Jack
Friday, June 4, 6:42 a.m.
The simultaneous occurrence of my eighteenth birthday and my last day of high school arrives with zero fanfare. I should be excited on both counts, but instead I’m lying awake in bed, staring at the ceiling like I’ve been doing since 4:00 a.m., fighting off a panic attack. I feel as if I’m held together with off-brand masking tape.
The rising sun pierces through a slat in my shutters directly into my eyes. I have to get up soon anyway, so I drag myself out of bed to open the window. I’m greeted by a brown mushroom cloud of smoke rising from the horizon. The hazards of living in Southern California; if it’s not earthquakes, it’s wildfires. This one looks pretty bad. And naturally, my mother isn’t even here. If my high school graduation and eighteenth birthday weren’t important enough to make her leave her book tour and come home, wildfires burning out of control with zero percent containment sure aren’t going to.
The winds haven’t stopped blowing for three straight days. A grayish-brown haze permeates everything. I’m anxious about leaving for New York tomorrow while this is going on. Big fires like this never get put out that quickly. Often, they jump highways and weave through canyons until they burn all the way down to the ocean, destroying everything in their path. What if the winds change direction and they burn all the way here? It only takes one ember. I know firsthand that everything can change in a single second, so I find myself perpetually on edge, waiting for it to.
“The Imperial Death March”—my mother’s ringtone—pierces the early morning silence, jarring me out of my thought spiral. I’m tempted to let it roll to voicemail, but I pick it up at the last possible second.
“Hey, Mom.” I lie back down and rub at my eyes.
“Hi, babe! I wanted to make sure I got to wish you a happy birthday and happy graduation because my schedule is so packed today.” Bingo. Less than three seconds to make it all about her. That might be a record. She barely takes a breath before she launches into her litany. “I have Good Morning America and then that Vanity Fair thing in the afternoon, and then my agent is meeting me for drinks to talk about the next two books. Trust me, I’d much rather be there to celebrate and see you get your diploma, but I know you understand. I’ll make it up to you when I see you on Monday in New York, I promise. I’ll take you to Jean-Georges for dinner.”
And then to someone in the room she says, “Jesus, what does a girl have to do to get a latte around here?” It’s followed by her lilting laugh. It’s fake. I’ve actually heard her practicing it.
“No worries. It’s only a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” I say, half joking.
“Exactly.” She thinks I’m talking about her and the press tour she’s on, when I’m actually talking about me. My mother, gotta love her, is completely self-absorbed. “How are you holding up otherwise? The news makes it look like the whole city is on fire. Is it smoky where we live? Make sure you don’t leave any windows open. I dread what the pool is going to look like from the ash.”
I want to tell her how much it sucks that Dad isn’t here, or my brother Alex, and that most of the time, it seems like she doesn’t want to be here either. Or that sometimes I hold my breath until it feels like my lungs will burst and that some days, I wish they would.
But we don’t have those sorts of conversations. We never have. She pays my therapist Carole to listen to that stuff. And her question was rhetorical. So I stick to my standard response. “Fine.” It’s easier that way.
“Good. Jesus, my kid is graduating, and he can vote now. I feel so old. It seems like I should impart some parental wisdom or something.”
I sigh and watch my ceiling fan spin in slow circles. This is more for her benefit than it is for mine. “Imparting wisdom seems reasonable given the circumstances.”
She’s ready. I can almost picture her scrawling it on her hotel bar napkin last night in anticipation. “Life is always going to have highs and lows, so don’t focus on the parts you can’t change. Today is the beginning of the next chapter of your life. It’s a blank page, and you’ve got the pen.”
“You sound like you’re reading the Google search results for self-empowerment memes. Or the conclusion of a keynote.”
She laughs. “It’s actually from Chapter Sixteen in my latest book, but it’s good, right? It’s a hundred percent applicable for you.”
It’s not though. I have never felt less like I was holding the pen.
“People pay twenty-eight dollars a pop for that knowledge because they know it’s the truth. How lucky are you that you get this sage wisdom for free?”
I roll on to my side and close my eyes. “So lucky.”
Someone talks in the background, and I can tell Mom is distracted because she misses the sarcasm in my voice. “Anyway, you all packed for tomorrow?”
No.
“Almost.”
My stomach tightens. I landed a paid summer internship in New York before I start at Columbia this fall. I’m booked to leave on a red-eye tomorrow night. I’ve gotten as far as putting the empty suitcases in my room.
“Great. I’m busy all weekend with a million events, so I’ll see you Monday. The hotel is prepaid, so order some room service and check out the city—have an adventure—and I’ll probably be there around four or five on Monday after the signing, unless I get held up.”
