Where u?
I text Jen from the lonely beach house, Saturday night, the last weekend of the summer and she’s not responding. I give her five minutes and then text again.
I glance at the clock. It is close to midnight now and she’s been gone all day. Ivy and my parents are sleeping, but I sit fidgeting on the couch, trying and not succeeding to watch a DVD I rented last week and forgot to return.
I text Shane.
Five, six minutes, no response, so I try Joe as a last resort.
Silence. I groan with frustration and open the contacts menu on my phone, the clunky buttons clicking furiously as I scroll to Jen’s number. I can’t believe she’s reduced me to this; to calling her like some relic of the 1990s. I jam the phone up to my ear and listen to the dial tone, leg shaking, teeth worrying at my lip.
And the call is dropped.
“What the fuck?” I mutter in outrage and navigate to Shane’s number. Hey, man. I imagine myself saying as it rings. I know it’s so weird to call you but I was wondering if you’re with Jen. See I’m just stressed about it in case she’s gone to Joe’s weird brother’s house again. Last time things got a bit weird and I wanted to make sure that-
Shane rejects my call.
This time I spring up from the couch and start pacing the room, circling around the coffee table, from the bathroom door to the stairs.
Phoning Jen. Call rejected.
Phoning Jen. Call rejected.
Now I'm panicking. I’m imagining her passed out at some heinous house party in a pile of broken glass and blue absinthe. Actually, she’s dead. She’s died and it’s all because of me. Or there’s a creepy guy, maybe-
“Hello?” Her voice finally comes over the line and I almost fall to my knees with relief.
“Oh my God, Jen!” I cry, only then realising how insane I sound. She, however, sounds pissed off. “Why did you ring me like seven times?”
“You weren’t picking up.”
“I’m busy, we were watching a film.”
“What? Where?”
She hesitates.
“With who?”
“Um,”
“Jenny!”
She lets out a hassled sigh, “Look, Jude-”
“Are you three hanging out without me?” If my entire family wasn’t asleep I would be yelling, but they are, so I am hissing into the receiver, incensed. How could they do this to me? “Wait, you’re planning a surprise party, right? Something I can’t know about, isn’t that it? My birthday is in November though, you’re a few months early but I appreciate the thought, really. So kind.”
“C’mon, Jude.”
“Where are you?”
“Well, I went outside to take your call…” She says vaguely, and I hear the chirping of grasshoppers in the background, nothing specific enough to give her location away.
“You’re at Joe’s caravan.” I surmise.
“No.”
“Shane’s?”
“Here, look, I-”
“You’re at Shanes! Aha! I caught you out, you little sneak!” And I grin triumphantly until I remember that I am offended, actually, and what they’ve done is hurtful. Sorrow takes hold of my heart, “Wait, why are you hanging out without me though? Why are you hiding this from me?”
There’s a few seconds of silence on the line, and I'm only certain she is still there because I hear Joe’s distinct laugh muffled somewhere in the distant background, “I’m sure you kind of know why,” she says eventually, “you know, with it being Shane’s place and all, it’d just be a bit awkward.”
“Awkward? How?”
“You should probably sort this out between the two of you but-”
“This is about Clóda.”
“Clóda? Um, no, it’s not about that, that’s not what he said anyway.”
If I keep interrogating her I’ll get answers, because Jen is easy. She’s about as good at keeping secrets as a tabloid journalist and she never keeps things from me, at least not for long and I can sense the cracks forming, perfect for sticking my prying fingers into. “Oh?” I say, “Well if it’s not about her then what is it?”
“Really? You can’t think of anything else?”
“No, seriously! Just tell me.”
“I think you should talk to him.”
“What? No, you tell me-”
“It's none of my business!”
“Jen!”
She hangs up.
I curse and stare down at my phone for several long moments, my heart is pumping in my chest. What the hell? I open up a message to Shane and type frantically.
I delete it. Asking him to meet me somewhere implies that I want to fight him, which I decidedly do not want, because he’d pummel the absolute shit out of me and walk away with half my front teeth lodged in his knuckles.
As though possessing some telepathic connection with me, Jen sends me a text.
I slump onto the sofa and stare vacantly at the TV screen and think about all of the things that I have ever done wrong in my life. The time I went to a theme park and shot repeated water cannons at that couple until their inflatable boat capsized. The time I broke my wrist while riding a wheelchair down the travelator in Tesco and got banned for life. The time I drew a giant dick with weed killer on the lawn of the catholic girls school near my house, and so many more things. Smashing flower pots, throwing stones, accidentally breaking vending machines, but I never did anything to intentionally hurt my friends, not really, not maliciously. Everything I’ve ever done has been in the pursuit of entertainment, something funny, something memorable, something to beat back the boredom like encroaching nettles that will sting and blister my ankles.
Yet it’s not really a voice of reason I can hear in my head now, it’s my fathers, a disembodied head floating by my ear.
“Why do you act like this?” He scolds, “you’re not a child anymore, we shouldn’t have to deal with this kind of behaviour. Can’t you just sit still? Can’t you just be calm? See this is it, this is how you are, you don’t think before you act. You know, other parents don’t have kids like this. Other parents have kids that do as they’re told, who don’t cause trouble, who don’t get phone calls from the school reporting of yet another problem, another detention, and you’re-”
I jump as my phone springs to life on the cushion beside me, buzzing obnoxiously and hopping toward the edge of the seat. I’m certain it’s Jen again, so I snatch it up in a fury.
“Look, Jen, you were right, it’s not a good time to talk. I actually think I just want to be on my own and…” I trail off when I realise it is not her on the line. It’s someone else, maybe someones. All that I can hear is giggling.
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