Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Jules: Age Seventeen
Connecticut
Jules sat up in bed, suddenly wide awake because...
Tap. Tap. Tap-tap-tap!
Yes, indeed, someone was outside of his bedroom window.
He threw back the covers and went to pull back the curtain and...
It was the kid called Hobbit, smiling sheepishly as he crouched there on the roof. Jules unlocked the window and pushed it open. Sunrise was just barely lighting the eastern sky. He glanced back at the clock-radio on his bedside table. It was 5:43 AM.
On a Saturday.
“Good morning?” Jules asked.
“Yes! Good morning,” the boy said eagerly from the other side of the screen. “I’m so glad you’re not mad. Belle didn’t want to call and wake up your mother, so she, you know, sent me as, like, messenger.”
“Do you... often climb onto roofs to deliver messages?”
He sighed. “I know it’s weird. And potentially treacherous.” He looked around him. “But yours isn’t bad. The roof outside of Shelly’s house is pretty steep. But I’m not afraid of heights. It’s kinda my superpower.”
“Good to know,” Jules said.
“Ready for the message?” Hobbit asked.
“Please.”
The kid cleared his throat dramatically. “It’s a singing telegram,” he explained.
Jules laughed. “Coming from Belle, I would expect nothing less.”
“We are going to the beach today, and you must come along!” Hobbit sang in a voice that was lower than Jules had expected, clearly making up the tune as he went.
But then, he switched into a remarkably ridiculous but still pitch-perfect falsetto.
“We’re bidding farewell to the summer, summer, summer!
So grab a towel and your bathing suit, Jules Cassidy, Jules Cassidy!
We’re waiting for you out front in Tom’s! Car!”
With a flourish that was half bow, half victory dance, the kid sure-footedly scrambled away, climbing swiftly down off the roof, then sprinting across the backyard.
Jules closed the window, hit the bathroom, dug through his dresser drawer to find his bathing suit as he brushed his teeth, grabbed his sunglasses and a sweatshirt and then a towel from the linen closet, wrote a note for his mom and left it smack in the middle of the kitchen counter where she’d be sure to see it, and was out of the house in record time.
The beach was very New England.
The water that lapped against the coarsely-sanded shore was the Long Island Sound, and if Jules squinted hard in the bright morning sun, he could almost see all the way across to the North Shore of Long Island. Cold Spring Harbor. Home of Billy Joel, whom his dad had adored.
Shelly had spread several brightly colored bedsheets out on the sand, and Sadie set up an umbrella which they made Hobbit sit beneath.
“You go to the hospital once,” he grumbled. “Just one time for the worst sunburn in the history of mankind and they make you huddle in the shade for the rest of your life.”
But he clearly loved the attention the two older girls showered on him.
Today the trio weren’t dressed identically, with the exception of the truly ridiculous straw sunhats that Sadie had pulled triumphantly from her bag once they were all in the car.
Jules had almost been jealous that he hadn’t gotten one, too.
Belle and Tom both ventured into the water—which itself wasn’t arctic, end of summer and all—but the wind was fierce and from the north. After emerging, Belle confiscated all of the extra towels and wrapped them around the two of them as they now sat shivering in the sun.
Belle had peppered Jules with questions yesterday after school—superficial things like where he came from, what were his plans after graduation, favorite color, favorite band, favorite movie, favorite book, favorite Star Wars character, favorite episode of classic Trek, favorite vegetable...
Today she dug a little deeper. “Do you have a boyfriend back in... wherever?”
Wherever was a good name for it. That town he’d left behind, where David’s parents still lived. David lived there, too, but right now he was all the way across the country at UCLA.
On the other side of the beach-sheet, Shel and Sadie were leaning in to hear his answer.
They both seemed annoyingly intent upon setting him up with Hobbit, which was ridiculous.
Such matchmaking was regularly done by straights.
You’re gay, and I know a gay! As if both he and Hobbit simply being gay was all that was needed for them to start dating or hooking up or whatever the girls were imagining.
Like chemistry and attraction and personality didn’t play into it, just sexual orientation.
And yes, Hobbit was adorably weird and sweetly funny, but he was also a tad too young.
“I did,” Jules answered Belle’s question evenly. “Until a few weeks ago. But he graduated and when he left for college—on the day he left—he told me he didn’t want to do long-distance and he broke up with me.”
“Oh, shit,” she said, reaching out of her towel cocoon to take his hand. “Just like that?”
“He stopped to say goodbye on his way to the airport.” Jules hadn’t told this to anyone, not even his mother. And his intense, tunnel-vision year of David had left him distanced from his other friends. “I was completely blind-sided.”
“Oof,” she said. “And then thrown into the trauma of moving and being the new kid and not even having your friends there to hug you and say Fuck you—what’s his name? No, you don’t have to tell me, he doesn’t deserve a name.” She shouted, “Fuck you, you no-name asshole fuck! You suck!”
Jules laughed. “His name is David. We were together for, well, it was about a year.”
“Shit,” Belle said again. “Really? What is wrong with him?” She turned to look at Tom, narrowing her eyes. “You better not dump me when we graduate. I’ll hunt you down and... ugly cry and get snot on your shoes.”
