Ice Cream Cones in Hand
Jimmy and I are walking the half-mile back to our neighborhood, ice cream cones in hand. I’m talking about the movie we just saw, simply babbling, and it’s obvious that he isn’t taking in a word I’m saying. He’s got that expression on his face, the one he wears when he’s thinking about something that he doesn’t like: his eyebrows are all scrunched together in the middle and he’s slouched over with his thumbs hitched in his pockets. I stop talking and Jimmy doesn’t take any notice. I’m not surprised: I could tell he wasn’t watching the movie, either. When the greatly adored hero died a horribly bloody and tragic death, as happens in any movie that Jimmy will agree to sit through (I’m a sucker for happy endings, but Jimmy says he won’t go to the movies with me if the ending isn’t thoroughly and satisfyingly depressing), he watched the screen indifferently, his eyes glazing over.
“Watcha thinkin’ about?” I ask casually, rescuing him from his trance. He looks as though he’s forgotten I’m here.
“Huh? Oh…thinking about? Nothing. Just, uh, nothing.” He gives me a weak smile. I narrow my eyes.
“I’m not stupid, you know.”
“You had me fooled.”
“Look, Jimmy, you think I can’t tell when you’re lying? I know you.”
“Stalker.”
I put a hand over my eyes and shake my head, an involuntary smile lifting the corners of my mouth. We actually did have an encounter with a stalker once. Jimmy thought so, anyway. It turned out that the poor old lady just needed help carrying her grocery bags and she thought that “a nice strong boy” like Jimmy would help her. Mind you, Jimmy is just this scrawny little twig, so the whole thing was pretty funny. I reminded him later on that little old ladies don’t usually stalk people, anyhow.
Returning to the task at hand I say, “No-but-really, what’s wrong?”
“I told you, nothing.”
“You’re not a very good liar, you know that, right?”
“Just drop it, okay?!” he says, finally irritated. I fall silent. And that’s the way it is for a few minutes: silent. The only sounds are those of our shoes scuffing across the pavement. And then Jimmy, looking at the white tips of his converse high-tops, mumbles, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to…it’s just that you nag too much sometimes. It’s annoying.”
I ignore this slight on me, though I don’t much appreciate being compared to some sort of pestering housewife. We sit down on the dock that looks out onto the bay. This is Jimmy’s favorite place: a long road that is basically the main street of our under populated town. It has an ice cream shack that you can walk right up to and order through a little window, a movie theater, and a grocery store, among other things. And of course, it’s right on the ocean. It’s easy to see why he loves it. It’s a got a fantastic view.
I pull off my flip-flops and put my feet in the cool, salty water. Jimmy’s just staring into space again. If I follow his gaze, he appears to be looking at the fading sunset: a canvas of golds, oranges, and reds, all thrown together around the setting sun. But I know that he’s not actually looking at anything; he’s just deep in thought. I have learned from years of experience that it is usually best to let him be and not say anything until he wants to talk.
Suddenly Jimmy tears his eyes away from the blinding sun.
“Hold this,” he says, and gives me his ice cream, so now I have my cookie dough ice cream cone in one hand and his peanut butter fudge in the other. I take this as permission to speak.
“Can I eat it?” I ask. It’s very tempting.
“If you want,” he says. He stands up, stretches, and pulls off his shirt.
“What are you doing?” I say slowly.
“Swimming.”
“Swimming?”
“Swimming.”
“Right. Okay. You’ve lost it.”
“It’s not cold.” And as though to prove his point, Jimmy dives into the water. He swims out to the buoy and back, and then, “Oh, come on.”
I shake my head. “I’m quite fine staying dry, thanks.”
He climbs up onto the dock and sits beside me, the water running down his naked torso. His jeans are soaked, and they leave a great wet mark on the wood. I’m standing now. Jimmy shakes his head, sending water flying in all directions. He tells me that he’s going to get another ice cream. I listen to his bare feet padding across the dock, and then his footsteps stop and it’s quiet. I know what he’s going to do. Secrecy has never been one of Jimmy’s strong points. I hear him running back. He’s trying to push me in. Idiot. I step to the side at the last second, and he goes flying off the dock and into the water. I’m laughing hysterically. I can’t help myself. Jimmy pulls himself out of the water again, this time looking disgruntled.
