What Didn't Happen

“I just want you to know if anything should happen I love you.”

“Uh… alright,” Jay said, and felt like an ass because in his head he had always waited for someone to say something like that, and he figured he would have something profound to say back. Jay was sick of people never having anything real to say, but now he understood why they never did.

“No, I’m serious,” Michael said, “No matter what happens—”

“Why would anything happen?”

Jay Strickland was fear prone. The littlest thing could set him off, and here they were, on Friday night, after a long week in the first year at junior college, sitting in the semi darkness of his family’s den, and Michael turned and said some shit like that.

“Nothing,” Michael said. “It’s just… people should say that. They need to say it.”

“Well, I love you too,” Jay said, and it felt strange and too personal. Jay never thought he would be so stuffy.

It was late summer, and though the lights were out in the living room, and it was flooded with the blue light of a bad movie on the TV, outside the the last of the sun was sinking through the trees, turning the branches into black lace patterns.

“You wanna smoke up?” Michael said. “Can we?”

“Shut the den door so it doesn’t get out. I’ll roll.”

Michael got up. He was taller than Jay, almost gangly with a large mass of curls that made Jay think he should be a rabbi. Jay had been certain Michael Cleveland was Jewish for years, but now he simply decided he couldn’t tell what white people were.

“You can roll a blunt?” Michael said, proud.

“I can now,” Jay said, cutting open the grape flavored cigar.

“Dear God,” he murmured, looking at the bag. “Purple Widow.”

“We’ve had some fun with that.”

“Last time I smoked it I wanted to die.”

“You wanted to die before you smoked it. It just didn’t make your mood any better. It never does.”

As Michael sat down, he pulled the blanket they were sharing over his knees and said, “You’re not feeling fucked up, are you?”

“Not tonight,” Jay said before admitting. “It comes and goes, you know.”

“Buddy, you know I know.”

For a moment Jay was taken out of himself. He had to remember what he was doing, which was rolling a blunt and trying to impress his best friend with what he had learned over the summer while he was away. Suddenly that panic from the time when Michael had gone and had his incident, when he thought he’d lost his best friend, struck him.

If anything should happen… Don’t say that shit again.

“Here you go,” Jay said after he had licked the blunt shut, and was sealing it with a lighter.

“Weekend relaxation for friends.”

“Can we smoke this all by ourselves?” Michael wondered.

“You’re joking, right?” Jay said.

But Michael had already lit it, inhaled and, holding the smoke in his lungs, passed it to Jay.

Smoke leaked from Jay’s nose, and he coughed as he was about to speak and then closed his mouth while Jay took a sharp, eye watering inhale. As the den filled with the dank smell of marijuana, and Jay’s head swam a little, Michael, coughing again, said, “Ah, but weed is the one the thing we should never joke about.”

He told himself the next morning, when he came back from the bathroom and went back to sleep on the cot by the window while Michael slept in the bed, “Now I have him. Now he is here and safe and nothing can happen,”

And then immediately, Jay reminded himself how false that sort of thinking was. Junior year he had felt so rootless. Everything was supposed to happen. He was supposed to start driving and taking advanced classes. Life would explode. He would be an upperclassman. But the eye surgery had come, and then he’d spent most of the summer with his eyes bandaged, unable to see and in that first cycle of despair. The day after the surgery, the Twins had come over with balloons and a card, but that was the last time they came. Later on he saw them, and mentioned that they never called and never visited and they said, “Was your finger broken?” So he learned a lot about life and friendship.

Jay hadn’t expected his high school friends to be around. The truth is he didn’t believe they existed from June to late August, and none of them had known what had happened. But he looked forward to, even with a bandage over his eye, seeing his best friends, and when he’d gotten back to Saint Ignatius, he looked and looked for Michael thinking, maybe we just didn’t have the same classes? Was that even possible? He spent a week, even two, looking for him until he had to admit that Michael was gone and now he realized that, in the end, Michael had been his only real friend.

Jay can’t remember anymore when it was he found the school directory. He feels like months passed, and he wonders why he was so slow on the uptake about the whole thing. Jay found the number and, on the other end, there was Michael.

