JERK: a novel
Premise
JERK is a comedic novel about a peeping Tom plaguing a small town, and the story of the group of wayward high schoolers that are forced to track down the perpetrator in the shadow of a complacent police force.
Prologue
For Alexa, the doorway to adulthood was shaped like a dead body. Specifically, the one on the pavement in front of her.
As she moved closer, his lifeless corpse looked more and more like a wax figure. His skin looked shiny—too shiny—in the rain. Her mind wanted her to read life into his lifeless body: she saw his pale face and thought he looks ill, and when she observed his contorted body, she thought he must be uncomfortable. The pose he was in was so twisted and unusual, it was almost funny. If I died looking this sloppy I would be so embarrassed, Alexa thought.
She glanced over to Ivan as he sort of loitered over the body, fretting about what to do.
“We should call the police,” Ivan said as he frisked himself for his phone and started to pace.
Alexa thought her mind ought to be racing but it wasn’t.
She watched the blood run into the rivers of rain. Now she understood the saying “scream bloody murder,” because a scream—a true, unadulterated, pitchy, wholly un-cool yell—escaped from her mouth. It felt like a scream that belonged to someone else entirely, like she had been dubbed over.
She waited for the panic, the paranoia to pull her down to the ground alongside the body, but it didn’t. She could finally see exactly what they needed to do with bracing clarity.
Chapter 1: If There’s a Will, There’s Me on Top of Him
Ivan’s eyes rolled a little, but his lids remained mostly closed. A wave of light pastels swiped past in the passengers’ seat. Was it morning already? Yes. A grease mark from his forehead on the window matted the view of the harbor as he and Alexa crossed the overpass on their way back to Pembroke from Boston. They have driven this route at least a hundred times during the course of high school to get to the sleazy bars in Boston.
Alexa’s one hand was on the wheel thumbing a cigarette while the other was thoughtlessly combing through her blonde hair. That hair she thought it went “poof,”but it really went “oof.” The black roots were three weeks grown in, so she just sort of went with it.
“Someone’s up early,” she cooed in a sardonic, sing-songy voice.
“Yeah, I’m barely alive. What was in those shots, Irish Mist?” Ivan groaned. All he could think was, I have school in the morning, and I might barf in homeroom.
“Yes, actually.” Alexa giggled to herself and took a drag of her cigarette. She looked delighted to witness Ivan’s intoxication, almost proud of herself: the way parents look at their children at a recital or pageant or when they open the big envelope from a choice college. There is no such thing as pride rooted in anything other than self-satisfaction, Ivan thought. Parental eyes are always bright and crazed with self-congratulatory worth. I created this, I am the source of life, I am God.
That night, Ivan had spent the better part of twenty minutes fending off two forty-something men as they tenaciously pursued him at the bar. It wasn’t that Ivan was exceptionally attractive. He had dark features and a strong brow, which only became appealing when coupled with a sense of unfettered confidence. Ivan was way too much of a self-conscious virgin, so instead his features made him look awkward and underage, like he’d borrowed a grown man’s genetics for the evening and promised to return them before curfew.
But the patrons of the few bars that wouldn’t ID him didn’t care: their hairy fingers picked at Ivan’s clothing with feigned interest and mocking comment as an indolent excuse for their gaze to linger a moment longer on his pale and splotchy skin. Later that night, he would stand in front of the mirror in his parents’ bathroom and inquisitively pick at the places where they touched him, remembering their fingerprints with taboo excitement at feeling wanted, drawing a forbidden power from it, even though he knew he should feel disgust.
But for now he was still in the passenger’s seat of Alexa’s teal Prius. She navigated the long stretch of highway between Boston and their hometown, Pembroke, with ease.
“Woof, those boys were brutal to look at. I mean, the one looked like a smashed baby animal and the other looked like the sociopath who goes around smashing baby animals.” Alexa’s arm draped comfortably along the car door. Ivan knew that Alexa thought of herself as a smoker, but she didn’t look the part. She flicked the waist of her cigarette with allocated and thoughtful purpose, as if she thought to herself, Yes, now flick once…aaaaand now flick a second time.In Ivan’s estimation, Alexa was talking way too much to still identify as someone who had not recently done cocaine in the bathroom of a gay bar. But then again, being critical of others was like electrolytes to Alexa: it gave her energy.
“Speak for yourself. I saw you making out with that random straight guy Will in the men’s room!” Ivan smirked, blooming into a schadenfreude bubble of warmth, knowing they would look back on this moment in the morning and cackle at Alexa’s carelessness: She will snort and say, “Oh, God,” and laugh with her head down, as if she was surprised she’s the same person as the girl who made out with Will tonight.
“I mean, I always say, ‘If there’s a Will, there’s me on top of him.’” She turned and looked at Ivan. He was determined not to laugh, but seeing her mascara make quotation marks in smudges around her eyes made him spit with laughter.
They had been best friends ever since ninth grade, when they got called to the principal’s office because Alexa had looked over his shoulder in Biology and copied his answers exactly, including the wrong ones. After watching Alexa talk her way out of detention by threatening to conduct a full audit of everyone’s exams to search for similarities in a long-winded diatribe, she eventually wore Principal Wellington down from detention to a firm warning, he became enamored by her confidence and wanted to be as close to it as possible.
Alexa kept driving as the grey morning sputtered and leaked through the pine trees. Ivan dozed off into a drunken stupor: toeing the line between the waking world and a dream.
Ivan stirred, remembering the voices of the men in the bar as he lumbered toward the exit: “Heyyy, where are you going so soon?” His arms were out wide and stroking through the dark space in his mind where their forgotten faces once lived. He pushed through to the waking world as Alexa turned onto his street.
“Drop me on the corner and I’ll walk the rest of the way and slip in through the back.”
As Ivan got out of the car, the sound of the bay at the end of his unlit block washed through the dense gray of the early morning. One lingering gull sang out as white fog radiated down his street, from what felt like a softer history: one less jagged than this one.
“See you in like, an hour for school, you busted hooker.” Alexa peeled off and the night absorbed the sound of her tires.
Ivan turned on his phone’s flashlight to illuminate the winding street that led to his parents’ house, just off Main Street. Exhaustion clouded his mind and his footsteps on the wet road sounded like a razor on clean skin. He shook his head at the thought of Alexa’s increasingly cloying grasps to be edgy, and how they so obviously were triggered out of her insecurities after college acceptance letters began distribution, and her mailbox remained empty, or worse: filled with small envelopes. Some people shut down when feeling insecure, but Alexa displayed more of her gooey insides to the world. It made him so nervous to be around.
He gave a quick leap from the stone steps in the front yard to the cross-planked stoop and slinked inside, careful not to let the screen door clap. The shutter blinds of his bedroom were snapped closed, but he could still hear the late-night sprinklers his father scheduled in the spring, tilting into the air to an unnecessary height outside his window. He pulled his socks off his feet as he sat at the edge of his four-post bed.
The late spring carried an anaphylactic breeze into Massachusetts: the poplars and oaks swayed with generous offerings of pollen like zealous flower girls, covering windshields and storm drains in a thin green film. Outside Ivan’s bedroom window, a row of dense hydrangeas in a gossipy consortium lined the sagging single-car garage. Their surging green branches wavered in the upwind and triggered the motion-sensor light over the garage, illuminating the gravel driveway and sending a timed shadow puppet production onto the painted wallpaper of Ivan’s bedroom.
Ivan held the spots on his sides where the men touched his shirt and purposefully pinched at him and relived the guilty satisfaction of being wanted. He fell asleep with his arms wrapped around his sides like that, sort of hugging himself.
