"Jake and the Price of Cool" was originally written as a short story, which appeared in the Quercus Review. It has also been adapted as a short film screenplay, which will hopefully go to camera sooner rather than later.
n the end, it was worse because I think I might have been partly responsible.
We all heard about the disappearance at the same time, about Chuck's kid. Chuck was one of the older students, doing painting mostly, and a bit of sculpture. He was married and had Jake, four years old and pretty great. Chuck brought Jake into class whenever we had special fund-raising things, and that's how I met him.
I participated in these events haphazardly, whenever it suited my convenience. It was kind of pathetic, really, the way the school kept conspiring to make all of us self-centered individualists — I mean, after all, we were art students — to cooperate on something innocuous, get us ready for the real world or something.
I admit, I have a problem with group work in any sense, but I'm damned if I'm going to be manipulated into working with other people for the sake of a few cupcakes or some popcorn.
Usually I cut out with my friend Steven, but this one time, I stayed. It was some goofy bake sale thing, and I let myself get roped in to help restocking the tables.
I guess it was fate, because I got to meet Jake. Something about him, I don't know what, made me deviate from my usual anti-kid stance, and I offered to let Chuck and his wife wander a bit on their own while I sat with him.
Jake. I think about him a lot, I guess. I mean, where did the name come from, for one thing. Cool name for a cool little kid. He was the Jake-est kid I ever met. It was like Chuck and — what's her name, his wife — had waited until he was old enough they could tell he was a Jake before they ever named him. I could think from now until the end of time and never think of a better one.
I ended up sitting in a corner of the hallway with Jake for, I don't know, like half an hour or something. Steven had cut school completely that afternoon, and, to tell the truth, I was kind of glad. I mean, he's a friend and all, but I couldn't imagine him having the patience to talk to a four year old for more than a millisecond.
I snuck Jake a couple of cookies, and we chatted about dinosaurs and dump trucks, you know, kid stuff. I felt so clean, like I'd been scrubbed from head to foot with the purest water in the world.
I tuned out that group of girls who dressed like tarts and hung around making goo-goo eyes at the guys – I didn't have any idea why they were even at a school like this.
I forgot about the loser know-it-alls who spouted off about what I should think was cool – oh, and my absolute worst nightmare: the fat kid who never talked to anyone, but always had his tape recorder going. This guy – utter loser. He used to follow me around when I first started school, but that only lasted until I told him, well, in foul language even for me, to just piss off.
With Jake that day, I let all of it fade away into so much white noise. I only thought about how nice it would be to be simple again, and innocent, and think trucks are the coolest thing ever.
When it was time for him to go home, Chuck thanked me, and it was nice, because suddenly I went from thinking of him as a great big no-talent dumb guy to a pretty great father and probably a nice person.
I wouldn't say the foundation was there for a great friendship or anything, you know; some guys you're never going to really want to look up. But — and I swear I thought this then, with no benefit of hindsight, but with a present sense of irony — I told myself, Chuck'd be a great guy to have around you in a crisis. No lie.
Art school is never the best place in the world for honesty or relationships based around anything but artifice and ego, but I tried. I really was trying.
It was hard to make friends when I wanted to keep my standards high, and no one else seemed to live up to my expectations. At some point, I think, I just stopped trying.
I was very often late for class, and I saw this as a form of being honest with myself. I was putting, as I saw it, a judgement of relative value on the idea of promptness. Was ‘on time' really me, or something valued by a system I didn't care about?
That's the beginning of why I think I might have been a little bit responsible. Maybe.
It's like this. Everyone snubs a lot of people, all the time. Mostly, you do it to protect yourself. You save your own time for you. You don't want to be wasted, and you especially don't want to be rushed early into your grave worrying about everyone else. Sometimes, you don't know who you piss off. You just don't. I always figure you get pissed off, other people get pissed off, but it's only your problem if you're the one getting upset.
I mean, you can't make other people responsible for your emotional state, right? That's yours to deal with. That's why we have courts. Courts don't punish the lying, cheating guy who made a fool of his wife; they punish the wife for taking out her rage on his sports car with a baseball bat. So, as per that lesson, I've learned one sure method of defense — walk away from everything, and never look back.
Ten minutes later, Steven and I were standing outside in the frigid air smoking our last couple of ciggies in the only place permissible. My fingers were bright lobster red, and Steven had a smile that actually quivered. Bloody cold day.
Sound carries on cold days like daggers into ice, so we might have actually been the first ones to hear the sirens. Two blue-and-whites came roaring right up to the front doors of the school, and an officer opened the door for Chuck's wife.
The whole student body came pouring out in the next few minutes. Chuck was slow in emerging. He would have just had enough time to make it from the cafeteria back to one of the painting studios probably, and whoever they'd sent to get him had had a hell of a time locating him. They could have sent me. I'd have found him in no time flat. I would have been able to talk to him if I had. I wish I had. Stupid wish. I didn't know what was happening. I would have had to have been psychic to know.
