The One He Let Go

Jimmy

After he chased me down to try to talk to me after I took the blame for the football shattering my pastor's window, I would've hit him. I really would have, but I was always kind of a pacifist as a kid, and a loner. So a desperate kid like me never thought I could mean anything to anyone. And boy, was I wrong.

I thought I was persistent, but that Dean Winchester.. I'm glad he's always been more stubborn than I ever was. I tried to ignore him and keep some of my dignity as I walked away. Besides, he never really wanted to be my friend and I knew that. I could tell after the first few days we were hanging out, but he was the only kid in the neighborhood who didn't pick on me and call me names like "loser" or "momma's boy," so I stuck with him. At first, it was sort of like a safety thing. If I was around him, I thought the other kids would leave me alone, and I wasn't wrong, it worked. I was so tired of being an object of ridicule for the kids who thought they were better than me just because they had both of their parents and things were stable in their homes. Dean didn't know I was an only child without a father. He didn't know my mom was depressed and I spent my time at home taking care of her, but he didn't care. He didn't need to know that about me for him to stand up for me and tell the other kids off, so I thought he wanted to be friends. I thought we could be friends, but I couldn't help but get the feeling that a friendship wasn't what he had in mind after that, but at the same time, I was too scared to ever leave his side. It was pathetic, really, and staying at home with my mother wasn't an option for me. She never wanted me to spend my childhood like that, cooped up indoors taking care of her when I was so young, so I'd always be sent outside to play. Now I never told her I had an issue with bullies. That'd only make the poor woman feel worse. She had this impression that I was a happy child with a lot of friends, and that's only because that's what I would tell her if she ever asked. I wanted to believe it myself, but all I had was Dean, and even he didn't treat me like much of a friend until that day with the football. When he was asking me for all those small favors, it felt like he just wanted to get rid of me, but he really had no idea how much it meant to me for him to stand up for me the way he did. As a kid without a father or without any friends, I saw that as kind of a heroic thing to do. To this day, I still haven't told him that. It'd only enlarge his already excessively enormous ego. Anyway, after I got the idea that Dean didn't want me around, I didn't just give up on him there. I wanted to do something just as heroic as he did before I really called our settlement "square." To little boys at the time, it didn't take much to be a hero. I'll admit taking the heat for a broken window made me feel pretty mighty and when I told him we were even, I thought that would be the end of my persistent annoyance to the great Dean Winchester, but he wouldn't have it.

Picture this: A sad, lonely, scrappy-haired, and blue-eyed little boy holding his head up high with a football awkwardly tucked under one arm walking away from a house with a broken window. See it? Now imagine another little boy, a little bigger than the first with freckles all over his face and these really bright green eyes, running after the scrappy-haired boy, yelling, "Jimmy, Jimmy, wait!" Of course, little Jimmy--that's me--decided to ignore the other boy, Dean, and started to head home, but good ol' Dean Winchester was a hard-headed kid who didn't get the hint that Jimmy didn't want him around.

He kept pestering me until I finally snapped and yelled at him. That's when he found out about my family and my home situation, and what did he do? He yelled at me for not saying anything to him about it in the first place. I'm guessing it's because that's when realized what a little tyrant he was being to me, but still, he yelled at me! I may have been a loser, but I wouldn't stand for it after all we'd been through, so I yelled back at him. Now all you're picturing is two little boys screaming at each other on the sidewalk, right? Well, that's just about what happened. But what do you expect? We were just kids being kids. I'm thankful for that though, because since we were just kids, we couldn't hold a grudge against each other. All it took was a simple sorry from both parties. Or maybe the fact that we were kids at the time wasn't the only reason Dean and I were so quick to forgive and forget. Maybe that wasn't it at all. I've seen how evil some little children can get, and how angry some little boys can get. Maybe it was because I was so hopeless to find anyone else who could, or would, be a friend to me that I apologized to him and forgave him so eagerly. Perhaps that's it. I don't know what Dean's reasoning was to be so forgiving and accepting, but I'm glad he had it.

And that's how it all began. Knowing Dean, he would say it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and I couldn't agree more.