The Collected Works of Gretchen Oyster by Cary Fagan

Author:Cary Fagan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tundra
Published: 2019-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

15

Not Good Enough

Personally, I couldn’t understand why Jackson would want to leave.

I mean, our parents were perfectly nice. On the annoying scale, they rated three out of ten. And Mom and Dad were both pretty good cooks. We each had our own room. Our allowance went up every year.

We had two streaming services.

So why did Jackson leave? Because he didn’t like us? Because we weren’t good enough?

My parents said that wasn’t the reason. They said it especially wasn’t about any of us kids. But I couldn’t help wondering what Jackson thought of me. Sometimes we would have fun together, throwing a football in the backyard or watching one of those shows he liked, where people pulled pranks on their friends. He liked to collect vinyl records from the punk era and would play his new one for me and I would pretend to like it. Once when my parents were out and he was supposed to make dinner, he made all of us enormous ice cream sundaes with whipped cream.

But that was Jackson in a good mood. When he wasn’t, he didn’t yell or throw things. He just grew dark and silent. If I spoke to him, he wouldn’t answer.

It was with Mom and Dad that he got angry. Not long before he ran away he had an argument with them at the dinner table. It had something to do with losing his new, expensive basketball sneakers. Jackson finally got up and knocked me half off my chair as he went by.

I suppose George was the least affected by Jackson being gone. There was such a big age difference between them that they lived in different universes. George looked up to Jackson the way somebody looks up to a movie star or sports hero, as brilliant but distant, like an actual star in the sky. After Jackson left, George still went on playdates and trips to the zoo. He had a noisy birthday party and went crazy with delight over his mound of presents.

As for my parents—well, their whole life changed. They stopped going out for dinner with friends. They dropped their ballroom dancing lessons, which I was now sorry I used to make fun of. They didn’t talk as much, or smile as much—unless they saw one of us looking at them. They tried to be normal parents, but I knew that every moment was hard for them.

And then there was Heather. She never went to parties or movies anymore. She had dropped all of her friends but Jennifer and spent most of her free time holed up in her room. When some boy she used to talk about finally came to the door to ask her out, she told him that she was too busy. Then she went back to her room. She didn’t become any nicer to me, though. If anything, she was even meaner.

As for me, I’d really only had one friend, and you already know who that was. I wanted to hate Zack, but somehow I couldn’t.

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