Something else happened during those weeks.
I allowed optimism to creep in.
Optimists believe things will always work out for the best. Optimists live in a rainbow-colored, sugar-coated land of denial.
Optimists miss warning signs.
Like the Saturday morning I was over at Jacob’s place, sitting on his bed and knitting while he edited Koula’s video.
He stood up and stretched. “I’m starving. Want a sandwich? PB and J?”
“Sure.” His parents always bought bread and jams from the farmers’ market, so even the most basic of sandwiches was elevated to a whole new level of delicious.
My fingers needed a rest, so I put my knitting needles down and wandered around his room. I wasn’t snooping, not exactly. But when I found his old high school yearbook wedged behind other books on his shelf, I was immediately intrigued. NORTHWESTERN SECONDARY was on the cover in embossed gold lettering. There was so little personal stuff in Jacob’s room, this small discovery felt huge.
I found his class photo. Goal: To become the next Steven Spielberg. Then I searched for the senior boys’ basketball team photo. Jacob was in the back row. I was about to read the names in the caption to see if I could find Randle and Ben when something fluttered out from between the pages.
It was a letter, addressed to Jacob. The return address read S. Esterhasz.
Suddenly a bionic hand slammed the book shut, scaring the crap out of me. “You shouldn’t snoop,” Jacob said.
“Says the guy who read my scrapbook when I first met him. You practically gave me a heart attack.”
He took the yearbook out of my hands and put it back on the shelf. Then he crumpled the envelope into a ball and stuffed it into his pocket.
“Letter from an old girlfriend?” I asked. Only half joking.
He said nothing.
“You never talk about your friends. It’s okay to talk about them, Jacob. You let me talk about Maxine. I like talking about Maxine.”
“Yeah, well. We’re different that way.” He sat beside me on the bed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. And I never mind when you talk about Maxine. I’m just— It’s not who I am.”
Then he started to kiss me. Which led to the inevitable.
And I forgot all about the momentary weirdness.
There was also the Sunday night in March, when Jacob invited everyone from YART to come over and watch Inglourious Basterds, another of his favorites. It was getting dark out, and we could see the lights from the tankers that were always moored in English Bay, part creepy, part beautiful.
Miranda laid out more awesome snacks: chips, smelly cheeses, strawberries that tasted like strawberries even though they weren’t in season. I made myself a heaping plate before Koula started double-dipping.
Koula and Alonzo sprawled out on the couch, one of them at each end, feet touching. Jacob, Ivan, and I propped ourselves up with cushions on the rug.
The movie was fantastic. Normally I couldn’t take that much violence, but when it involved a successful plot to assassinate Hitler, even I had to get on board. Jacob gave a running commentary about the techniques Quentin Tarantino had used, until Koula yelled, “Oh my God, shut up!”
“I modeled my first films after Tarantino,” Jacob said when the movie was finished.
“Really? Can we see one?” Ivan spoke through a mouthful of chips.
Jacob shook his head.
“Come on, we won’t judge,” said Koula.
“Yes, you will,” he said to her. “You judge everything.”
“Maybe so. But I also confessed my worst sins in front of all of you. And there’s no way your early films are more embarrassing than miming in public.”
Alonzo kicked her. “Thank you, Koula. Thank you so much.”
“She’s kind of right, though.” Bits of chip sprayed onto the carpet as Ivan spoke. “We’ve told you a lot.”
“We’ve pretty much bared our souls to you,” said Koula. “And I bet Petula’s bared more than that.” She and Alonzo laughed, and I felt my face go hot.
They kept pestering him, and Jacob finally said, “Fine. One. I’ll show you one.” He hooked his laptop up to the flat-screen TV. He found the file he was looking for and hit Play.
It was five minutes long. The premise: A constipated burglar breaks into a house. He suddenly feels like he has to go. He leaves his gun outside the bathroom. The owner comes home while the burglar is straining to go. He picks up the burglar’s gun and kills him in a hail of bullets while the burglar is still sitting on the toilet. The burglar’s last words as he lies dying in a pool of blood: “On the bright side…I pooped.”
It was juvenile and over the top, but we still laughed.
Except for Jacob. He didn’t even watch it. He unhooked his laptop before the credits could roll.
Ivan figured it out before the rest of us. “The two actors. They were your friends, weren’t they? The ones who died.”
Jacob didn’t respond.
“Do you feel guilty?” asked Koula.
He gave her a sharp look. “About what?”
“That you lived, and they didn’t?”
“Every day.”
“You shouldn’t. It’s wasted energy.”
“But we all feel that way, don’t we?” said Alonzo. “Guilty.”
“What do you feel guilty for?” asked Koula. “Loving mime?”
“No, bitchy-poo. Being gay.”
Koula groaned. “Oh, get over it.”
“It’s not that easy. My whole life I’ve been told it’s a sin. It’s hard to shake that stuff.”
“I feel guilty, too,” I said. “It may not be rational, but it doesn’t mean you don’t feel it anyway.”
“I sometimes think,” said Ivan, “if I hadn’t made my mom mad? She never would have swum out so far.” Tears started to roll down his face.
Jacob put an arm around Ivan. “What happened to your mom was not your fault.” He glared at the rest of us. “This conversation is over.”
Alonzo shrugged. “If we can’t have this conversation with each other, who can we have it with?”
He had a point.
Jacob wasn’t in school the following morning.
He didn’t come to school for three whole days.
And last but not least: a couple of weeks later, Serge the Concierge stopped me as I entered the lobby and asked if I’d bring a letter up to the Cohens. “It got placed in the wrong mailbox.”
It was another letter, addressed to Jacob. The return address: S. Esterhasz. I held the envelope under the light in the stairwell as I walked up to the sixth floor, but I couldn’t read anything.
Miranda opened the door. “Serge asked me to bring this up.” I handed her the letter.
The color drained from her face. She took it from me. “Thank you. I’ll give it to him later.” I kicked off my shoes and started toward Jacob’s room. “Oh, and Petula? If you wouldn’t mind, don’t mention this to him, okay?”
That seemed weird. But I said nothing.
The next day Jacob wasn’t in school again. He didn’t respond to my texts. His mom answered when I called their house; she said simply that he was “under the weather.”
I was pretty sure that was code for “depressed.” Every single one of us in YART had gone down that rabbit hole, and more than once.
I worried about Jacob when he dropped out like that, but after a couple of days he’d resurface and be his usual cheerful self.
It’s only with hindsight that I see those moments were clues to something bigger. And that’s the downside of optimism.
It makes you blind to signs of trouble ahead.