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Jem graduated from Maycomb County High School the spring I finished the eighth grade.
Graduating from there was just about the pinnacle of scholastic achievement that you could achieve in Maycomb in those days. Most kids never made it all the way to high school, and of those that did, still many didn’t graduate, so it was a big accomplishment.
Atticus had expected nothing less from my brother, but even I could tell that he was beaming with pride, even if he didn’t say too much, ‘cause that wasn’t his way. He just kinda patted Jem on the back, not real hard or nothin’, and told him he did a good job. Cal was proud too in her own way and I guess she had reason to be, what with her doin’ a lot of the raising of us.
The ceremony was held on a Friday at the field, another Friday night like those where we used to go and watch Jem play football. He’d never been real good in high school, but he’d always made the team, and cheer him on we did. I’d go home those nights my voices as tired as Jem’s legs probably were.
Cal made sure I wore a dress even though I still hated them with a burning passion at thirteen.
“You’d better wear one,” She told me, stern as stern as she starched it, prim and proper. “Your brother been working every day of his life for this.”
At this point in my life, our relationship had settled into grudging acceptance built on top of fierce devotion, so I just sighed and wore her outfit and my shining shoes. I’d wished Cal could come with a passion, but she’d just shook her head and I was old enough then to understand why, even if I didn’t like it one bit.
The whole ceremony didn’t last long at all on account of there being only a handful of graduates. This was probably a good thing because I spent the entire time fiddling with my dress and shoes, which got me no short of fifteen disguised glares from Aunt Alexandra, who, despite not being wanted by anybody, had decided to come in for the event.
Afterwards, we went back to our house and ate pie Cal had made and Line cake which Miss Maudie brought over. I had a piece of each and they settled full and heavy in my stomach, but it was a good type of full and heavy. Just about everybody there was grinning and talking and smiling and congratulating Jem on his great achievement.
Jem had decided to attend the University of Alabama, the culmination of his childhood football dreams and the dreams of anybody in Maycomb who knew anything about higher education. Even without the slight crick in his arm from that long ago summer, Jem wouldn’t have made the team, so he settled on just going to the school, being in that atmosphere, as he liked to say. I told him that maybe he should consider taking up baton twirling or possibly even cheerleading and he shot me a mad glare and stumbled off to his room.
Jem has never quite recovered from growing up and the dreaded monster that Atticus called puberty. Even at seventeen, he often wondered off suddenly, frown crossing his face, angry over this or that. I often missed our younger days, when disputes were easily solved and forgotten with a good old wrestling match.
In the days after he graduated, Jem took to spending hours in his bedroom, looking over the books he and Atticus had got when they went to Tuscaloosa. They were the types of books you wouldn’t find at any store in Maycomb and probably also the entirety of the county.
Last September, Jem had announced his desire to follow in Atticus’s footsteps and study law, to which Atticus had shook his head.
“Do one year undeclared, then make you decision,” He’d told Jem. “Be sure of what you want.”
Jem had nodded and, like he always did, taken our father’s words under advisement, leading to him having quite an array of different classes scheduled for that fall. Because of that, he had much preparing to contend with that summer and spent most of the time either in his room or hanging out with a girl from town, Louisa, who’s name was much too close to my given one for comfort.
Needless to say, I couldn’t wait for Dill to come.
Dill came two days late, according to my calculations.
He appeared in the middle of the day, having just gotten off the train from Meridian. Dill looked much the same as he always had. His hair was still nearly white and his eyes were still too big for his face. Though it’d appeared that he’d grown since last summer, I had too, leaving him still almost an inch shorter than me, a fact that I pointed out to him almost immediately.
“Aw, shut it, Scout,” He declared, a half petulant, half pouty expression crossing his face.
I shrugged my shoulders and leaned forward to kiss his cheek. “Don’t you worry Dill,” I told him. “You c’n still be my husband.”