“It wasn’t that funny,” he says in a low voice, and when I don’t stop laughing, he pushes me into the ocean, which I probably deserved, because I should’ve been paying attention. Now Jimmy’s the one laughing. I’m soaked to the skin. The water seeps through my clothes, causing goose bumps to spring up on my arms. I splash around for a moment or two, gasping for breath, then I pull myself up onto the dock, sputtering indignantly. In between roars of mirth, Jimmy wipes tears from his eyes and says, “C’mon. We should go home, and you should change your clothes. You’re gonna catch pneumonia.”
By the time we reach our neighborhood, I’m shivering with cold. There are goose bumps coating my entire body now, and as I look behind me, I see that we’ve left a trail of water behind us, all the way down the street. Like Hansel and Gretel leaving a trail of breadcrumbs so they can find their way back home.
We stop at the end of my driveway. Jimmy’s house is next door. Even from where we’re standing you can hear his parents arguing, the obnoxiously loud sounds seeping under the cracks beneath the doors, oozing through the glass in the windows. I shift my weight awkwardly.
“Are you, uh, gonna go home? Because you can come to my house for dinner, if you want.”
Jimmy, looking extremely grateful, says, “That would be nice.”
We traipse up the walkway and I kick back the welcome mat to uncover the hidden key. Jimmy roughly stuffs it into the lock and forces the door open.
“Jimmy’s staying for dinner!” I call into the house.
“Lovely,” my mother says. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, reading a magazine. “Are you going to stay the night too, darling?”
“No, I couldn’t do that. I’ve gotta be home by eight.”
“How come?” I look at him suspiciously. It’s not like him at all to actually want to go home.
Jimmy mutters something about having stuff he has to do. Not a very satisfying answer, but I don’t want him to attack me again, so I let it go. We head to my room. Jimmy flops down on my bed and looks at the ceiling. I might be uncomfortable if anyone else did that, but we’ve known each other so long that he’s like family. I don’t have any brothers or sisters, so Jimmy’s the next-best thing.
We’re both silent for a while. I sit down in the swivel chair at my old desk. I think my mother found it at a yard sale. It has a long dark burn down the middle that makes it difficult to write anything on it. I trace the groove with my finger and spin back and forth in my chair aimlessly. Jimmy’s eyes follow my path, back and forth, back and forth, but he doesn’t move. I slow to a stop.
“What is it?”
“Huh?”
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
He shrugs but doesn’t answer. His eyes travel over my room. It’s still pink, from when I was like six. A baby room. His eyes rest on the side table next to the bed.
“Would you be offended if I looked through the stuff in your drawer?” he says.
I raise my eyebrows at the odd request, but gesture toward the stand and say, “By all means.”
He slides across the bed and lays on his stomach as he pulls open the drawer. It hasn’t been opened for a long time and makes a squeaking noise as it slides out. I watch him closely, not knowing what he’s going to do. That drawer is just odds and ends, a place I’ve shoved things because they wouldn’t fit anywhere else.
He brushes aside recent additions to the drawer-ticket stubs, a social studies test I failed-and digs down into the past. He takes things out and sets them aside to move them out of the way as he continues his search. I’m not sure what he’s looking for, or if he’s looking for anything at all. He doesn’t speak as he excavates. He’s all business, and very focused. Finally he pulls out a handful of relics from my past.
He sets the artifacts on my bed. One of them, a marble, rolls across my faded purple comforter and drops onto the floor with a light plunk. The rest he sifts through. He unrolls a sheet of paper to find a childish drawing of a family: mother, father, and daughter. It seemed that first days of elementary school were always filled with things like that. Draw a picture of your family. Write about what you did over vacation. It was all the same.
There’s a blue paper party hat, the kind you can buy in a pack at the dollar store. It’s folded in half along the edges and has therefore lost its cone shape. Now it’s flat.
“That’s a piece of history, right there,” he mutters, and I know exactly what he means. I remember birthday parties with those hats. We’d stick them over our noses and mouths and act like rhinoceros or dinosaurs. We were so stupid. And if the parents were really courageous, we’d get little party blowers. You’d blow through a plastic tube and the rolled up end would unfurl and you would have this obnoxious horn noise. It was like the domino effect. One kid would take their little horn out of their party bag and blow it, and soon everyone would be blowing. And then the horn part of it would break, and all you’d have was a little whoosh sound as the air went through the end, and all it would do was unroll. And no one would want them any more, and they’d be thrown away.
