Just Friends Read online

  Jena’s smile is non-committal. She’s heard this before.

  “This time, I know I’m right,” says Tilda. “Trust me.”

  How dumb can you be? Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. He could win the Nobel Prize for stupidity. What a jerk. Over and over, like a video on a loop, he sees her looking at him. Waiting. And what did he do? Nothing. He really blew it this time. What’s that old saying? He who hesitates is a champion loser. Dumb and doomed. He should have grabbed her the second she yanked him through the door. He should have said he’d been so worried about her he couldn’t get to her fast enough. Look at my shoes! Look at my clothes! I risked my life for you! He should have told her how he feels. Failing that, when they were sitting on the couch and she leaned her head against him he shouldn’t have thought about kissing her, he should have just done it. Been an action man, not an inaction ditherer.

  But he didn’t do the things he should have – or, possibly, shouldn’t have.

  And so the autumn shuffles along in a normal, autumnal way. Leaves fall, temperatures dip, days get shorter, clothes get heavier – and Josh and Jena act as if nothing almost happened.

  The thing is, he doesn’t know if Jena is acting or not. It could be that she’s still thinking of him as roommate not romance material; she may have no idea how close she came to being lunged at by a boy who’s like one of the girls. But Josh, of course, is acting his heart out. Is this being grown up? Hiding how you feel; pretending to be one thing when you really want to be something else? Every time he sees her he wonders what would have happened if the General hadn’t charged in worrying about his electricity bill. Would Josh really have done something? Or not? He thought he was going to, but he’s let himself down before. On the other hand, maybe it was better that he didn’t, that the dad police arrived just in time. Or maybe it isn’t. He rides up and down on the see-saw of doubt. If only she would give some sign that she did know that something almost happened: to let him know she thinks she had a close call, whew, or, alternatively, to indicate that she wishes the General had run out of gas two miles from home. Since she doesn’t, he just wonders and frets – and pretends.

  There would never be a bad time to have his dad around, but Josh figures that now would be a really good time for him still to be alive. They could have a man-to-man talk the way fathers and sons do in movies and TV shows. Not that he’s aware of any of the fathers and sons he knows personally having those talks. Carver’s father always tells him to ask his mother and Sal’s dad is always too busy or too tired to say anything more than “We’ll talk about it later.” The only man-to-man pieces of advice either of them has offered over the years are For God’s sake use a condom (Mr Jefferson) and Never ride the clutch (Mr Salcedo). But Ethan Shine might have been different. In Josh’s memories of him, he is not only always present but he’s very user-friendly. Helped him with his homework. Drove him to junior chess club. Showed him how to make a perfect sundae. Josh has never been fishing in his life (he doesn’t eat them, he’s definitely not going to hook them and watch them die), but he has no trouble imagining him and his father sitting by a tranquil river, lines in the water, sunlight winking through the trees, talking about life. Birds would sing, bees would buzz, and Josh would tell his father all about Jena and all his doubts. In turn, Ethan would give him useful but manly advice based on experience and a realistic view of his only child (Hannah isn’t realistic, she’s a mother).

  It’s because Josh doesn’t have his dad that he’s been looking forward to the start of the holiday season the way someone who gets seasick on a pool float looks forward to the end of an ocean voyage. He and his mother are going to Brooklyn to spend Thanksgiving with his uncles, Walt and Mark. What a relief it will be to be back on land! thinks the hapless sailor. What a relief it will be to be in a Jenevieve-Capistrano-free zone for even a few days! thinks Josh. He could use a break that doesn’t affect his heart.

  More than just the liberation of being away, however, is the fact that Walt is the closest Josh comes to having a male parent. Uncle Walt, his mother’s brother. Blood relative. Genes in common. Man of the world. When Josh’s father died, Walt stayed with them the entire summer, bonding with Josh and comforting Hannah, just his presence making things better if not actually good. Josh really likes Walt and Walt really likes him. They text and email weekly. At least once a month they talk on the phone. They have a running chess game going, each with a board set up in a corner of his bedroom. Although they see each other infrequently – visits having to be doled out between the Shines in Parsons Falls and Mark’s large family that spans seaboards and continents – when they do it’s always clear that the bonding worked. He can talk to Walt.

