MacKenzie Bernard
Maybe it’s just me, but when I’m forced to hang out with an abusive, anxiety-prone, kleptomaniac that happens to be named Jason, my main thought is “Jason was the killer in Friday the 13th.” So, yesterday when Mr. Jennings said I had to hang out with this new Jason kid, I accepted the fact that I would die before I ever had the chance to write this. I mean, really, what the hell was Mr. Jennings thinking? He had seen this kid stealing the pencils off people’s desks when he was supposed to be discussing “The American Dream.” He had seen this kid flip his desk over and punch himself in his own nose when he got caught. He had seen this kid panic and run out of the room. I’d accepted my death. I just didn’t know why all of a sudden Mr. Jennings clearly hated me.
Jason hadn’t come to school yesterday. Who skips school on their second day? Serial killers(I decided). I had to pick Jasonup at his house, but that was the least of my problems. He lived right next to the high school, in a house you can see if you sit in the right desk in Mr. Esselman’s class. I pulled up to the curb and waited for Jason, reveling in my last moments of freedom.
Jason didn’t walk out the front door like I expected. He cut across his neighbor’s grass with a stack of envelopes in his hand. He pulled open my passenger door and sat down without saying anything.
“Hi,” I said, finally breaking the awkward silence.
“Hey.”
“Is that your mail?”
“No.”
“Oh. Um, cool.” I mentally yelled at myself for bothering a serial killer.The second awkward silence commenced.
“Well, I don’t care what you wanna do later, but I have to watch this kid with autism after he gets home from school until five. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” I said. It was true, but I was reallypraying he hated kids or that the autism would scare him off.
“That’s ok.”
“F—k” I thought. But instead of saying that, I smiled and began to drive. “So, what did you do today?”
“Can you tell anything different about my beard?” he asked.
“Um, no?” I decided that was a better response than “What the f—k?”
“I trimmed it to match Mr. Jennings.”
“Oh, well, I guess I can see that,” I lied. Mr. Jennings’ beard just didn’t work on a black haired Asian kid.
“Yeah, so I worked pretty hard on that. That’s why I didn’t come to school. This took me hours to get just right.”
At this point I realized he was serious and gave up on any possibility that Jason wasn’t going to kill me.
“Yeah, well, I guess you gotta have your priorities.” I noticed he had socks on under his sandals as well.“Um, why did you want to match Mr. Jennings again?”
He took a long pause.
“Why do you want to know?” He asked as if he had never heard such a strange question.
“Just wondering,” I reluctantly answered, cringing at my terrific ability to bother this kid.
Jason began incessantly tapping his fingers against the dashboard. Sweat dripped from his Jennings beard. The tapping turned into pounding.
“Are you ok?” I asked.
He hit himself in the nose and slowly stopped his pounding as if a good hit in the nose was all he needed to snap back into reality.
“I’m...I’m fine.”
“Are you sure? Is your nose ok?” I asked, hoping he couldn’t tell that I didn’t really care.When I hang out with kids I suspect as serial killers, I have a tendency to become incredibly selfish.
“I’M FINE!” He yelled in a stentorian voice. I thought it best to take his word for it.
I was relieved as we pulled up to the home of the kid I had to watch. Jasonseemed to have calmed down and casually got out of the car as if he hadn’t just punched his own face.He stood awkwardly, waiting for me to do something.
“Well, Aidan’s bus will be here any minute. We might as well just wait out here.”
“Ok.”
I deliberated whether I should warn Jason about how Aidan often got a little out of control, but I figured Jason wasn’t the type of person to be scared off by an eight year old’s tantrums. Besides, out of the two of them, I expected a whole lot more trouble from the klepto kid.
I was incredibly thankful when Aidan’s school bus arrived in a matter of seconds. The three of us went inside the house and I turned on PBS Kids while Jason stared down at his socks and sandals.
“You can sit down if you want” I said. He sat down with Aidan and me on the couch.No one talked throughout the entire duration of a horrible Angelina Ballerina episode.By the timeAngelina Ballerina ended and Nanalan’began, I thought maybe hanging out with Jason wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe we could both just act like the misadventures of the PBS Kids characters were really affecting our lives and we’d never have to speak.
He had other ideas.
“I can’t watch this show” he said.
“Oh, yeah, I know. It’s awful.” And it was true. Nanalan’ is about a talking squash puppet and her granddaughter that’s a talking pea (figure that one out). I don’t know a better way to explain pure sadism.
“No, Ican’t watch this show. Puppets… and vegetables…those are my two biggest fears” he said. I really hoped he was kidding, but I’m not that lucky. “Can we turn it off?” he asked with a sense of urgency in his voice.
“Um, no. Aidan will freak out.” That was true too. You don’t mess with Aidan’s shows. Jason didn’t listen. He got up and turned the TV off. It was only a few seconds before Aidan had pushed him out of the way and had the TV back on. I realized I was wrong;Aidan wasn’t going to freak out, just Jason. Jason began pacing around the room and picking up everything small enough to fit into his pockets. I hate these kinds of awkward moments.
“Um, I know you’re in a bad place right now, but you really can’t take their stuff,” I said trying to sound as if all my friends that had watched Aidan with me had made the same mistake.
“You’re right, you’re right. I’m sorry.” At this point, he moved himself to the corner of the room where he sat, rocking back and forth, switching between hitting himself and plugging his ears. When Nanalan’ ended, I decided it was morally wrong to let Jason sit in agony.This saddened me; Jason’s breakdown had been a lot more entertaining thanNanalan’svegetable mishaps. I tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to the George Shrinks episode on the TV.
“The vegetables and puppets are gone.”
“Thank God,” he said with such passion that I got the idea he had been really praying in the corner for God to save him from the vegetable puppets. But I honestly couldn’t blame him for that.
