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Kids weren’t supposed to sit in the front seat but they barely went over 35 mph and he remembers her saying it was okay. Said it in a way that made anything okay, right after sliding their boards in the back over the tailgate and clicking his seat belt in place.
Spoke with that smile that made him less scared.
It made cutbacks less daunting the first few times he carved through the waves wall. Made the students teases less personal, made rejection hurt less and confidence more easier. Made him feel more capable when he couldn’t do things that other kids could, like make it through a sentence without stuttering.
Mom was good at that, he realized, probably way too late, at smiling and telling him how proud she was. She did it after he made it through a sentence without stopping, after giving him little hints at the pronunciations as he read her the recipe in the small kitchen, feet dangling off the counter as he spelled it out in his head, wondering when the letters would stop moving.
She did it after he gave the little girl one of his toys in the sandbox, after she explained to him that some kids don’t get as many toys as others.
She did it after he successfully toasted his first marshmallow over the fire, cheering before helping him remove it to taste.
She did it hours after he had stuck himself in his closet, where the screaming wasn’t so loud and where his pile of Legos could fit. He asked why she was crying but doesn’t remember the answer, just knows she was proud of him for some reason.
He had made that particular spaceship before with the blues and yellows, followed the directions and everything so it looked the same, didn’t mix up the colors like he did the last time. He figured maybe she just liked that one better, so he handed it to her to keep.
Then she smiled again and that weird feeling he got sitting in the closet for hours went away. The one he wouldn’t have a name for for a while, even though it would come back.
Some kids got more toys than others, he knew. Maybe those were the ones with the parents that had bigger houses and boats and nicer clothes. The ones that teachers seemed to like more, didn’t scold as often as they did with kids like JJ, offered more help and maybe better grades.
JJ wasn’t one of those kids.
Ricky sat with him at the barbeque, trying to explain why he wanted to be an EMT, sitting with JJ longer than he normally did, usually getting too annoyed with the kid.
“That’s so much schooling!” JJ had said between sucking all of the air from his already empty juice box, giving his older cousin a look.
“No, it’s not,” Ricky lazily countered, holding his own juice box, though it looked more out of place in his older big-kid hands.
“It sounds boring.”
“S’better than what my dad does, slaving away in a garage all day.” The older kid turned in his camp chair, looking behind them as if checking for said dad before shaking his head. “I wanna do something that won’t leave me grown up and looking back like I wasted my life. I don’t want to be a lonely forty year old like my old man.”
JJ was confused.
“He’s not lonely, he has you and Aunt Clara.”
Ricky shook his head again, giving the fire pit in front of them a long look before glancing over at his younger cousin.
“You won’t get it until you’re older, J.”
JJ hated when older people dismissed him, but whatever. His cousin could be really lame sometimes.
That weird feeling from the closet comes back, though he’s not in his closet this time, he’s at a lunch table. An empty lunch table. Realizing Mom forgot to pack his lunch. Again.
Then he’s waiting outside for her to pick him up and it’s there again, making his chest feel funny. He thought about the things he’d tell her once she arrived, about how he wasn’t called on to read aloud and how he was okay with that. But the teachers hadn’t called on him because…because they barely looked at him. Somehow that was worse than being told to be quiet in that mean voice they used. Somehow that made the feeling in his chest worse.
The boy standing a few feet away from him distracts him from it, for only a few minutes as they wait together. He wants to tell him how cool his backpack is, show him how it matches his own, with the red and blue splashed under the web pattern, with the Spider-Man mask in a slightly different place.
He doesn’t get the chance before the boy is running towards a dark blue truck, with a man with the same crazy hair sitting behind the wheel.
JJ wonders if the boy had more toys than him and if teachers liked him, if the man had a big house and a big boat and nicer clothes.
The feeling comes back for a third time that day.
Mom doesn’t come in after they fight anymore.
He waits in his room, just like Dad had told him to do way back. He starts making something he deems better than the spaceship, trying to put pieces together without the directions. It’s hard, he realizes after a while, but it’ll be worth it when he gives it to her and she tells him how proud she is.
Two teachers talk to him one day and suddenly he wants them to stop. They ask about the bruise on his face but he doesn’t want to admit that it was his fault, that he just gets in his dad’s way sometimes. So he lies.
And it feels good, to make someone think something else, something that’s not entirely true. It was his fault, he just didn’t want to get Dad in trouble.
It was a little harder to lie to John B as they swapped and shared snacks at lunch. He doesn’t really know why, just hopes it gets easier because the bruises don’t stop and neither do the questions.
JJ finds her guitar in a box on the porch, half of the strings curled in a way he’s sure meant they were broken. He wonders how much it’ll cost to fix, once she comes back and she takes him to wherever you go to fix that sorta thing.
He wasn’t sure.
About the strings, but also about her coming back.
Numbers didn’t move around as much as letters but as he watched the boy next to him fill out his pretest sheet, he doubted he was anywhere near good with them. Maybe he was painfully average, for once, considering how fast the kid next to him was scribbling down the answers, almost as if he didn’t even need to see the equations, like he had memorized the entire timetable and everything, like overachiever shit and–
And principal’s office. Something about cheating.
JJ wasn’t mad at the fact she sent him to the principal, even if she used that tiredly annoyed look that he was basically immune to now. It was the fact that she accused him of cheating, off of Pope Heyward’s freaking pretest, of all things.
He wasn’t her smartest student by any means but even he knew the pointlessness of cheating off of someone’s pretest.
The inside of his closet didn’t do much for the sound of bottles shattering against the wall.
