Junie & Jackie - A Love Story

1

Jackie Williams had been my neighbor for as long as I could remember.

It wasn't a great neighborhood, but not horrible. The only horrible house was Jackie's. It was white, but more of a beige tone due to years of no maintenance. The yard was overgrown, weeds at knee height and even taller, with random pieces of junk and empty, smashed liquor bottles scattered throughout. Half the windows were boarded up with scraps of wood, newspaper, and cardboard. The cops were there once a week, at a minimum. It was a known drug house. I was sure the only reason the Williams' hadn't been run off and out of town was because everyone was buying from them, even the cops. At least, everyone in our neighborhood was.

My dad was more of a closeted meth head. He hid it well, at least in comparison to David, Jackie's dad. I only knew he had a problem because I had found him nodding off a few times, and one night I caught him sneaking over to the Williams' and grabbing something out of the mailbox. He hadn't known I was sitting on the roof smoking a joint, but I watched as he tucked a little baggy into his pocket and shoved some cash into the box.

I wasn't sure if my mom knew, but I never told her. It would break her heart to know. She was not the type to be understanding about addiction. She grounded me in high school for smoking, and always limited Dad to two beers on weekdays. She thought she was a little classier than she was, which is why she would never need to learn that her husband was doing meth.

I was studying to be a nurse at the local community college. It was something I always wanted to do, help people, make a difference. I wanted to make it out of the city, or at least out of the neighborhood. It was my one goal. I loved my parents, but this wasn't where I needed to be.

Anyways, back to Jackie. He's the reason I'm starting this whole story.

To be clear, I didn't hate Jackie because he had a trashy family and a shitty house that brought down the neighborhood property value. I didn't hate him because I was pretty sure he helped his father and stepmother cook meth with his baby sister in the house. I didn't even hate him because he fucked girls who I could only assume were hookers with his window open, all for my viewing and listening pleasure.

I hated him because of how evil he was to me our entire lives.

It started in second grade, when his family moved in. I was a chubby kid, no doubt about that, but up until then, I always thought I hid it well. Clearly, that wasn't the case.

We got teased on the school bus because we were talking at the bus stop on his first day coming to school. He couldn't stand the idea that anyone would think he would ever like a fat loser like me. That's when the bullying began.

He called me any name you could ever dream of, every synonym for fat in the fucking thesaurus. He pushed me, tripped me in gym, and overall made my life a living hell for the entirety of elementary school.

One thing about kids, they're all followers. Jackie, who still went by his full name of Jackson back then, was deemed cool the second he stepped onto school grounds. He was cute, for a second grader, with messy brown hair and freckles and dimples. He was charming, funny, and not completely fucked up back then. No one knew of his horrendous household. He wasn't the entire school's bully, just mine. Everyone loved him, and everyone hated me.

So thus, my hatred for Jackie Williams.

It got better for me halfway through middle school. That's when he started smoking weed, acting out, losing most of his friends. At least the popular, goody two shoe types that were friends with him before. That's also when I started running religiously and starving myself to fit in. By eighth grade, I had made three friends (Wes, Tyra, and Jada) that I still had to this day.