The Tragedy of Loving Jamie Clarke (5 page)

Ding dong.

Oh no, Jamie is here! Crap, crap, crap! I can’t do this! No, this is too much. Help!

-6-

Ding dong. Ding dong.

Okay that’s twice in a row. Crap!

I turn the triangle knob that my mother bought at a garage sale last week until the door clicks open.

“Hey April,” Jamie says with a wide grin. “I was beginning to think you were ignoring me until I got the hint and left.”

Caught!

“I know I’m sorry I was listening to music and didn't hear the doorbell” I lie.

“You look beautiful.” Jamie is looking at me like I’m a shiny dessert waiting for him to devour.

I wonder if this is how cannibals look at their meals before chopping them up and throwing them into a stew. Cannibalism, seriously this is what I am thinking about?
I am so glad mind reading isn’t actually a thing. I wish I could say that he is the only one looking like he wants to devour the other but he’s not. Why does he have to be so damn good looking? It is making it difficult for me to pretend like I’m not excited to see him.

“Thank you,” I reply grabbing my purse off the coat rack that Grammy gave us for Christmas some years ago. “Shall we head out?”

“You mean you’re not going to invite me in to meet your parents? Are you that embarrassed by me?” Jamie is clearly teasing me but the thought of him meeting my parents makes me queasy.

I picture him walking into the living room and seeing the framed Yin-Yang poster hanging above the fireplace, the torn and stained pink couch and enough old furniture that makes it look like an antique store threw up, and him running outside screaming, “April’s a freak! April’s a freak!” And if that wouldn’t already send him running I am sure that my parents and their “we’re cool people,” act would. He’d walk in and my dad would quiz him on the latest baseball trivia, a hobby dad has taken up recently, and who knows if Jamie is even into baseball. Then, mom, of course, would break out the old family photo albums and show Jamie all of my most embarrassing pictures including the one of me from my fifth birthday where I decided it would be best celebrated completely naked. It would be the nail that seals my fate and I would forever be known as the girl who stripped when she was five.

“They’re not home” I reply throwing my purse over my shoulder and joining Jamie on the front stoop.

Jamie shrugs and nods for me to step outside. We make our way down the driveway and onto the sidewalk in front of my property.

“So, Ms. Tour Guide, where to first?” Jamie asks.

This is unbelievable! He asked me to show him around Perkins Harbor but I was too busy freaking out about whether this is a date or not and didn’t think to make a plan. I can take him to Gourmet Coffee and show him the one place most of our peers hang out at night, but then we run the risk of running into half of our junior class, including Liza, and I have no desire to do that. I already know what would happen if we ran into her; Jamie would be seduced by her and he’d forget about me and it won’t matter that she has a boyfriend because it never does. There’s always Flower Cave, we can grab their famous lobster rolls and run less of a risk of seeing our classmates. Or I can play it safe and take him to The Cove. There’s no way we’ll run into our classmates there, not at this hour anyway.

Once Amber and I walked to The Cove after 7 o’clock p.m. just to see what life was like there at that hour and ran into a few of our teachers who paraded us around like trophies. When our classmates found out we had been hanging out with our teachers they made fun of us for weeks. To this day, Amber swears she has nightmares about it and if she knew I was considering it she’d kill me. But at least in The Cove I’m safe from the prying eyes of my classmates and worse yet, Charlie, who still hasn’t moved on from “us.”

                     “Have you been to The Cove yet?” I ask as I begin walking down the block toward the Ocean Walk, a man-made pathway that parallels the ocean providing pedestrians a breathtaking walk into the cove.

                     “Can’t say that I have,” Jamie replies. “The most I’ve seen of this town so far is the high school, the ocean and a Trolley stop with a red trolley named, Hally. It was a pretty exciting day.”

                     “Oh well then you haven’t seen anything yet. We also have Cally, Ally and Sally.”

Jamie’s face lights up. I know it’s all an act; no one is ever excited about the fact that we have more than one Trolley unless they’re tourists. During the summer months Perkins Harbor is a hot tourist spot, especially for Canadians. Tourists swarm both The Cove and the main part of town looking to soak up the sun and take in the beach breeze while doing some shopping. It’s during the summer months that my parents work the most. The Anchor has become the most sought after resort in Perkins Harbor and usually both my parents and Amber’s parent’s work double hours. Mom, Mrs. Hills and Mrs. Claven work the front desk as reservation managers while dad and Mr. Hills work as hotel managers and Mr. Claven manages the pool staff.

“So tell me about yourself, April Marks,” Jamie says as we approach the entrance of the Ocean Walk.

I fold my hands in front of me afraid that if I leave them at my sides Jamie will think I’m trying to hold his hand. I thought I would have relaxed a little by now but I am still so nervous that at any moment my breakfast is going to come up.

“There’s not much to tell. I’m pretty basically
what you see is what you get
,” I say tugging at the bars to center the brace again. Normally my mother helps me get it on but since they were gone by the time I got out of the shower, I had to do it myself and couldn’t get the straps tight enough to keep the brace from sliding.

“Okay well if you won’t tell me something I am going to be forced to draw my own conclusion about who you are,” Jamie says crooking his lips in a way that it makes me stumble off the path and hug against a rose bush. “Wow it’s only our first date and I’ve already
knocked you off
of your feet. I must be doing something right.”

He pulls me up and as I
brush the
dirt and bristles of the bush off my dress I am feeling even more nauseous than ever. I must have looked like a crippled turkey when I fell. All I want to do is turn around and go home and curl up under my covers till the end of time. I am so busy thinking about being buried alive by my shame that it takes me a minute or two to notice that even though I’m vertical again Jamie is still holding my hand. He is staring at me with those blue eyes and his lips look like they’ve been designed for kissing and before I know it we’re engaged in another stare-off. I have a thousand thoughts running through my mind but the one that plays over the most is the image of him leaning in to kiss me and me throwing up on him. I see his face full of disgust as he wipes the contents of my breakfast out of his eyes and it makes my knees quiver. I pull my hands back and pretend that I have an itch on my neck.