Jimmy uncovers a small wooden box smaller than the palm of his hand. It’s polished with an oak finish that shines from the sunbeams coming through the window. The top swings back on its hinges as he opens it. I’m spinning in the swivel chair again. He cocks his head to the side as he examines the box’s contents and then holds it out to me. I take it. Inside is a small, milky white tooth. It’s turned on its side. One face is smooth, and the other side is sharp and pointy. I nudge it with my finger, feel the sharp edge and flip it over onto its back. The inside is hollow, and the sides rise up around it forming something like a little canyon.
“Did the tooth fairy forget to come?” Jimmy asks with a ghost of a smile. It’s still not a real smile. He doesn’t seem able to produce one of his signature grins today. I actually haven’t seen one of those grins for about a week. He’s lying on his back again.
“Yeah,” I say. “I woke up the next day and my tooth was still sitting there. I picked it up and went down the hall to show my mother, and she said that she had been so stressed out that she had forgotten. She had forgotten. That just about killed me. I still got a dollar, though.”
“How old were you?”
“Like nine.”
“You still believed in that kind of thing when you were nine?” Jimmy rolls over onto his stomach again and looks at me.
“Of course. I mean I stopped after that, but-”
“Nine is awfully old.”
“No it’s not. When did you stop believing in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus?”
“I don’t think I ever believed in any of those.”
“That’s a lie.”
“No it’s not,” he says. “My parents never really did that kind of stuff. They were like your mother, they forgot. They just did it a lot more often.”
“So that makes it okay for you to make fun of me?”
“I’m not making fun of you, and I never have,” he’s getting annoyed now. “I always played along to this sort of thing to make you happy.”
“Anyway,” I say, not wanting to start up an argument. “Now that I think about it, nine-years-old was never a good year.”
Jimmy considers this, still looking irritated. “No, nine was a good year. Nine was definitely good. Maybe you’re thinking about ten. That was the year when everyone made fun of me because my mother came into the classroom one day. I had forgotten my book report, and she kissed me in front of everyone. That was such a big deal then,” he says. He frowns slightly and stares into space as he thinks, then catches me looking at him worriedly and forces a laugh. “Doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Anyway,” I say. “Nine was a bad year. It was the year my dad got cancer. Well,” I correct myself. “It was the year he was diagnosed with cancer. He probably had it before then.”
“Oh,” Jimmy says. “I had forgotten that.”
“Lucky you.”
Jimmy stares back up at the ceiling again. I wonder what’s so interesting up there. I look and see nothing. He presses his hands to his eyes, looks at the ceiling again, then rolls over onto his stomach.
“You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. Just fine.” He doesn’t look at me as he speaks. He hasn’t looked at me, like really looked at me, for the longest time. Why? What is he afraid of?
“You sure?” I ask
“Yeah.”
“You don’t look fine.”
He raises his eyebrows. “I don’t?”
“No.”
“I feel fine,” he says firmly.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Those bruises look like they hurt.”
“Well, they don’t.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
I can see that I’m not going to make much progress. I switch my approach. “Okay. Just making sure. Because you seem sort of…off…lately.” I can tell from the look on his face that he’s annoyed with me. I continue cautiously, “Because you know you could tell me if something was wrong…”
“Just drop it,” he says in a low voice.
I hurry on before he can get angrier. “I’m sorry, but I’m worried about you-”
“Don’t be. Just don’t worry about me. I’m not worth it.” He waves away the problem with a wave of his hand.
“Well you’re so quiet and out of it all of sudden-”
“Why can’t you just leave it alone? Why?”
“Because you’re my best friend and I care about you!” It seems so blatantly obvious to me.
“Well, don’t! I don’t want you to care about me. Not you, not anyone!” Jimmy’s standing, his hands balled into fists. Neither of us says anything for a moment.
“Fine,” my voice sounds angry, even to me. “I won’t bother in the future.”
“You won’t need to.”
