Chapter 66: Choosing to Decide

Wednesday, December 21, 1983

Jas and Paige both took the day off, sending sick notes with us. In 1983, sick notes were still magic. All it took was a parent’s signature and you got credit for the day, no questions asked. That was so not the case when my kids were in school, sadly.

This morning, Jess gave me a little nod when we arrived. I gave her a little nod back. I had no idea when we’d get together, but I could just hang out at school until I found out.

We both wound up in Drama, where Jess slipped me a note reading ‘Benches, 2pm’. I could meet her there.

Amusingly, if I’d ever been slipped another note in high school, I couldn’t remember it. Perhaps Candice had? If so, it was lost to me now.

We left around one. Angie wanted me to drop her at Paige’s, but I told her it was a much better idea to take her own car rather than potentially be stuck with Ted. I had a feeling she was considering just going after him, but she wound up agreeing that discretion was the better part of valor.

At least, I think she did. I might find out differently by tonight.

Jess showed up right on time, as expected. We hugged, and then she said, “Lunch?”

“Where?” I said.

“Um...” she said, then looked around. “Rico’s, maybe?”

“Works for me.”

We walked to my car. She was quiet for the short drive, and just ordered one taco when we got there. That was unusual. Jess was tiny, but she burned one hell of a lot of calories, and one taco wasn’t going to do it.

We were the only customers, so it wasn’t hard to find a table, nor to ensure privacy.

Jess said, “I wanted to get some advice. The problem is...”

She stopped, then sighed.

“The problem is,” she continued, “that I’m going to turn back into old Jess here for a bit. The onion with all of the layers still on. I can’t even tell you what I need advice about. Well, I could, but I know you, and I can’t.”

“That’s as clear as mud,” I said.

She chuckled softly. “Yeah, I know. I promise you’ll get the whole story in January.”

She blushed a little, then added. “I ninety-percent promise you will. Stuff could happen.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Stuff can always happen.”

“It has a way of doing that.”

Our tacos came up. I went to fetch them, then sat down. Jess went ahead and opened the foil on hers, so I opened one of mine, and we both ate.

When she’d finished, she said, “Here’s what I’m going to say.”

I nodded.

“Suppose I know someone who’s having a rough time of things. Life will get a lot better when she graduates, but her home life sucks. You know people like that.”

I nodded again. Of course I did.

“She can hold out until graduation, or she says she can. At the same time, things could blow up on any day at all, and then ... then she’ll be wrong.”

I kept nodding, and gave Jess’s hand a squeeze.

She sighed, then said, “If ... if I do something, she may not forgive me, and I may really blow things up. Really. I could make things a whole lot worse.”

“And you need to know if you should act or wait?”

“Yeah,” she said, then shook her head. “No, that’s not true. I know I should act. I’m just being a chicken.”

“There’s nothing wrong with thinking everything through as much as you can.”

“Yes...” she said, then chuckled softly. “Yes, there really is. ‘If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice,’ right? If I keep thinking everything through, I won’t make a choice, which is a choice.”

“True.”

“I know I should act. I know that. But I might really, really fuck things up. Not for me, though. I’ll come out smelling like roses. If anyone besides you and me ever knows what I did, they’ll thank me, but most likely, no one will know. Except the people in question, and they ... they’ll ... I’m not the one that’ll get dragged into the mud.”

She was blushing a bit when she said that, and I thought she probably didn’t know it. That meant one of her layers wasn’t doing its job. It also meant that some part of that was more complicated than she was letting on.

“Taking a wild guess,” I said, which got a little smile from Jess, “I’d say that you know someone who’s doing something bad, which is screwing up the other person you mentioned. Telling stops the something bad, but that means the person who’s doing it has problems, and those problems will hit everyone else around them.”

“Bingo.”

“And this is a big something bad.”

“I think so,” she said, nodding.

“I think all I can say is that, if you know you should act, act. You can’t be responsible for what other people do. If you see something really wrong and you let it go, you’ll kick yourself. You’ll kick yourself even if you couldn’t have done anything about it, once in a while,” I said.

I was thinking about a bunch of dead Marines in Lebanon. I’d been too late to even try, then. How many more times? Could I stand by and watch 9/11 repeat? Or hundreds of smaller tragedies?

She blinked, likely seeing the turmoil in my own thoughts but having no way to relate them to what she knew of me. I could hardly explain it, either. My layers were doing no better than hers.

After a brief hesitation, she said, “That’s it, then. I’ll do what I think I need to do.”

“Jess?”

“Yeah?”

“You know that I’ll be there for you, however things go. Angie, Jas, and Paige, too. Even if you’re right and no one knows but us, it sounds like you’ll need support, and we’ll be there.”

She sighed deeply. “That matters a lot. I think the real old Jess, the one with all of the layers undisturbed, she probably would have made herself wait. I can make a really good case for waiting. If things went wrong in between, I could let myself off the hook, or bury the regret nice and deep. It’s gotten hard to do that now.”

“We’ll be there.”

“Good,” she said, then blinked. “Wait. I’m still hungry.”

I passed her a taco. “It’s an extra. I bought a spare. I know you.”

She smiled a bit, though it was still muted. “Not many people know how much I actually eat.”

“Our secret.”

“We have a lot of those.”

“We do.”

“And yet, they’re staying kept and neither of us is dead,” she said, grinning just a bit more.

“They deserve to be kept.”

“Some secrets don’t. Some have to be betrayed, even though you really don’t want to.”

I nodded. “Ours don’t hurt people.”

“Thanks. Really, Steve, thanks! That means a lot. I still ... sometimes I still wonder if I’m lying to myself first, and everyone else, when I think I’m a benevolent dictator who’s using her power well.”

“In my opinion, the real problems set in when you stop worrying about things like that.”

She smiled. “Thanks, again.”

She tore into the second taco and it was gone quickly.

“I needed this. I’d have chosen not to decide, otherwise.”

“Glad to help, as always.”

“I think you’re the first person ... well, kid ... in years that’s just been glad to help and not wanted something from me,” she said.

“That’s a really complicated thing,” I said, smiling. “There’s wanting, and then there’s wanting at someone else’s expense. There’s also ... well ... it’s not like I haven’t benefited considerably from being your friend. I’d have had no idea how to handle the press if you hadn’t dragged me across the school gossip mill a few times.”

She’d blushed a bit at the start of that, but by the end she was chuckling. “That was fun. Still, I stand by what I said. You just helped. You really didn’t have an agenda.”

“I had an agenda. My agenda was to make a cool, interesting friend. You can never have too many friends.”

“Then you succeeded,” she said, smiling. “Overachieved, even!”

“At the risk of an ego explosion, that seems to be the story of my life.”

She chuckled again.

“We should go back. I hate to eat and run, but I have to meet some other people. Nothing to do with this. This’ll take a few weeks to do right. If I don’t do it right, I will get burned, but more importantly, it’ll probably backfire.”