Jason spent the rest of time at Aidan’s house reading the mail he had stolen earlier. He didn’t say a word, just smiled a goofy grin as if reading other people’s mail was what he lived for.
When we got to leave Aidan’s, I was relieved that I had made it two whole hours with Jason. But, it was only 5:00 and I still had an entire night to get through.
“So, what do you want to do,” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t suggest something like skinning cats or knocking over a 7-Eleven.
“I don’t care,” he said in a tone that suggested he was more uncomfortable than I was.
“We could go to the mall,” I suggested as I drove aimlessly.
He scratched at his Jennings beard. “I’m not really supposed to go to malls.”
“Your parents won’t let you?”
“No, I got caught trying to take the fourth season of The Brady Bunch.”
I slammed on the breaks.
“You like The Brady Bunch” I asked awestricken. Never in my life had I met someone who shared my appreciation for The Brady Bunch.
“Oh, um, yeah, it’s pretty good.” This was not the bold answer I had hoped for, but I wasn’t going to get too picky on a kid like Jason.
“Let’s go to my house. I have all five seasons.”
“Ok,” said Jason and he smiled the goofy smile I thought only came from stolen mail.
I called my dad and explained I had a kid in my car that liked The Brady Bunch. “Can he please, please, please come over?”
“Oh my God. I’m begging to have a serial killer in my house,” was my main thought, but I figured it was best not to let my dad know that.
“You won’t leave your room, right?”
“No.”
“I don’t want him in our bathroom.”
“Ok.”
“You have $2 on your desk. I’ll keep it for you until he leaves.”
This was always the bulk of our conversation whenever my dad let me have people over. I usually told him if my friends took my pocket change, I’d assume they needed it more than I did, but I decided to make an exception for my newklepto buddy.
Jason and I spent the next seven hours watching season four of The Brady Bunch. For the first time in my life, I was able to have an intellectual conversation about the show that’s so heavily impacted my life.
“So, why did you try to steal this season? I mean if I was going to steal a season, it would be season one, no contest.”
“There are some great episodes in season four. I mean, there’s “Fright Night” and“Jan, the Only Child” and, dear, God, don’t forget “The Great Earring Caper.””
“That’s a great point. But, I think my favorite in this season has gotta be “Love and the Older Man.””
“Obviously, that goes without saying.”
God, he was a genius.
I took Jason home around midnight and we made plans to finish up season four the next morning. I watched as he walked into his house and realized he really was kind of attractive. Sure, I had noticed that he was tall, athletic, and built; those qualities really just take a back seat once you see someoneflipping over desks and physically abusing themself. If only Jason wasn’t a kleptomaniac, abusive, anxiety-prone, scared of vegetables/puppets, or trying to look like our English teacher, he’d be almost perfect. I hate the way life messes with you like that.
I woke up the next morning with five realizations:
- I wasn’t dead.
- My copies of Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg andA Very Brady Christmas were mysteriously missing.
- Instead of caring, I mentally complimented Jason on his clearly impeccable taste.
- I was actually looking forward to seeing him again.
- I was severely scaring myself.
Jason came over early in the morning on a bike he was about a foot and a half too tall for.
“I think you need a new bike,” I commented.
“Oh, it’s not mine.”
“Oh, right.”
I kept an eye on him as we finished up season four; the rest of myBrady Bunch stuff was going to stay mine.
“So, you’re gonna hang out with Jessica today, right? Do you want a ride?” I asked when the last episode ended.
He didn’t answer. Instead he took off his glasses and rubbed at his dark blue eyes with two fingers.
“Do you want to know why I have to match Mr. Jennings?”
“Ok.” Not exactly the answer I had anticipated, but much more interesting.
“Well, when I first met Mr. Jennings, I just knew that was a look I could really rock. I mean, can’t you see it? “The Asian Mr. Jennings”, that’s going to be me. That’s what they’re gonnacall me.”
I clearly didn’t understand.
“Um, ok. But, why?
“What do you mean “why”? These kids see an Asian Mr. Jennings, they’re going to be like “Damn, there’s a kid who’s got his s—t together.” You know? They’ll think “There’s a kid I want to be like.” They’ll look at me and rue the day God gave them non-Asian parents.”
“What about the other Asian kids?”
“They’ll hate me because they didn’t think of it.”
I paused, trying to wrap my head around Jason’s plan, but that was proving difficult.
“Yeah, I don’t think I get it.”
He was visibly annoyed.
“There’s nothing to “get”. I’m going to be an Asian, teenage Mr. Jennings. People are going to think I’m groovier than The Brady Bunch themselves. You just wait and see.”
“Well, ok then. Um, do you want a ride to Jessica’s?”
“No, I’ll just ride my new bike.”
“Ok. This was, um, interesting.”
“Yeah.”
He left, but not without a stack of Post-It notes and a glove he found on my desk. I curled up in my bed and wondered why the one person I’d probably ever meet that knew just as much about The Brady Bunch as I did had to be a complete psycho. Possibly even worse, I’d probably never get my copy of A Very Brady Christmas back, and that could have seriously cheered me up. I’d be mad at Mr. Jennings for inadvertently doing this to me, but I figured Jason was going to cause a lot bigger problems for him. But, for the meantime,Jason was Jessica’s problem. I texted her a warning:
“That kid is crazy as f—k. He’s probably going to steal your stuff and freak out on you and probably hit himself in his face. And he’s trying to be an Asian Mr. Jennings because he thinks that will make people think he’s really cool. AND he stole A Very Brady Christmas and Greg Brady’s autobiography. And he’s on his way to your house on a stolen bike. Have fun.”
And then, just to be a real a-----e, I texted her again a few seconds later:
“Lol.”