even if I don’t want to.