She always gets held up. She won’t be there until at least seven thirty because she’ll end up going out for drinks afterward, and we both know it.
“Sounds good.”
A production assistant tells Mom she is needed on set now, which is fine because I need to hop in the shower and get ready. Natasha and Ajay should be here soon.
As I hang up with mom, I find myself tensing up thinking about Natasha. Ever since college decisions were released and I got into Columbia University—Natasha’s dream school—and she didn’t, the vibe has been off between us, and it’s been amplifying my stress about leaving. She’ll only be a few hours away at Tufts just outside Boston, so at least our relationship won’t be too long distance. I’m hopeful once we get through the summer and settle into our new routines at college, we’ll be fine.
When Natasha’s fire-engine-red Kia Soul pulls up in front of my house, I put on a smile. I try to take a deep breath to recalibrate myself, but the air smells like every ashtray in every casino in Vegas combined.
Ajay is already in the front seat, so I climb into the back. This morning he’s dressed like a cross between a frat boy and the manager of a Best Buy, with his royal-blue polo, black, belted pants, omnipresent flip-flops, and black hair gelled to perfection underneath a backward Stanford ball cap. He puts his bare feet up on the dashboard that I helped Natasha sticker bomb two years ago when she got the car.
“I hope they don’t run out of hash browns,” Ajay says, his brows forming a V.
“Hey!” She swats his feet down. “What is your obsession with these hash browns?”
“Seriously, that happened to me once there. How do you run out of potatoes at a breakfast restaurant? I felt like I was in nineteenth-century Ireland.”
Neither of them wishes me a happy birthday. I wonder if they’ve forgotten.
“I need some coffee on an IV drip,” I say and yawn, hoping there is enough caffeine for this day.
It only takes one loose thread to unravel an entire sweater. Every object—animate or inanimate—has a saturation level, a boiling point, a limit to its physical or mental capacity or capability. As I press my head into the seat back, I consider that this may be what it feels like to be approaching mine.
My eyes snag on the constellation of freckles on Natasha’s right arm shaped like an upside-down heart. A month ago—on the same day as the spring concert—she was bored and drew on herself, connecting the dots with a black Sharpie. Outlined like that, the end result looked like a poorly inked tattoo of a nutsack. Naturally, it wouldn’t wash off, and our band director was super pissed, because the concert dresses are short-sleeved. I can’t help but smile thinking about it.
“Did I tell you that Nikul’s friend ate an entire bowl of cannabis gummies at a party and they found him asleep in a tree at the center of campus?” Ajay’s older brother Nikul goes to Stanford, where Ajay’s heading too. He often regales us with wild tales from his brother’s college life. Ajay will take ten minutes to tell a two-second story if you let him, so I pretend like I’m listening, but in actuality I’m stealing glances at Natasha as she drives.
She looks very “signature Natasha” today, with her heart-shaped mirrored sunglasses, bright-red lipstick, and mismatched patterned socks peeking out of her beloved silver thrift-store Doc Martens that, legend has it, were donated by Frances Bean Cobain, as in the late Kurt’s daughter. I’m pretty sure the thrift store dude was bullshitting her, but this is LA, so you never know. Her copper curls are pulled into a high ponytail, and small, silver earrings in the shape of arrows dangle from her ears.
Natasha catches me looking at her in the rearview mirror, and we exchange tight-lipped smiles. She drives over a pothole, and the car suddenly dips down to the right. The force of it smacks my head sideways against the window. I cry out in surprise and pain.
Natasha pulls the car over and whirls around, apologetic, frantic, and wide-eyed. “Oh, jeez, Jack, you’re bleeding. Try not to get it on the seat,” she says and reaches for a crumpled fast food napkin stuffed in the cup holder. Crumbs tumble to the car floor as she holds it out to me. “Wow, that’s a lot of blood. I am so sorry.”
She looks pretty worried. Something warm and wet cascades down my cheek. I touch my face, and my finger comes away red.
“No worries. You can’t help failing infrastructure,” I say, pressing the napkin against the source. I unbuckle myself, scoot to the center seat, and lean forward to look at the damage in the rearview mirror. “It’s superficial. Facial injuries can sometimes bleed a lot because there are so many blood vessels close to the skin.”
“You’re going to have to Photoshop your wound out of your graduation picture,” she says and covers her mouth with her hand.
“I’m pretty sure I’ll live, though I might need a second napkin.”
“Tell people you got in a knife fight or something,” Ajay jokes as he digs out his wallet and hands me a Band-Aid. He is the kind of the guy who carries one around just in case because you never know, which only adds to his charm. My dad always admired his preparedness. “Girls dig a guy with a scar and a story.”