Before I have time to decipher this odd declaration Jimmy walks swiftly through the doorway and down the hall. I don’t go after him. I hear the slam of the door, telling me that he’s gone home. I’m surprised to find that I don’t care. I was what I had to do to be a good friend, making sure he was all right, and he got all ticked off at me. It wasn’t my fault.
But a small part of me feels guilty, not because I was prying into Jimmy’s business; I mean, that’s my job, but because I’m the reason that he has to go home sooner than usual, and I know that he’s the last person who deserves to get beat up on by his own father.
I walk over to my window and pull up the blinds a little bit, just enough to be able to see next door. The black car pulls out of the driveway. Jimmy’s mother is in the car, probably going to stay in the apartment that he says she’s gone and rented. That means that he and his dad are the only ones home. Poor Jimmy. He’ll probably have a host of new bruises when I see him tomorrow.
I pull down the shades and yell to my mother that I’m going to bed. I’m going to get up early tomorrow morning and go swimming, maybe go see a movie if Jimmy catches up. I turn out the light and pull the covers up to my chin.
I wake up at four o’ six in the morning. Moonlight trickles through the window softly. I don’t why I’ve woken up, only that there’s something wrong. Something doesn’t feel right.
I sit up with my feet dangling over the edge of the bed. I try to think. Why am I so worried? Something happened yesterday. Something…I can’t remember.
I stand up, go over to the window and pull on the cord hanging down. The blinds fold and rise up to the top of the window. The moon makes everything look bluish. It’s comforting, almost. Blue is such a relaxed color.
There’s a shadow outside. A silhouette. A figure walking down the street. Common sense tells me I should get out of the window in case the person is some psychopathic murderer, but my body gives no reaction to the order. I’m still trying to remember…
I watch the figure’s gait, how he-I have determined he is indeed a male-walks with his hands tucked into pockets and slouches. I’ve seen that walk before.
The shadow finally reaches my house and it’s when he walks by that something clicks and I finally recognize him. It’s Jimmy. The fear evaporates, but I feel the same sickening feeling that something is wrong. With a burst of spontaneity I tiptoe out of my room, past my mother’s closed door and out of the house. Once outside I begin to sprint to catch up with my friend. The pavement bites into my bare feet as I run down the road.
“Jimmy!” I call. His silhouette stops and turns around, then waits. I catch up to him and say, “What’re you doing?”
He has the look of a puppy that’s just been caught doing something it shouldn’t be. “I, uh, couldn’t sleep,” he says. His hands are stuffed in his coat pockets.
“Do you often go for walks in the dark when you can’t sleep?” I grin.
Jimmy doesn’t even smile.
“No. Just…” he lets out a lung’s worth of air. “Just tonight.”
“This morning, you mean. It’s four o’ clock.”
He shrugs and doesn’t say anything.
We walk in silence. I wonder if I should try to get him to talk to me, but decide against it. No good will come from that. I’ll just walk with him. Then maybe this feeling that makes me feel like being sick will go away. Nothing bad can happen.
We reach the ocean and the old wooden dock with its squeaky boards. Everything looks so different in the moonlight. I’m not sure that I like it. We sit down on the edge of the dock like we did yesterday afternoon, but I’m afraid to put my feet in this nighttime water. It’s very different than sunset water.
Jimmy sits with his knees drawn to his chest, on the very far side of the dock, leaning against the post, putting as much distance between himself and me as he can. He lets his head droop and his chin sit on his knees. He looks so moody and…sad. I don’t remember him looking this sad yesterday. Do I really make him that miserable?
“Why did you come out after me?” he says. His voice scares me, and I’m glad he’s sitting on the opposite side of the dock. It’s so flat and empty.
“I couldn’t sleep either,” I say. “And I saw you walking outside, so I figured I’d tag along. I hope you don’t mind.”
Jimmy says nothing.
A seagull cries. Its wings carry it across the sky, sweeping in great arcs. It gives another mournful cry. It seems to be searching for something. And it’s all alone. It makes me want to cry.
The first signs of a new day coming are beginning to appear on the thin line that is the horizon. A lighter shade of blue appears against the night sky and spreads slowly. I should probably get home soon, before my mother wakes up and discovers my absence. But I don’t move. I can’t leave Jimmy alone. Not when he looks like he does, so sad and hopeless. I should make him come back home with me. Am I allowed to do that?