That was something he had to listen to with a straight face, as long as his dad was watching. He couldn’t give away how much it scared him, when he got bad.
Like, ugly and unrecognizable bad, with heavy yet quick hands that hit hard without warning.
Sorta. It wasn’t entirely unrecognizable anymore – he actually recognized it pretty well, like looking back on a bad habit you didn’t realize you developed until it’s unbreakable. It was just him lying to himself, trying to feel that same sense of satisfaction he felt when he lied to other people.
It didn’t really work.
John B’s dad is amazing. He knows about boats and the stars and took them fishing and didn’t stare at JJ the way other parents did.
He knew, though. JJ could tell. Even if they didn’t talk about it, he sometimes asked JJ about Luke, asked about his mom.
That’s when JJ started pretending, too. It wasn’t just telling it all wrong, it was acting the part.
There was a difference.
John B surfed too. Thank God.
Something about him also made that funny feeling go away, the feeling from the closet. Something about the way they said shit without actually saying anything out loud, could understand things with just a look and maybe a shove or two. It made him think that it should stay like this, like they should keep surfing together and skipping school together and become grown ups together. That sounded pretty amazing.
Same with Pope, who made him understand what people meant when they called a person ‘good’. Pope was everything about ‘good’, believed JJ when he told him he wasn’t trying to cheat off him during the pretest, believed him when he said he knew other kids did try that shit, though, with him specifically, ‘cause every class had a designated student that you could cheat off of and Pope just happened to be that student. But Pope didn’t see the sense in telling the teacher because it would just get him in trouble and he wasn’t used to being associated with that word, JJ knew.
JJ supposed Pope had good parents, like John B, could tell from the way he was so unlike JJ sometimes. Like the cheating shit. JJ didn’t see why kids like him had to take shit from kids that had more than them, who’s parents had more than their parents, from rich kids. JJ hated rich kids, and Pope did too, just showed it differently. Didn’t steal from corner stores and vandalize rich people's things and ignore authority like JJ did. He followed rules, did what he was told, was a little bit ahead of the curve than JJ was.
He knew just because you acted a certain way, it didn’t make you any different at the end of the day.
He also owned more comics than both John B and JJ combined, passed down from his dad (he knew he was right about the parent thing), had a big tree house in his backyard and could build a spaceship without the directions, which was pretty fucking cool, in JJ’s opinion.
He was a weaker surfer though, but JJ decided to still keep him around.
JJ stole money from his dad the same day he had his first kiss, which was the same day he met Kiara Carrera. It went in that order, too, even though he wouldn’t have complained if it was switched around a bit. He could’ve done with meeting Kiara before the kiss, so maybe it could’ve been with her as opposed to before he saw her surf and felt stupidly attracted to her.
Then the whole receiving the beating of his life would’ve come after all of it, after Dad found out about the money and got bad again. He brought up Mom stealing his money, talking like she was a thing of the past and that’s when he realized that she was.
He also realized tomorrow would hold bruises he wasn’t sure how to hide, and that he would steal from Dad again.
He deserved it, what came after.
John B’s favorite thing was taking blame for shit, turns out. Like the fight in the cafeteria that left both of them with bloody noses and pending in-school suspensions. JJ waited until John B was out of the room before peering at Big John, trying to gauge how bad John B was gonna get hit when they got home.
He insisted it wasn’t his fault, begged to let John B off the hook because he didn’t deserve the blame, especially if it ended up getting him in as much trouble as JJ was gonna be in with Luke.
Big John looked at JJ in a way he’d never forget.
Oh, JJ thought. Maybe he and John B weren’t so similar after all.
Maybe the feeling came back after that, just for a second but just long enough.
People didn’t pay attention if you didn’t want them to. At least he thought, before he caught Kiara doing it, and wasn’t that scary. Someone as gentle yet headstrong as her, someone who cared. Who didn’t take shit from rich people the way Pope did and didn’t pretend like they don't exist like John B did. She was like him, just as devil-may-care while also just as…perceptive.
Yeah. That was scary as shit.
Big John goes away sometimes and he takes John B with him now.
Not literally, though he might as well for how out of it John B becomes when his dad’s gone. JJ tries to bring him back but it doesn’t always work.
Can’t keep him out of his dad’s office long enough, these days.
Kie’s gone, too, though with her it is literal and JJ gets deja vu, remembering the familiar no-warning and no-goodbye-in-sight like it was yesterday. Could’ve been, for how fresh it feels, just like that closet-feeling overcoming more than just his chest this time.
It’s his head, too.
Maybe he didn’t get to keep people who made him feel less scared and people who listened and people who cared. Maybe he was stuck with that feeling from the closet plaguing his chest and places he couldn’t really describe.
It comes back after he steals from his dad again, just like he knew he would, except this time it’s more than just the cash from his worn wallet. Try the keys to the thing JJ imagines is one of the very few possessions his dad holds close.
Not close enough.
And not without leaving JJ with a heavy unsteady hug, one that would’ve had both of them on the floor if JJ hadn’t held him up because he couldn’t stand on his own. Probably couldn’t say what he said without being dead drunk either, but that didn’t really matter. It was what was left when he no longer had her smile or her ‘I’m proud of you’ or her warmer, more stabilizing hugs.
It was feeling alone, even in his dad's arms, that brought the feeling back.
Watching the black waves wrestle with the stolen boat that held his best friend, one of the first people that made him feel less alone, not so by himself for once, it finally put a word to the closet-feeling.
Without even having to ask, he knew Pope and Kiara felt it too. Wasn’t bred from the same place, wasn’t brought out from the same things, didn’t revisit at the same times but still came around, every now and then.