That night, Fay and I got an email from Jimmy Frye.
Which wasn’t unusual in itself. He liked to write us emails, long ones—I’m talking multi-thousand-worders, emails that required you to scroll even if you maximized them to fill the whole screen. I didn’t save any, and even at the time I mostly just skimmed them, so I only vaguely remember what was in them. Sometimes he complained about his love life (or lack thereof), but a lot of the time it was just advice—on college, on dating, on landing a good part in the spring musical, whatever he got it into his head we needed his advice on.
This email, though, was different. I’d never gotten an email like this from anyone.
m k fantastico: ummm did you see jimmy’s email?
OmiPalone212: His screed, you mean?
m k fantastico: i’m scared to read it
OmiPalone212: Don’t be.
OmiPalone212: Unless you have a phobia of typos, caps lock, and the word “FRIENDSHIP.”
OmiPalone212: In which case I advise you to delete it.
But I did read it, in a state of heart-hammering fear. I wish I could recreate it in detail now, but all I remember is the gist: he was so disappointed in us. He’d thought Fay and I were his friends (“my FRIENDS”). He’d stuck his neck out for us, put his ass on the line, bent over backward to make us happy—and what for? We never thanked him. We never talked to him unless we wanted a favor. We never even wished him a happy birthday (“which was a MONTH ago, by the way”). He was heartbroken—I remember him using that word, or maybe it was “you broke my heart.” But it served him right, he concluded, for putting other people before himself. He wouldn’t make that mistake ever again. “HAVE A NICE LIFE.”
m k fantastico: holy shit
m k fantastico: what should we do?
OmiPalone212: Absolutely nothing.
OmiPalone212: My dad gets like this sometimes. He’ll get over it.
She was wrong about that, actually. I didn’t know it then, but this was the last interaction we would ever have with Jimmy Frye. He never talked to us again.
I guess, looking back, this was my first experience of someone being mad at me. (Someone other than my mom, I mean.) Which is funny to think about, considering I spent so much time worrying that Fay was mad at me—but of course, I was a person whose life was ruled by the fear of making someone mad. Now my fear had come true. Granted, it was just Jimmy Frye, whose opinion I had never given a shit about, but the feeling was still unbearable. I’d had no idea he took his relationship with us so seriously. I’d always considered it purely transactional. I thought about Bottom’s remark during Latin that morning: “A person can be used as an instrument.” Was that what Fay and I had done to Jimmy? Were we horrible people?
Obviously, this all looks very different in retrospect. But it took me years to fully understand what a creep Jimmy Frye was. A standard-issue sexual predator would have been one thing, but in the whole time we knew him, Jimmy Frye never made any kind of pass at me or Fay. He told us multiple times that he was only attracted to Asian women. Fay and I did recognize this as creepy, and we mocked the hell out of him—to his face, even—for talking about his fetish like it was a sexual orientation. But this just made us even more confident that we could handle ourselves around Jimmy Frye. No one knew better than we did what a pathetic loser he was. We were taking advantage of him, not the other way around.
I wish now that I could go back in time and tell my seventeen-year-old self that it’s extremely not normal for a forty-six-year-old man to be friends with teenage girls. But I can imagine exactly how my seventeen-year-old self would react to that. “So what?” she’d say. “I’m extremely not normal. I’m not like other teenage girls.”
But maybe if I phrased it differently … “Jimmy is placing way too much emotional pressure on you and Fay,” I could say. “He’s a grown man. It’s inappropriate.”
“Since when do Fay and I care about being appropriate?”
Touché. I’d have to put a finer point on it. “He’s sketchy,” I’d say. “It’s just like everyone’s always saying: he’s pervy.”
No, I’d really lose her there. “Jimmy doesn’t perv on us,” she’d say, incredulous that older-me could have lost sight of this. “He only likes Asian women, remember?”
And then I’d have to sigh and say it. “Listen, it’s messed up how he talks about Juniper Green. It’s racist, and it’s disrespectful, and it’s wrong. Even if she doesn’t know about it, she deserves better. You should stand up for her.”
