didn’t care what people thought about him. He just was who he was. He didn’t come out as gay to me until years later (because of course it takes a long time to build up that courage), but he was always authentically himself. Always. I loved and admired that about him.
Every day we would smoke weed and ditch school. After we had too many unexcused absences, I had the brilliant idea of getting us actual excused absences. I always had a knack for accents and voices . . . and I had his mom’s voice down pat. I’d call the front desk of our school: “Hi, this is Caroline McCalpin calling. I need to come pick up Jack, so please let his teachers know, thanks.”
It worked every time. Other kids started to notice and ask me for my services.
“Can you call me out of school too?”
“Yes. That will be twenty-five dollars.”
I’d press *67 to make my number private, so the school had no way of seeing that everyone’s mom had the same phone number. It was foolproof, you guys. I got pretty sophisticated with my mom voices, too. I could do a Macedonian mom, an Irish mom, a New Jersey mom . . . Jenna’s, Lisa’s, and Jeff’s mothers respectively. I could do whatever anyone wanted from me. I once excused a kid for an entire week.
I started getting cocky about my ability . . . I probably crossed a line when I began making calls to the office while I was in class. In my defense, it was a huge public high school with overfilled classrooms and over four thousand students trekking through the halls. We could get away with a lot.
It was fourth period when my friend Megan started to complain:
“Ugh I don’t want to go to eighth period. I haven’t studied for my test at all. I’m gonna fail.”
I grinned at her, grabbed my phone, and pressed one button (I had the school phone number on speed dial), then pressed the phone to my ear. I looked around the room—our teacher was all the way on the other side, blocked by a sea of rowdy students. It was fine. Stop worrying!
I put on what I thought was a bright, enthusiastic mom voice. “Hi there! This is Peggy Manzer, Megan’s mom? Yeah. Megan’s not gonna make it to eighth period today, she’s got a bit of a tummy ache. I think it’s diarrhea, but I’d rather me find out than you! Ha-ha!” I had no doubt Megan would be leaving school without a problem. My Peggy Manzer impression was spot-on.
Unfortunately, one small piece of classroom etiquette was ingrained in me despite all my efforts not to learn anything in school. Without realizing it, I was whispering on the call. I used my library voice, so it was pretty obvious that it was a student calling. Megan got detention . . . but I didn’t! They never figured out it was me.
With Jack, I was the one leading us into trouble. I introduced him to his first cigarette and his first ecstasy pill. All of it. Jack kept up smoking for years after that first cigarette that I gave him. (I recently got him to quit smoking because that guilt weighed on me all this time.)
Jack went along with it all because we both felt . . . different. Also, he loved pot as much as I did. Bonding! We had this rebellious spirit that led us to shoplift and get high and hang out at the graveyard at night. There was this little section of the graveyard where an entire family was buried. The mom, the dad, and baby. Their last name was Vinkus, and our nighttime activity soon became “hanging out with the Vinkuses.”
Jack’s mom hated me. Can you imagine why? Because I totally can’t.
She called my mom at one point and said, “I do not want your daughter anywhere near my son.” We were your modern-day Homeo and Juliet: a gay boy and his troublemaker best girlfriend, torn apart by their families’ disapproval of their love . . . of weed. After that we would just sneak around with our friendship. Nothing was going to split us up.
He would call my house phone over and over again, and my family couldn’t stand it. He wouldn’t let up until I had answered. He’s actually in sales now and he’s really good at it—it’s that relentless persistence. But we would end up with like ten voice mails in