Jim - Fifteen

Jim

          Holy mother of God, if I get the s**t scared out of me one more time this week I will seriously keel over. The air raid was just another event that proved me to be the inexperienced chicken of the group. Even Gabe handled himself better than I did.

            Actually, Gabe handled himself a whole f*****g lot better than any of us. Don’t ask me where it came from, but he managed to get himself off the roof and drag Erich with him. The guy must have some kind of super problem solving ability. He ought to have himself a comic book.

            At least I didn’t handle it the worst. Erich was practically catatonic through the whole thing, with all that shaking. If I hadn’t been trying to keep my tongue from swelling up to the size of an apple, I seriously would have tried to check his vitals. He was that out of it. Lucky for him Gabe was there, though why the hell Moretti stuck with him through all that was way beyond my reasoning.

It took a while for everyone to calm down enough to get up from our spot, crammed together in the corner by the boiler. Finally, Hersch said, “I think we’ll be all right now.” None of them acknowledged that the blood from my tongue was creeping towards the edges of my mouth.

The four of us got up. My legs felt like cooked noodles under me, and I had to clutch the boiler as I scanned the room for damage. The power had gone out, leaving just the lamp in the corner. Some mortar from the ceiling had crumbled but, in the most f*****g ironic act of God I had ever seen, our hideously ugly dorm was exactly as it had been.

Gabe slung Erich’s tree trunk of an arm over his shoulder and hoisted him to his feet. Amery looked like a mess. His face had gone from milky white to an unhealthy looking flush and his white-blond hair was plastered to his head with sweat. He kept shaking as Gabe led him over to the bunks and sat him down.

“Moretti…” I started.

“Just give me a minute,” he said quietly. “You okay?” Gabe asked him. Erich kept his eyes on the ground and nodded. “Good. Here, just lay down. Lay down here and go to sleep.” Erich didn’t protest, but lay back in Gabe’s bed. Gabe pulled the covers over him. “It’s over now.” Erich shut his eyes and didn’t say anything else.

When Gabe turned around, Hersch and I were looking at him with so much confusion he had to do a double-take. What the f**k? He had practically tucked Erich into bed! “Um, I guess I’ll take his bunk tonight.” As per usual, he started chewing nervously on his thumbnail. “He’s not so good with air raids. I was, uh, with him, when the sirens went off in London, you know? So I… I guess I just felt like I had to make sure he was okay.”

Hersch nodded, looking astoundingly unconvinced. “We get it.” He shot me a look out of the corner of his eye that made me feel like he was reaching into my pocket and yanking my money away.

No way in hell was I losing that bet. I thought that money was as good as mine. That night didn’t prove anything about Erich. All it did was make us suspect Gabe even more of being queer.

Gabe sat down in the desk chair and let his head droop dejectedly.  I looked at Hersch. “O should make sure Rebecca’s okay.” It was starting to sound like I had a wad of cotton in my mouth. I hated to bring her up, since Hersch had spent the last four days about one ill-timed remark from choking me out. But my fear of Hersch’s strangulation was beaten out my worry for Rebecca’s safety. Though, in all honesty, any bomber that tried to kill her was in for a nasty surprise. She would probably put the heel of her shoe through his throat. I just wanted to make sure she was okay, kind of like Gabe with Erich, I thought.

Of course, when I said “make sure Rebecca’s okay,” Hersch heard, “go f**k the daylights out of her.” He looked at me darkly. “I’ll go.” He said before storming out, leaving me with alone with a fairy, a petrified Nazi, and a profusely bleeding tongue.

It didn’t take long for Hersch to come huffing back. “God! Half the school is out there. This is the only building with a basement in the whole campus!”

“Is Rebecca…?”

“She’s there,” he said flatly. “Uh, she was. She went back to her room. I tell you, that girl has got nerves like steel.” He laughed ironically. “Knight put us in the safest spot in the whole damn school. It’s like a bomb shelter down here.”

“Did you look outside?” Gabe asked.

