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JJ Maybank had always had a complicated relationship with food, which, as anyone who had ever described a relationship as ‘complicated’ before knows, really just meant that it was bad.
JJ didn’t remember the last time he felt full — before his mom left maybe? There was never any food in the Maybank house, seeing as Luke ate at the pub most nights, and couldn’t be bothered to waste money on groceries he wouldn’t eat. Even if there had been food, JJ wouldn’t have known how to cook it, was barely tall enough to reach the stovetop, let alone use it. He quickly got used to the quiet ache of an empty stomach; JJ wasn’t the type to dwell on problems he couldn’t solve. He ate frequently enough that he wouldn’t die anytime soon, so he didn’t see any use complaining. It was easy enough to ignore most days.
His vision blanked out when he stood up, and his hands tingled, and his face felt like something changed temperature wise, but he could never decipher whether it was hot or cold. Sometimes, if he had been running or surfing or if the weather was too humid, the blood rushed in his ears so loud that all he could hear was ringing, and he went to the bathroom to sit on the floor with his head between his knees until it passed. Normally he could ignore it, keep walking, maybe hold onto a bench or a wall or something. Sometimes his legs gave out under him, or he walked into walls because he couldn’t see anything for a few seconds, and he just acted like it was because he was clumsy.
It was fine.
But the thing nobody warns you about with hunger is that it grows roots. It’s like farmer’s friends — you pull one up and you think you’ve cleared your lawn but it’s already spread its seeds and then you have whole patches of them and you’re finding little barbs in all your socks.
The biggest change on the food front of JJ’s life was Kiara Carrera, who sat herself down at their lunch table in fifth grade with a stiff upper lip looking like she had something to prove. She wasn’t really new because nobody could really be new in Kildare — they’d all known each other since kindergarten. JJ made a poster about bottlenose dolphins with her in first grade which got a B+ — but she wasn’t exactly familiar either. It didn’t matter though, because John B had taken after his dad, and he was always digging for treasure nobody else believed in. Big John Routledge would disappear for weeks looking for Aztec gold or blood diamonds or whatever the fuck. John B Routledge would look at a person and spend weeks digging for something shiny he could catch in the light.
JJ was too grateful John B had cared enough about the fool’s gold at his core to ever, ever dissuade him of it.
So Kie became a regular fixture of his life, and she brought regular access to food with her. Her parents owned The Wreck, and back then their friendship was so innocent, so young, so unlikely to last, that the Carreras didn’t mind letting them eat for free. John B ate like a vacuum cleaner, and Pope ate like a growing boy, and Kie ate like she was proving a point, and JJ picked at his fries and drank some soda.
JJ didn’t think about food much when he didn’t have any. He found it much harder to not think about food when it was sitting right in front of him and he still couldn’t bring himself to just be fucking normal about it.
He left hungry most days, feeling like an idiot, because the food had been right there and he just couldn’t bring himself to eat it. He walked in everyday starving, spent hours at school waiting until he could eat at The Wreck, and then he sat down and the smell made him nauseous. He ate as much as he could stomach, because he knew logically that he was still hungry even if nothing had ever seemed less appealing, but he always finished quicker than the others.
The food was delicious, easily the best on the island, which somehow made it worse.
Sometimes he got in a weird mood, when his dad was particularly bad or school was particularly frustrating or he missed his mom a bit too much, and he felt like he was collapsing in on himself. He got clingy and defensive and he ate so much at The Wreck that he usually ended up puking it all up once he got home. He tried to stretch himself around the pogues and around the island and around the best seafood he had ever tasted, and he always took too much and lost all of it. He got in fights with Pope and Kie for being overbearing, and he got kicked out of parks for loitering, and he hunched over the toilet in his mouldy bathroom and tried not to cry as his stomach spasmed.
They were usually short episodes though, and JJ’s friends forgot about their annoyance in the face of some new scheme, and JJ went back to stealing fries and wishing he had space for more.
Sarah Cameron was the newest of John B’s expeditions, and JJ made a lot of jokes about spelunking in the privacy of his own mind. Still, he couldn’t help but think John B was maybe edging just a little bit closer to becoming his father, to dedicating his life to a treasure that he would never actually find.
But whatever — John B having bad taste in people was actually the best thing that had ever happened to JJ, so who was he to judge?