I open my mouth to say, “Why don’t we head back?” but Jimmy beats me to it.
“I have…a question,” he says. His voice gives away nothing, but he looks at me this time. His dark blue eyes look pained.
“Okay,” I say. He looks out at the horizon, now developing into a nice periwinkle blue, and turns back to me.
“What would your first thought be if you found me dead?” he asks slowly, weighing each word.
I stare at him. Is he serious? I peer at him closely. No, it’s just Jimmy and his morbid sense of humor. What would be my first thought? I say the first thing that pops into my head.
“I hope he mentioned me in his will.” I say with a small, amused smile and look back out at the ocean. No laughter escapes Jimmy. I glance over at him and the deadly serious look on his face, and wonder if I should point out that I was only joking. I take another look at his dark face, his set expression. What’s the use? He’s in a bad mood.
The sound of daily life is beginning to pick up. People walk past us down the street in shorts and t-shirts, enjoying the summer weather. A low stream of conversation and laughter establishes itself as the background noise for the day. It’s warm out, and now that the sun has appeared on the horizon, I put drop my feet over the edge of the dock and let them float in the salty liquid below. It’s sunrise water now.
Jimmy doesn’t unzip his jacket, and makes no hints about wanting to go home, or even to get up and go somewhere else. If my mother ends up sleeping in, I’ll be able to slip in before she even realizes I was gone, I say to myself. I can’t just leave him here.
I feel so uncomfortable not saying anything to him while we just sit here. I think of maybe making some conversation, but I know it will just be forced and stupid, and I’ll be the only one talking. The movie theater won’t be open for another couple of hours. But the ice cream shack is open early. I twist around to squint down the street and look at it. A boy is at the window receiving a sundae. I could get us some ice cream, and then it wouldn’t seem so awkward not talking, because we’d be eating. There’s nothing like ice cream for breakfast.
After conferring with Jimmy (he gave more of a grunt than an actual reply), I go to get us ice creams. It’s a good thing I know what his favorite flavor is, because he didn’t say what he wanted.
My feet hit the planks of the dock with little slapping noises.
Slap, slap, slap.
I hope Jimmy’s okay.
Slap, slap, slap.
Maybe I’ll get him an extra scoop of ice cream on his cone.
Slap, slap, slap.
I reach the end of the dock, where the wood merges rather ungracefully into asphalt. I make my way to the peeling paint of the ice cream shack and order our ice creams through the little window. The smell of sugar cones and hot fudge catches in the breeze and I have to smile. While I wait I look out at the fully risen sun. Its rays warm me and hug every inch of my body. The feeling of something being wrong fades into a dull stomachache. That’s good. I don’t want to have to worry about anything. Jimmy’s going to cheer up when he feels the warm sun and we eat our ice cream, and he’ll smile again. Everything will be fine.
I pay for the ice creams and shuffle away with one cone in each hand, in the right cookie dough and the left peanut butter fudge. I’m about twenty feet away from the ice cream shack when I stop. That feeling…that feeling. It rushes up again so quickly that I’m not prepared. I feel it in the back of my throat, trying to come up and overflow into my mouth. It hurts to swallow. I look around for Jimmy desperately. Can’t find him. Why can’t I find him? I scour the dock; see him leaning up against that post. He’s got his hand in his pocket again. My mouth goes dry. He pulls out something silver that flashes in the glare of the sun-it’s a glare now, no longer the comforting warmth it was. Everything comes to a screeching halt as the world crashes down around me, like some freakish nightmare where you don’t wake up.
Jimmy has a gun.
The words reverberate in my head, but it takes another ten seconds for me to grasp the meaning.
My God, he has a gun.
I begin to run, ice cream cones in hand. The reasonable thing to do would be to drop the dessert. You can run faster that way, a good friend of mine, Common Sense, tells me. But I can’t drop the ice cream cones. Then they’ll fall in the dirt, and that sun-that damn sun!-will make them melt. And then how will I cheer Jimmy up?
I try to yell out to him, to tell him to stop, but no words seem to be able to escape from between my lips, only air. Why is it that I can talk to Jimmy about stupid things like teeth and party hats, but when it really matters, my vocal cords shut down?