But this would be the most ineffective argument of all, because my seventeen-year-old self hated Juniper Green. Honestly, I don’t even know exactly why. Juniper was annoying, for sure, but Fay and I were annoying too. I think I just got swept up in the fun of having an enemy. So I’m sure my seventeen-year-old self would say something like, “Juniper Green deserves nothing.”
“Come on. She’s only seventeen. She’s hardly a real person yet.”
“Are you saying I’m not a real person yet?”
Am I?
Well, I can’t talk to my seventeen-year-old self. Even if I could, there’s nothing I could say—nothing anyone could have said—that would have changed her mind about Jimmy Frye, and nothing that would have made her feel like any less of a wreck that night. I just kept imagining myself the way Jimmy saw me—selfish, immature, a fair-weather friend—and I felt physically sick about it.
m k fantastico: do you think we’re bad people
OmiPalone212: Good and bad are heterosexual concepts, remember?
m k fantastico: heeeee
I remember typing that “heeeee” with no expression on my face.
From the couch, where she was watching the eleven o’clock news, my mom said, “You’re so quiet.”
“Just IMing with Fay,” I said.
“Usually you laugh a lot when you’re doing that,” said my mom. “Are you feeling down about something?”
I turned around from the computer, surprised and kind of touched that she’d noticed.
She picked up the remote and turned off the TV. “Let’s talk,” she said. “If you want to, that is.”
I turned back to the computer and typed:
m k fantastico: UGH my mom is SO ANNOYING
m k fantastico: she wants to yell at me about college shit
m k fantastico: brb
I logged off AIM and turned back to my mom, straddling my chair backward. “So,” I said, resting my chin against the back of the chair, “you know how Fay and I are friends with Jimmy Frye the IT guy?”
My mom paused, thinking. “Remind me,” she said.
It was possible that I’d never mentioned him to her (I sometimes mixed up what I told her and what I told my therapist), but it was more likely that she’d just forgotten. I wasn’t sure where to begin. “The guy who tells us gossip,” I said. “We took him out to Joe Junior that one time?”
“This is a guy at school?” she said.
Her tone was gentle, pre-sympathetic, and I knew what she was thinking: Fay liked a boy and I was jealous. “No!” I snapped. “Well, technically yes, but—”
The phone rang loudly in the kitchen.
My mom jumped at the noise. “What the …? It’s almost midnight.” She went into the kitchen to answer it, and I was about to get pissed off at her for abandoning me in the middle of what could have been a real heart-to-heart—but then she came back into the living room and held the phone out to me, smiling.
“I think it’s him,” she whispered.
My stomach dropped. I shook my head, terrified.
“Nell,” said my mom warningly.
This was a fight we had a lot, mostly when my grandparents called; I’d been phone-avoidant since I was a little kid. (Everyone is phone-avoidant nowadays, but I was ahead of my time.) I didn’t know how to explain right then that this wasn’t just my run-of-the-mill phone anxiety. Helplessly, I took the phone. “Hello?”
“I’m so sorry to bother you at this hour,” said a pleasant baritone. “You weren’t asleep, I hope?”
It wasn’t Jimmy; it was Bottom. I laughed in surprised relief. “No way,” I said. “What am I, five?”
“Oh, thank goodness,” he said. “I know the etiquette is to never call anyone before nine a.m. or after nine p.m.”
(I’d never heard of that rule before. It stuck with me, and I still think of Bottom whenever I have to call a patient at home.)
“But I’ve been trying you for hours,” he went on, “and the line was always busy.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I was using the Internet, so I tied up the phone line. You should have IM’d me.” I thought it was weird that he hadn’t. He’d never called me before. Who called anyone anymore?
“Ordinarily I would,” he said. “But I wanted to discuss something”—he hesitated—“of a rather sensitive nature.”
I had no idea where he could be going with this. Ignoring my mom’s curious smile, I got up and took the phone into my bedroom. “What’s up?” I asked, praying he wasn’t about to declare his love for me or something.
