Chapter 462: Jonathan XXIII—A Better Sign
“So did you talk to her?”
Jonathan twisted closed his locker and looked at, his friend, Scott who stood next to him in the hallway. “Talk to who?”
Scott’s ginger eyebrows straightened and he hung his bottom lip like a Neanderthal. “Dur, Elena, hoy, hoy who’d you think I meant?”
“Oh,” Jonathan said and he sighed. “No, why?” He’d talked to Mom, but bringing it up to Elena, he just couldn’t. In his mind he couldn’t bring up one working scenario where he successfully brought up the subject of eating disorders to her, and didn’t come off sounding like a blathering idiot. Even if he did bring it up sensitively to her, he couldn’t imagine she’d be that enthused about him knowing. It’d be embarrassing for her, and knowing her as well as he did, being embarrassed made Elena angry.
Scott widened his eyes and shrugged, the corners of his mouth turned down. “Well, hey, she’s not puking before drama so something got done. It’s cool. Unless she’s doing something else completely, hell maybe she’s just not eating.”
Just hearing that warmed his chest, and Jonathan felt his hands break into a jittery sweat. “She’s not?” No he hadn’t talked to her, but maybe Mom had? He couldn’t think of when she would have, or maybe Elena had wised up herself, or something. Nodding, he smiled, “Scott, hey she’s been eating at lunch. I mean if you’ve been watching her as much as I have, she’s been eating.”
“Yeah, but it’s just salad, not even dressing,” Scott grimaced.
Jonathan sighed. “Yeah well it’s something.”
“Yeah,” Scott replied.
Normally, Scott’s interest in Elena put Jonathan in a bad mood. The other guys made jokes about her noticed her rack and crap like that and Jonathan knew it was just to annoy him, but Scott was different. Pointedly, Scott never made jokes like that, he was completely polite to her at all times, and he bristled more at crude talk about her more than Jonathan did. And Scott was the only other one who’d taken notice of Elena’s condition to begin with. Jonathan knew he’d have to be an idiot not to realize what that meant. But at this point he was grateful to have someone to talk to about it.
Scott’s worry over Elena meant that Jonathan had a friend ready to listen and understand and offer opinion and constructive judgment. He didn’t have to fester with knowing Elena’s pain and not being able to do much about it. It took a great deal off his chest just to be able to talk with Scott about her and he knew his friend would never know how eternally grateful that made him, considering the other weights on Jonathan’s chest.
First the Danny issue, which Jonathan was still not certain about. Telling Alex helped out a ton, because at least he knew he had Tanguay as a brother in arms of sort, watching out for Danny’s behavior and keeping Mom from making a big mistake. And Jonathan knew that Mom was probably real close to a real bad mistake and it pissed him off at her for considering it, at Danny for presenting it and at the world for making it possible. See this was something he couldn’t really discuss with anyone except for Alex. He couldn’t tell a shrink or a friend or anyone because the first thing they would do is gossip to the next listening ear about it.
He couldn’t do that to Dad.
And then Dad!
Jonathan just really, really hated the world right now. Yeah, he’d heard some of what Mom and Dad were talking about the other night. Why the hell would she be jealous of Dad and Mrs. Foote, and Brandi too? What? Did that mean Dad had done something with one of them, did she actually suspect that Jennifer was pregnant with Dad’s… That was just enough to start his own personal eating disorder. Gross!
Maybe it was Mom’s guilty conscience, because of how she had been flirting with Danny and stuff maybe she was thinking Dad was guilty of something in her own mind so she could like justify herself or something. He knew that kind of thinking. Or, even worse, had she been flirting around with Danny to get back at Dad for something, like, messing around with Jennifer…. GROSS!
She wasn’t even that pretty! She wasn’t even blonde or anything! Yuck Dad wouldn’t mess around with Mrs. Foote. Jonathan knew he couldn’t. Maybe Jennifer tried with Dad or something. He knew for a fact that Jennifer and Mom never got along real well, maybe that was why? Maybe it was all in Jennifer’s stupid head and she’d been lying to Mom about something, and maybe Mom believed her and then… Oh anything to make Mom and Dad both innocent in all of this. Dad loved Mom, and Mom loved Dad… well when he wasn’t being a dork she loved him.
“Are you okay?”
Jonathan looked at Scott, “I don’t feel too good, but I’m okay.”
Scott patted him on the shoulder, “Come on, we only just started the day.”
He couldn’t really relax at lunch either. Even though he’d managed to push the torturous thought of his parents being stupid out of his head, the problem of Elena still existed. So he tried not to stare but he did keep an eye on her as she sat with her friends across the cafeteria. A salad, bright round tomatoes, orange carrots, lettuce, pink strips of ham and shavings of cheese. Argh! She was painstakingly filtering the cheese off the top with her fork and flicking it onto her napkin.
What about the ham?
“Yo, Jonathan HELLO! Listen to me here this is serious stuff okay?” Jonathan blinked and looked at Danny.
“Oh right, yeah I’m listening, Buddy….”
“Elena!”
Jonathan caught up with her outside the cafeteria. “Hey I haven’t seen ya all day.”
Elena smiled and he felt so much better, and his brain fuzzed over in a happy way. How could anything be wrong when she was just so pretty? “There ya are.”
“Soooo…” Jonathan said, “What’s up?”
Elena smiled, “The usual. What’s up with you?”
“I don’t know,” Jonathan replied.
Elena widened her eyes, one of her eyebrows slightly lifting, “Fascinating.”
