Career Day

Part One

Part One

For all intents and purposes an orphan (Mom dead, Dad...gone), Jasper Dent hated most holidays. Christmas. Thanksgiving. Easter. New Year’s. He was even beginning —at the tender age of sixteen —to develop some unkind thoughts in the direction of Arbor Day, a holiday which, as best he could tell, had nothing to do with families, but which just sort of irked him, anyway.

Holidays were when families got together. When people celebrated. Together.

For three years now, though, it had been just Jasper and his grandmother, and Jasper had begun to suspect that her senility wasn’t going to go away anytime soon. His grandmother, he realized, was legitimately nuts, and she wasn’t getting better. If anything, she was getting worse. He couldn’t confide this to anyone, of course; she was technically his guardian (even though he did most of the adult stuff around the house), and doing so would bring Social Services down on him like hurricane rain. The last thing he needed was that noise in his life.

Thanksgiving. Christmas. All the rest. Sometimes Jasper could glom onto his best friend Howie’s family for these occasions, but Howie’s parents —his mother, in particular —didn’t really like Jasper all that much, and hauling Gramma to someone else’s house was like traveling with a baby. He had to pack a bag with her favorite snacks, some weathered old soap- opera magazines for distraction, and even an adult diaper. Just in case.

Howie fought to help Jasper live a normal life, and for many of the usual holidays, he came pretty close. But he couldn’t help Jasper with Career Day.

“Jazzmatazz!”Howie crowed, coming around the corner of the school corridor, carefully dodging the jostle and bustle of Lobo’s Nod High School’s between-class rush. Howie was a hemophiliac, and he bruised if you looked at him too hard. “How goeth it, m’lord?”

“You just came from English, didn’t you?”

Howie nodded enthusiastically, bobbing like a headbanger. On anyone else, it would have looked ridiculous, but Howie was six foot seven and gangly, so it looked completely idiotic.

“I dig the Willy Shakes, Jazz. He stirs my romantic soul.”

Falling in step with Howie as they headed to algebra together, Jasper said, “No, what’s getting stirred is your loins, and that’s because of the student teacher who doesn’t understand how the lighting in that room impacts her bra.”

“Nipples like this, Jazz,”Howie said with the solemnity of a priest, holding up his thumb and forefinger, half an inch apart. “Honest to God. You could dial your Gramma’s phone.”

Gramma Dent still had an old dial phone. She was convinced that the government could listen in on any other kind. Jasper didn’t have the heart to tell her that the government could listen in on this one, too. Easier that way.

“I’m so glad to know this,”Jasper said drily. “And please stop calling me ‘Jazz.’”

“You need a nickname. As your best friend—”

“My only friend.”

“Even better! Anyway, I’ve taken it upon myself to give you one. Jazz it shall be. I declare it thus and hence!”Howie bellowed this last, and everyone in the corridor turned to look at them.

“Stop it,”Jasper said, almost whispering. He couldn’t abide the eyes on him. He knew people always looked. Stared. When he wasn’t aware, they did it openly, nakedly, and when he was alert, they did their best to look like they were otherwise occupied. But he knew better.

That’s him, people said and people thought. That’s the one. That’s the one whose father...

“Stop what?”Howie demanded. “Stop loving you, Jazz? I wish I could quit you, but I can’t. Someday, we’ll run off to New York and get married, the way God intended it.”

Despite himself, Jasper cracked a grin. “Sorry, man —my nips only go out about this far.”He mimed a quarter inch.

“Oh, well, in that case, nice to know ya…”

**********