Chapter 4 Jessie
Jessie
“How’d you sleep?” asks Luke.
He’s scrambling eggs and the smell of slightly burnt toast permeates the air in the living room.
He has his AirPods in and is talking louder than he needs to.
He looks fresh. Ready to take on the day even though all he’s wearing is an even more flimsy pair of sleeping shorts than he had on yesterday.
Looks like he could pop out, do an Iron Man, and still have the audacity to look pleased with his lot in life.
“Like crap.” I get a mug out and fill it with coffee he’s brewed. “I was awake more than I was asleep.” He has the decency to look slightly uncomfortable. “You mind putting some clothes on?”
“Sure.”
He finishes scrambling the eggs. If he’s trying to hurry on my account, it’s not immediately obvious.
When he’s good and ready, he turns the heat off and goes to his room, only to come back a minute or two later wearing a pair of swimming trunks that are significantly smaller than the sleeping shorts were.
“Better?” He gives me a big, shit-eating grin. I don’t answer. “Eggs?”
“Does this count as first breakfast, or second?” I ask.
“First. Woke up ravenous.”
I look away quickly. “Eggs will be fine.”
We eat on the sofa. He talks pretty much the whole time. I manage to tune most of what he says out and focus on the life force that is caffeine hitting my veins.
“So, d’you want to?”
“Huh?”
“Do you want to hang out with Chase and Gould later?”
“Uh, nah. Can’t.” I don’t know who Chase and Gould are, and strongly suspect I don’t want to. “Going to go out with my dad.”
I feel a sense of relief as my dad reverses out of the drive.
For a second there, I thought Luke was going to worm his way into tagging along with us.
I could tell he was about to ask if he could come, he’d already started opening his mouth when his mom put her hand on his shoulder and gave him a gentle look that said Sweetie, let Jessie and Greg have some father and son time.
He closed his mouth quickly and smiled amiably like the good momma’s boy he is.
My dad and I spend some time walking around Ocean Avenue.
It’s charming and quaint. A little too charming and quaint for my liking, but my dad is rapt.
He points out store after store with childlike glee, “Look, Jess, we have a…” he rattles off store names seeming truly amazed that an affluent, touristy place like Carmel caters to visitors who are in the mood to burn cash.
I find a pair of sunglasses I like and get in line to buy them.
“Here, let me,” he says.
“It’s fine. I’ve got it.” It’s true. I have my own money. I’ve been working and saving for the past six months.
“You’re a student, Jess.” Drop-out technically, but whatever, I guess. “I’m your dad, let me treat you a little.”
I hand the sunglasses to him, torn between feeling resentful that he’s paying and feeling pissed at myself for not choosing a more expensive pair.
Afterwards, we stop at an ice creamery with cheerful red and white awnings.
It’s the type of place that has sorbet made from Japanese strawberries on offer, and gives you the option to top your scoop with edible gold leaf.
“You’ve got to try one of their milkshakes, Jess. I’m telling you, they’re next level.”
I briefly consider telling him that I’m not a kid anymore but decide against it when I see a milkshake with three scoops of Belgian chocolate, hot fudge, and organic hazelnuts on the menu.
We chat about this and that. He mentions how happy Rachel and Luke are to have me living with them three times and then gives me an earnest look and says, “How’s your mom?”
“Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Don’t call her your mom.” It’s a pet peeve of mine.
What the hell makes people think that the dissolution of a marriage necessitates the addition of ‘your’ as some fucked up faux prefix when they got by for the first fourteen years of your life comfortable enough saying, “Mom’s in the kitchen,” or “Mom needs help with the laundry,” without feeling the slightest inclination to point out that said mother is in fact, my mother.
“Sorry. I won’t do it again. How’s Mom?”
“She seems fine. Good, I guess. Neil’s a nice guy.” Factually untrue. Neil ranks precisely as highly on the Total Douche Bag scale as every other boyfriend she’s had, but I’m tired, I have an ice headache, and I don’t want to get into it.
“That’s good. I’m happy to hear that.”
“Shall we go?”
We talk at length on the way home about the merits of having an afternoon nap versus not having a nap whilst trying to recover from jet lag.
By we, I mean him. He talks. I pretend to listen.
As it turns out, it doesn’t matter. When we get home, Rachel and Luke are out.
It’s blissfully, blessedly quiet. I lie on my bed and close my eyes and enjoy the complete absence of sound.
Especially the absence of creaking mattress springs and the frenetic fap fap of my insufferable stepbrother jacking his dick.
“Jessieeee.”
The soft, soothing sound comes at me through layers and layers of sleep. I’m snatched out of such a deep sleep I feel nauseated and disorientated. I don’t know what day it is or where I am. I open my eyes and look straight into blue.
Oh fuck.
Now I remember.
Luke is crouching over me, he’s speaking quietly. Sweetly. He has a hand on my shoulder and is patting me supportively. “Time to wake up, Jessie.”