So why didn't I go over to him when he came out? Because, my darling, you don't go traipsing over to a man standing with his ex-wife when you're an attractive young girl she's only met briefly once. Especially in dire circumstances. You don't give the wife anything else to worry about. I know I was Chuck's friend and all that, but I hung back. I didn't want to interfere. I think I did the right thing.
She was crying and screaming, beating Chuck's chest, all completely hysterical. Then Chuck started to cry, and I really began to admire him, strange although that might sound. Here was a guy whose heart was broken, whose world was falling apart, and he wasn't going to be a jerk who pretended everything was all right until he could get to a bar and drown himself in beer. Come to think of it, I don't think I ever once saw Chuck take a drink.
The whole school knew by the end of that scene out front that Jake had disappeared. Somewhere between the bus stop at the school and the one near his mom's place, where she was waiting, Jake had gone AWOL, and the police were taking it very seriously. I was heart-sick too, a bit. Poor Chuck. Poor Jake. But I swear, I always believed things would be fine. I mean, he was a great kid. Right?
Two days passed, with no word about Jake. It may seem heartless, but life just went on, and I found myself heading up the hill to go skiing with Steven. I could hardly pass that up, could I?
We took the lift up, and I promised myself I'd never let on to Steven how much I was suddenly regretting having agreed to this crazy thing. I figured I could probably have lived my whole life without doing something that passed off entering mortal danger as a recreation. And then, we were off, and I supposed I was committed.
The run took us down what he told me would be a fairly lazy slalom course through a slightly wooded area, and I felt misled from the start. Trees, everywhere, I swear, and every one had my name on it. I was going very fast, very out of control, and following me, I had Steven with his "Bend your knees!" and "Don't hit anything that looks harder than a pillow!" Right.
And then we were flying, over a rise in the suddenly-cleared snow, trees sinking away behind us where I didn't dare look for the sake of my precarious balance. The hill dropped steeply, and the river valley spread out before us. The ends of my skies were on nothing momentarily, and then I was leaning forward at a crazy angle, knees bent because it was my only hope left for staying alive, and we raced toward the plain below.
And then, that combination of speed and wind and ice crystals slapping my cheeks, and the heat of my sweating brow. . . It was like the best chocolate with a warm brandy, at the beginning of a long weekend where you have nothing at all planned. But even better. I was in control and so wild, all at the same time. I was transported, and not just at high speed down a hill. I was floating outside my own body, and at the same time perfectly, euphorically grounded.
I can honestly say nothing in my life has ever been quite as frightening or exhilarating as those five minutes on the mountain with Steven. There have been some pretty good driving near-misses, but nothing else even comes close. I started to think maybe I'd be able to jump out of a plane if someone invited me to, and I wouldn't chicken out and beg off with a cold like I did the last time.
I could have seen the lights as soon as we got over the rise and onto the slope, but I didn't. Steven did, and he had his skis off and was running as soon as we hit the level. I was slower and much clumsier, but I made it to the bridge almost even with him. He'd deserted his skis, and I'd followed suit. I was like an albatross suddenly, not understanding how my legs worked, and out of my element. My head was still back on the hill.
I saw Chuck as soon as we were across the bridge. He was walking slowly toward the fringe of woods behind the school in the wake of a crowd of police officers. There was a gravity about him which made me follow him in wonder. He was so dignified, so straight. His sandy beard was the only bit of color on his face, although I swear it was thirty below. I shed my gloves as I walked. I never found them again.
I slipped my hand into his. Whatever the reason, I wanted to be there for him. Anyhow, who else did he have at the school? The wife wasn't around this time, although she must have been on her way. We were both numb, I figured, Chuck and me, and I felt like a bit of an interloper. Here I'd been, living it up on the ski slopes, while he'd been in hell the last two days wondering if his little boy was ever coming home. To have lost him once already to his separation, and then again — no, that would be unthinkable, and unbearable.
Now, I'm wondering a bit how much I presumed. After all, I was just the chick who had coffee with him every day or so, to hear stories about that kid of his who I liked so much and whose father was so proud of him he could have been SuperJake under the small snowsuit and blond mop. SuperJake.
An officer came out of the woods carrying the little bundle in his arms, with ridiculous care. It was wrapped in the green snowsuit, although I heard later that wasn't at all how he'd been found. I felt Chuck's fingers squeeze, and I held on for dear life.
A week later, and I got a call which brought me to the police station to make my statement. Not that I could be much help; besides the ski trip, I hadn't even been in the area for the couple of days before. It was the long weekend, and I had been holed up for the most part with my reading list and my story boards. What could I tell them that they couldn't have found out from anyone? I figured that Chuck had mentioned me, or that someone had seen me holding his hand as they brought his son's body out of the woods and laid him, cold as the ground, on the stretcher. The ambulance cut brown swathes through the white of the snow. I wondered if we'd be able to tell where everything had happened when the spring came.