  There was a time when being even a hundred miles away from home would have put Jenevieve Capistrano out of his sight if not his mind fairly firmly, but that time isn’t now. This is the twenty-first century, and in the twenty-first century you are only as far away as your phone. They have barely left the driveway when Jena texts him to say that she’s sorry she didn’t get to say goodbye. This is a busy time of year for her social set. Josh and she swap texts for most of the drive. She sends him a picture of the enormous bird her father won in the turkey shoot (frozen, mercifully). Tonight she’s going to the first party of the holidays at Tilda’s boyfriend Anton’s house, but Jena can’t decide what to wear. What does he think? The red dress? The blue? Pictures are sent of each. Josh says she’ll look terrific if she goes in overalls. Not helpful, she replies, but signs it with an X. He sends her pictures of their journey – funny signs, odd buildings, weird licence plates, a photo of his mother shouting at the SatNav when she realizes that they’re lost. Jena’s last text is OMG! Gotta get ready XX.

  She sends him a selfie wearing a green dress, ready to leave for the party. He doesn’t hear from her again except for a smiley face wearing a pilgrim’s hat and Don’t eat 2 much XX beside it on Thanksgiving morning.

  At Walt and Mark’s everyone pitches in preparing the birdless dinner. Walt and Hannah do the baking, Mark is chef and Josh is his kitchen assistant. Which keeps him busy, but not so busy that he doesn’t find time to think about Jena. How was the party? How was dinner with her grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles? Were there fights like there usually are? Did the General undercook the turkey again? Did her family play games after dinner like his did? Was she thinking of him?

  Josh and his uncle have a tradition, started at the beginning of the bonding mission after Ethan died. Whenever they visit, he and Walt spend a day together without Mark or Hannah. If they’re in Parsons Falls, he and Walt take his uncles’ dogs for long walks in the woods. If they’re in the city, he and Walt spend a day in Manhattan (leaving Hannah and Mark to walk the dogs). Depending on the time of year, they might start at Central Park or Rockefeller Center, they might go to a museum, ride the ferry or walk the High Line, but wherever they start they always end in the Village, walking the same streets legendary musicians of the folk scene once walked. Walt, who teaches history, never tires of telling Josh what and who were there in the sixties and seventies, and Josh never tires of hearing it – no matter how many times he’s heard it before.

  They make their expedition on Black Friday when others are out being trampled in the sales. This year they go to the Tenement Museum. Walt is more interested in the stories of history’s losers than of its winners. It wasn’t only legendary musicians who once walked the streets of Lower Manhattan. The waves of immigrants fleeing starvation, war and persecution in the nineteenth century all found a home here, no matter how tenuous or how difficult. Josh’s own forebears – Shines, Wolffs, Hullahans, Impys, Kesslers and Lonnegins – were among them, starting new lives in the tenements and slums of this new city with all its promises and dreams and lies. Walt knows so much about the area that the museum staff joke they should give him a job. Afterwards they roam through the Lower East Side until they finally end up in a café on Spring Street.

  “So, Josh, how’s life treating you these days?” asks Walt
after they’ve sat down.

  “Six of one, half dozen of the other,” says Josh.

  “That good?”

  Josh knocks over the salt. “I have some personal stuff that’s kind of driving me crazy.”

  Walt leans back in his chair. “I don’t want to ruin the surprise or anything, but does it happen to involve a girl?”

  Not only has he become irrational, he’s become suspicious as well. “Who told you that?”

  “I did notice you’ve been checking your phone a lot since you got here.” Walt shakes out his napkin. “And Charley Patton did mention something last time we talked. You know what he’s like.”

  “Yeah. He has a big mouth like my mother.”

  “I think it was more concern than gossip,” says Walt. “Charley says you’ve been a little listless lately. Not as playful as usual.”

  Moody. Broody. Locked in his room, playing his guitar.

  “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  But Josh does want to. “This is just between us, right?”

  “If you don’t want me to say anything to Charley Patton, I won’t,” Walt assures him. “It’s just between us. Man to man.”

