by Jessie Ann Morrison
The boy and I are sitting on the carpeted floor of Katie’s bedroom, leaning against the side of her bed. His name is Jax and he wears scuffed white shoes. He has a little mole on his neck, and shiny hair that needs cutting. It hangs over his eyebrows in lanky curtains. His eyes are dark and inscrutable.
“Hey,” he says, unfolding his legs and standing up. “I’ve got a song you’ve gotta hear.”
He walks over to Katie’s CD tower and trails a finger down the titles, finally choosing one and putting it in the player.
“You heard of the Allman Brothers?”
I hadn’t.
“Oh yeah,” I say quickly. “I love them.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m really into classic rock.”
“Me, too!” I smile vivaciously, per the instructions of YM magazine.
“What’s your favorite band?”
Shit.
“Oh, I really couldn’t pick one. There’s so much classic rock out there these days.”
“Totally. “
Katie’s parents are both at work and we’ve gotta be out of the house by five. Katie’s in the basement with Jax’s friend T.J. She was tossing around the idea of letting him go to third, and I’m wondering if she is actually going through with it. He could be unbuttoning her pants right as we speak. Up here on the second floor, Jax has opened the window and lit an incense stick. We’ve had a bunch of wine coolers, and Jax has pot in a tiny little zip lock baggie, like a lunch bag for one of my old Barbies.
“You smoke?” he asks.
I’m the same age as he is, fourteen, so why do I feel so naïve? Will he try to kiss me, and if he does, will he know that I’ve never kissed anyone before? I feel a quick panic—for just a moment, I wish I was still in eighth grade. I’m scared, and I think about my parents. But just for a moment.
“Sure.”
He opens the bag and pinches out some green stuff. He pulls a little pipe out of his pocket and begins to pack the pot inside of it. Then he pulls out a lighter.
Crossroads, one of the Allman Brothers says, seem to come and go.
Our eyes are closed and our shoulders are touching.
“What’s that sound?” I want to know.
“Slide guitar,” says Jax. “There’s nothing like it in this world.”
He’s right. It trembles inside of me.
“So much better than that conformist commercialist top 40 crap,” Jax continues. Where did this knowledge come from? Where does one learn these things?
Freight train, he sings, each car looks the same.
“Do you like school?” He asks me.
I think about this question. I’ve learned by now that with a boy like Jax, simple questions aren’t really simple. In other words, he’s not asking me whether I’m getting a good grade in English (which I am).
“Eh, it’s okay.” General ennui: usually a failsafe response.
“I can’t wait until I’m sixteen so I can drop out.”
Drop out! What will he do? Where will he go? What will his parents say? Does he even have parents?
“Well—why don’t you like school?”
“Look. I don’t buy into the hierarchical fascism that is high school. Teachers telling you what to do, how to think, how to dress, what to believe. Telling you what to read. Let me ask you something: what’s two plus two?”
“Four,” I hesitate, my voice a question. But what can two plus two possibly be but four?
Jax exhales in exasperation, pursing his lips, so that the escaping air blows his hair straight out from his forehead.
“Maybe. But maybe not. How do we know? Everything we’ve ever learned is just something a teacher told us. So how do we know they’re right?”
“Well—I don’t know. I mean, some things are just true. Like math stuff, and science. Facts.”
Jax just shrugs.
“I don’t believe in facts,” he says esoterically, one eye hidden behind that curtain of hair.
Crossroads, asks the Allman Brother, will you ever let him go?
“So….what are you going to do when you drop out?”
“Who knows? Follow a band. Move to Norway. Do you know it’s one of the most prosperous countries in the world? It uses the Scandinavian Welfare Model, and everyone has health care. They also have one of the most environmentally conscious societies in the world.”
“And fjords.”
He looks at me, thunderstruck.
“Yes,” he says slowly. “And fjords.”
He touches my cheek with his fingers and moves in, slowly. I don’t know what other first kisses are like, but in the spectrum, I think ours rates high. I follow his lead, this boy who is so wise and soft-lipped.
His urgent fingers push up the hem of my shirt. Why am I thinking of my parents? “Come on,” he says, when I try to push his hand away, “Be free.” But how do I tell him I’m not ready without sounding like a hopeless rube? Downstairs, Katie, with her sophisticated Lincoln Park townhouse and her eyeliner and her handbag with the designer logos all over it, is probably shirtless, and T.J. is unhooking her lacy Victoria’s Secret bra, the type of undergarment that my mother would never even consider letting me wear. And he’s probably seeing the matching panties, too, while I’m engaged in a wrestling match with this boy and the bottom of my shirt, knowing that I’m wearing a beige Jockey bra that holds my barely-there boobs and goddammit, I’m not ready.
So I push him off me and stand up.
A fjord is a long, narrow inlet carved out of a mountain by a glacier. The glacier makes its cuts by pressing and pressing, keeping that pressure on until even the mountain gives, and impervious stones get worn to nothing.
But see, I may love the Allman Brothers now, and maybe I did drink wine coolers and smoke pot and let him kiss me, but I’m only fourteen, and fjords are as old as the world. They’ve given into the push, but I don’t have to. I still have time.
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