Dill flushed at that and kinda looked at the ground, which made me wonder if I’d said something wrong. It’d been agreed upon long ago that we was gonna get married soon as we were old enough. We hadn’t talked about it much when I was ten and eleven, but last summer Dill had kissed me goodbye on the lips and tied a string around my wrist like a promise ring.
That afternoon, I filled Dill in all the happenings he had missed in the months he had been gone: Walter Cunningham had finally made it to the fifth grade but decided to quit school instead of go on, Cecil Jacobs had started dating Mary Thomas from one town over, and Mr. Avery had up and died last winter, which had been relatively cold by Maycomb standards.
In return, a Dill told me about his year in Meridian, which, if I knew Dill, was sure as sure riddled with lies. He had started up high school, where he was the most popular boy in school. As much as I loved Dill to death, I couldn’t begin to imagine that was true and I told him so. After all, it wasn’t like Dill was a football player or particularly handsome, two traits that I noticed correlated with an exponential increase in popularity.
In response, Dill had informed me that next year when I started I was most probably going to get stuffed in a locker.
I punched him in the shoulder for that because, unlike Jem, he still let me, even though he cried out, loud as loud.
The next night, I learned that I had competition for Dill.
He and Jem had been in Jem’s room talking and they’d banished me, closing both the door to the hallway and the door to my room. It made me right mad, because, for one, I was no longer allowed on Calpurnia’s orders to be alone in a room with Dill with the doors all closed and two, they were excluding me.
Cal just shook her head when I came to inform her of the great tragedy. “Sometimes,” She told me as she worked on dinner, “Boys need to be just with other boys.”
She patted my hand gently and suggested I help her and I complied. “But why? Why can’t girls be there?”
“Sometimes the boys need times to talk about girls, if yo’know what I mean.”
I wasn’t exactly sure I did.
When I was done helping Cal knead bread, I decided I’d go up and have a listen through my door, try and see what exactly they were talking about. I crouched by the door that ajoined our rooms, sitting just a bit off to the side so they couldn’t see me through the door.
Jem was talking ‘bout Louisa and how pretty she was and how, Oh God, she’s let him put a hand up her blouse, which he made out to be just about the greatest thing since sliced bread a couple of years ago. The whole scene of my brother, my Jem, doing all that with a girl just about made me want to throw up my lunch right there on my hardwood floor.
Lord, I thought and grasped my knees tight as tight to my chest.
Then, Dill started in about all his conquests with girls and oh boy, did he have a million. If you listened to him, he had a new girlfriend just about every week and they did just about everything but the real thing. Jem ooh and awed and I wondered whatever happened to both of their minds. Maybe they were both turning into mad dogs.
God Almighty, I thought as I laid back on my bed, if even half of what Dill had told Jem was true, then I guess my engagement was in a load of trouble.
Despite all the girl talkin’ he did with Jem, Dill did seem to agree with me on the Louisa front.
Three nights in we both watched from the porch as she came to visit Jem, all dolled up, hair pinned back, light pink dress spotless. She was the type of girl that made me both glad and ashamed I was wearing mended overalls and no shoes. Jem’s whole face lit up like candles at Christmas when he saw her and he rushed out, just about ignoring me and Dill.
Once they were gone and we were both sprawled on the porch boards in the twilight, the June heat finally receding a bit, Dill spoke. “She’s a right menace.”
I nodded severely. “You ain’t wrong about that.” I sighed into the night. “You sure ain’t.”
Dill sighed, but it was a different kinda sigh than mine. It was sadder maybe, or more lonely. I wasn’t sure.
He propped himself up on an elbow. “We should make a plan and t’stop it,” He informed me.
Being that Dill had always been quite good at plans, I agreed readily.
From there on out, we launched our plan to break up Jem and Louisa, strategizing much as we used to do back when we were trying to lure out Boo Radley.