  They’re not by a river, they’re next to the window looking out on the busy city street – grey buildings and sidewalks, crammed storefronts, people hurrying past with their things to do and places to be and not even a visible spring – but, much as he fantasized about telling his father, Josh tells Walt about Jena. All the things he hasn’t told anyone else. How he reacted the first time he saw her. How he climbed the tree in her front yard. How they became friends. How he can’t stop thinking about her. How he almost kissed her; how he didn’t.

  Walt doesn’t speak until he’s done. “So is this the girl in the photo?”

  “What photo?”

  “The one your mother sent of you trying to break your back in a yoga pose.”

  The picture of him and Mo doing double downward dog for the class demonstration. He has no privacy; not a shred.

  “Mom sent you that?”

  “She has no secrets from me.” Walt winks. “Not since I broke her code and read her diary when she was fourteen. She gave up after that.”

  “That’s not Jena.” Josh laughs.

  Walt picks up his fork and puts it down again. “Oh, I thought—”

  “That’s Ramona Minamoto. You know her. Remember? You even gave her a ride on your motorcycle once, and she complained you drove too slow.”

  “That’s Ramona? Good God!” Walt makes a well-I’ll-be-damned face. “Of course I remember her. She’s hard to forget. But I haven’t seen her for a while. What a difference a year or two makes. She’s sure grown up.” He winks. The talk has deviated from what Josh envisioned, but the wink is pretty man to man.

  “Jena’s more …” Conservative? Conventional? “… you know, more regular than Mo. She hangs out with the popular crowd.”

  “Ah.” Walt nods. “I see. So you’re worried she doesn’t believe in cross-species fraternization.”

  That, too.

  “I just think … you know … that I’m not really what she’s looking for as a boyfriend.”

  “You never can tell with folk, you know. She may hang out with the cool crew, but she also hangs out with you. Right?”

  “Yeah.” In a not-so-you’d-necessarily-notice sort of way.

  “You’re good friends. You said she tells you stuff she doesn’t tell anybody else.”

  “Yeah.” Rent-a-pal. There when no one else is. “And I’m the go-to guy when there’s some emergency.”

  Walt has a thoughtful, marking-a-paper look on his face. “What kind of emergencies?”

  “Oh, you know,” says Josh. “Alien invasion … giant blood-sucking bats swarming over Parsons Falls … the end of civilization… That kind of thing.”

  He nods. “What happened? She locked herself out?”

  “That, too.”

  The paper Walt is mentally marking is hovering somewhere between grades. “And you don’t think that she might have a crush on you? That maybe that kind of thing is a hint?”

  “I guess so. Carver thinks it might be. He says that stranger things have happened.” Men have walked on the moon. Cloned sheep. Put a computer in a pair of glasses. “But I’m not exactly a babe magnet.” More like a babe deterrent. Tell the girls that he’s invited, and they’ll all go somewhere else.

  “But you know that she likes you,” insists Walt. “That’s what’s important.”

  “Right. Only I don’t know how I’m supposed to be able to tell how much she likes me.” He looks down at his half-eaten meal and then back at his uncle. “Ramona said there’d be signs so I made a list.”

  “Of course you did,” says Walt. Josh is known for his lists. Mainly because he never remembers where he put them.

  “There were six things on it.” Starting with Jena saying she’s never known anyone like him and ending with her letting him drink out of her glass, he rattles it off as if he’s reading it. “But I don’t know what it means,” he says when he’s finished. “What do you think?”

  “Honestly?” asks Walt. “I think there’s only one way you’re going to find out for sure.”

  “Yeah, that’s what Carver said. But what if I ruin everything? What if I say something and we’re not even friends any more?”

  “Then maybe you weren’t really friends to begin with.” He raises his cup as if making a toast. “It’ll be a new year soon, Josh. Besides, it’s better to try and fail than never try.”

  Josh isn’t sure whether that’s history’s winners talking or its losers.

  Better to Try and Fail

  Josh is resolved. He’s going to tell her. He has nothing to lose. Not really. Better to be miserable in certainty than miserable in doubt. Nonetheless, he doesn’t call Jena as soon as they get home on Sunday. He wants to, but he doesn’t. Hang tough. Be cool. He unpacks, slowly. When he’s done that, he goes over to Carver’s (the long way) to pick up Charley Patton, who comes running as soon as he hears Josh’s voice. At least someone missed him.