“No way am I risking that.” He twinkled his eyes at her, then leaned forward to say to Jules, “We really don’t have to talk about this, if you don’t want to. But if you do want to rant, we’d be deliriously happy to shout Fuck you, David, with you.”
Okay, red alert, a crush on a straight guy was very uncool. Except it was really kinda perfect for this moment in his life. Fuck you, David, indeed. For such a long time, Jules hadn’t so much as looked at other guys, thinking he and David were it, forever.
Thinking David felt the same, because he’d said so—words whispered in Jules’s ear, so many times, so many nights...
Jules had believed him. How naive was that?
Jesus, maybe he was as much of a child as Hobbit. They should make a play-date to build a Lego castle.
“Group hug!” Belle commanded as she tried to shuffle her towel mountain with Tom toward Jules.
But Sadie and Shelly immediately leapt into action, nearly lifting Jules off the beach-sheet and pushing him toward Belle even as they draped themselves around his other side and back.
Hobbit came firing out from his umbrella shelter like he was a professional baseball player diving for home plate, wrapping his arms tightly around Jules’s lower legs.
“Oh, wow,” Jules said as even Tom reached out from where he was towel-locked in on Belle’s other side to put his hand—gentle and very warm—on top of Jules’s head.
“This isn’t...” Necessary, he was about to say, but it suddenly was.
What the hell had he done last year, making his world David, more David and only David?
He couldn’t stop the tears that suddenly filled his eyes so he closed them and just let himself be hugged by these lovely weirdos.
And to answer his own question, it was beyond obvious that sex had played in. Strongly. His body was still seriously confused after having so much regular sex for so long, and now absolutely none at all. None in a non-solo setting, that is, which was sadly almost worse than none.
But this kind of fearless contact and warmth and yeah, love, from this funny group of kids who barely knew him, it made his heart ache less.
As this hug went on and on and on, it was starting to be a little too-much, so Jules tried Belle-ing it. “Okay,” he said. “Thank you. That’s enough. Hobbit, back to your umbrella.”
Just like with Belle, he got immediate compliance to his commands. Although that was the wrong word. His direction. These were theater kids and they were extremely good at taking direction.
Belle was looking at him as if she were still worried. Even though his eyes were dry again, she’d been close enough to see them fill with tears. “My mom went to school with your mom,” she said, and he knew exactly where that was leading.
And no, he did not want to talk about his dead father, please and thank you.
Tom to the rescue. “My mom’s older. She probably babysat for your mom.
I mean, I don’t know that for sure, but she likes saying that.
It’s that small-town thing. Everyone knows everyone, and has a history, and really probably should mind their own business.
” Those words were directed to Belle, before he turned back to Jules.
“We’ve been interrogating you—your turn to interrogate us. ”
“Is it safe?” Jules asked, and bingo, they all laughed. He figured this motley crew would be familiar with the most famous, dentally-inspired interrogation scene in the cinematic world from the classic movie, Marathon Man.
But okay. He did have questions. His first was to Hobbit. “Your feet are decidedly non-furry, what’s up with that, and isn’t it almost time for second breakfast?”
It was Sadie who laughed the hardest at that.
“Sadly, he’s not the Lord of the Rings fan, that’s me.
He’s just tiny and adorable—although he does appreciate a good second breakfast.” She reached into one of the many bags she’d lugged from the car and pulled out a box of granola bars, tossing one to each of them.
“Who’s Sandy?” Jules asked. There’d been a lot of talk in the car about someone named Sandy.
“He’s my boyfriend,” Shelly answered.
“Is he, though?” Sadie said. She then told Jules, “He was supposed to come to the beach with us today, but, big surprise! He bailed the way he always bails when there’s no chance of getting Shel naked.”
Shelly exhaled her exasperation. “You’ve always hated him.”
“Kinda because he’s an asshole,” Tom said mildly.
“But he’s my asshole, so back off,” Shelly shot back.
“Next question,” Jules jumped in, aiming his words at Belle and Tom. “How long have you guys been together?”
They answered in unison. “Fifth grade.” They both laughed and immediately said, “Owe me a coke.” Then laughed again.
Belle added, “Not so much with the kissing back then. That was kind of a tenth grade discovery.”
“She went to the Junior prom with Elmer Fudd,” Tom said, “and I discovered I had... something of a major problem with that.”
“Stella!” Belle shouted in her best Marlon Brando. “Stella!”
“He crashed the prom,” Hobbit chimed in from his territory way over in the umbrella’s shade. “He was really yelling Belle, but it sounded a lot like Stella. Or so I’ve heard. It remains legendary.”
“Elmer Fudd?” Jules asked.
“Names have been changed to protect the innocent,” Belle said.
“To keep me from hunting him down and ugly crying and getting snot on his shoes,” Tom said with a grin.
Belle laughed at his call-back, and kissed him.
Ah, fuck you, David. Jules sighed. He didn’t think it was audible in the noise of the wind off the water, but Belle turned back to him and quietly asked, “You okay?”
“I am,” Jules said, managing to smile at her. As loudly extroverted as she was, she was just as kind as Tom—as all of them. “Just... I thought I had what you have.” He raised his voice, “Fuck you, David!”
“Fuck you, David,” his new-found friends howled along with him, and you know what?
It actually made him feel better.