Even after all that shit went down over the Summer, after JJ lost them and then found them again, he couldn’t quite swallow his reservations. If kooks and pogues were a sliding scale, Sarah would undeniably be the member of their crew furthest toward kook, and JJ would be furthest toward pogue. Kiara had one foot in each world, pogue-leaning by choice only. John B and Pope were both poor, ignored, and disenfranchised. Their parents tried, but being broke is like playing life on hard mode. Big John was gone often, and the Heywards put so much weight on Pope’s future it threatened to crush his present. Pogues through and through. Still, they weren’t poor like JJ was poor, white trash poor, cocaine poor, you know where I’m from poor.
So John B said, “Me and Sarah kind of got married,” all giddy and shit, and JJ thought fuck man, did this godforsaken island teach you nothing?
Then Sarah Cameron joined them at The Wreck, and JJ watched her pick absentmindedly at her fish, and he started noticing the way she curled in on herself sometimes, and he thought oh ok. Recognition through the other or whatever. And he felt it when she noticed him putting little piles of his fries on his friends’ plates while they were distracted, and throwing the rest at seagulls, saw the recognition in her eyes as well.
They started sitting across from one another, sharing plates. They ate a half portion each. On bad days JJ ate more, and Sarah ate less. They were clearly both practised at distracting from their eating habits, so the others didn’t really catch on, and they never talked about it.
But hunger was really the most base definition of a pogue, JJ had always thought. The experience of seeing and wanting and not getting. The experience of having something literally handed to you on a platter and desperately wishing for it while your stomach turns mutinously at the thought of actually getting it. So Sarah Cameron was cool, he decided. It didn’t change his behaviour at all, because JJ’s an excellent liar and had been acting like Sarah Cameron was cool since the first time John B made googly eyes at her, but it felt good to know anyway.
JJ thought Sarah might’ve noticed when he changed his mind about her, might’ve opened up around him a bit more. Or maybe she didn’t notice, and she just happened to come to the same conclusion about him at about the same time. Either way, they go from ‘people who both managed to trick John B into liking them’ to ‘people who care about each other’ quietly, over baskets of fries at The Wreck.
JJ Maybank had always had a complicated relationship with love, which, as anyone who had ever described a relationship as ‘complicated’ before knows, really just meant that it was bad.
Love was never simple when he was a kid — not before his mom left, and definitely not after. There wasn’t a lot of it in the Maybank house, except that there was, which actually made it worse.
JJ had lots of secrets about his dad. The obvious one was the bruises, the lies he told school nurses and ER doctors. Then there was the drugs and the contraband, shit he hid from the cops and the coast guard. The pogues knew those secrets, the same way the pogues knew most of JJ’s secrets, because he told them. But the deepest, most hidden, most shameful secret about Luke Maybank was that he loved JJ, and that JJ loved him right back.
Kie looked at the bruises on his ribs, on his face, on his arms, and said, “Someone who loves you wouldn’t have done this.”
But JJ looked at his split knuckles, thought about the marks he had probably left on his dad’s side and thought I would. He had never said it, because Kie was only fourteen, and JJ was fourteen too but his fourteen was older than hers somehow, and she still thought love and cruelty were mutually exclusive.
He didn’t want to tell her that they were braided together, inseparable, because he didn’t think they were, for normal kids. He didn’t really want her to know he wasn’t a normal kid.
It went like this: when JJ was 12, he spent 3 weeks straight at the Chateau, sleeping on John B’s bedroom floor. His arm was in a cast, with all the pogues’ names written on it in sharpie. Those facts were not unrelated. While he was staying there, the Routledges’ chicken eggs hatched, and one of them was a rooster. Big John let JJ name that rooster, and he called him Kentucky Fried Chicken (Kenny for short), and watched him go from a little puffball with legs to full grown and annoying as fuck in the mornings. When he slept over, Kenny would crow at sunrise and he would shoot up — he had always been a light sleeper (don’t examine that too much) — and he would remember that day, Big John pointing at one of the tiny chicks, a bleary eyed, ugly little thing, and saying, “JJ, why don’t you name that one,” and he would smile.
JJ fucking loved that bird.
When he was 16, John B found a shipwreck and a compass and a world of trouble. A couple of thugs stormed the Chateau and the pogues fled to the chicken coop. The birds squawked, terrified, loud, and one of the guys started walking towards them, and all JJ could think about was the way Miss Lana was screaming, the way she looked crying on that bathroom floor. The coop was cramped, hot with the 4 of them packed inside of it. JJ reached for Kenny, gentle at first, tried to calm him down, but he was a rooster, he was just an animal, he didn’t understand what was happening. The guy was getting closer. He had a gun. JJ could see Pope trembling, the wetness in Kie’s eyes. His touch got rougher, as he tried to get his hands around the bird’s beak, and when that didn’t work, around his neck. Kie was looking up, like she couldn’t bear to watch. JJ couldn’t think, could barely breathe, the fear and adrenaline flooding his brain, and then he heard a snap. He felt Kenny stop struggling in his grip.
