My worst-ever Jesse relapse happened the night we watched the video of Michael Jackson's Thriller. I was a freshman in high school, and Jesse was a junior. There was a huge group of us at a friend's house. His name was Chris Hanks, and he had a big screen TV, which was a huge deal.
Chris and his family had a mansion with lots of property, and we all watched the Thriller video before going out to a bonfire in his backyard. Most of our high school was there, so I didn't even talk to Jesse until later that night when a lot of people had already gone home. Jesse was staying the night at Chris's, and I was riding home with someone who was staying late, so we were two of the remaining ten or twelve at the end of the night.
It was during that time when I left the garage and went to the bonfire. I found Jesse there. He was sitting on a log, poking at the fire with a huge stick—probably six or eight feet in length. It had to be that long because the fire was huge and hot, and he couldn’t get any closer.
Two other people were sitting nearby, but they were preoccupied with each other, so I only spared them a quick glance before looking at Jesse again. He smiled at me, and my heart melted just like it did every time. I smiled back and waved, trying to look unruffled.
I was just about to sit on the opposite side of the bonfire, but Jesse patted the seat next to him, indicating that I should go over there. I could hear music playing from the garage. It was pop radio, and they were playing a song Jesse knew by heart, so he unabashedly sang it out.
He was being silly and smiling the whole time, but he had undeniable musical talent. I was dreading being next to him even before I sat down. I initially left three feet of space between us, and Jesse stared down at the empty space and then at me with a questioning expression.
"What's the matter? You don't like my singin'?"
I smiled and scooted slightly closer. "I love your singin'," I said. "I just didn't want to get too close while you were stirring up the fire."
He smiled at me, and then I watched as the look on his face shifted. He grew gravely serious, staring at me with a predatory expression. He scooted close to me, puffing out his chest, breathing deeply, and staring down at me in the most intimidating way possible.
"Were you scared from that Thriller video?" he asked, trying to scare me.
"I wasn't too scared," I said in a damsel in distress type voice with a hand to my chest, mimicking the actual video as much as I could.
Jesse held his serious expression and puffed out his chest even more as if to say that I was a fool for not being afraid.
"Maybe you should have been scared," he said, still looking deadly serious as he stared straight at me. He had always been a bit of an actor, so it made sense that he was trying to convince me that he was a zombie or whatever Michael Jackson was in the video.
What did surprise me was the way he continued looking at me. Jesse was messing around for the first few seconds, but I watched in amazement as his expression shifted from one of crazed-zombie to one of curiosity, or confusion, or frustration, or some mixture of all three. Jesse took a deep breath, and I watched his chest rise and fall as he continued to stare at me. He looked at my whole face, stopping to stare at my mouth, and for about five glorious seconds, I thought Jesse Bishop, the love of my life, was actually going to kiss me. I knew in my heart that he wanted to—I could see it by the way he looked at me. He stared at me for what seemed like forever before he finally broke eye contact.
"Your dad was adopted, anyway," he said in a frustrated mumbling tone as he turned to poke at the fire again.
"What?" I asked. My fifteen-year-old heart was about to pound out of my chest. "What'd you say?" I asked.
"Nothing," he said. "I was just messing around with you." He shrugged it off and turned to say something to Jason, the guy who was sitting close by with his girlfriend.
That night did me in for quite sometime. Nothing ever happened between us, but the memory of the way Jesse looked at me that night stayed with me for way longer than I cared to admit.
Okay, I'll admit it.
Two years.
I didn't completely obsess about him for that long, but I didn't date anyone else either. It wasn't that I was hopelessly devoted to Jesse as much as it was the simple fact that no one else was as good as him. I compared all potential suitors to him, and they all fell short.
Barrett was the first guy I felt a real attraction to, and that wasn't until my sophomore year of college. I dated a few guys off-and-on for very short periods of time during high school and my first year of college, but Barrett was my first long-term boyfriend. I had been with him for a little over a year now, and thought things were going pretty well—until I saw Jesse at the shop.
I was close to my family, and Jesse's sister, Jane, was one of my best friends, but I really only saw Jesse at family occasions, and there were always a lot of people around, so it was easy for me to act busy and not pay much attention to him.
But not tonight.
Tonight there was a hug.
I replayed the whole scene in my mind… the way he hugged me while I held his hand, searching for non-existent dirt under his fingernails. He was always easy to hug, and I could have been in that position a lot over the years, but I had somehow always managed to evade him.
If he had been my blood relative, it would have been easy for my heart to understand that he was off-limits, but as it stood, my brain said no but my heart still rebelled. I was drawn to Jesse the way you're drawn to a famous movie star—hopelessly and perpetually crushing even though you know you'll never have them.
I remembered the way he smiled and put on his glasses. I remembered thinking what a juxtaposition it was that this tough, motorcycle-building guy could be so sweet and adorable.
I felt my stomach tie into knots when I thought of Tammy in her lavender dress, beckoning Jesse to come over there and telling him to hurry up. I felt hot blood rush to my face at the memory of it, and I reached down to adjust the faucet.
I twisted the knob all the way to the right and gasped when my shower switched from pleasant to shockingly cold. I gasped two or three times as I did my best to get used to the cold water. If nothing else, the miserable shock of it served to distract me for a minute.
I went to my bedroom a few minutes later, feeling a little better.
"Barrett called again!" I heard Rebecca's muffled voice as she yelled through the walls.
"Thanks!" I yelled back.