“First of all, I wanted to thank you,” he said, “for covering for me in Latin today.”
That felt like such a long time ago. “Latin?”
“I’m such a terrible liar.” His voice was hushed, like he was scared of being overheard, even though he was at home. “I appreciate you playing along.”
I still wasn’t sure what he was referring to, but I was too embarrassed to say so. “Oh,” I said vaguely. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Well, I am a little worried,” he said. “I didn’t expect the story to travel so fast, but it looks like the whole school knows. And I was just wondering if you told anyone about our conversation last weekend—”
“That you got into Yale?” I was still confused, but glad I could reassure him. “No, I didn’t tell—”
“—when you saw me and my parents coming out of Skip and Trudy’s office,” he continued, overlapping with me. “Sorry—you were saying?”
“I—wait.” Now I was really lost. “I thought you were coming out of Deenie’s office.” Had I actually seen them coming out of Deenie’s office? Or had they just been standing outside it? Skip and Trudy’s office was right next to Deenie’s.
“Oh, good lord,” said Bottom. “I thought you …”
I took a sharp breath as I pieced it together. “Your parents got Wanda fired?”
“They didn’t mean to,” he said quickly. “Not like this, anyway. Not in the middle of the year, in a way that would attract a ton of attention.” His voice was going higher-pitched with stress. “I begged them not to make a big deal of it. Or at least wait until after graduation. But they were so upset about the play. Especially my dad.” He sounded close to tears. “He walked out at intermission.”
I was pacing in circles around my bedroom. I always do that unconsciously, even now, whenever I’m making a hard phone call. “I’m really sorry,” I said, not knowing what else to say.
“I love Wanda,” he said. “You know that, right, Nell?”
“Of course,” I said. “We all love Wanda.”
“I just don’t want anyone to think I was the one who …” He trailed off. “It’s complicated,” he said. “Do you understand?”
“Completely,” I said.
But I didn’t understand at all. It would take me years to appreciate how complicated, in general, life at Idlewild must have been for Bottom; even now I’m sure I don’t fully get it. I probably never will. Case in point: I’m realizing only right this second, as I think back on that phone call, that it might have been less sincere and more calculated than I assumed. Could he really have thought I was “covering” for him in Latin class—when I’d so pointedly speculated that “some people” might have been offended by the prologue—or was he just buttering me up? I took him at his word when he said he loved Wanda, but if he actually hated her, would he have told me so?
At the very least, though, I understood this: Bottom was freaking out. He badly needed a friend in that moment. And he was counting on me.
I stopped pacing and stood at my bedroom window, dizzy from all the circling. I studied my reflection in the glass. I widened my eyes in an expression of concern, cradled the phone lovingly between my ear and shoulder. “You can trust me,” I said. “I won’t tell anyone.” It didn’t feel like enough, so I went even bigger. “I’m on your side,” I declared, “no matter what.” As I spoke, my reflection in the window looked like a trustworthy girl on a TV show.
Bottom exhaled with relief. “Thank you, Nell. You’re a true friend.”
“It’s no big deal.” I was so thrilled with myself, I started pacing the floor again.
“It is a big deal,” he said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. I wish I could thank you a million times, but it’s already past my bedtime.”
I wanted to mock him for that—it was barely midnight—but now I was getting really into the whole being-nice thing. “Sweet dreams,” I said, admiring my reflection in the window. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“You mean today,” he said. “Technically. It’s two minutes past midnight.”
“Hey,” I said. “That means winter break technically starts tomorrow.”
“And even more importantly,” he said, “tomorrow is technically La Bohème.”
He was way more psyched for that than I was, but for his sake I squealed with anticipation. “La Bohème!”
“Amor, amor!” he sang into the phone.
I hung up feeling much better. Jimmy Frye was wrong. I was an amazing friend.
m k fantastico: omg
m k fantastico: boss
m k fantastico: Bottom just called me on the phone
m k fantastico: guess what he told me