I somehow make it to the fourth grade without ever seeing the Peanuts comic strip. So I don’t know that I’m imitating Lucy when I put signs up all over my elementary school, advertising my services as a therapist. In puffy paint and Magic Marker, I inform my peers that every Tuesday I will station myself on the large rock that dominates the northwest quadrant of the playground and anyone who likes can come and ask me for advice. I know what you’re thinking: Why Tuesdays? Because Monday is too loaded, Friday is not loaded enough, Thursday is charged with anticipation for Friday, and Tuesday is essentially a less popular version of Wednesday. And “less popular” is exactly where I belong.
There are kids who go through elementary school having no friends whatsoever. But between parent and teacher pressure for harmony, this is actually tough to manage. It generally requires hygiene issues or the regular cutting of one’s own bangs. I am the kid just above that rung, the one with a handful of friends. Scraped together, there are just enough of them for me to suspect that if they have sought my nine-year-old wisdom at bowling parties, perhaps I can be of use to the population at large. Because I have the brain of a small child, it does not occur to me to charge for this service.
The Monday before I open this not-for-profit juggernaut, I am pulled out of class by the principal. This is beyond shocking to everyone, including the teacher, including me. At this point in my life, my greatest infraction has been forgetting my recorder on a school bus. My heart races as I try to imagine what I could possibly have done.
It seems that I did not have permission to tape posters up all over the place, and if I had asked, I would have been informed that the entire school had just been freshly repainted. Now there are bits of colored construction paper embedded in the walls. It will be years before I do the calculus on how much it costs to repaint an entire public school and where that money comes from. For now, it doesn’t seem like a very big deal. Perhaps the principal should bore someone else with her list of chores. I apologize but my real concern is that my therapeutic practice is getting off to an inauspicious start.
The good news is that word has spread that I was pulled out of class and why. This is the moment in which I learn that all publicity is good publicity. Or, well, I learn the adage. On Tuesday, when the lunch bell rings, I march past the tire swings and the monkey bars and climb up onto the rock like a Buddha in a jean jacket. At first, business is slow. It’s just me and my best pal, chatting. She is the human equivalent of the pianist’s own money in the tip jar. But soon enough, people we don’t know as well come around and she excuses herself to apply stickers to her backpack.
During my first recess, I have four customers. Their problems stem mostly from one another. One day, licensed therapists will tell them that their problems stem mostly from their parents, but that day has not yet come. For now, it’s all Suzy-is-mean-to-me and Danny-stole-my-gummy-bears. There’s a fifth customer, at the end of the hour, but he only asks me a question about the dearth of strawberry milk in the cafeteria. I can’t decide if he doesn’t understand what I’m doing here or I don’t.
A few Tuesdays into this enterprise, Jason Pakarinen leaves the enclosure around the basketball court and saunters up the concrete path that leads to my rock. I think he will turn off at any minute because Jason Pakarinen couldn’t possibly be coming to talk to me. I am not disgusted by boys like some of my friends. I am, in fact, madly in love with Jason Pakarinen. His mother and my mother are quite friendly, but this has never stopped him from pretending I don’t exist. The fact that Jason Pakarinen even has a mother is bewildering to me. What does one make a perfect boy for dinner? How does one tell him what to do? What does he dream of at night?
This is really happening. Jason Pakarinen is headed straight toward me. My clientele is expanding in marvelous directions.
“Yeah,” Jason Pakarinen begins.
This speaks to the intimate secrets he’s about to reveal—he greets me as if we’ve been conversing for hours.
“Yeah, I have a problem,” he says.
Dear God, I think, has he prepared a speech?
“Yes?” I ask, fluttering my nascent eyelashes. “How can I help you, Jason?”
“Yeah, there’s this really annoying girl giving advice on a rock.”
To his credit, this is a pretty sick burn for a fourth grader. I make a mask of my face as if unaffected, even though I am desperate to dispose of my own body.
“What do you think I should do about it?” he asks, roundhouse kicking my feelings.
“Shut up,” I tell him.
I mean it as a jab but it comes out as more of a guess. Shut up and boner occupy the deepest crevices of my insult bag. I have to dust them off before deploying them.