“That’ll last about five seconds,” she says and grabs her purse from the floor and digs through it, then extracts a tampon. She rips the plastic wrapper with her teeth and hands it to me by the string. “Here, hold this to your head with pressure. It’s super absorbency.”
To her credit, it makes perfect sense, which is how I end up holding a tampon against my head for the rest of the drive to the restaurant.
Fifteen minutes later, the three of us are crammed into a booth at the Pancake Shack—the gold standard by which all other pancake restaurants should be judged; if you can imagine it, they can put it on a pancake, whether it belongs there or not. We discovered it last year, and we’ve come here a few times, though never during the week. It’s fairly empty compared to the weekends, when there’s a line out the door.
Ajay holds up his mug of coffee to make a toast. “Happy birthday to Jack and happy get-the-hell-out-of-high-school day to us all.”
“Cheers to that,” Natasha says as we clink our mugs together. So she does remember, though she hasn’t made a big deal about it being my birthday like she has in the past. It might as well be any other day. I chalk it up to the fact that she’s focused on graduation happening and her speech, which I know she’s nervous about delivering. She’s rewritten it six times.
“And to Subliminal Sunrise, which will always remain the greatest ’80s cover band in history,” Ajay adds.
“Yessss,” I say. We clink mugs again.
Subliminal Sunrise was the unfortunate byproduct of a truly terrible idea we had a couple of years ago to form an ’80s cover band for the school talent show. We had T-shirts made. I still wear mine all the time. We played a kick-ass version of Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” and immediately disbanded after taking third place.
I order the Happy Face—a birthday-cake-flavored pancake stack with extra whipped cream and a triple side of hash browns. At Pancake Shack, there’s a silent understanding that aging is mandatory, but maturity is optional.
“Are you guys excited for Carly Ginsburg’s party tonight?” Natasha asks, adding another creamer to her coffee.
“Isn’t it basically going to be a bunch of wasted, half-naked, entitled assholes playing loud music, hooking up, and grinding against each other in the dark?” I ask.
“Exactly,” Ajay says with a grin.
Confession: none of us have ever been to a “real” high school party. Not the kind Carly Ginsburg throws, the kind involving red cups and bad decisions. I want to go, mostly out of curiosity, but I also don’t really care. I unfold my napkin and lay it across my lap. “We could do something else. I mean—I’m also fine with kicking back and watching a movie and ordering some food or something,” I suggest, half hoping they’ll take me up on it.
Natasha immediately dismisses the idea. “Are you kidding? I am not going to spend grad night holed up watching Netflix and eating pizza like every other weekend of my high school existence.”
The way she says it makes it sound like a bad thing. I don’t let myself get worked up. Regardless that it’s my birthday and last night in LA, she’s entitled to want to go to the party. It’s not like we’re never going to see each other again; we’ll be alternating weekend visits. It’s just crappy timing that this is all happening at once.
Ajay’s eyes light up with excitement. “I’ve heard Carly’s house is off the hook. All the rooms have themes, and there are hidden passageways.”
“I once heard her dad has an actual Batmobile,” Natasha says as I turn my head and glance toward the back of the restaurant.
There’s a girl sitting by herself in the far booth near the bathrooms. Her nose is buried in a well-worn copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy, which happens to be my absolute favorite book of all time. I’ve seriously read it a dozen times. It’s the book that made me want to be a writer. The idea of making shit up and getting paid for it always seemed like the ultimate dream job to me, but my parents were not behind creative writing as a college major, let alone a career. They’re all about practicality, job security, and the ability to pay rent.
The girl’s hair is short and purple and spiky, which makes her ice-blue eyes stand out even from this distance, and she’s wearing a chunky, light-gray sweater despite it being nearly eighty degrees outside. Her ears have multiple piercings from lobe to helix. Her face is familiar, in the same way that a person you’ve seen a million times but don’t actually know can look familiar. As if sensing my gaze, she looks up and locks eyes with me. I quickly turn away.
“We’re going together, right?” Ajay asks. “I can pick everyone up.”
I don’t want to be tied to anyone else’s schedule. I make up some excuse about needing to finish packing and having to be up early and how I’ll meet them there. I purposely don’t look at Natasha for fear I might see she’s visibly relieved.
After draining two cups of coffee in record time, Ajay excuses himself to use the bathroom, and Natasha and I are finally alone. Something seems off about her, more so than usual.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
She finally looks at me. “Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be okay?”
“I don’t know. You’re acting kind of weird.”
“Why? Because I don’t want to stay home and watch movies instead of go to a party?”
“No.” I sigh. “Never mind. It’s fine.”