Hersch shook his head. “No, but the professors are saying the campus wasn’t hit. The bombs dropped on the town a couple miles south of here.”

Gabe shook his head and sighed as he climbed up into Erich’s bunk. “Sure bloody felt closer than that.” He mumbled, flopping onto his back.

I snorted. “You’re lucky it wasn’t. Weren’t you two supposed to be scaring off the bombers?”

“Shut it, Jim. Moretti was brilliant.” Hersch shocked the hell out of me by coming to Gabe’s defense. “Amery’s toughest guy we know, and he probably would have died without you.” He reached over to Gabe’s bunk and patted him approvingly on the shoulder. “You did good, Gabe.”

Gabe, of course awkward as ever, stuck his thumb in his mouth and started to chew. “Thanks,” he said quietly.

Hersch smiled back and headed for his own bunk. “We might as well get some rest, or at least shut up so Amery can sleep this off. Not much we can do now but forget about it.”

None of us said another word, and all I could think about as I climbed up to my bed was how this air raid had changed the way we thought about Gabe.

Hersch knew just as well as me that Gabe wasn’t exactly the kind of guy who got a lot of compliments. Usually we were just tough on him because he came off as such a queer. But the guy was sweeter than almost anyone I had ever met, and giving him s**t was starting to make me feel like I was kicking a puppy. Why should it matter who he wants to f**k, I thought as I lay back, lighting my last cig of the night. He’s a good guy, and he’s not trying to put anything over on me. Maybe Hersch is on the right track here. We ought to be nicer to him. I am going to be nicer to him.

That was the coherent thought I managed to string together before the exhaustion swept through.

When I woke up in the morning, I was completely sure I was dead. The bombers must have come back, or the bunk collapsed and Hersch crushed me, or Amery had used me for some nighttime target practice. There was no other reason in my mind for why I should be so rested. It’s a sad point in your life when sleeping until eight thirty feels so good that you have no other option but to believe you’re in heaven, but that was the point I had reached. Can you blame me? I had basically spent the past month and a half in a constant state of exhaustion.

Once I realized where I was, I got even more confused. With no better plan coming to mind, I leaned out of my bunk and dangled my head over the edge. Hersch was propped up in his bunk, his nose buried in his notebook. He looked at me like I was a circus freak when he saw my upside-down stupor. Still groggy and stupid with sleep, I slurred: “what’s going on.”

Hersch eyed me over his book. “Brit History is canceled today. I guess the professor was pretty shaken up by last night.” He took in my look of continued confusion and sighed, tossing his journal aside. “Come on,” he said, pushing my head out of his way as he climbed out of bed. “You can’t hang there like a bat all day.”

I swung myself back up and hung my legs over the edge as Hersch made his way over to the boiler. He emerged with a cigarette for himself and tossed me an apple, which hit me hard in the chest and rolled down to my knees before I managed to fumble it back up into my hands.

Hersch shook his head and laughed. It was the first real laugh I had heard out of him in a week. “Banhart,” he said, leaning back against the boiler. “It sure is tough to be mad at you.”

I snorted. “Yeah, and it’s sure tough to feel you’re about to shoot me all the time.” Hersch turned his unnervingly serious gaze on me, and I scratched uncomfortably at the back of my neck. Now, I wasn’t as completely socially stunted as Amery, but talking about my feelings didn’t exactly come naturally. Looking awkwardly back at Hersch, though, I knew I had to say something. “Look, I get it, Abrahamson. She’s your sister, and she’s, uh, important to you.”

Hersch dropped his eyes, distractedly lighting his cig. “She’s all the family I’ve got left.”

Now I knew exactly what I had to say next, even if it was the last thing in the world I wanted. Not even a girl as neat as Becky was worth making Hersch’s life any more fucked than it already was. “Then I’ll lay off,” I said, trying not to sound as reluctant to say it as I actually was. “I won’t go after her again, honest.”

There was a short silence, and I had a moment of panic where I thought maybe that actually hadn’t been the right thing to say, and I scrambled to come up with a plan of action in case he tackled me. But then Hersch looked at me with a half smile that reminded me so much of Rebecca I could have fallen out of bed. “Thanks, Banhart,” he said, mumbling a little bit, “that, uh, that means a lot.”