Jason Pakarinen laughs—cackles, really—and walks away. I watch him intently to see if he’s returning to his friends. Much to my relief, he’s headed for the boys’ room. Alas, this means that my humiliation was but an errand for him. He had to pee the whole time.
* * *
Twenty years later, I am standing behind a police barricade on Fifth Avenue because it’s the Gay Pride parade and all parades are awful at the molecular level, even ones for clean air and kittens. I am with my boyfriend and we are waiting for our turn to cross the street. We’ve been standing here for so long, I can’t remember a time before we were standing here. There’s so much cheering and stimulation that it takes an adult Jason Pakarinen several attempts at calling my name before I hear it.
I turn around to see that he, too, is waiting to cross the street. Because of social media and life in general, I recognize him as instantly as he recognizes me. He’s wearing fancy spandex and leaning on a sleek bicycle that looks like a paper clip that fell from heaven. If there were any justice in the world, Jason Pakarinen would be drinking in an Applebee’s in the middle of the day with his ass crack showing. But there is no justice in this world. Jason Pakarinen went on to be well-liked throughout high school and graduated from Stanford and a bunch of other schools and is currently a physicist in London.
Who let him back into the country?
We embrace. Because apparently, being an adult is about the same thing as being in fourth grade: embracing your sworn enemy. I admonish myself for being flattered that Jason Pakarinen is so happy to see me. I introduce him to my boyfriend and they chat about total nonsense. Like the pros and cons of dropping off one’s laundry. I am gobsmacked by how they can have such a dull conversation, as if the universe didn’t just collapse on itself. But it does make me happy to imagine a little girl such as myself, wondering what my boyfriend ate for dinner when he was a kid, knowing he was not a cruel child.
When a cop moves the barricade aside, we all hustle through together. Jason Pakarinen tells us all about his life, about how wonderful London is and how he’s just gut renovated a house for himself and his wife, a pickle monger who’s pregnant with twins.
“They’re mine,” he says, making a clever joke.
I tell him about a novel I just bought, holding up the bag as proof, as if purchasing a novel trumps everything he has just said. My boyfriend, who never knew Jason Pakarinen, the boy-god, looks at me like I’ve been drinking. At the end of the block, I assume Jason Pakarinen and his bike will cut into the park, but he keeps following us, wheeling and talking.
“I’m so glad I ran into you,” he says.
Again, I try not to be flattered. Finally, as we reach another corner, he shows his cards. His mother heard from my mother that I used to work at a publishing house.
“This is true,” I tell him.
“My wife is putting together a book proposal,” he says.
“On pickle mongering?” asks my boyfriend.
“She’s really popular in the UK,” explains Jason Pakarinen. “I wonder if I can ask you to look at the book proposal.”
“I worked in publicity,” I explain. “I didn’t really see proposals.”
I have seen hundreds upon hundreds of book proposals.
“Oh,” says Jason Pakarinen.
I can tell he’s about to give it another go. You don’t get into Stanford by giving up that easy!
“Well,” he says, “maybe if you just had any advice for her … I’ll e-mail you.”
“I rarely check it,” I say. “Anyway, it was nice to bump into you!”
I give him a hug so brief it could pass for a breeze, grab my boyfriend, and pull him away. In my peripheral vision, I see Jason Pakarinen looking confused, as if he has overstepped his bounds. And maybe he has. I don’t ask people I haven’t seen in twenty years for favors. I don’t go up to doctors at parties and ask them to look at a weird bump on my thumb, and I certainly don’t say, “Wait here, I want you to look at my wife’s weird thumb bump.” As far as Jason Pakarinen is concerned, my advice-giving days are over. Shop’s closed. But perhaps this doesn’t justify physically running from this blast from the past as if a shard had hit me in the eye.
“Well, that was a little on the bitchy side,” my boyfriend decides.
I know it was. But I give him a dirty look for saying it first. He is undeterred, waiting for an explanation for this incongruous behavior. What he does not realize is that it’s not incongruous—it’s overdue. What he does not realize is that Jason Pakarinen is responsible for a fragment of the woman he loves, a fragment so small no one would notice it missing but me. I look over my shoulder to make sure that Jason Pakarinen has disappeared. Then I ask him who his favorite Peanuts character was and cross my fingers for the right answer.