california never felt like home.

August "Gus" Jackson. ❝ If you sat around there long enough and heard all the phonies applauding and all, you got to hate everybody in the world, I swear you did. ❞

[st-pitch-blease]

[annielions-blog]

“that’s it,” annie assured. “i’ll be fine.” she knew she had to turn to get to the stairs that took her out of the athletic area, but turning to face the boys again wasn’t really something she was, or would ever be ready to do. so, she stalled. “so, uh..what are you playing?”

[augustjackson-blog]

“I don’t play anything,” Gus said, matter-of-fact. “It’s track and field, it’s all times.” Coach did not seem to be anywhere near a resolution, so Gus tacked on another sentence just to fill the downtime. “I used to play football.”

[jackievonnegut-blog]

          “Oh. Well, you don’t have to quiz me.” Jackie shrugged, dropping her hand from his and holding it out for the cards instead. “I can do it myself.”

[augustjackson-blog]

He hesitated, then surrendered them to her, leaning back. “They’re your cards,” Gus said. “You could try me.”

[jackievonnegut-blog]

          “Are you criticizing my handwriting?” Jackie asked, a little more comfortable now that he’d at least attempted to banter with her. She reached out a hand to keep his steady so she could read the card, squinting at the mess of loops. “Checks and Balances which are constitutional grants of power that enable each of the branches to check some acts of the others so that no one can dominate.”

[augustjackson-blog]

He hadn’t noticed how hard his heart was beating until he could compare it to the stillness of her hand. Was that slight thudding in his fingers really just his pulse? 

“No, it’s beautiful,” Gus said, correcting himself before he could correct the correction. “I just can’t understand it very well.” 

[annielions-blog]

“oh, yeah, must be all the….wind today,” annie said feebly, not even sure if there had been wind at all. “i’ll be okay though,” she assured, exhaling deeply through her nose through all the sniffles. “just gonna, uh, take some benadryl when i get home, or something.”

[augustjackson-blog]

His head turned automatically to wherever he thought he’d feel the wind best. “Okay,” Gus said, and then because mild disbelief was almost second nature to him at this point, even when unwarranted, he added, “If that’s it, you’ll be fine.”

[annielions-blog]

“oh,” annie said, getting the unmistakable feeling that she’d pried. but, gus wasn’t crash. he wasn’t going to push her out of his room and slam the door in her face. he was answering her questions, which was a nice change. “did they change because you wanted them to?”

[augustjackson-blog]

“No,” Gus said. It was like exhaling, letting go of an answer he’d been holding onto for a long, long time. No one had ever bothered to ask him the question. His general adaptability had been something even he’d taken for granted. Proof of something about his character, something he’d always let himself believe. It turned out that he’d just always been able to reach out and steady himself on the same support, over and over, and even when he knew he didn’t have it anymore, he still found himself reaching for it on occasion. He felt like he owed Annie a little more of an explanation than that; he wasn’t going to make her dig for it, he wasn’t going to hide it like a coward. “It just happened. It’s not a great story, but the short version is that my dad isn’t with us anymore. You know he was in the military, right?”

[jackievonnegut-blog]

          “Very?!” Jackie gasped, though it wasn’t as sharp as it could’ve been, considering she was overall operating at less than full capacity. So it was a soft gasp, fittingly so, considering they were in the  l i b r a r y. She caught the smile he tried to hide and it made hers wider.

[augustjackson-blog]

The lingering, vague mix of guilt and uncertainty, was not gone, exactly, but for the moment, it was shoved firmly to the side. For now, a smile was enough to do a lot of things he’d never consider, not seriously. 

“Don’t get too excited,” Gus warned. It sounded grave, like a real warning, a reprimand against pride and not, for example, a light-hearted quip.  Gus had never been able to quip. He cleared his throat, like that was going to dislodge a snappy rejoinder of any description.  “We’ve got the whole deck to go.”

It still didn’t sound right. School, school, school. “Uh--hold on--” He held out the top flashcard on the deck for her to see. “I can’t read this.”

[jackievonnegut-blog]

          “Annie Never Picks Vodka,” Jackie mumbled. “Appoint, negotiate, pardon, veto,” she rattled off, tapping a finger to her lips for each item in the list. “Federal agents and judges, foreign treaties, criminals for … crimes, proposals of laws,” she added, elaborating before Tutor Mode Gus could. “Good?”

[augustjackson-blog]

His new iron-clad hold was on anything not school. “Yeah,” he said. Gus looked up at her, flipping to the next card blind. He rubbed the nape of his neck, turning to hide, more or less, a small, involuntary kind of grin. He knew what she was trying to beat, darting ahead with the answer before he could get instructive. 

“Very good,” he admitted.

