Stalking Jessica
Febos, Melissa
Stalking Jessica MELISSA FEBOS After I've walked the dog, checked and rechecked that I have my lecture notes and student critiques ready for the 10:00 a.m. class I teach at the Gotham Writers'...
...Softer," she said, and a different sort of shame coursed through me...
...I just didn't know it yet...
...With Jessica it was different...
...We entered high school, and a cruelty sprung up between us, as if to counter the tenderness between our bodies...
...The first few images are of her pudgy son, in one of those baby trailers that people hitch to the back of their bikes...
...For all my sexy dreams about Ani DiFranco and Jeannette Winterson, I had never actually touched another girl with lustful intent...
...In the hallway between classes I saw that her soccer teammates had decorated her locker with crepe paper and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, and I knew we were through...
...As I entered my teenage years, this intimacy slipped into sex...
...I would die without you," she told me, and my heart glowed...
...Jessica tried to convince me that I was leaving her, but looking back, I don't believe that was the case...
...There is her husband, a man of ordinary looks, though her beauty renders him homely by comparison...
...My father was just a stranger in a Florida trailer...
...It wasn't long after that first tousle in my bed that things began to change...
...Jessica reminded me of me, too...
...When she called less, so did I. We both became busier with other things...
...But best of all, she has posted some new photos...
...Her mouth was so soft...
...Jessica stopped complaining about her mother so often...
...We sewed the cutout fronts of worn band T-shirts onto other T-shirts and pronounced loudly in the school cafeteria that if we weren't best friends we'd surely be lovers...
...Finally, I find one that interests me...
...Not that I haven't loved hard—I have...
...There we cuddled beneath the glazed gaze of her Kurt Cobain poster...
...Our breakup came without a fight...
...Weekends, we smoked seedy joints, listened to the Go-Go's and Pearl Jam, and scavenged our basements for old pictures of our mothers looking beautiful in bell-bottoms (hippy, mine...
...But I haven't been left again...
...They like you...
...When dusk slipped across the pond and through my home, I turned up my headphones, flipped on lights...
...Her arms are thin and tanned, her belly is as smooth as when she was fourteen, the year we became lovers...
...Maybe Jessica and I would have been lovers faster if we hadn't been best friends, but that prohibition dissolved when she went to summer camp and kissed her first girl...
...She smiles big for the photographer, surely her mother or brother, both of whom I remember well...
...Her step-father was a rich Republican, and a face-slapper...
...I fantasized as much as any teenager, but my only physical exchanges had taken place with men...
...My return was prompted by my parents' panic at discovering my newfound adolescent facility for lying and drinking...
...When I dyed my hair green, her mother declared our friendship over...
...My girlhood was punctuated by friendships like ours: a collapsing of two worlds into one, the vacuum of total intimacy...
...I felt it like the smell of autumn, as a momentary piercing in my chest, sucking the breath out of me on the school bus...
...I lived on a pond, in the mossy woods of our Cape Cod town, where the population nearly tripled during the summer months...
...I touched the way I wanted to be touched...
...Maybe that's why I'm still looking for her...
...Her memoir, Whip Smart, was published in March 2010 by St...
...I had returned to public school after a year in private school...
...Why don't they plan a play-date for their babies, and for themselves...
...Quickly, I get to my most important reason for being on Facebook, checking up on Jessica Morrow (not her real name...
...I click through the images with increasing speed...
...There is Jessica, in a blue bikini...
...Mine adopted me, so successfully that I often forget we're not biologically related...
...One day, we hitchhiked home from school, praying that no teachers or friends of our parents would roll up, but giddy with the risk...
...I've just been chasing my own broken heart so that I can make more room in it...
...I scroll back on Facebook to revisit Jessica's bikini shot...
...It has been a couple of days since my last visit, and in the interim, Jessica has written on a friend's wall that she will be on Cape Cod this weekend...
...her mother screamed at her a week later, when I painted Jessica's fingernails black and drew a sad firefly on her forearm below some Bikini Kill lyrics...
...I kept making zines and mixing tapes, sewing things onto my sweatshirts and jeans...
