Bernadette

  All this time I was trying to juggle a busy social life. I would split my social schedule up between my close friends and my fringe friends alike. I was hanging out with Yolanda a lot before she had a boyfriend. Now that I had more free time. I organized volleyball games at the beach,  group movie trips and I would hang out with girls from work. Because my heart was elsewhere, I had no reservation about asking girls to go out and do things socially. To me they weren’t dates so I didn’t fear rejection.

  This backfired on me once or twice. My mother never drove so it would be up to someone in my family to drive her around. One day she had brought up a name of a girl I had worked with named Bernadette (the one that would hit me). She was now working with my mother and when she heard I was her son, Bernadette wanted to hang out sometime. I was reluctant, but after several times of her catching me dropping or picking my mom up, I agreed.

  To be polite, we were from different worlds. On top of that she intimidated me. She would make overtly sexual references to me even though she had a boyfriend. I was afraid to be alone with her. It was becoming a trend. Girls in unhappy relationships would want me, but single girls didn’t. Although she wanted something to happen, nothing really did. However, that is not what she told everyone at her job. My mom got mad at me. I don’t know what my mom heard, but I was angry. The next time I talked to her I told her as much. She begged me to forgive her and we ended up going for a walk in a park to talk things out. She was sorry, but confessed she had feelings for me and that she had needs. I asked her what she expected from me, “Do you think I’m going to throw you onto that picnic table and have sex with you?” She muttered “I wish.” Under her breath, but I pretended I didn’t hear her. I knew being alone with her was dangerous, I brought her with me to visit Matt at the docks, thinking that would curb her intentions. They didn’t stop. Matt new my predicament and when Matt caught me alone, he said ‘you’re in trouble with a capital T. It came down to the point that she would leave her boyfriend outright for me. I believe she would have. But the sad truth was, she was not in my social class. She would never fit into my world and wasn’t worth the effort it would take to get her there. This event cause me to recall something Jen mentioned to me when we were first hanging out about how her friends would take to me. In a way Jen had said I was out of her class.  I only saw her one more time, when I went briefly to her Halloween party months later. Still awkward, when she told her boyfriend to go away so we could be alone to talk, I left.  

In June, Ringo and his All*Starr Band was going to be playing at the Jones Beach Amphitheater, a concert venue right on the beach. It was a must see show for me. Priscilla and Erin wanted to go. I got Yolanda a ticket as her graduation gift, and of course I wanted Jen to come. My mind was on Jen as it always was.

I didn’t really pay attention to anyone else besides Jen at the concert, and may not have remembered who else went if it weren’t for the fact that Yolanda, continuing her self-destructive ways, hurt her back badly when fell out of her upstairs window sneaking out of her house the previous night to hang out with her boyfriend, which for the record was not my brother. However, she did take him as her date to her Prom.

The thing that stuck out the whole night was that Jen suggested that we should move out West.