“I’m so glad to hear from you, man,” Michael said. “What the fuck is going on?”

“Oh, shit. And shit and shit and shit,” Jay said. “What happened to you?”

“I’m at Whittier now?”

“How is it?”

“It’s okay,” Michael seemed to be considering this. He said, “It’s alright.”

“This place really sucks,” Jay said, at last. “I didn’t even realize that until now. I mean, I kinda did, but—”

“We need to get together.”

“You’re right,” Jay said.

“What about…. Friday night?”

“I never do anything on Friday night,” Jay said.

“Are you Jewish? Are you opposed to it?”

“No,” Jay said. “I just realized I never do anything on Friday night. I’m such a loser.”

“We can be losers together. Tell you what, I got a car for…. A guilty parent’s gift… Let me know where you are and I’ll come and get you. We can even go to the Whittier slash Saint Ignatius game and make people wonder who we’re rooting for.”

“All this football and confusion too!” Jay said. “That settles it. We’re going out.”

“You’ll never guess what happened.”

It was not Jay’s way to begin a phone call with a hi or a hello.

“No,” Michael agreed, tiredly. He’d been tired since they’d gotten high the other night. “Not unless you tell me.”

“Oh,” Jay said in a different tone.

“Sorry, that was rude,” Michael said. He yawned and stretched.

“What’s up?”

“Tony. You remember Tony Fabian?”

“The asshole from Saint Ignatius?”

“Yeah,” Jay said, and he said this next without judgment, “Well, the asshole died.”

“What?”

Michael almost threw down the phone.

“He’s our age.”

“Nineteen,” Jay said. “College freshman. Killed himself. They say he did it two days ago. Steve Pancratz called me. His funeral is next weekend.”

Michael didn’t speak for a while.

“You all right?” Jay said.

“Yeah,” Michael said, shaking his head. “I am. I… It’s hard to explain. How I feel.”

The night of the game, when Michael got to the door, they embraced and clapped each other on the back and Jay said, “Let’s go.”

It never occurred to him to introduce Michael to his parents because they just weren’t the kind of people you introduced friends to.

“Lassador’s so fucking big,” Michael said, “with nothing in it. It took me twenty minutes to get here, and it’s going to take another twenty minutes to get to Whittier and you just think, damn it’s a lot of nothing all over this place.”

But when they got to the school and they saw the cars in the parking lot and everyone going to the game, they sat in the car and, after a moment, Michael said, “Do you really want to go to this?”

“Not really,” Jay said, feeling relieved.

“You know that quarry lake up in Sylvania?”

“I don’t,” Jay said.

“Well,” Michael said, “I’m about to show you.”

“I didn’t know you had eye surgery.”

“Yeah,” Jay said. “I didn’t even know I needed it. And then when I heard I needed it, I didn’t know it would happen so soon. And I didn’t know I wouldn’t be able to see for a whole summer or be all alone. Or come back to school with a bandage on my face and still feel alone.”

“But you’re better now?”

“Yeah. Yes. Sort of. My eyes still hurt, but there aren’t stitches in them anymore and I’m not wearing a patch. So… better.”

“I went to a crazy house,” Michael said, flatly.

He took out a cigarette here, and Jay had smelled cigarette smoke on his jacket in school, but because it was school, because he’d never been with Michael outside of school until now, he’d said nothing. Now he smelled the smoke and Michael said, “Probably the same time you had to go to the hospital my parents put me in the crazy house.”

“At Morelton?” That was all Jay would say. What else could you say?

“No, no,” Michael shook his head, the white smoke of the cigarette rising in a thin line. “It was for kids. It was like a rehab. But a rehab for crazy people. If it makes any sense.”

“What happened?” Jay said.

“I got… really, really sad.” Michael said. “Sadder than I’d been before.”

Michael had been sad, but then everyone was sad at Saint Ignatius. Jay spent most off his time saying to friends, “Well, you’ll have to look on the bright side,” and it wasn’t until this summer, sitting at home by himself, his eyes bound, that he realized how sad he had been too.

