A Passage of Several Days

…And you are still alive.

You even know the difference between a cosine and a sine. Possibly. Your brain is fried from math study, which is why you haven’t written.

Ms. Patterson knows you write in this journal during class. If you open it again in math, she confiscates it.

Which is why you are spending lunch period hunched in the corner of the cafeteria, scribbling away.

LOTS TO TELL. WHERE TO BEGIN?

Okay.

Part One. Jay.

Just when you think it’s safe to make him your enemy, Jay surprises you.

He comes to your house with a brand-new chess set and asks if you want to play. CHESS! By the time you pick yourself up off the floor, laughing, he looks like a hurt puppy. “I thought you LIKED chess,” he says. So you reassure him that you DO like it, and you invite him in to play, and he’s the worst player in the world but he LOVES it, and you teach him a defense or two and he calls you a genius, and all of a sudden you think he’s an okay guy after all.

And after you’ve beaten him a second time, he agrees to buy you dinner for no reason at all. And when you get to China Wok, you ask him why he’s doing all this stuff—the unexpected visit, the chess, the food—and he says he’s just trying to be friends again. And he tells you he’s worried about you, because you look mad all the time. “Aren’t we still buddies, Duckeron?”

And you have to admit, this makes you feel pretty great, even though you have to tell him you HATE his nicknames.

You explain you’ve been a maniac lately because of the math. You haven’t really BEEN mad, you’ve just LOOKED mad. Which is kind of the truth, but kind of not, because Jay Adams has not exactly been on your list of top ten favorite people these days. Not even top thousand.

Anyway, he seems relieved, and he offers to help you with homework but you say no, because HIS help is likely to REALLY sink your grades. And now that you’re talking like human beings, you finally unload how you feel about his matchmaking—calmly, rationally—and he’s sort of getting it, sort of not, asking you stuff like, “Well, what kind of girl do you like?” when Sunny walks in with Dawn.

End of conversation. Jay acts like he has never seen a more beautiful sight in the world than Dawn Schafer. Dawn and Sunny sit down with us, and Jay asks Dawn a million questions. She’s acting really friendly, probably just humoring him, but they’re having a great time.

And you’re thinking, hmmm, Dawn and Jay? You wouldn’t have predicted it, but maybe opposites do attract. And in a funny way, you are jealous, McCrae. Because life seems so easy for Jay. Even though he can be a pigheaded goon, people like him. Girls like him. And why not? He’s out going. He’s friendly. He’s funny. When you get past all the stuff that makes you crazy, you find a sweet guy. But that’s not the WORST part. The worst part, the thing you really envy, is that it takes SO LITTLE to make him happy.

The Secret to Contentment, According to Jay Adams: Meet a Girl.

The Secret to Contentment, According to Ducky McCrae: worry about how you look in the morning, because even though you can’t bring yourself to wear boring conservative clothes, you don’t want to risk setting off the Cro Mags. And make sure you don’t bounce too much as you’re walking into school, because Marco the Cro Mag king will say you’re flitting, which makes everyone laugh. If you survive THAT, you’re off to a good start, and IF YOU’RE LUCKY you’ll have a few laughs with your 13-year-old friends, the only ones who seem to appreciate you, and when you go home, you’ll find that your brother has not left the milk out of the fridge all day and has actually bought a few groceries and maybe run a load of laundry with some of your stuff in it. THAT’S contentment. And that’s pathetic.

So you’re thinking this, and you’re getting mad and frustrated at yourself for being jealous, and your friend Dawn, who otherwise has always been pretty sensible, seems kind of fascinated by Jay, kind of attracted to him, and then…

We all order food, and he asks for spare ribs and sweet and sour beef.

Of course, he has no idea that Dawn is the World’s Number One Health Food Nut, who eats absolutely NO red meat.

Her face clouds over. Her eyes narrow. She mutters, “Ew.”

Does Jay leave it alone? No. He asks questions, finds out about her eating habits, and looks at her like she’s from Neptune. Then he says things like “How can you NOT like a juicy red steak?” and “Aren’t you HUNGRY all the time?” and Dawn doesn’t want to make a scene, so she’s trying to change the subject, but you can see her getting angrier and angrier.

You no longer feel so jealous. But is that right? Should you be GLOATING because Jay is under attack?

Why not?

Finally Sunny manages to get us all talking about movies—only Jay is chewing the spare ribs lovingly and saying, “mmmmm” while looking straight at Dawn, who is not amused, and you realize your 8th-grade friends are much more mature than some of your OLDER friends, and before you know it, everyone is serious—including Jay—because Sunny is talking about her mom’s cancer.

This sure doesn’t brighten things, but Jay has stopped his doofus act and is listening intently. He comments that Alex’s aunt had lung cancer, and you remember that. You remember how Jay and you comforted Alex when she died, and how Jay cried, and you feel this pang in your chest for the old days, when we were all so close.

It’s a pretty intense dinner. Afterward, you drive Jay home, and one of the first things he says is, “She’s perfect!”

You explain that if he even THOUGHT about asking Dawn out, he would probably have to abstain from meat-eating for a few months first, before she’d even look at him again.

But no. He’s talking about SUNNY.

He is saying that she’s perfect for Alex.

And this, finally, leads to

Part Two. Alex.

But it is almost time for next period and you haven’t eaten anything yet, so you sign off temporarily.

No Longer Hungry

Just Bored With English Class

…So you pretend to be writing the great American essay, when in reality you are going back to where you left off.

Yesterday. Okay, you’re home from the China Wok. You’re thinking about Jay’s comment.

Matching up Sunny and Alex. It’s so JAY. So mind-bogglingly WRONG. But just the fact that he showed concern for Alex is a good thing. And THAT’S what you’re thinking about. Maybe the three of you are NOT on three different planets. Maybe you can all be best friends again.

And really, there’s something about the idea that isn’t so stupid. It might be good for Alex and Sunny to know each other. Not in a dating sense, just in a hanging-out-as-friends sense. Sunny’s the ONLY person who would understand the kind of depression Alex must be having.

And Alex might be just the one to reach Sunny when she gets into one of her dark, angry moods.

So you figure you’ll invite them both to hang out with you at the beach Saturday. You call them. Sunny doesn’t sound thrilled that Alex is invited. Alex says he’s sick of the beach and he doesn’t like meeting strangers.

It’s not easy, but you twist their arms.

You tell them both, “It’s important to me that you come.”

Which is true.

And they agree.

Another good deed by Ducky.