We started following the two into town at night, Dill’s sweaty hand grasped in mine, pretending we were going on a date ourselves. Quite a few times Jem caught us near them and shot me the stink eye, tracing a line across his throat that could really only mean one thing. In response, I’d often just smile and cling to Dill’s hand a little bit more, pretending I was oh so in love with him.
Once, when Louisa actually invited me out with them, I spilled ice cream on her shoe, which was maybe just maybe not an accident. She was real nice about it, nicer then I would have been, but the way Jem glared at me afterwards told me he knew it wasn’t an accident.
Finally, after me and Dill accidentally bumped into them in town and then accidentally gave her a run down of all the embarrassing things Jem had just about ever done, he pulled us aside later that night.
“I don’t know what y’all are up to, but you’d better stop it!” He told us. “Ain’t you grown out of this yet?”
He grabbed my arm and gave me a good shake and the gave Dill a good shove, before storming off to his room. We could hear the door bang shut from the porch. After that, we sat out there for a long time and I leaned my head up on Dill’s and rubbed a muddy tear off my face. When I looked up, I could see that there were some in Dill’s eyes too.
“You cryin’?”
“No, I ain’t.”
I didn’t believe him, but figured it was a pretty harmless lie so I let it be and just put my head back down on his shoulder.
After that, Jem didn’t talk to me except for grunts for a long while.
Atticus sat me down the next night and asked me what happened, and I told him, straight to his face, because I never did like lying to my father. When I finished, he sighed and placed his hand on my shoulder.
“Scout,” He told me, “Sometimes people have to grow up and sometimes they need space for that and sometimes because of that space things change. Your brother loves you. Maybe he’ll get a girlfriend someday, maybe he’ll get a wife. That doesn’t mean he’ll love you any less. Just give him his space and someday he’ll come back to you.”
“Yes, sir.” I nodded and Atticus gave me a hug, quick but firm and dismissed me with no more scoldings, something I was a might surprised about.
After that, I tried to follow Atticus’s advice and give Jem space. Instead of bothering him, Dill and I took to wandering the streets of Maycomb, reminiscing days gone. We walked by Boo’s house often and stood in front, wondering what he was doing in there, if he was still making scrapbooks out of newspapers. Even after all this time, I think Dill still wished he’d come out.
One Saturday we started going to Barker’s Eddy to swim, the same place Jem taught Dill several years ago. If Cal or my Aunty found out they’d have a fit ‘cause swimming with a boy was right sinful, even though we both wore our underthings. Last winter, Aunty had tried and given me a talk about how boys will look at girls, want girls and all, and I’d stared all wide eyed at her.
Dill, however, never did seem to wanna look, which I guess was a good thing and maybe meant he was a gentleman.
There wasn’t much to look at anyway. I was still flat as a plywood board, though the last time Cal edged in and scrubbed me during a bath, she informed me that that would be changing awfully soon. I wasn’t necessarily sure how I felt about that bit of news. I wasn’t particularly opposed to it, by any means, but it represented another step closer to the notions of womanhood that I didn’t particularly want to deal with.
At any rate, we’d swim and splash and squeal, acting like the little kids we used to be. I always wished Jem could be there and I reckon Dill did too, but we fared just fine without him.
One night in July, when Jem had just about forgiven us and was just beginning to talk to us for brief moments, Dill and I were lying out by his aunt’s fishpond. It was a clear night, unusually cook for Alabama in July and we were taking the opportunity to stare up at the stars.
“Dill?”
“Yeah?”
I paused, trying to think of how to word what I wanted to say. That’s something I’d been trying to do more recently instead of just blurting things out. It didn’t work too well.
“Are we still gettin’ married?”
“Why you askin’ that, Scout?”
I sighed. “I heard you talkin’ with Jem the other night. Sounded like you’ve been kissin’ a heck of a lotta girls.”
Dill’s face paled. “Aw, Scout.” He whined, voice quiet.
“Ain’t it true?” I asked, hoping he’d say it wasn’t.