That was about as sappy as I ever cared to get, and I could tell Hersch had passed his tolerance for sentiment long ago. So I racked my brain for a change of topic. “Last night was crazy, huh?” I asked, taking a massive bite out of my apple. F**k, was I ever hungry.

Hersch caught on to the conversation jump eagerly. “Sure was,” he coughed, blowing smoke through his nose. “Amery sure was a mess. You ready to hand over that quid yet?”

I snorted, spitting an unpleasant amount of apple through my teeth. “Not on your life, pal,” I said with my mouth full. “Your money’s as good as mine.” At that point it occurred to me that neither of them was actually in the room. “Where’d they get to, anyway?”

“Knight’s office,” he replied. I cringed at the very thought. “I guess he wasn’t too happy to find out they jumped ship as soon as we actually needed fire wardens. They had a note under the door this morning.”

“S**t,” I said, juggling my apple between hands, “that’s rough. He had better go easy on them. Amery could probably tear his arms off.”

“Either that or turn back into a statue.”

“I liked him better that way,” I laughed. “Then I don’t have to keep my neck covered all the time. I swear, if you two teamed up you could take over the world. When you’re both pissed I feel like I could get murdered at every corner.”

Hersch rolled his eyes put out his cig in the ashtray (or, as it would appear to outsiders, the ruined shoe that Erich had bled all over after the fight with the Wankers). “Don’t hold your breath,” he muttered. “Speaking of getting murdered, that Biology exam next week is going to kill us. If you go get books from the library I’ll start the essays.”

I wanted to kick him for suggesting that I do any work during the one hour of my whole life I had free, but of course he was right. I flopped the floor and headed over to my trunk. “Great. I can’t wait to decipher whatever bilingual s**t you manage to get on paper,” I groaned sarcastically.

“You want to trade?” He knew f*****g well that I didn’t. I would rather let Erich yank off my eyelids than sit down and write so much as a page, and given the choice I think Hersch would rather scratch away in his stupid journal than have a good f**k. Even in half-English, he was better than me to an absurd degree. All I could do was shoot him a nasty look as I pulled on my pants and sulked out the door.

All the way up to the library, I stewed over how bizarre the week had been. I thought if one more unexpected thing happened, my brain would shut off, maybe have one of those fits in the night like Gabe (supposedly, I was always sleeping to hard to actually hear it), and then go belly-up.

The whole thing got me thinking about how we deal with our pasts. Erich was probably the toughest guy in the world, but now we all knew even he circumstances were rough enough to remind him of home. Hersch was so f*****g protective of his secrets he would rather wall Rebecca off in her room than risk her telling me anything. And Gabe, I mean what the hell? In the light of day, what he had done the night before seemed even wackier. Small, shy, violin-playing Gabe had somehow managed to get Erich off that roof? Where the hell had he pulled that out of? Composure like that only came from experience; believe me, as a person who has never possessed it. 

So what about me? As far as I was concerned, I didn’t have a past, not one worth mentioning anyway. If I wanted them to think of me as anything besides an American pretty boy, I had to stop acting like one. And earning Hersch’s trust seemed like a damn fine place to start.

I was probably a little too wrapped up with this while I dug through the shelves of books. Since it was technically class time, the library was deserted, so I should have noticed someone else creeping in to join me. But I didn’t, so when I turned around and saw Rebecca lounging against the shelf behind me, I had to bite my tongue, reopening my battle wound from the night before, to prevent the escape of what would have been a humiliating scream.

“Hey there, sailor,” she said with sarcastic seductiveness.

“Why do you always do that?” I breathed.

Rebecca snorted. “You’re too easy to scare, pretty boy,” she laughed. “Actually I am hiding out. Herschel is bound to come looking for me soon. He’s already been up to check on me once this morning. The air raid last night has him completely spooked.”