He looked, unseeing, at the limp corpse in his hands, didn’t even think to let go, just thought, fuck, I loved that bird.
(Later, when they were all stranded on the island, when JJ made a flag, he drew a chicken, and he meant love, and he tried not to think about it too hard.)
It went like this: John Booker Routledge sat next to him in the third grade and he read the problems aloud for them both because JJ hadn’t quite figured out how to get the letters to stop swimming yet, and JJ called him Bree even though nobody else did, and JJ curled his hands into fists under his desk. Pope Heyward hesitantly asked if he could play pirates with them, because he wanted to make a treasure map and because he thought it’d be super cool to find a skeleton with a gemstone for an eye, and JJ hugged him and fell asleep on his shoulder, and JJ shoved him around in the backyard of the Chateau. Kiara Carrera turned her face away from the sun and the light caught in her hair, painted her whole body gold, and she yelled about reusable shopping bags and industrial fishing waste, and she made them all string friendship bracelets, and JJ flirted with her and danced with her at the Boneyard, and JJ starved.
Sarah and Kie never really explained what went down between them in freshman year, mostly because so much other shit happened that nobody really remembered to ask.
But they were all drunk at the Boneyard, on the very outskirts of the party, and Kie made some lighthearted disparaging comment about the way Sarah and John B spent the whole evening flirting.
“You’re not invited to my birthday party,” Sarah had responded imperiously, though she couldn’t quite keep from smiling, and both of them laughed at how absurdly childish it all felt.
Kie gasped dramatically, placing a hand over heart. “How could you? I promise I don’t even like you that much!”
And Sarah just laughed more, shaking her head. “No no, you’re allowed to like me now, you already passed the screening. Sorry to give you the full fucking TSA treatment, everyone else who loved me was a controlling psychopath!” and then people weren’t really laughing anymore.
Kie hadn’t really connected those facts in her brain before — she had unknowingly been dividing her life into before and after, keeping things separate. Sarah’s commitment issues and Sarah’s family issues seemed like events from completely different lifetimes.
Pope knew Sarah Cameron the least, out of their group. John B, obviously, knew her best, and Kie had her own history with the girl. JJ and her had some kind of food-sharing treaty thing they both thought nobody knew about, but Pope knew because Kie knew, and Kie knew because she was always trying to hand JJ snacks and actually make him eat them. This venture had gotten way more successful now that JJ could eat half a granola bar then wordlessly hand the rest to Sarah. Obviously Pope knew a lot about Sarah’s family drama, but mostly just because he had been there for a bunch of it.
JJ was off somewhere getting more drinks for the group, and thus had no thoughts at all about the interaction.
John B looked at Sarah consideringly while she watched them, having noticed that her joke didn’t quite land. Her blonde hair was messy from the wind, and her eyes were uncertain, and there was something about the shape of her smile that John B recognised.
“Oh, c’mon guys, it’s funny,” she grinned, but it didn’t quite meet her eyes.
So John B just chuckled and said, “You should tell that one again when JJ gets back, he’ll have a blast with it,” because he didn’t quite know what to say about Ward or Rafe Cameron, the same way he didn’t quite know what to say about Luke Maybank.
So Sarah reenacts the whole thing when JJ returns with the booze, and JJ does laugh.
“TSA’s fuckin’ terrible at their job, though, right?” he jokes back.
“Right?” Sarah responds, gesturing with her hands and almost slapping John B in the arm.
“Oh, sir, you have a bomb? Of course, right this way — I’ll love you forever and ever! You, person who’s been nothing but kind to me, hold it right there,“ JJ made an exaggerated frowny face, pointing theatrically, “You cannot board this plane with scissors!”
Sarah descended into hopeless giggles in the sand. John B made emotionally fraught eye contact with Kie. Oh god there’s two of them, said the set of her eyebrows, but there was concern behind the exasperation, and affection behind the concern.
Kie accepted one of the beer cans from JJ, and placed a little packet of sourpatch kids in his hand while he was distracted. He leaned across John B to share them with Sarah, and they didn’t even finish them all, but it was something.
It was something.