Dill face turned paler than it already was, ghost pale, Boo Radley pale. He pulled his knees up to his chest and rested his head on them. For a while he didn’t say anything and I started tapping my fingers noisily against the ground. “Dill-“
I started speaking, but he interrupted. “If I tell ya something strange, will you still be my friend?”
What was he on about? “ ‘Course I will. Don’t talk nonsense.”
Dill sucked in a breath and tightened his arms around his legs. “I was just fibbin’. I ain’t kissed any of ‘em. I haven’t kissed any girls but you.”
“Why would I feel mad about that? I know you ain’t honest. That’s nothin’ new.”
“Scout.”
Dill wasn’t looking at me now. He was resting his head on top of his knees, looking out at the pond where the moon’s shadow was reflected.
“Yes?”
“I ain’t kissed any of those girls, but I kissed a boy.”
Dill’s words hung in the air like a cloud, a big dark one that meant that a storm was coming. I kept waiting for him to laborate, but he didn’t say anything else.
“What do you mean?” I asked because at this point I was mighty confused.
Dill sighed and still didn’t look at me. “Aw, Scout, I don’t know. He was one of my neighbors and I didn’t mean for it to happen, honest I didn’t, an’ then he punched me in the stomach two days later.” Dill finally turned towards me, scrubbing at his eyes. “I liked it though, Scout, I did an’ what if like kissin’ boys instead of girls?”
I pulled my knees up to my chest, copying his position. I wasn’t real sure what Dill was describing. It was something I’d vaguely knew existed from off-handed comments and murmured insults and threats. From what I could tell, there were no good sentiments associated with things like that.
“I don’t know, Dill. I don’t know nothin’ about that.”
Dill seemed to shrivel in on himself more. “There’s a lotta people who say it’s wrong or somethin’, Scout.”
He looked so pathetic there and sounded so sad that it knocked me out of my surprised stupor. “Aw, Dill, that don’t mean anythin’ an’ you know it. Everybody said it was wrong when Atticus represented Tom Robinson, but they were all wrong, ‘member?”
Dill breathed in deep and finally turned to look at me. His eyes were wet, I could tell. “You mean that, Scout? You don’t hate me or anythin’?”
I reached out and put my arm around Dill, glad he was still small.
“‘Course I don’t. You’re my best friend, even if we ain’t gonna get married.”
I nuzzled against him and we watched the moon reflect itself in the fishpond together. I wasn’t sure what this meant, for me or Dill, but I’d guessed he’d need a friend if it all were true. I felt bad that he wasn’t going to be my husband, but I’d had a suspicion of that from the beginning of summer. At least this way he wasn’t leaving me for other girls, I thought.
The night before Jem left for the University of Alabama, he joined me out on the back porch. It was mid-August and summer was ending, or at least for him it was.
I’d been sleeping in my cot all summer, listening to the scurrying and croaking outside, but Jem’s had lain barren and lonesome, collecting dust in the corner. He’d said he was too old for this now, that he needed his privacy, but I just saw it as one more sign that our childhood was over and done with.
That night, though, as the almost full moon shone in through the screen, Jem slept next to me after he brushed all the dust off his old cot. He’d just begun forgiving me, but I didn’t want to chance things so I didn’t say nothing when he came out.
“Scout?” He said to me when we were finally all laid out, the night as black as pitch.
“Yeah?”
“I reckon I’m gonna miss you like the dickens when I’m away.”
At this point, I turned to face him even if I couldn’t see more then his eyes in the dark. Jem never had been the sentimental type so his admission surprised me. “Really?”
“‘Course I will, Scout.”
When I heard the sincerity in his voice, I felt a deep flush of regret. “Aw, Jem, I’m really sorry ‘bout everything with Louisa. I really am, honest to God.”
Jem sighed. “I know you are, Scout.”
I let out a tired, sad breath. “If you wanna marry her, I’ll ‘cept it.”