“He’s not the only one. You should have seen Amery.” I puffed myself up a little. “If you’d believe it, Gabe and I had to get the guys under control.” Blatantly lying, good choice.

Rebecca smiled. “Well, you fared so well during the last raid.” I sensed a dash of sarcasm, since obviously passing out mid-c**k suck was not the perfect response to an air raid. But she wasn’t just making fun of me, but I didn’t manage to sense that until about one second before she was reaching for my collar.

I’ll admit it, I kissed her for as long as physically possible. I might have even pushed her up against the bookcase and slipped her the tongue before the words came punching their way out of my mouth. “Becky, wait…”

She untangled her lips from mine long enough to correct me, “Rebecca,” before diving in for more. To add to my problems, I was never going to be able to call her by that name. In the end, I had to physically shove her away to force myself to stop. “What got into you?” she asked indignantly.

F**k Hersch, I thought. Never for one second did I ever think I would have a friend who meant enough to me that I would be willing to push a girl as fine as Rebecca away just because he told me to.  But I was about to do just that.

“We can’t do this.”

She knit her eyebrows together. “Do what?”

I knew I would start to stammer if I tried to elaborate, so I just waved my arms. “This,” way to articulate, “We can’t keep doing this.”

She caught on then, and the look that passed over her face made me think that she could take Erich down at the knees if she wanted to. “James, we are not doing anything! We haven’t done anything!” I was about to remind her of the fact that she had wrapped her lips around my dick no less than a month ago, but she got there first. “This is about Herschel, isn’t it?”

F**k, she was smart. “Of course it’s about Herschel,” I said, even though I had actually been praying for her not to figure it out. “You know better than I do what happened to him, but I’m pretty sure this,” I motioned wildly with my arms again, “isn’t helping him get better. So if he doesn’t want us to be around each other, then that’s how it has to be.”

Becky practically growled. “I don’t give a f**k what Herschel wants. Herschel does not control me. Hell, Herschel can barely control himself right now. And if you quit this,” she said mockingly, “because of him then you are just spineless.”

“He’s my best friend, and he’s trusting me not to go after you!” That much was true.

Her face darkened and I knew I had said the wrong thing. “You think he trusts you? Then you ask him about Poland. I swear he won’t tell you a word of truth,” she seethed. “And if you think you know the first thing about him and Kristen, you’re an idiot.” She turned on her heel and started to stalk away.

But now I was really unnerved. If what she was saying was true, Hersch was hiding even more than I thought, and that made me so uneasy I could have passed out. “Hey, wait!” I called. Shockingly, she actually turned around. “Tell me. Please tell me what happened,” I practically begged. “You’re right, okay? I don’t know what the hell is wrong with him. So would you just tell me?”

She took a deep, ragged breath, and locked her steely gaze on me. “Kristin is dead.”

It was literally like she had sucked all the breath out of my lungs with a vacuum. I actually physically choked. Kristen was dead. Dead. I should have seen it coming. God, why hadn’t I seen it coming? But Hersch had never let on. ‘I’ve got a girl back home,’ he had always said. He had been lying to me from the first moment we became friends.

I didn’t know what to say. “Becky…” I started.

Wrong f*****g response. I didn’t actually see it happen, but Rebecca let out an exasperated groan and stomped down hard on my foot. Call me sensitive, but it felt like I had been crushed by a tank. As I hopped around, screeching pathetically, she turned away from me again. “Rebecca,” she growled before stomping out of the library.

 

Once I regained the use of my foot, I had limped back to the dorm. What choice did I have? Hersch had already left for class, thank God, but I couldn’t bring myself to care about passing Classic Lit that day. Besides, from what I found out later most kids were so torn up about the air raid they ended up canceling classes anyway. For most of the day, I brooded on exactly what Hersch’s elaborate lie meant for the rest of us. And slept.

This was huge. If what Rebecca said was true, then Hersch was the greatest f*****g actor I had ever met. Never in a billion years would I have guessed what really made him such a moody b*****d. But there was also a pretty good chance that I couldn’t trust Becky. I considered this at points in the day when I felt especially cocky, when I managed to convince myself that she had made it up because she wanted me so badly she was willing to drive a wedge between me and Hersch to stop me from keeping my promise to him. Not one of my brightest ideas, to say the least.

