On the Porch
He was the type of kid who sat on his porch step and talked to me about how fickle human beings were. I didn’t know what fickle meant, but I liked it because I thought it sounded like pickle. I had only met him because after we moved, my mom told me that I needed friends and should bring a glass of lemonade over to that boy who always sat next door. I did. He looked up at me, turned back to the road, and said, “You would probably have more fun playing with the other kids.”
He was probably right, he usually was, but I had this need to prove him wrong. So I sat there, and we talked. I ignored the game of tag across the street and told him about Chicago. He ignored his glass of lemonade, but he seemed interested in what I was saying, which was unusual. People had a tendency to push me to the side in the same way that they lazily swatted aside plump flys on a hot summer day. I figured that this was understandable given that I was a seven-year-old who had a tendency to exaggerate things.
When I told him that I missed my dad and the baseball games that we used to go to at Wrigley’s Field, he turned to me and said, “You know Macy, try not to miss it too much. Things are never the same when you go back.”
That didn’t make me feel better, but I appreciated that he tried. I turned my face away from him, but I saw my mom standing in our kitchen window and decided that staying here was better, even if it meant that my mom was responsible for me making my first friend here.
On the first day of school, I learned that Jake was impossibly smart. I supposed fickle was a smart-people word, but some part of me had suspected that he had been making things up. Jake never raised his hand, just kind of sat in the corner. Mrs. Peterson asked him what he was reading, and he told her that it was Don Quixote. She looked doubtful and asked him what he liked about it. He said, “I find the contrast between Don Quixote’s romantic attitude and Sancho Panza’s realism fascinating. It’s a great study of the changing literary trends at the time,” and she mostly left him alone after that.
I liked that he wasn’t stuck up about his intelligence. He kept to himself, but if someone crossed him he would launch into these intense explanations and use vocabulary that was ten times more dignified than how he usually spoke.
On the playground that day, I discovered that I hadn’t really made any friends. I walked over to Jake, who was sitting under that stupid oak tree and reading his book. He took one look at me and set his book to the side, not even bothering to mark the page. We lay on the grass and looked up at the clouds for the rest of recess.
By the time we were in third grade, I sat with Jake on his porch step every day after school. One time my mom told me that I shouldn’t go over there so often, told me that Jake was no good for me. I reminded her that she was the one who had wanted me to meet him. I also told her that Jake was basically a genius, and wasn’t that a good influence? She gave in and the next day she took us bowling.
I remembered her comment’s longer than I probably should have, but I did have a tendency to hold grudges. I saw her catch herself before she brought it up to me again, and I kept going over to that porch step. There was a chip in the concrete, and I would play with the gravel that collected in the divot.
The summer before seventh grade, I realized that Jake didn’t really talk to anyone except for me. I glanced sideways at him, cracked my jaw, and said, “Jake, why did you never play tag or anything? Back before. Actually, why don’t you play sports now, or join any clubs or anything?”
He frowned, studying me in a way that would have made my mother uncomfortable. I found that I liked it. “I don’t know. I never really saw any point in it all. It’s not like anyone ever accomplished anything playing sports.”
This was the first time he had flawed logic, and I reminded him of the salaries that professional athletes earn. He reminded me of concussions.
“But, why don’t you talk to anyone else?”
“Why should I? Are you sick of me?” He wiggled his eyebrows.
“Well no, but…”
My mom called me back home to dinner then, her presence almost constant at the kitchen window these days when I was over at Jake’s house.
Once we entered eighth grade, I realized that I liked him, one of those stupid grade school crushes that manifests itself in sweaty palms and an attempt to seem normal. He was everything that my dad wasn’t, which I figured mom should approve of. Instead, she hovered by that kitchen window, ducking her head and pretending to wash dishes when she caught me watching her. One afternoon she sat me down, drew a deep breath. Her brow was furrowed and she asked, “Does that boy do drugs?”
I felt my eyebrows drawing together but smoothed them out with my thumb, remembering last week when my mom had told me that I needed to control my attitude. Now was not the time to fight her on that. “No mom. Definitely not.”
“But that boy is so pale. And withdrawn too. I read that that can be an effect of drugs, withdrawing. So pale! The circles under his eyes. That’s just not natural, Macy. I swear, watch yourself around that boy.”
