Hideaway

Jackie and I were best friends until I tried to kiss her and she told me she didn't like boys. We were thirteen, I think; the summer before eighth grade, so yea. I had been hanging out with Jackie's family all summer. They had a nice house, and even though it was old, the wooden floors reminded me of what homes should be like. Kind of romantic, right? Everyone's smiling around the dinner table in a well furnished house with paisley window shades and blue wooden sidings.

Also my own parents decided that it was time to fight again--I can't remember what this one was about, but it started when I found my mom crying on the red sofa in the dining room with a piece of paper in her hand. It didn't end until after they both had challenged the other to a divorce. But they couldn't do it. Hell of a summer though.

Jackie and I had gotten bored of pretty much everything else to do around town and in her house. No new movies. No new stores. We had biked to the lake nearly every day. TV was almost painful, we'd watched it so much. I had started looking through the cabinets and drawers in her kitchen, staring at the multicolor cooking set and the fine silver with fluted handles tucked away underneath the regular silverware in a kind of hidden compartment. I was that bored.

One of us suggested tag. I laughed because there were only two of us. What about hide and seek? That was Jackie's idea, definitely. I wouldn't tell her I was scared of the dark, but I was especially afraid of the dark when I also happened to be in her basement.

The stairs creeped and as my feet alighted on the concrete floor I instantly realized that this was a horrible idea, to be playing hide and seek in a basement that randomly erupted with noises of plumbing and strained air conditioners. She wanted to hide first, and I agreed. She turned off the light and as I sat down on the stairs, eyes in my palms, counting aloud to twenty or thirty, I tried very hard to hear her. Her summertime bare feet sweeping across the smooth floor. The air circulating around her as she moved carefully through the rooms below her house.

But I could not. And as I walked around after reaching thirty, navigating like a blind man, I tried to humor myself. Maybe get her to laugh so that I could find her and we could both go upstairs and do something less creepy. Like a cross word.

I was big on self deprecating humor back then. Nobody told me they hated it until one day it seemed like everyone was telling me to stop complaining "every goddamn second". Somebody had told me that once, in that exact way. I remember her face was flushed and red and shaking, but I cannot for the life of me remember who it was. But this was seventh grade and I was the only child of a couple that didn't love each other so I had enough reasons to think that I was relatively worthless. Mom crying when I asked her to make me pancakes; letting the griddle slam into the sink and telling me that she couldn't do everything for everyone all the time. But I'm your son? Or Dad walking past me one time as I walked into our front door, waving at him, and he just kept on walking past me, like I didn't exist even at all.

The worst were the grades. This'll sound corny, but whenever I used to get a good grade in elementary school, she'd have to frame it. She used the same frame over and over again, but still, when I got an A I got to see it hanging on the wall next to our kitchen table and I felt like people cared. But sometime in the summer the frame, and my last report of the year, a creative narrative about a dream house, disappeared. Just gone. There was no sign of struggle, but as I sat at the table and munched on my morning cereal, alone, before heading out over to Jackie's house, I felt deeply betrayed.

It occurred to me that this might not have been a localized incident. I didn't bother to clean up after my breakfast as the milk sat in the porcelain bowl. I slowly moved into the empty family room. All the pictures were gone. The dark wooden frame that sat on the coffee table of me in my baseball uniform was no longer there. The huge family portrait, a sixteen by twenty four, was gone too.

No I couldn't even pretend that my home was a happy one. There weren't smiles from long ago to hint at a time when the house had been quiet during dinner time, when my dad hadn't had to sleep in the basement.

So I left the house that day, pretty confident that nobody no longer loved me. I later found out that my mom had hidden all the pictures in the attic. She hadn't burned them like I imagined she had, standing over them in the backyard late at night with a can of gasoline in one hand and the grill lighter in the other, her face glowing orange, twisted up trying to decide whether to laugh or cry; in either case, like a maniac. But the fact that they still existed didn't make me feel better when I found out a few months later.