[jackievonnegut-blog]

          That was … painless. Was he alleviating the pressure of discussion because he could tell how exhausted she was? What did that mean? Knowing him, it almost seemed like a bad sign, but she knew it wasn’t. She sat up a little, propped up against the bookshelf instead of being held up by it (and told herself there was a  d i f f e r e n c e  between the two positions.) “… review the actions of the executive and legislative branches.” Her eyelids were still heavy, but she kept them open enough to look at him, smiling at the fact that he’d conceded to her, even if she wasn’t entirely sure of his rationale behind doing so.

[augustjackson-blog]

He’d slipped. He’d done something antithetical to his own principles. No, not really, he’d just let go of something; lifted just the last finger and let up on the constant, steely grip he kept on his standards. He’d judged them ineffective, unsuitable, deleterious. No, he’d just compromised on something. Not a big deal. Compromise wasn’t terrible. No, he’d let something lapse, again, to possibly serious consequences. He’d failed her, in a way. No, she was smiling. Things could not possibly be so bad. No, a smile from a girl was not a good enough reason to do anything. Aha, yes, yes, it was. Empirically, it was. 

“Right, a statute can be judged unlawful or invalid. Same for executive decisions, stuff like that,” Gus said, a little of the constant tutor in him coming out, a little of the competitive show-off. Somehow, he managed to make himself sound more or less normal. This was what he was going to do, from now till graduation. He flipped to the next card. “Executive branch has what powers?”

[jackievonnegut-blog]

          “Yeah.” Jackie leaned her head against the bookshelf. The effort of speaking so many words at once had drained her of the shot of energy she’d gotten when Gus came. She was weighed down, again, in her head, her eyelids, her shoulders. She rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand. “I think that’s–” it was only three letters, but that felt like a lot. “something else.”

[augustjackson-blog]

“Yeah, I guess it is,” Gus said. She seemed to sink under that line of inquiry. He’d crushed her with only a few simple questions. Ordinarily, he’d never feel guilty about that kind of thing; she ought to have an answer. Some reasoning, to be presented and summarily picked apart. It’d probably wreck her. He would not be able to stop himself. Demonstrably, he was n e v e r able to stop himself.

He tried to divine the ethical true north of this conversation--or, really, any conversation he’d had with Jackie since that one party, that one night in someone’s upstairs bedroom--and discovered, like a man looking up from his intense examination of the ground, that he was utterly lost in a landscape he thought he had known well. 

He coughed. Gus held up the first card, and read from it. There was only ever one safe topic. “Um--a judicial review is the ability of the court to ... ?” 

[jackievonnegut-blog]

         “Like …” Jackie dragged her knees to her chest and rested her chin on them, clamping her mouth shut. Things you don’t want to hear about. “I don’t know, everything. When I can’t sleep, it’s ‘cause I’m thinking about everything, all at once. Like I’m literally on 5 hour energy, except … I’m not. You ever feel like that?”

[augustjackson-blog]

He was reduced to fiddling with the cardboard edges. “Well .. sort of,” he said, slowly, and only after a long, qualifying pause. “Not everything. For me, it’s one thing, over and over. And I can’t sleep until it’s, like ... resolved in some way.”

Gus flipped through the edges, again and again. “Maybe that’s completely different.’

[jackievonnegut-blog]

          “Um,” Jackie stalled, waiting for his evaluation of her work before saying anything further. She beamed at his approval. “Thanks.” She returned to the question at hand, wracking her brain for a way to tell him without lying to him, but without telling him the full truth: that she was  c r a z y. “I had a lot on my mind.” No matter that none of it had been on her mind until last night, when the episode began. “And I think Dean put 5 hour energy in my drink again.”

[augustjackson-blog]

He made up his mind to ask before the window of opportunity closed. It was direct and to the point. He told himself that he was prepared for just about any answer. “Like what?” Gus kept shuffling the cards as if he were about to read off the text from one.

[jackievonnegut-blog]

          Jackie grinned when he agreed, though the triumphant feeling of dragging him down (literally) was quickly replaced by nerves when he accepted the cards. She watched him look through them with her thumbnail between her teeth, eyes flicking back and forth between him and the cards. It was a silly thing to be nervous about, flashcards, but she always found herself second guessing her work – no matter how insignificant – when someone else looked at it. And it was even worse with Gus, of course, who wouldn’t hesitate to point out an error.           “The entire semester, yeah,” Jackie answered, leaning over to look at the cards, too, as if they could’ve changed since changing hands. “I was just gonna do the chapter, but I couldn’t sleep so, I color-coded and everything.”

[augustjackson-blog]

“Why couldn’t you sleep?” Gus asked, suddenly and instinctively. He knew why he couldn’t sleep--in fact, he knew several whys, none of them all that great--and while he knew that, rationally, this was just projection of some variety, he’d gotten in the habit of worrying in a bad way. It made him both fiercely protective and slightly paranoid, which J.J. usually found annoying and he, to his grim dismay, usually found to be justified. 