“Shall we?” I say taking a step forward hoping that he’ll forget the awkwardness of my movements in the last few minutes.

“Okay, so before I give you my conclusion as to who I think you are, can you at least tell me about some of these hobbies of yours,” he asks.

“They’re really nothing special,” I reply as I maneuver around a group of pedestrians that separate us as they pass by. “I like to write and I do a lot of reading. Nothing too exciting. I’m no Hemingway that’s for sure.”
             
The sun is beginning to settle beneath the horizon with a mixture of red and orange that blinks off the water as the waves crash along the shore. It’s the perfect setting for some romantic movie where the two protagonists realize they’ve been in love for years. They would stand along the ocean shore and kiss as the waves crash around them and the whole world would stop to give them a moment of bliss. But in those movies bumbling idiots like myself who fall into bushes and envision throwing up on their dates don’t exist. Only
I
am capable of such ridiculous things.

“What type of writing do you do?”

“Creative. Poetry and prose. I guess. The truth is I haven’t written a poem since I was eight and that poem was entitled,
Snowy shoe foot
. Clearly it wasn’t one of my best. ”

“That’s so cool,” Jamie says gleefully. “I must know more about this Snowy shoe foot.”

“Oh no, that was the first poem I ever wrote and it was awful. I don’t even remember how it begins and that’s probably for the best.”

“Okay well, have you published anything?”

“Yeah right,” I don’t mean to laugh at him but getting published isn’t something someone like me will be able to accomplish. “No way any publisher is going to take me seriously.”

“You never know. If it’s something you really want to do then I think if you buckle down and push yourself you can do anything. Life’s too short to doubt yourself when you find something you truly love.” Amber and my parents have said pretty much the same thing to me but coming from Jamie it just sounds more convincing.  “What’s your book about?”

I shake my head. Writing oneself into a story and as a superhero with powers of invisibility is kind of obnoxious and I don’t want Jamie to think I’m conceited.

“I’d rather not say.”

“Okay,” Jamie sings. “Does it have a lot of vampires and werewolves?”

“Why do guys think that all girls are into vampires?”

Full disclosure, Amber and I saw Twilight four times when it was in theaters but, since everyone who admitted to liking it were ridiculed for it, we decided to play it cool and pretend we hated the whole vampire/werewolf concept.

“One word, Robert Pattinson.”

I stick my finger down my throat, pretending to be disgusted. “Sorry, but I prefer my vampires without glitter.” I reply, walking around a family dressed like they’re heading for the theater. “Besides, vampire books aren’t marketable anymore. I want to write something that going to spark an interest with an agent not something they’ve seen a thousand times before.”

“Well, I bet whatever you’re working on is going to be fantastic.”

I shrug. “It could be, I guess, if I could get passed the first paragraph.”

“I’m sure you’ll get there eventually,” Jamie flashes me a smile and winks. “I always admire people who have the discipline to sit down and really write. I met an author once at a bookstore in Boston and he had these incredible stories about how he got into writing. I’m sure yours are just as fascinating.”

At this I roar with laughter. It’s true, most authors have these great stories about how they got into writing. Not me. I didn’t have some wild epiphany or dream that sparked an idea. When I first starting wearing a brace and saw how I looked I locked myself in my room and read and when that got boring I started jotting ideas down, sort of mindlessly. After a day or two of me staying hold up in my room my parents called Dr. Klein and blamed him for their daughter becoming a recluse.

Dr. Raymond Klein has been my family’s chiropractor for years and I’ve been going to see him for adjustments since I was 8-years-old. My appointments had always been the same, a few twists here, a couple of leg bends there, nothing unusual but when I went to see him for a routine adjustment three summers ago he noticed that my spine was beginning to curve a lot more than a spine is supposed to. So after deliberating and observing me for a few months he sent me to a specialist, Dr. Meresh. After a series of weekly measurements and follow-up X rays Dr. Meresh determined that I had scoliosis and in order to avoid surgery would have to wear a back brace until I stopped growing. It was a devastating blow since I was going to be starting my freshman year of high school in a few months, a time when you’re supposed to start becoming the person you’re going to be the rest of your life. I had been looking forward to high school since I was in the 6th grade but after receiving that news, high school was the last place I wanted to be.

              As upsetting as it was to wear it the original brace was easier to disguise with the right clothing so most of my peers couldn’t tell but with this new brace, well
,
I can’t remember a time when I felt worse than the first time I slid into it and felt the weight of the bars on my shoulders. I tried to hide it with the same clothing I had been wearing with the original brace but it was useless. No matter how many hoodies I wore the bars stuck out like a basketball player in a kindergarten classroom. It took me a full week to go out in public wearing it and going back to school was a major fight in my house but obviously it was one I was ultimately going to lose.

As Jamie and I walk and talk I notice that when we pass little kids some of them point at me and laugh...I feel exposed out here like I am on display for gawking eyes. I see Jamie cringe and glance at me to see how I am handling it. Mist is flying off the ocean splashing our faces as the breeze kicks up a few notches. I don’t remember the Ocean Walk being this long in the past. This must be so embarrassing for him. He is brand new to this town and hasn’t established a rapport with anyone yet and because of me he is going to be known as the freak-groupie. Any chance he has at getting in with the popular crowd is destroyed now that he’s been seen with me. I knew this was a bad idea. My life was ruined the minute I was diagnosed and now I’ve taken Jamie down with me.

“Does it hurt?” Jamie nods at the part of the brace he can see.