Chapter 4 Jessa #2
“Okay…” I listen to the muted sounds of a video game counting up deaths, the worst kind of soundtrack.
I hate watching him play. I want to play too, but I’m too embarrassed.
I’m shit at all of it. The one time I did try, I head-shot Dade, who was on my team, and he called me deadeye for a month while laughing at me.
It wasn’t my definition of fun, but some of the other guys who hung around him sure thought it was great, so it caught on at school for a while too.
“Soooo I’m gonna hang up,” I murmur, wishing he was in a conversational mood. I feel needy tonight.
“Oh, wait,” he calls out, keeping me from flipping the phone closed. “Kayla wanted us to be there tomorrow at seven since her friend is doing a poetry reading or something.”
Of course he’d pause the game for anything Kayla-related.
Ever since they met at some pretentious art show he attended to be bougie or something, he’s been obsessed with her and her skinny, bony self with that stringy blond hair.
She was trying real hard to look like a skater kid, but I’d never seen her with any kind of board, just the JNCOs and baby tees and Skechers.
Bitchy to me too, I think ’cause she’s probably hungry. Girl needs a cracker.
“Ughhhh, Dade, we hate the poets…. Remember you said Dadaism died long before these wannabe beats bought their stupid berets…. Why are we going to watch this sideshow?”
“It means something to Kayla, so it means something to me,” he says, using perfectly complete sentences to discuss her, with polysyllabic words and nouns and verbs and subjects.
Yet, for me, it’s just grunts and random sounds.
I groan again; this means instead of a hangout talking over the latest games, movies, and if I’m lucky, music, he’s gonna be all over her tomorrow like some kind of horse on a salt lick.
I especially loooove it when he sucks on her earlobes and she giggles and shrieks.
It’s one of those perfectly annoying moments that makes me wanna go off just like Mack does.
Dade getting a girlfriend over the summer has made him scarce and obnoxious, and while I know I’m not jealous of him dating (ew, penis), I am kinda jealous about all the time she steals from me—’cause he sure ain’t cutting into his video-game hours.
Mostly I’m just worried she’s gonna derail our plans to graduate and go to the New School in New York, where he’ll become a director and I’ll be writing for a glossy music mag.
“Can you watch over her friend? Keep her from feeling like a third wheel or something? I dunno, talk some girl stuff to her or whatever.”
“You know I don’t talk girl stuff.” It’s like he hasn’t been hanging out with me every afternoon for the past two years.
“Then wow her with your expansive knowledge of the roots of punk rock. Or tell her about your new room. I don’t care, just make sure she doesn’t get abducted or end up hating me—they’re apparently super close.”
Like abduction and hating him are in the same category… I take a deep breath and try to school the anger out of my voice. Tomorrow will no longer be fun bestie time, but a shit babysitting job.
“Fuck, okay, but you owe me.”
“Actually, you owe me, for introducing you to the masterworks of Wes Anderson, or when I got Rubens away from you last year.” I hear the game start up, almost back to the two-word responses.
Dade helps me with two major things…. He teaches me more about movies, which he finds very important.
I find it fun-ish. Mainly I like the soundtracks, because it seems whoever makes critically acclaimed films also picks pretty decent song selections.
His other service as my best friend is to redirect some of the more vigorous bullying at school and public places.
Dade and I don’t hang out at school, but if someone’s being nasty—like Olivia Fucking Rubens, tossing food at me for the better part of last year in the caf, he’ll intervene and flirt a bit so I can make my escape to my lunch spot behind E building.
I’d have a lot more lunchroom casserole in my hair without him, so I guess some kind of debt is owed.
“Fine, I’ll watch her friend.”
“Cool, cool.” I hear gunshots and grumbles; he’s tuning back out. “Her name is some kinda animal… Cat, Raven, Robin…”
“Egret? Turtle? Hymenoptera?”
“Pretty sure it had nothing to do with a hymen.”
“Shut up, they’re bugs like wasps and bees and those giant mosquito-looking things that eat other mosquitoes.”
He doesn’t give me a response, and the sound of him playing stretches out. I’m about to tell him I’m hanging up again when he pipes up, “Bird, her name’s Bird.”
“Her parents named her Bird ?”
“It’s a nickname, ass. Want me to start calling you Delphine?”
I cringe at the sound of my first name. I am not a Delphine.
I’m Jessa, after my second name, Jessamine.
My parents loved giving us a plethora of names.
Delphine Jessamine Thalia Papadopoulos. It’s ridonculous and tiresome as fuck when I end each school year filling in endless bubbles on my EOG Scantrons.
Especially since our Greek heritage is dubious at best…
likely a mix-up at Ellis Island, ’cause we definitely have smoosh noses versus that classic aquiline look.
“Fine, I’ll babysit her Bird.”
“Sweet,” he says, and ends the call. I snap my phone closed hard, as if he could actually hear it.