My little brothers had gotten me a Swatch phone for Christmas. It was the kind where two people could use it at once. One person would use the receiver, and the other could pick up the base and use it has a second receiver. My brothers thought it was the coolest thing, and it really was, only I never found myself in a situation where I wanted to let someone listen-in on my phone calls. It was a neat looking phone, though, and I picked up the teal and pink receiver and dialed Barrett's number.
He picked up on the second ring.
"Hello," he said.
"Hey."
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"I just got out of the shower, why?"
"I was gonna come by and pick you up to come to a wedding with me."
"Why are you still in town?" I asked. "I thought y'all were leaving for the game."
"Something happened with the bus. It's only a three-hour drive, so coach said we'll just leave in the morning. Everybody's going to the wedding now. I was gonna see if you wanted to come with me."
"What wedding? I was planning on seeing a movie with Rebecca."
"You can do that anytime. Randall Boyd only gets married once, and it's tonight. Everybody's gonna be there. Most of the team's going to the reception. We're gonna surprise him."
Randall Boyd graduated two years earlier. He was the star center for the Tiger basketball team and a beloved Memphis athlete. There was no doubt in my mind that Tammy was a bridesmaid and Jesse was a guest at this very same wedding.
I couldn't see him again so soon.
"A wedding reception?" I asked in a tone that very clearly meant I did not want to go. "Why don't you just come to the movies with me and Rebecca?"
"Because I don't want to," Barrett said. "Everybody's going to that party."
"I wasn't invited to that," I said. I had a towel wrapped around my head, but I took it down, letting my damp hair fall onto my shoulders. I ran my fingers through it, not even caring that there were tangles.
"I was invited," Barrett said. "The whole team was. Randall's our homeboy. We just didn't think we'd get to go because of the game."
"Y'all still have a game tomorrow," I said. "You don't need to go out partying all night."
He breathed a laugh. "It's a wedding, Rose—not a bachelor party. We're not even going to the wedding, just the reception. I want to go. Me and Randall are tight. You don't have to come if you don't want to, but I'm going."
"I hate to do that to Rebecca," I said.
"Tell her to come," he said. "Nobody will care. We're showing up with a group, anyway. Plus, it's supposed to be huge."
There was a long period of silence where I contemplated whether or not I wanted to see Jesse.
"Or not," Barrett said when I hesitated.
"I'll go," I said. "We'll go. If you're sure nobody's gonna care that we weren't invited."
"You're invited," he said. "We're invited. I already told you that. All the guys are going and taking their girlfriends."
"What time?" I asked. I felt suddenly nervous and anxious as the reality of the change of plans set in.
"I'll pick you up at eight."
I glanced at the digital clock by my bed, which read 6:49. "Okay, we'll be ready."
"All right, see you in a few," he said.
We told each other goodbye, and I hung up the phone before going into the other room to talk to Rebecca. She liked Barrett and easily agreed to change plans so that I could hang out with him.
She and I turned on the radio and spent the next hour getting ready. We were both in good moods and had been singing along with every song that came on. The station we were listening to played pop hits, so it didn't surprise me when a song called Jessie's Girl came on. I tried to contain my enthusiasm when it started, but I loved the sound of the song so much that I just couldn’t help myself. That familiar guitar lick was just too catchy.
Instead of turning the radio off, I reached down and turned it up, shaking my hips to the beat. Rebecca was still putting the finishing touches on her hair with a curling iron, but I was done getting dressed. In spite of knowing it was wrong, I felt happy at the prospect of seeing my cousin again. I was in a good mood because of it, and I reached out for a nearby hairbrush and held it to my mouth like a microphone.
The song was in a comfortable key for me, so I sang the words I knew so well.
Jesse is a friend.
Yeah, I know he's been a good friend of mine.
But lately something's changed that ain't hard to define,
Jesse's got himself a girl, and I really don't know why.
And she's watching him with those eyes,
And she's loving him with that body, I just know it.
Yeah 'n' he's holding her in his arms late, late at night.
You know I wish that I was Jesse's girl.
I wish that I was Jesse's girl.
Why does he want a woman like that?
I thought I had been doing a good job of staying on pitch, so it surprised me when I opened my eyes to find my roommate staring at me with a dumbfounded expression.
"What?" I asked, as the song continued without me.
"You changed the lyrics," she said.
"No I didn't."
"You sure did. You were singing totally different words than him."
I had been singing the song with those modified lyrics for so long that I didn't even remember that they were modified.
"That's because he's a guy singing and a girl can't sing that song with those words, so I changed it. He just said 'moot'," I added out of nowhere when I heard Rick Springfield say the word in the song.
"What?" Rebecca asked looking even more confused.
"Moot," I said. "What kind of word is that? It sounds so weird."
"What are you talking about?" she asked.
I pointed at the stereo. "The song," I said. "There's a line in the song that says the point is probably moot. I know it's a real word; I just don't like it. I've literally never said it in a conversation. I think it makes me feel like he's trying to say the word mute and he's mispronouncing it—or maybe even a moat, like the thing around a castle. It's just an odd-sounding word, don't you think?"
Rebecca stared at me with a thoughtful expression. I couldn't tell if she thought I was crazy or if she was contemplating how she felt about the word moot.
"I don't think I've ever used that word either," she said. "I didn't even realize he said that in the song."
I nodded. "He said, 'I want to tell him that I love him, but the point is probably moot'. What kind of word is moot, anyway?"
"See, you did it again," Rebecca said.
"Did what?"
"Changed the words," she said.
"Huh," I huffed, sounding surprised at myself. "I guess I just change the hers to him since I'm a girl," I said casually.
I tossed the hairbrush onto my bed and turned down the radio so I didn't get myself into more trouble.