“I felt like I couldn’t go on,” Michael said.

“And you told your parents?”

“No,” Michael said, flatly. “They were just tired of me moping around, and so they sent me to a shrink. And then I told the shrink. I was trying not to. You know I realized what was going on with me when I was trying hard not to tell the guy. But then it slipped out. There it was. He told my parents, and I don’t know that he was supposed to do that. Confidentiality? But Confidentiality be damned because I’m a minor. I guess. They found out and they put me in the nicest looney bin they could.”

Jay said nothing. He just looked at the black water glimmering in the darkness of the approaching night. In the distance, on the other side of the lake, a truck was coming through the grasses and he could hear the Eagles singing”

Take it eaaasy!

Take it easssy!

Don’t let the sound of your own crying

Drive you crazy.

The truck lights went out, and the doors opened and slammed, but the music still played.

“You want a cigarette?” Michael said?

Jay was about to say, “No,” and “I never smoked,” and “We shouldn’t”, but what he said was, “Yeah.”

He didn’t cough. He was very careful with it and it was very good. He said, “What was it like?”

Michael sighed and exhaled, looking up at the moon that was dull white in a brown black night.

“Embarrassing at first, because I was in a crazy house. And then a relief because, well, everyone was crazy. Life is hard, Jay.”

“I know.”

“No,” Michael said. “I don’t mean in that teenage kind of way where everyone bitches but thinks it’s going to get better. I mean, life is hard. It doesn’t get easier. Some people just don’t make it. I never knew that. Not until this summer.”

They drove around the lake, past where the truck had been. The truck was still there, Jay could see, and Michael turned his lights off and drove in the dark so that they wouldn’t be noticed.

“What are we doing?”

“Seeing what other people are up to,” Michael said.

They were teenagers, Jay noted, white, playing touch football. From where he couldn’t say. A bunch of boys getting drunk, two drunk girls.

“Looks fun enough,” Jay said.

Suddenly, one of the girls staggered from the others to lie against the truck and the moonlight, dull till now, was bright and blue white. One of the guys ran to the girl while the others were still tossing the football about, pulled the girl by the front of the truck away and into the grass.

“What the…?” Jay began.

“He’s fucking her,” Michael said. Then he corrected himself.

“He’s raping her.”

You can't hide your lyin' eyes
And your smile is a thin disguise
I thought by now you'd realize
There ain't no way to hide your lyin' eyes

They watched while no one else seemed to, and Jay said, “What’s wrong with people?”

Michael started up the car without answering, and as they drove away, the last thing Jay saw was the shirtless boy pumping away on the unconscious girl, his buttocks flexing in and out, her legs bent over her shoulders, mouth open like a corpse’s, and then they were all hidden in the grass.

“What a fucking world,” Michael said.

“Should we have done something?” Jay said. Then, “But what could we have done?”

They rode back into town almost in total silence until they reached Jay’s house.

“We could have shouted knock that shit off,” Michael said.

“We could have,” Jay said. “We could have done something.”

And then Jay said, “You know what?”

“Huh?”

“I think if we’d said something then we couldn’t have watched. And I think we wanted to watch. A little.”

“All we can do now,” Michael said when they got to Jay’s driveway, “is be the best, most stand up guys we can be. And be there for each other. You know? That’s all we can do.”

Jay nodded.

“Look,” Michael said, “you’re right. So, let’s be better people.”

Jay was consoled by Michael admitting he was right, not consoled enough to admit he’d gotten a boner watching that guy fuck the unconscious girl, but now Michael was saying:

“Next Friday?”

“Sounds far off,” Jay reflected.

“I work till seven tomorrow night.”

“You got a job?” Jay was amazed. It was so grown up.

“Kroger,” Michael said. “But what about Sunday? You go to church?”

“You know we do. What if you come with my family? We go to Saint Jude. It’s short. Then we have all Sunday.”

“Is your family cool?” Michael asked.

“No.”

Michael said, “Neither is mine.”