I know instantly that he’s waking me the way his mom used to wake him as a boy. Hell, she probably still does. He probably lets her. For some reason that makes me want to scream. It makes me want to shake him.
“The fuck?” I croak.
He gives me another series of pats, changing the tempo to a gentle back rub when my eyes drop closed again. “Your dad asked me to get you up. You’ve been asleep for almost three hours. He says if you don’t get up now, you’re going to have trouble falling asleep later.”
“Leave me alone.”
A soft chuckle fills the room. “Aw, you’re so sleepy. Come on, I’ll help you up.” He takes my arm and pulls me up onto my feet. His strength is surprising. So is the fact I don’t punch him.
I splash my face with cold water and follow him out.
“We’ve ordered pizza for dinner. We got pepperoni and bacon and mushroom. You can choose which one you want, and I’ll have the other one. I don’t mind either way.”
When we get to the house, my dad and Rachel wax lyrical about how much better I look and tell me repeatedly how much better I must feel.
“I bet you’ve rounded a corner, Sport,” says my dad. “I bet you’re going to feel a hundred percent tomorrow.”
The pizza arrives right then, and the events that follow put an end to me feeling normal any time soon, or ever again, for that matter.
My dad carries the stacked boxes of pizza into the media room and as he does so, Rachel grabs onto his waist and Luke grabs onto hers. They both bob jubilantly from side to side.
“Pizza, pizza par-tay, pizza, pizza par-tay,” they chant.
Sweet Jesus.
Are they doing the conga?
I’ve barely recovered when we get to the media room. My dad sets the pizzas down and says, “What’ll it be?”
“Get the Party Started,” bellows Luke.
“Oh, Lu,” smiles Rachel, shaking her head at what a munchkin he is, “again?”
My dad doesn’t need to be told twice. He has Siri on the case right away.
The opening beat of the song gives rise to a very profound kind of shit show.
The kind of shit show I could have lived the rest of my life without and been perfectly happy about it.
My dad and Rachel start dancing immediately.
The result is a frightening discordance of arms and legs.
Luke isn’t far behind them. He’s doing this weird high-stepping thing with one hand raised over his head.
It looks like he’s auditioning to be a back-up performer in one of those aerobics videos from the eighties.
As jarring as all this is, it still isn’t the most disturbing thing happening right now.
The worst thing of all is the look on Luke’s face – pure joy.
Unbridled happiness. Delight with no hint of restraint.
The only other time I’ve seen a face looking like this is the time my mom and I went to watch our neighbor’s daughter’s nativity show a few years back.
Callie was in the first grade. It was her first time on stage.
She loved it. She practiced for weeks. She was sheep number four.
She gave it her all. She did her absolute best and didn’t hold anything back.
There was no pretense and zero chill in her performance.
She was six and half, she didn’t know yet that life requires you to protect yourself, to hide parts of yourself so people can’t use those things to hurt you.
She made no effort to hide how hard she was trying or how vulnerable she was making herself.
At the time, seeing her like that made me well up.
It made me want to cry knowing how many lessons she still had to learn, and how much life was going to knock her around before she learned them.
Seeing Luke like this, makes me want to cry too, for a totally different reason.
Watching him dance, seeing his face ruddy and shining like the big, dumb beefcake he is, fills me with such profound second-hand embarrassment I feel it throughout my body.
It’s hot and unpleasant. I feel the color rising from my neck to my face. It’s a live, visceral thing.
Someone needs to warn this guy about life and people and bad things in general. Someone needs to set him straight, to tell him a thing or two about reality, or he’s going to wind up getting hurt.
“Get in here, Jess,” cries my dad.
“Thanks, but I’d rather have a red back spider lay eggs in my ear.”
He doesn’t hear me over the music. Luke bounces over and gives me a little shove with his hip that sends me sideways.
My dad is on the other side. He bumps me back towards Luke.
Between the two of them they jostle me back and forth for the rest of the song.
Rachel watches on with a hand clamped over her mouth, eyes shining with pleasure.
“Pizza’s getting cold,” I say, the second the song ends.
My dad and Rachel huddle up on one side of the sofa and I sit as far away as possible on the other side.
I fully expect Luke to sit on the armchair since it’s empty, but of course he doesn’t.
He crams himself into the space between Rachel and me.
He’s sitting so close our knees and shoulders touch.
Rachel hands us a throw blanket to share.
“I’m fine, it’s summer,” I say. It’s the beginning of June and the Californian weather is balmy.
Luke gives me a sideways aw shucks grin, “We keep the temperature down in here so we can get cozy for movies.” He says it like it’s obvious. Like it’s the type of thing everyone knows. Like it’s normal.
We tuck into our pizza as the movie starts playing.
Luke is sitting so close that despite the strong smell of melted cheese and pepperoni in the room, I can smell him.
He doesn’t smell how he should. He should smell sickly sweet, like maple syrup and gardenia.
He doesn’t though. He smells like fresh air and salt water and something else I can’t put my finger on.
It’s fucking annoying.