When he looked at her face for clues, he happened to catch her looking at him. His ribs seemed to squeeze a little tighter around his lungs. “It’s good work, though,” he said, flipping through the cards again. “Well laid out.”

[jackievonnegut-blog]

          Jackie nodded. Her eyes fell from his face to his feet when he shifted. He was hard to read, but it was enough to know there was something to read; that there was something going on behind his words, his head was always somewhere else. The distraction was distracted. “In that case,” she twisted slightly to open her discarded backpack (which, in hindsight, would’ve made a better pillow), pulling out a stack of index cards bound by a rubber band. “Quiz me?”

[augustjackson-blog]

Gus eyed the library carpet, which he trusted about as much as he did the carpet of any public institution, but he shifted his backpack off his shoulder and sank down to his knees beside her. The library was seeing little traffic, anyway. They wouldn’t necessarily be in anyone’s way, and he really did intend on reviewing his notes. He took the rubber banded index cards from her before really being sure she was offering them to him, and undid the band. 

“Okay,” he said, agreeing long after the fact. “Sounds good.”

They were more or less obscured back here by the shelving in a strange pseudo-privacy that triggered both a tremulous, nervous giddy thumping in his chest, and the subsequent bloom of an irritable fatalism in almost the exact same place. Gus sat, cross-legged now, conscious that at this particular moment he really had no interest at all in gov’t, exam or no exam, Dean or no Dean. School was a safe topic; it was what they were supposed to be doing, anyway, and he hadn’t managed to offend or distress her with it yet. Two attempts to deviate had done nothing but that. 

Gus flicked through the cards instinctively to get a sense of their composition--and also to come up with something to say that might possibly break his losing streak. Nothing. Failure rankled. He was getting sick of his own bullshit. “Do these cover just the chapter or the entire semester?” he asked, trying to stay in the present.

[jackievonnegut-blog]

           Jackie was a little disappointed when her actions did not illicit the response she’d been looking for, but only a little, because this was Gus. She knew not to have high expectations. Still, his presence was a welcome distraction (no doubt the last word anyone else would use to describe Gus). “Government – like, normal government,” she was quick to clarify. “which, you should be studying for too, shouldn’t you?”

[augustjackson-blog]

“It’s on the docket,” Gus said, shifting from foot to foot. That was true--he meant to review his notes, finish out the chapter after tutoring, and scribble down some bulleted points for what he was pretty sure would be the next classroom-stopping argument with Dean--but it was ‘scheduled’ so to speak, for later. “My four o’clock didn’t show, so. I guess it gets moved up a little.”

[jackievonnegut-blog]

           “Good question – I mean, yes.” Jackie sat up at his voice. He might as well have been the librarian. No, he was worse than the librarian. Well, him finding her was worse, anyway. At least she and the librarian had an understanding of sorts. She picked up her book, holding it up in case he hadn’t seen it on the floor. “I’m studying.” She grinned, raising her eyebrows as if this should be impressive to him.

[augustjackson-blog]

It was the sort of display that prompted praise, which Gus only dispensed when the situation warranted--he believed, firmly, that you didn’t get points for merely doing what you were supposed to do. Studying in the library was pretty much what he expected of any student, anywhere. That did not move a conversation forward, which was what he’d been tentatively pushing forward with Jackie. The reality was turning out to be that the only topic that did not invite catastrophe was school. “What are you studying?” 

[jackievonnegut-blog]

          The school library was good for one thing:  s t u d y i n g. That was what Jackie had come here to do. It was just, she didn’t always end up doing the things she set out to do. In this case, a valiant effort had been made. She’d brought her work to the library, found an empty aisle, and cracked a book. Her mistake was letting herself lie down while she read it – and letting herself fall asleep on it. Luckily, she’d only been out a few minutes (and therefore, had not yet entered deep sleep) by the time someone happened upon her aisle. The sound of footsteps was enough to wake her, propping herself up on her elbow enough to look aliveish, expecting the librarian (who’d caught her in compromising positions before.) “I’m awake, I’m awake.”

[augustjackson-blog]

Everyone got about five minutes grace. That was the standard across the board. On minute six, he packed up and left--if the student in question didn’t care to show up or send, at the very least, an unconvincing excuse via text, he couldn’t be bothered to stay. Fair was fair. Rules were rules. When this particular sophomore failed to make an appearance, he shoved the text book back into his backpack and cut through a few empty aisles, unthinking, on his way to the exit, turning down just the right row to encounter the current, uncomfortable exception. Her head had been down, which disappointed him a little--Gus wanted to think that he could pick her out by just from a glimpse or a silhouette, but in the moment, Jackie had just been another dozing kid in the library.

“Are you alright?” Gus asked, more out of reaction than genuine concern.