Now what? Usually talking to her was so easy, but over the last week, over the last couple of weeks actually Jonathan felt the mar between them, he knew something about her less than perfect, he felt it. How can you pretend something is alright with someone, when you knew it wasn’t and they were effectively lying about it?
Life could really suck sometimes. Jana and Freddy didn’t know how easy they had it right now. The most they had to worry about was what to have for dinner and whose birthday party they were invited to. Well, Freddy had hockey to think about as well, but he excelled in that and he didn’t have a girlfriend. Jonathan felt his stomach urp, now he knew what they meant about girls being nothing but trouble. Well say something interesting idiot! “So they have good salads here, I’ve never thought about trying em.”
Doofus!
Elena closed one eye. “Sure? It’s salad, it just tastes like water really. And the cheese is a pain in the ass to scrape off.”
Be helpful! Jonathan brightened and pointed, “Hey I heard that dairy is actually good for you, I mean it helps ya like lose weight.”
“You think I need to lose weight?” Elena said with an edge in her voice.
Doofus! “No!” Jonathan said quickly, “You’re really really skinny! You don’t need to lose any weight I meant cheese was good for you or something like the calcium for strong bones or something like that….” Oh. My. God. Jonathan could feel his heart pumping to explode.
Elena half grinned. “Erm, whatever. I just don’t like cheddar that much, the ham was good though.”
Oh thank God she ate the ham! “Ham is good!” Jonathan exclaimed. “Protein! We need protein! It builds strong muscles we need that protein!”
Elena laughed. “You’re silly. Look I gotta run to drama I’ll see you after school okay? I mean, I’ll see Jana anyway, do you still have hockey now on Mondays, oh nevermind, see ya!” She gave him another smile, bright eyes, rounded cheeks she waved her tiny little fingers at him and turned down the hall.
Shoving his hands in his pockets, Jonathan rocked on his heels. “Whew!” And finally he felt a real smile.
Jonathan found that channel surfing could make him seasick, with the money from his first real contract signed, he’d bought himself his first real apartment, nice things, and a television package with over 300 channels. Why anyone would need that many channels? German, French, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, some not even subtitled stop the shaking, please let him off the ride!
“No, no, wait leave it there,” she asked.
Jonathan squinted, what was her name? He inhaled the sweet scent from her blond hair, and he felt bad. Poor girl didn’t deserve to have her name forgotten she was really sweet and hell he’d known her for two weeks… or months… ah it was a bad time of night. Fine she can have her woman’s channel, so he left it.
“I like this channel,” the girl said and she stretched and curled up on him, cheek on his chest and Jonathan grinned and settled with her, he could feel her heart beat, her breathing, he’d remember her name in a second. “They show a lot of good thought provoking programs on it, there’s no fluff or anything.”
“Mmm damn I try not to provoke any thinking if I don’t have to,” Jonathan yawned. “I gotta save some space in my brain, honey.”
“You goon,” the girl said.
Damn, and her name you doofus?
And then in an instant he felt his life derailed. A commercial came on, a slender girl standing in front of a blue draped background, monotone piano music in the background as she spoke, “In America today, 4 out of every ten girls suffers from either anorexia or bulimia, I am one of them.”
And then
another girl, a heavy set girl, a sad face, “In
And then, Jonathan felt his heart stopped because the next shot showed her face, the face he’d seen on magazine covers and in newspapers and on billboards and the news. That face he’d never quite forgotten but had lost touch with, shelving away in his heart until he no longer missed her, because he’d never really known her had he? And she’d only become more beautiful, completely, flawless.
“Aw that’s Elena Ruiz!” the girl gasped sitting straight up and Jonathan felt a little jilted. He still didn’t like the fact that the whole world acted like they knew her personally, like she belonged to them.
Elena on
the television, eyes staring into the camera, it felt like they were looking at
him, and she spoke. “It’s a sad statistic that in today’s image conscious
society that ninety percent of
Her lips, her chin, the way her left eyebrow flinched just a little as she spoke, the warmth of her voice, that slightly uneven tooth on the right side, oh God how he knew her. His heart wouldn’t slow, and the girl on his lap, curled against his body felt suddenly cumbersome and heavy. He looked at Elena’s pretty little throat and her dainty collarbones and he hurt inside, as she advertised this institute and then she half smiled, he KNEW that smile it belonged to him! “And remember,” she said and she took two steps and joined the girls who had previously spoken, and stood between them holding their hands. “That an eating disorder is an illness that can strike anyone and it is not your fault. Please if you or someone you care for is suffering from an eating disorder; call the hotline number on your screen to receive a free…”
Jonathan closed his eyes for a second. He couldn’t think or hear and when he opened them the commercial was over.
The girl sighed. “Oh wow, see even the commercials on this channel are deep. Oh Jonathan, why don’t you take me to the ballet? I want to see Elena, everyone I know has seen Elena in the front row and I never, I only get to see her from the bad seats, why don’t you hockey players like ballet?”
Jonathan smiled and kissed the top of her head. “Hey I love the ballet. You like Elena?”
“Mmhmm,” the girl breathed.
“I went to school with her when we were kids,” Jonathan murmured.
“Shut up!” The blond yelled and she hopped off the couch. “You never told me that! You know her?” Her pale eyes were wide and her cheeks red, her hands on her hips.
Jonathan nodded, “Yeah, I bet she remembers me too, I can get us some seats, front row, I’ll even take ya backstage, wanna meet her?”
The squeal was peculiar to slim blond girls, Jonathan even knew his own Mom to make that noise when extremely delighted. She pounced him so hard, falling into his chest and stomach that momentarily Jonathan couldn’t breathe, but yeah he could go with it. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her back.
“Thank you!” she whispered.