More than anything, though, I started to get paranoid about what the other guys were hiding. Obviously none of them had exactly come here for the climate, but if Hersch could hide something like that so convincingly, anyone could. And that prospect scared the living s**t out of me.

I ended up cutting class for the rest of the day, so I didn’t catch up with the guys until dinner. Turns out Knight was powerfully pissed that Gabe and Erich had ditched their detention when duty called, and he had sentenced them to a week of doing rooftop watch every night, without their usual exclusion from first period. I tell you, I would have thrown myself off the school if I were them. I guess Erich wouldn’t let Gabe tell Knight about the panic attack, even though it might have gotten them off. And he thought I was stupid.

This arrangement wasn’t exactly ideal for me either. Their stupid problems meant I had to spend seven straight nights with just Hersch. I was fucked, and I knew it. There was no way I could make it all that time without opening my big mouth. Once I knew something, it was bound to get out sooner or later.

Initially, I had planned to keep quiet for as long as possible, but when I crawled into bed that night, I realized I had to say something. It was eating me alive, to the point where I was scared that if I kept my mouth shut my face would actually explode.

“Hersch,” I started.

“Yeah?” his voice came from the bunk under mine.

I wracked my brain for the right way to start. “We’re getting to be good friends, aren’t we?”

Hersch responded after a second. “Yeah. You’re my best mate, Banhart.”

It took a lot of guts not to back down there, before I could get to what I really wanted to say. “But, you know, you don’t really talk about yourself. Hell, you know everything there is to know about me.” It was true.  An excess of long, boring nights without Gabe or Erich around had led to me telling him every mind-numbing story in my pitiful repertoire of life experiences.

There was a long pause, and I knew he was weighing just what he should tell me. That’s how Hersch was. Not one word ever went uncalculated. “It’s not really fun to talk about,” he said with a hint of saracasm. “I mean, I spent the last year and a half in a half-mile wide corner of a city closed in by brick walls.”

Well, I was too far in to quit now. “What about your family? Rebecca sure seems like she wants to talk about them.” He didn’t answer, and I knew I had to dive in if I was going to get anywhere. “What about Kristen? Tell me about her.”

Hersch still didn’t say anything, and I thought that was it. He was never going to tell me anything. Then, “She’s perfect,” he said quietly. “She’s the best thing that ever happened to me.” I could hear him take a deep breath before starting again. “You won’t get it, Banhart. But in a place like that, you can go crazy without someone to hold on to. Back there, she was all I had in the world. It’s like for every bad thing in me there was something good in her.” He stopped for another second, then amended with a croaking laugh, “that sounded stupid, didn’t it?”

I couldn’t respond. I had to ask it. “You love her?”

The words from below were so soft I had to strain my ears to hear. “Yeah. I love her.”

“You miss her?”

This time there really was no response. Just a muffled, sad little sound so quiet I was barely sure I heard it. I couldn’t ask him. I knew right then that unless I wanted to wake up the next morning to find Hersch hanging from the rafters, there was no way I could ask him about what had happened. I knew it wasn’t fair for me to expect him to tell me truth. The girl he loved was dead, and that was something I couldn’t even begin to understand. All I could do was make sure he knew I was there for him.

“She sounds great, Abrahamson,” I said softly. “Really great.” He didn’t respond, of course, and I was left staring at the ceiling and feeling very, very small. Then I rolled over and buried my face in the pillow, trying to drown out the pitiful sounds below me and swallow the lump in my throat.

Author's Note

Posted very rough

Reviews

[Arianna]

THAT WAS AWESOME. took me over 12 hours to read...BUT IT WAS AWESOME! i love it !
i love the struggle that jim has within himself
and the fact that gabe was all kick a*s and every one was like ...woah.
and i was like :D thats my gabe!
:) IM SO EXCITED.