  When he gets back to his house he makes himself a camomile tea, puts on a Blind Willie McTell album and only then does he pick up his phone.

  Jena answers on the first ring. “Josh! I wasn’t sure when you’d be back. It feels like you’ve been away for weeks.” Not to him. To him it’s been at least a year. “I’ve really missed you.”

  I’ve really missed you. Charley Patton and Jenevieve Capistrano. It’s just as well he’s sitting down.

  “You did?” She has?

  “Of course I did.”

  Hang tough. Be cool. He doesn’t say, I missed you too.

  “Hey,” says Jena, “what are you doing now? Are you busy?”

  “To tell you the truth, right now I am. I’m on the phone.”

  She laughs. “What about getting off the phone and coming over? I really want to talk to you. I have some major stuff to tell you.”

  He says he has some major stuff to tell her, too.

  “So you’ll come over? Asap? I really want to see you.”

  I want to see you…

  “I have some things to do first. I’ll see you in an hour or two.”

  He’s as calm as a tornado. He takes a shower – and stubs his toe on the tub. Although it’s only slightly more necessary than providing a dolphin with an umbrella, he shaves – and cuts himself twice. He trims his nails – and stabs himself with the scissors. He irons his favourite shirt and his best jeans. He irons them again. He considers wearing a tie, of which he owns two – one that belonged to his dad and the guitar tie his mother gave him for his birthday – and then decides that a tie is too uncool; he’s going to a romantic tryst, not a job interview. Assuming he makes it there without being hit by a car.

  When Josh finally emerges from his room like a butterfly from a chrysalis, his mother is stretched out on the sofa reading a book on natural healing that Mark the nutritionist gave her.
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br />   She gives him one of her surveillance-camera looks over the top of the magazine. “Going somewhere special?”

  He walks past her and into the kitchen. “No.”

  His back is to her, but he hears her sniff. “What’s that smell?”

  He pours himself a glass of water. His throat is so dry he feels as if he’d swallowed sand. “I don’t smell anything.” It’s the cologne Walt gave him – a good-luck gift. Light but sophisticated. Masculine without labouring the point.

  He doesn’t have to turn around to know that she’s still eyeing him. A digital surveillance camera: no film to run out.

  “So where are you going?”

  “I told you. Nowhere. Just going to go see the guys for a while.”

  “You ironed your jeans to see the guys?”

  “Gees… Look at the time.” His glass bangs against the counter. “I have to go. See you later, Mom.”

  The last word he hears her say is “When” as he runs from the house, slamming the front door behind him.

  As anxious as he is to see Jena, he doesn’t rush, taking his time to get his heart rate down and go over what he’ll say. As if the two or three hundred times he’s already gone over it aren’t enough. Jena, you must know how much I like you… Jena, you’re the nicest and prettiest girl I’ve ever known… Jena, I was thinking maybe we could go on a real date – you know, girl and geek, ha ha ha… Maybe he shouldn’t say “geek”. Maybe she hasn’t noticed. He doesn’t want to put ideas in her head. Not that one at least. Jena… Jena… Jena… He couldn’t be more nervous if he were being chased by starving lions. He walks around the block behind hers, repeating his mantra over and over: Jena, you must know how much I like you… Jena, you’re the nicest and prettiest girl I’ve ever known… Jena, I was thinking maybe we could go on a real date – you know, not as friends… I mean, we’d still be friends but… Jena… Jena… Jena…

  At last he stands on her corner. His palms are sweating. Should he act like it’s just a regular visit, chatting about this and that and making jokes, or should he walk in, say, “Jena, there’s something I have to tell you before anything else.” And just blurt it out? Maybe he should have brought her flowers. Even one flower. A rose. He should have brought her a rose. A red rose. She would have been pleased, but surprised. “What’s this for?” she would have asked. And then he could have told her. “The red rose means love.” Does it? He thinks so. It means something. He has no idea. He takes a deep breath and marches up her front path. We who may be about to die or at least terminally humiliate ourselves salute you.