But I wasn't going to be let off with a simple little statement. The officer who took my name raised an eyebrow at it, flipped up a list from a stack of papers, and told me to wait. A short but interminably tense time later, I found myself in a frightening box-room in front of a desk with a lamp on it I kept expecting them to turn in my face. There was a mirror on the wall in front of me, so I knew I was being watched by more than the two guys in the room.
I felt like asking why I couldn't have a female officer present, but that was stupid, and a nervous thing. I didn't care if I was talking to a woman or a man. I just wanted to know what was happening.
They showed me a cassette tape, this random old school thing. I mean, everyone who's anyone does digital now. Then they played it for me.
I heard two voices come out, crackly, a hiss on the tape making the words all but unintelligible. I didn't have as much trouble making it out as they had, I guess. They told me to tell them what I heard, and every word I said they wrote down.
"He's not even a team player, because who would want him?"
"Fat great beachy-greasy totally priggish whale of a bad time!"
Giggles on the tape.
"I'm getting a stomach ulcer thinking about him. He should come with a side of milk."
Finally, the tape stopped. "Do you recognize the voices?" they asked me. "Can you identify them?"
I thought it was a trick question. Of course I recognized them. I stared at the two cool officers. I felt as cold as if I was back out on the frozen plain with Chuck's icy fingers in mine. What did this have to do with anything?
"The guy," I said. "That's Steven Withers. He's a friend of mine and Chuck's."
"We have him in the next room," the officer told me. Then he coaxed a bit. He didn't see I wasn't reluctant, just stunned. "We're not accusing you of anything. We're just trying to fill in the blanks. Whose is the other voice?"
It was obvious. "Mine," I said, all my puzzlement carrying over into the word. "It's me."
"And can you tell us," they asked, "exactly who you were talking about?"
I told them. Of course I recognized the conversation. Steven and I had been sitting on the bleachers in the auditorium, the darkened auditorium, making fun of the fat kid, Mr. Tape Deck. We were alone, or so I thought.
"This," said the officer on the right, "was found beside the body of Jacob Aldolfini."
I was very quiet, and I guess my hindsight had got it right, because what he said was like a confirmation, not a revelation. The quiet went pretty much right through me, from skull to stomach to toes, and I was frozen.
I barely heard them say, "Thank you," and dismiss me from the room. I would like to say I was incapacitated, catatonic, and didn't move until they carried me out, but that's not true. I got up, breathed deeply, lit a smoke, and left.
It was no big deal, right? I mean, the guy was such a loser, not that that made him so much different from almost everyone else in our class. It hurt my eyes just to look at him, all that blubber and those clothes that were always too small. He never said anything to anyone, but I do remember the tape recorder. Him and his tape recorder. And now it turned out he had been spying on us all along.
It wasn't just us either, as I heard at the trial. I sat in for a few days after I gave my testimony, and heard some of the other stuff he'd recorded. But it was the things I'd said, and Steven, that were the most pointed.
And he, that ugly bastard, just sat there all quiet and sullen, at the defense table, never saying a word or looking around. It was like he didn't care what he'd done when he snuffed out a bright little life, someone so helpless and happy.
Chuck sat at the back of the courtroom for the most part. He was with his ex all the time, so I never went up to him. Not that I figured he'd hear me if I said anything. His face was blank, like there was nobody home. Maybe there wasn't, now that Jake was gone.
No one really blamed Steven and me. No one ever said anything about bringing charges. We were not at fault. It was a nothing thing, a bit of harmless ragging.
Sometimes you have to lash out a bit to get things off your chest. You do, otherwise your little problems start to eat you alive. You have to bitch a bit. You get bitter otherwise.
Besides, it wasn't just the tape. They had a lot of circumstantial evidence on the guy, this disturbed guy who had taken Jake out to the woods and made him cold as ice, and then who'd put that tape in the pocket of the green snowsuit to explain why he'd done it. But it was the tape that got him. Me and Steven, we should be heroes. At the trial, they thanked us.
Steven met me outside, and we had a long coffee in the place across the street from the police station. We didn't talk about the trial. I don't know if we can. I wonder what I'll say, if I ever see Chuck again.
THE LAST RITE audiobook (unabridged) read by Jen Frankel
Young Maggie Stuart begins to have strange dreams, then develops what seem to be superhuman perception. Suddenly, she is thrown into the middle of an age-old battle between ancient foes. Will she stay a pawn, or can she become a force to be reckoned with herself? And just how does her teacher Mr. Hunt fit into the picture: as an ally, or her worst enemy of all?
n the end, it was worse because I think I might have been partly responsible.
We all heard about the disappearance at the same time, about Chuck's kid. Chuck was one of the older students, doing painting mostly, and a bit of sculpture. He was married and had Jake, four years old and pretty great. Chuck brought Jake into class whenever we had special fund-raising things, and that's how I met him.
