discriminate. People who used to hang out together stop being friends or realize they never were friends, really. Age makes men cautious. Judgmental, and once they judge, it’s final. Yeah, Bobby dumped Brad on the bed naked and filthy, and walked away. He was that anxious to get shut of him.
A rank pile of grey sweats by the bed tells her Bobby did finish the job and left before Brad yacked again and crawled away from the stink. She has no problem seeing him like this. Because she was a Pierce Point girl, not one of the cool kids, it’s the only way she’s ever seen him. Not naked, necessarily, but real Brad, neither charming nor social in the Fort Jude way. Underneath, he’s always been willful, brutish and blunt.
Now it shows, and if it hadn’t been for Walker taking control last night . . .
Fucking Brad will strut right back into that circle like the gypsy’s daughter, miraculously turned back into a virgin again. It’s the Fort Jude way. The Fort Jude way is a little miracle of denial. Jessie should know. There’s a thin line between organized society and raw nature. She knows how the town’s anointed nice boys looked at her back then; she heard the girls’ savage whispers snaking down the halls, but now everything is pretty, pretty, now everybody’s nice. Nice is the product of a powerful group effort. Societies like this one survive on the strength of a pact created by the group and mutually agreed upon. Nobody needs to know the truth if we act the part.
In this town the chosen are born smoothing over rough spots and ignoring the boggy ones – even Brad, at least they do in public, where people can see. Jessie shudders. As a kid, she envied that entitled, happy little circle. Now she’s in it – more or less. The kid who used to be nobody is somebody in this town. It’s comfortable. Fort Jude’s chosen do what they have to, to keep their pretty creation intact.
She’s been studying it ever since first grade. In a way, she’s like the anthropologist who moves into a jungle village, alien at first, fitting in so she can crack the place open for examination even as she’s welcomed into the tribe.
She knows now. Boy, does she know.
Before they bussed her across town to Northshore Elementary she was happy. She played in the dirt with kids who could care less who had what or who got invited or who your folks were, and if somebody pushed you down, you got up and started over. At Northshore, she spent solitary lunch hours and moody afternoons on the school bus, scheming all the way across town. Sure she could talk the talk and walk the walk if she had to, but she despised the superior little snots with their cotillions and sailing lessons at the Fort Jude Club. She loved to push their buttons. Never mind the cute outfits. She could turn heads, just boogieing down the hall in her trashy clothes.
Back in the day, there were still things nice girls just didn’t do, whereas Jessie didn’t give a crap. At Fort Jude High she sent those girls – the very friends she sits down with now – a different message: I can take your boy away from you, no matter who you think you are. I can have any guy you have and every one you want. Those girls used to look right through her, like, slut.
Well, she has their number now. But Jessie has mellowed.
Defiance sat better on Jessie back then. Odd how in the end you always come home to the town you stepped out of like dirty underwear and kicked away. Back in Fort Jude thirty-some years after the fact, she chose to assume protective coloration because for Jessie Vukovich these days it’s restful, fitting in.
Like a declared state of peace.
She has money; she still has her looks and she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life alone, rising on company ladders in strange cities. She’s proved herself. She doesn’t need to prove anything to these candy-faced, aging girls and she certainly doesn’t need to fight them. In fact, they’ve grown into nice, likable women that it’s fun to sit down with. Every one of them has been seasoned by troubles they don’t talk about: fucked-up kids, unfaithful or insufficient mates, some illness. They’ve all suffered losses and every one of them has chosen to smile in