Suddenly my voice works again. I yell as loud as I can, my throat feeling like it’s tearing from the effort, “Jimmy!” I can barely hear myself over the hard thumping of my heart.
My best friend doesn’t move. He simply brings the gun to his head and pulls the trigger.
I hear the blast from the gun and, after futile attempts to stay standing, feel my legs give out. Before it had seemed as though a spider had somehow gotten into my head and was spinning a web, each thin strand containing a thought, and all the thoughts are linked together to form one main idea: get to Jimmy. But now the web has become a tangled mess, all jumbled together, and it feels like my head is spinning. I do, in reality, feel dizzy, not to mention somewhat sick. And there’s the hollow feeling somewhere below my stomach, where a small bit of something was before. Gone.
You probably know what it feels like to fall from something high. You have that weird, slightly nauseous sensation in the pit of your stomach and everything happens very slowly, as though someone pushed the “slow motion” button. But I’m not falling. In fact, I’m quite still. I look at the dark pavement, willing it to swallow me up and just let me be alone in the darkness. Please.
The cracked asphalt does not listen to me, and it does not open up and let me inside. Maybe it’s because the sun is too hot and too bright. Or maybe it’s because the blacktop is smart, and is telling me to tough it out, because I’m on my own.
Slowly, numbly, I stand up and walk over to the dock. All the horror that was growing inside of me like some toxic mold is released through endless tears that pour down my face. I try not to cry, because Jimmy says only sissies cry, but I’m crying anyway. I don’t wipe the tears away, but let them fall. And as I try not to look down at the planks of the dock as they soak up all that blood…so much blood…I have been defeated. Jimmy is dead.
***
Sitting on the pavement, leaning against the brick wall of a restaurant a few months later, eating a peanut butter fudge ice cream but not really tasting it, I feel as though I’ve been sliced in half. Part of me wants to believe that it wasn’t in any way my fault that he killed himself, that it was his prerogative if he wanted to end his life, that he got what he wanted and is happier now.
But in the other part of me, I feel the worst guilt I have ever felt in my life, worse than when I cheated on my spelling test in second grade, worse than when I stole the Kit Kat bar from the gas station. Because I feel that, had I been a better friend, had I been there for him just a little bit more, he wouldn’t have had to resort to drastic measures. Had I been a better friend, maybe he wouldn’t be dead, he’d be sitting right beside me, telling me a funny story or else confiding in me about his family, if you could even call them that. Speaking of which, I saw his mother cleaning out his stuff the other day. I wanted to go over and rescue some of his things, the things that were “pieces of history, right there,” as Jimmy would say. Like his little league glove that he used for a grand total of half a season before they threw him off the team for punching out another little boy who made fun of him when he missed a pop fly. Or the spray paint can that he had bought when we were twelve and told me he was going to graffiti the whole town, but he never did anything with it. When I asked him about the spray paint a month later he told me that it would have been a childish thing to do and that I really ought to grow up. But his mother threw them all out, and the garbage truck came and mashed everything up into little pieces.
I can’t get to sleep at night anymore. My mother will come in and check on me, because she’s really worried about me, and I’ll close my eyes and pretend I’m asleep, but I’m not, really. And when she’s gone I lay awake, staring at the ceiling, sometimes forcing myself to stay awake, for fear that the nightmares will come back. Because every time I do drift off to sleep, I’m visited by ghastly nightmares. Some of them make sense. Some of them don’t. Often after a particularly bad nightmare, I’ll wake up feeling so guilty I have to go into the bathroom and be sick.
You won’t ever hear me say something stupid like, He was a great guy who made a mistake, because that’s not true. He was a great guy, yes, but he did not make a mistake. Mistakes are things that you do by accident. Jimmy knew exactly what he was doing. He didn’t shoot himself in the head by accident. His finger didn’t just casually slip and pull the trigger. He knew.
But I won’t forget him, not ever. Jimmy was my best friend, and even if he did take his own life, he doesn’t deserve to get washed away, like they washed away his blood from that dock. Because he doesn’t deserve to be forgotten.
Besides the length, which I've tried to shorten, and the beginning, which has no hook whatsoever, I've edited this story numerous times. I've just about worn it out, so I figure it's time to let some other people pick it apart. So please tell me what you think: your immediate reactions, parts you did and didn't like, etc. Thanks!