...Although the high of seduction, and being seen sexually by boys, was an erotic experience, any actual sex act with them left me numb and disoriented...
...Even now, I cringe at my unknowing bearishness...
...On Facebook I don't stalk the people I have wanted out of my life...
...Martin's Press...
...I smoked in the woods behind the cafeteria with juniors who sported nose rings and steel-toed boots...
...Melissa Febos was born in 1980...
...She lived on the west side of town, in a McMansion surrounded by identical McMansions...
...I would, I said, I would love her always...
...Jessica and I were early bloomers, and in eighth grade, we fell in love at first awkward meeting...
...I was glad to be strong enough to hold all of Jessica's secrets and her sadness, along with my own...
...Cute, cute, cute, snooze...
...But as my stalking of Jessica reminds me, that right is often best exercised with someone you never want to leave you...
...disco, hers...
...He had tried to kill her mother...
...They are what interest me...
...All her hand-decorated jeans and T-shirts and a favorite hooded sweatshirt of mine with thumb-holes chewed into the cuffs disappeared forever "She made me go to the Gap...
...Sometimes, in the years since Jessica, I've feared that I've loved less than I could...
...She had a father in prison...
...I wonder if she eats and how much remains of that other bodily obsession we shared but never spoke of...
...She is a graduate of the New School University and currently teaches there, as well as at NYU and SUNY, Purchase College...
...I felt our distance, then, knew I was more alone than before...
...You're good with people...
...You look like a freak...
...From the start, we talked very much like lovers, whispering into the phone late every night, laughing until we choked, swearing our undying loyalty...
...There's a girl here who reminds me of you," a boy I had known since elementary school told me on my first day back...
...I wriggle my hips in my ergonomic chair, take a sip of coffee, and scoot a few inches closer to my desk...
...He is at the beach, gleefully raising a tiny plastic shovel...
...She confided in me her troubled past, troubles that made mine seem insignificant...
...She stopped complaining about our peers' musical tastes and homogeneous fashion...
...I wasn't sure why and sensed a different sorrow in her, a more knowing sorrow...
...Jessica sobbed into the phone that night, and made me promise I'd still love her if she came to school in a Polo shirt...
...Afterward, in my bed, she twirled a strand of my hair around her palm...
...She adopted an air of resignation, and a J. Crew backpack...
...That worries me, but it also assures me that my Facebook stalking is not some perversion of social dynamics...
...I have always taken for granted my right to love anyone...
...I like you," I said...
...We were assigned different lunch periods, and she began eating (or not eating, as it were) with her soccer teammates...
...Before meeting Jessica, I had thought that I was the only bisexual adolescent on the planet...
...A few shots later, there she is again, squinting at the camera, one hand spooning mush into her son's mouth...
...Hers were different, smaller, nipples the color of Band-Aids instead of dark like mine...
...I was too proud then to know what I know now—that it was her decision, not mine...
...She is so thin, especially for a new mother...
...I'd never touched a breast not my own...
...Like a seasonal shift, our end was slow, and altered everything: the salt smell of the air, the bend and hue of trees over water, light as it fell on things...
...She returned brave with experience, and I was ready...
...I stalk the people from whose lives I feel excluded...
...I tug gently on the snarl of feelings her image stirs in me, wanting and not wanting to tease apart the braid of concern and curiosity...
...Jessica—both a newly minted mother and registered nurse—has taken one of those ubiquitous quizzes to find out "What Kind of Mommy" she is (laid-back) and another to discover her most suitable stripper name (Candy Stripe...
...My hesitation had only been a shyness that I liked to hide...
...When the green faded, I slunk back in through Jessica's heavy front door, and up the carpeted stairs to her room...
...She stopped changing out of her Gap sweaters in the girls' room before homeroom...
...class I teach at the Gotham Writers' Workshop, I sit at my desk with my second mug of coffee and open my laptop for my final morning ritual: Facebook...
...My instincts told me that one of us had to lead, and I coped with my uncertainty by assuming control...
...Jessica Morrow was the first...
...If it weren't for me you'd have a lot of friends," she said softly...
...She took Jessica's clothes to the dump while Jessica was at school...
Vol. 58 • January 2011 • No. 1