Jem chuckled. “I’m goin’ to college, Scout. I ain’t gonna marry her.” He paused for a second and I heard him move about a bit on his scratchy cot. “Someday I’m gonna get a wife, though. Time don’t stop, Scout. You can’t make it.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. It was the truth, but sometimes you don’t got nothing to say about the truth, even if it is the truth.
“Jem?” I finally said.
“Yeah?”
“I’m gonna miss you, too.”
With that, we drifted off to sleep, on that porch where we spent the innocent summers of our childhood, a childhood that seemed to be quickly ending.
The next day, Atticus, Dill, and me drove to Tuscaloosa to drop Jem off. It was a long drive, but mostly silent, the kinda silence that’s thick with the humidity of feelings. We unpacked his things in a shoebox of a dorm room and walked around the campus together. Dill and my eyes were bulging because we’d never seen anything quite so big.
When it was finally time for us all to leave, Jem hugged each and every one of us in turn, even poor Dill who’s cheeks turned faintly pink. “I love you,” I whispered to him, more blatant than I’d ever been.
He whispered it back and tightened his hold on me.
As we drove away, Dill and me looked out the back window of our car until we absolutely couldn’t see Jem anymore. The car ride back was even quieter and I didn’t even pretend I wasn’t crying.
The house felt empty and lonesome that night, as if somebody had taken great heaping spoonfuls out of it. Calpurnia gave me a hug when we got there, drew me to her like she hadn’t since I was a child. I couldn’t get it out of my head that Jem was gone. Even though he hadn’t been around much recently, he’d been a fixture my whole childhood, my unmoving, stubborn big brother.
It took me a long time to fall asleep and when I finally started dozing, I was awoken by a scratching sound at the screen. I sat bolt upright, worried for a second that it was old Boo Radley, even though by this point I was thirteen and really should of known better.
“Who’s there?” I called out, not loud enough enough to wake Atticus.
“Just me, Scout. Dill.”
I turned toward the voice and sure enough it was Dill, face lit up by moonlight in his flannel button up pajamas. “Can I come in?”
I nodded and slipped off the cot and padded barefoot to open the door for him, opening it real slow so that it didn’t make much noise.
“Can I sleep here?” Dill asked.
I agreed because I was pretty lonely all out here alone. Dill dragged Jem’s cot over so that it was right next to mine and he lied down and I did too. It reminded me of that one time he’d ran away and appeared under my bed, but I’d thought he was a snake. He slept with me then too, whispering ‘bout how his parents didn’t give a care about him.
“I miss Jem.” I whispered, soft like a secret.
“Me too.”
Dill reached out and pressed a palm against mine and I twined my fingers through his. It wasn’t romantic like Jem descriptions of doing things with Louisa, but it sure felt nice to have Dill beside me.
“Scout?”
“Yeah?”
“You wanna go to college with me?” Dill’s voice was soft and a little hesitant.
“I thought you said you ain’t gonna marry me.” I told him, remembering how he’d cut off our engagement a few weeks ago with his confession. We hadn’t talked much more about it since ‘cause anytime I brought it up, his pale skin always turned red as a tomato and he’d try and change the subject.
“We could still go to school together. You’re my best friend, ya know?”
I did know. He knew too and I squeezed his hand hard in mine just in case he needed a reminder. “You wanna go to Alabama?”
Dill shook his head against the cot and I felt it even in the dark. “Naw, Scout. We’ll go somewhere real far away. Paris or London, maybe.”
Those cities sounded so far away. I didn’t know anyone except the Great War veterans who’d been out of the country. In fact, most of the people in Maycomb hadn’t even been out of Alabama.
“That’s real far ‘way, Dill. Maybe we should try somewhere a little bit closer.”
Dill thought for a moment. “New York City. We’ll go to New York City.”
I grinned against the rough cot. “That sounds real nice, Dill.”
It did. For the first time all summer, things felt a little more secure, a little more hopeful. Maybe we were all growing up and changing, maybe Jem had left for college and Dill wasn’t gonna marry me, but it would be okay.
I was sure of it.