I think Jackie's parents found out that day that my parents were fighting. I had been going over to her house a lot, but they probably never suspected anything was amiss. We were just kids with nothing to do. We had been in the same pottery class in a neighboring town two years earlier, and since we were the only kids in the class who went to Astor Elementary, we had to become friends. So no, they didn't suspect anything. But that day after biking over and dejectedly knocking on the blue wood of her door, I had no other thought in mind then to cry. I was obsessing over it. That's all I wanted to do. I wanted to curl up into a ball and cry. I would have done it at my house. I could have done it in my room. But no. There's no way that could have worked because I would have been far removed from the only person who seemed to like me, and her house still seemed so happy. Not like mine. Not like the house where I felt like I was constantly walking on eggshells.

Looking back, I feel really bad about what I did. I wasn't embarrassed while I was laying on her corduroy blue coach, sobbing in hysterics while she sat in the oversized leather recliner next to it, just staring at me. She had tried to say things but I couldn't listen. I was so sick and tired of my parents and their faces and why wasn't anyone ever happy anymore. But afterwards, I felt so very odd. I shouldn't have told her all those things; I shouldn't have poured out the intimate details of my family's life. I shouldn't have told her that I didn't think my dad had been cheating but that how the hell should I know because he never talks to me.

As a preadolescence I was trying to communicate the things that even adults can't say. I felt relieved when I finally stopped crying and she ran across the wooden floor into the kitchen to get me a glass of lemonade. They always had lemonade. Fresh. Incredible. I was jealous of the strangest things. But when she sat next to me I started to feel uncontrollably embarrassed. Mostly because she wasn't saying much and I had just told her everything that had been in and out of my consciousness during the past month. I didn't say anything else and we just sat on the couch. This is how her mom found us when she came home from work shortly thereafter. Her mom worked a rather posh job in advertising, and she always came back at around eleven thirty. Her mom loved me. She thought it was great that we were both friends because, as she told me sometimes to Jackie's protesting, "It's just so hard for Jackie to find good friends her age." I didn't really know if that was true. But we were both the only children in our respective families, and I guess growing up it's kind of lonely. I never felt lonely, though, always felt like I had my mother with me, until that summer and then well, that's how I learned self deprecation. My eyes were swollen and red. My ankles were crossed as they dangled from the couch and my fingers were wrapped around a lemonade filled glass that I couldn't drag my eyes away from. I couldn't have looked more depressed. Jackie greeted her mom as cheerily as ever, and her mom looked at me, but not too long, before walking up the stairs to her room. I expected that to be that but it wasn't. A few minutes later she came back downstairs. "Gavin honey, are you alright?" I can still remember exactly what she looked like because she looked like an angel. Gray pencil skirt, black dress shirt, white cardigan, green rimmed glasses. That's all I wanted to hear. I wanted an adult to ask me how I was and to actually mean it. "Yea Mrs. Jo. I'm alright."

"Well if you ever need anything, if you ever need to stay here, you know you're always more than welcome." She studied me for a couple of seconds. "What do you guys want for dinner?"

And that was that. But between me and Jackie I was less sure. Maybe nothing changed. Nothing probably changed at all. But I started watching her more. I tried to gauge her reactions to things I said. To things I did. I didn't want her to be over worried or not worried enough. I didn't want her to distance herself from me but I didn't want her to think I was being too much to deal with. Soon thereafter watching television turned into watching Jackie. It was probably around this time that I started to like Jackie in any type of serious way but I didn’t actually know that I knew that then.

Oh, so anyway, we were playing hide and seek, and I must have said something funny or something stupid, either or, regardless, I hear Jackie giggle or something and I carefully move toward the sound I had just heard and start walking carefully. "Jackie, can we please do something else? I don't want to admit this but I am not brave enough to not be afraid of the dark." I didn't hear anything, so I kept trudging my feet flat over the concrete floor. "You know I can always just walk upstairs." I thought the threat would get her out of her hiding spot but it didn't. I tried to hear her again for a moment or two, but that was unsuccessful so I turned around and started walking to the stairs. Or at least to where I thought the stairs should be. But I ran into Jackie. Somehow she had gotten up out of her hiding spot, never did learn where it was, and I stubbed my toe on her heel. I was so scared that I grabbed her and refused to let go. First because I was really scared and then because it was funny.