“Well, obviously it’s not fine, or you wouldn’t be saying that,” she huffs.
I angle myself toward her slightly. “I feel like I’m missing something here. Did I do something?”
“I don’t want to get into this right now.”
“Into what? So obviously there is something.”
She raises her eyebrows. “Can we talk about this later please?”
“Why can’t we talk about it now?” I ask.
“Because.”
“Because why?” She doesn’t answer me and closes her eyes. “What is going on, Natasha?”
“Please stop.”
I know I’m poking the bear at this point, but I can’t help it. “No. I want to know what’s up.”
She sighs deeply and opens her eyes, then looks directly into mine. “I want to break up, Jack.”
“What?”
“I’ve been thinking, Jack, and—I think we should go back to being just friends.”
I shouldn’t be surprised. Things haven’t felt the same between us for a while now. The reality is she probably would have done it a lot sooner, but she probably felt like she couldn’t because I’ve been struggling with my dad’s death since he passed away a little over a year ago. At least she cared enough to recognize the poor timing, but her obvious distance has in some ways been worse. I know my grief has been difficult for her to navigate. It never dawned on me that she might actually opt to let go.
“Wow,” is all I can muster. I feel slightly shell-shocked.
She shakes her head, defensive. “See—this is why I didn’t want to say anything. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
“Oh, so you’ve been planning this for a while then?”
Ajay is on his way back to the table from the bathroom. “I don’t want to get into this now with Ajay here. We can talk later at school while we’re setting up.”
“Yeah, no sense in ruining breakfast, right?”
She ignores my obvious sarcasm and fakes a smile as Ajay returns to the table. Our server follows him with the pancakes, complete with a lit, rainbow-swirl candle shoved in the strawberry nose. Ajay sings “Happy Birthday” off-key and loud enough to attract the attention of some of the other patrons who smile and join in.
The collective noise becomes a muffled roar, as if I’m underwater. I pinch the fleshy part of my left palm below my thumb—something my therapist taught me to help ground myself when my anxiety builds—and try to act normal, whatever that is anymore.
I pretend to make a wish and blow, so as not to keep everyone waiting. But the truth is, I feel like it deserves some proper thought this year. I lick the whipped cream off the base of the candle and shove it in my pocket for later.
“Oh! I almost forgot!” Natasha roots in her purse and pulls out a small, red box tied with a silver bow. She puts it on the table in front of me.
“You didn’t need to get me anything.” She just broke up with me, but now she’s giving me a birthday present?
“I got it a long time ago, actually. I couldn’t return it.” Her face is expressionless, her mouth a straight line. What a heartfelt gesture. I slide off the bow and open the lid of the box. Inside is a winking red-chili-pepper bottle cap opener that reads BITE ME. Natasha says, “It reminded me of my favorite dinner and movie night. And it’s also a practical kitchen utensil.”
Natasha, Ajay, and I did this thing where we’d watch a movie and eat food that reflected the cuisine of the city where the film took place. New Mexico Night was a standout, mostly because Ajay had some mock trial practice and couldn’t be there. Natasha and I ordered in these amazing chicken burritos and marathoned all three High School Musical movies, which are set in Albuquerque, New Mexico, even though they were actually shot in Utah. It’s also the night we first hooked up. The fact that her gift happens to reference that particular moment is ironic in light of recent events.
“In keeping with the practical theme,” Ajay says as he slides an envelope across the table toward me and grins.
“What’s this?” I am genuinely curious, because Ajay has never given me an actual present in our eight years of friendship.
“Best I could do with short notice,” he says.
I tear off the end and give it a shake, dropping the contents into my palm—a single condom. But this one is special—its white packaging has a Pokémon ball on it and lettering that reads “Don’t Catch ’Em All.” I feel my cheeks flush red. It’s not at all awkward or embarrassing to be sitting next to my suddenly ex-girlfriend holding a condom that I definitely won’t be using with her. “And we wonder why Ajay is terminally single.”
Ajay swigs the last of his coffee in one gulp and says, “Don’t laugh. A condom is like a Swiss Army knife; it has multiple uses that don’t involve sex. You can use it as a fishing lure, an ice pack, a jar opener, a water container. You can cut it up to make rubber bands, hair ties, make things waterproof, and it protects against STDs. It’s my way of saying: may you be ready for anything life might throw your way.”
I can’t imagine what more life could throw my way at this point, but I thank him for it nonetheless. As I’m tucking it inside my wallet, Purple Hair Girl walks by our table. She totally sees me do it, and an amused smile flickers on her face as she passes. Even though I will never see her again, it bothers me that she’s going to walk around thinking I’m one of those douchey guys who carries a condom around in his wallet desperately hoping for action.