can’t be dead,” I said to Donna. “Can’t I do something? Can’t I help him?”
“I am only here to show you what might happen,” she answered. “Nothing is for certain.”
“But what can I do?” I asked. “Tell me what I have to do so he doesn’t die like this.”
“Love him,” Donna replied. “You can love him.”
She began to grow faint. Her skin paled and the candles in her crown slowly went out. I looked over at Jack and saw that he, too, was disappearing. The whole room was dissolving around me.
I woke up in my own bed, shaking and feverish. My body was on fire from within, and coupled with the strange and disturbing dream, I was sure I, not Jack, was the one who was dying. It would turn out that I merely had the flu. I stayed in bed for the next three days. My mother brought me aspirin, soup, and cold washcloths until I felt better, just in time for school to resume on Monday.
I spent the time reading, but mostly I thought about the dream. Donna had said that Jack was dying because of love, but also that I could save him by loving him. It didn’t make any sense. How could the same thing be his killer and his salvation? It was a puzzle far too complex for my undeveloped powers of reasoning. While I could easily spot the villain in a Hardy Boys novel, I hadn’t the first clue where to start solving the mystery of my own heart.
Jack was forbidden to visit me during my illness, which was just as well. I didn’t want to see him, fearful that I would see in his face the gaunt expression of death. When I finally did see him, Monday morning, I was relieved to see that he was his usual healthy self.
“Hey,” Jack said as we began the walk to school. “What a lousy vacation, huh?”
“The parade was cool,” I suggested.
Jack nodded as he kicked at the leaves covering the sidewalk. “Yeah, I guess.”
“And Christmas break is only a few weeks away,” I reminded him.
“Right,” said Jack, noticeably more upbeat. “And I bet it will snow soon. It’s cold enough.”
“Sure,” I said. “Then we’ll go sledding.”
With something to look forward to, Jack’s mood improved considerably. He began talking animatedly about our winter plans, of ice skating and snowball battles and, best of all, the imminent arrival of the annual Sear’s Wish Book and its store of treasures. I listened as he chattered, happy to be walking with him. But I also felt that I had now somehow become his guardian, responsible for making sure that he escaped the terrible thing that was waiting for him in the years ahead. I hoped that, like the flu, this new affliction would pass for both of us. Until it did, I would be watchful, looking for signs of danger, searching for the thing that would prevent Jack’s destruction.
CHAPTER 5
It is a dreadful thing to feel responsible for someone else’s well-being, and worse when that person seemingly feels no reciprocal obligation. Not that Jack didn’t care about me. He did. But as we got older, his idea of caring came to consist primarily of making sure I wasn’t ostracized socially, and this he did mostly because he needed to be sure of his own position in teenage society.
If I sound bitter, perhaps I am. Whether this is justified or not I cannot say. I only know that I spent a great deal of my time during the next few years keeping a watchful eye on Jack. I was always on the lookout for danger, always suspicious that disaster waited behind every corner. I developed a wariness that manifested itself in almost pathological shyness and a tendency to walk around with my shoulders pulled up. A stiffness settled in my neck and refused to go away.
I realize that I’m making Jack sound like a first-class egomaniac. He wasn’t. He was a teenage boy, with all the usual faults of teenage boys. If others existed for his convenience, it was only partially his fault. As I’ve said, people tended to orbit around Jack, anxious to either earn his notice or take care of him. Boys liked him. Girls swooned over him. Through the changing parade of friends and hangers-on, I was the one constant, always there, always waiting.
During this time I learned to more or less ignore the feelings I had for Jack, or at least to convince myself that what I felt was friendship on a level slightly more focused than usual. This I attributed to the fact that we’d been thrust together at birth. It was only natural, I rationalized, that I would be closer to him than I would be to other boys. If I happened to sometimes think about him while I touched myself (after repeated failure, I’d given up hope of ever remaining chaste), that was only because we were so often together that he came naturally to mind. And if I thought about other boys as well, and never about girls, well, that was something I didn’t allow myself to examine too closely.
Besides, I had gotten good at feigning interest in girls. Largely this was accidental, as I still didn’t quite realize that I had any real reason to pretend. My imaginings during masturbatory sessions were not overtly sexual, tending to focus more on vague daydreams about intense friendships. When I did allow myself to think about sex, it was in an offhand way, based mostly on glimpses of other boys in the locker room and wondering what it would be like to kiss or touch them. Even then, I hadn’t the faintest idea what two boys might do together, and my fantasies almost always stopped above the waist.
And anyway, I liked girls. I found them interesting, at least when they weren’t giggling and whispering together in corners, as they seemed often to be doing. I found that, with some effort, I could even engage with the other boys in conversations about which girls were the most kissable, personable, or likely to put out if asked (not that I really knew what this meant). If I never quite got to the point of actually asking one of them to a school dance, or to a movie, that was attributed to my retiring nature.
Girls were no problem for Jack. The charm he’d evidenced since birth only grew brighter as he reached his mid-teens. Where most of us spent a year or two battling acne, awkward bodies, and the ravages of hormones, Jack went through all of it seemingly overnight, going to bed a boy and waking up the next just a moustache away from manhood. His hair, once flaxen, was now a deep gold, which perfectly suited his blue eyes. Tall and lean, he’d discarded his baby fat long ago, leaving only muscle behind. It never occurred to him to feel inadequate because he was always the one against whom other people measured themselves.
It was no surprise that girls wanted to be with him, and beginning in the spring of 1964, he was frequently booked for Friday and Saturday nights. Often I was dragged along, usually as the partner of Jack’s date’s less-attractive friend. As it didn’t matter to me what a girl looked like, this would have been the perfect arrangement, at least if the girls I was paired up with didn’t inevitably fall in love with me. Several times I found myself doggedly pursued by a girl in whom I’d shown only polite interest. This would usually involve a few weeks of telephone calls and invitations to future events, all of which I accepted out of fear of hurting the girl’s feelings. But eventually whatever charm I initially possessed seemed to wear off, and after two or three get-togethers, the girls usually moved on. I was puzzled by this interest in me for some time, until on the night of September 2, 1964, I received an explanation.
In February of that year America was introduced to the music of the Beatles. Like just about everyone else under the age of 25, Jack and I embraced this new sound enthusiastically. We purchased Meet the Beatles, which we played over and over until our parents begged us to stop. Thankfully, the Fab Four released three more albums before the summer was over, giving us a regular supply of new material with which to irritate the adults in our lives, who eyed our growing hair with suspicion and longed for the days of Marty Robbins and Patti Page.
When it was announced that the Beatles would be playing a concert at Philadelphia’s Convention Hall in September, we knew we had to be there. But with tickets to the show sold out in a matter of minutes, we had little hope of going. That is until Lorelei Pinkerton asked Jack if he wanted to go with her. Short, plump, and years behind her peers in the development department, Lorelei had the classic plain girl’s advantage of cleverness. Sensing early on that John, Paul, George, and Ringo were something special, she had quickly volunteered