“Jake mom. His name is Jake. And you could at least make an effort, have you ever even talked to his parents?”
She shook her head, muttered about how she shouldn't have sent me over there with that glass of lemonade. “It’s not natural to have only one friend, Macy.”
“Mom, I have other friends. Jake is just my closest one.”
She frowned. “Watch yourself, Macy. Don’t do anything rash.”
The next day, I studied him as we sat across each other in the cafeteria. I could see the veins in his neck, blue lines like the rivers on the maps in geography class. I saw the circles under his eyes for the first time, realized that he was paler than almost everybody else in the cafeteria. But that was fine, it was just his skin tone. He had always looked like that. He noticed my gaze, asked, “What’s wrong?”
I shook my head. “Just thinking about all of our homework. When is the math test again?”
He squinted at me. “Tuesday, remember? You told me yesterday.”
I shrugged, “Guess I forgot.”
In tenth grade, he stopped coming to school. He was the only person I knew who didn’t have a cell phone, and I was annoyed that I couldn’t ask him where he was. Every time I tried to call his house, nobody picked up. The porch next door was vacant, and their cars never pulled into the driveway. For all intents and purposes, I may as well have been living next door to a ghost town.
A month after the teachers stopped bothering to call his name, I came home to my mom sitting in the parlor, still. She looked like she was posing for a portrait, with her spine stiff and expression smoothed over into what I recognized as practiced neutrality. “Macy, I told you that the boy is no good for you. His parents just called. They told me that he’s in a correctional facility. He’s recovering from a drug addiction.”
I didn’t bother answering her, just ran up the stairs and locked myself in my room for the weekend. Not so different from my dad after all.
My mom brought me soup, smoothed me hair and fed me crackers. It felt nice, but I hated that she had been right. Mostly, I just wanted him to get better, but I knew that she would hate if I remained close to him. Jake was gentle, but dad had turned into a hurricane when he had a bottle in his hand, had punched a hole straight through the drywall once.
Mom urged me to go outside, to take a walk and get some air. I complied, walking the opposite direction of his house. It didn’t help much, as we had walked through all of these streets at some point. I stopped at the pond near the end of the street, where we used to go swimming. Underneath the willow trees, he had told me that it was okay to be sad. We had played cards and laughed there.
I turned around when it started to rain. At the driveway, I picked up the newspaper to keep it from getting soggy. The plastic wrapping clung to the paper, and I almost dropped it when I saw his face right there, the main heading. There were tubes and wires encasing him, and his eyes were closed. ‘Local Teen Struggles with Heart Failure, Gets Heart Transplant’
I ran inside, thrust the paper at my mom. I felt the blood pulsing behind my ears, giving me a headache. She shuddered, looking up at me. “Macy..."
"Mom. They called you. Did you know, Mom?"
"I didn’t want you to get hurt honey.”
“No mom. You don’t get to decide that. Just no. Take me there. Take me to the hospital.”
She nodded, got her keys out of the crumbling dish that I had painted for her in second grade.
He smiled when he saw me. Jake. The machines kept an undulating rhythm, beeping, mocking me. I cringed when I saw the scar across his chest I tried not to think about how they had sliced him open, pried his ribs apart in order to transplant someone else’s life inside of him. He was still Jake, though. His heart was still his own in the way that mattered. I fell into the green vinyl chair at his bedside. “Why didn’t tell me? Why did you never tell me?”
“I didn’t want you to treat me any different I guess. I never meant to get close to anyone, but you forced your way into my life with your persistence and that glass of lemonade.”
I shook my head. “Tell me. You’re supposed to tell me things. You could have,” my fingers wrinkled the cotton of my t-shirt, “oh God.”
His thumb smoothed over my free hand, the one that was clutching the side of his bed. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I just didn’t want to be different.”
“But you are different. You’re Jake, and I can’t…”
He looked pale again, more like the Jake that I had grown up with. Now that I knew, the image was toxic, the venom of a snake seeping into my veins.
“It’s… It will be okay. Just let me be there for you, yeah?”
“Macy. You are.”
“No. Let me be there.”
He nodded, and my first kiss was in a hospital. With machines telling me that he was alive and that he was okay and that he was not my father. Antiseptic and purity and what he had tried to avoid in order to be stupid and noble and like Don Quixote. Everything that I should have known but didn’t. Everything that everyone had better tell me from now on.