Fiction | Short Story

Where’s Jenny B. Gone?

She had a smile like yours. None of us knew her real name. Then again, none of us were asking.

The point of us. Did we ever find it? Even if we did, did we notice? My money’s on us stumbling right through it, with rose-tinted glasses and sloppy tongues. Sure we thought we “got it.” Back then, we thought we knew everything. Like that time my car spun wheelies in the IHOP parking lot in pouring rain after prom and we almost collided into a line of shopping carts, but didn’t, so we took it as a sign: We, us, were in the right place, at the right time. We clung to almost like it’d be the best chance we’d get.

And it was.

*

Today’s your death-day. My sister says I shouldn’t say that, but if I don’t, how will I stop myself from forgetting? That’d be the first betrayal. Besides, she cries over Hollywood breakups; that’s her closest love. It’s been five years since, and still half my thoughts are to you; I can’t always tell which ones are for me anymore. This morning, I woke before the sun. Our tea-kettle whines on the faulty pilot you used to fix. Sometimes, I let it stay broken—as if that’d summon you back to me.

*

Your memory comes in bursts like Santa Anna winds, seasonally uprooting everything around me. I still carry a photo of us in my wallet, leaning against the crumbling brick wall of Lupo’s, our first Jenny’s show. We were a strange match. I wanted to look cooler than I was, more wavering and lanky and hard to pin-down, more corn-stalk than potato sack. You, you never had that worry. You were a punk-girl, all legs and eye-rolls and sarcasm. I, all glitter eyelids and mumbled words and poorly ripped shirt collars, so my shoulders peeked out like insecure half-moons. We smelled of vanilla wrapping papers filled with cilantro (not weed like we thought), and fizzy ’Gansett tallboys stolen from older brothers that we only half-drank.

*

I hold my chipped mug in our newly remodeled kitchen (I chose canary for the walls, because I know you’d prefer it to that green I wanted), waiting for our daughter to put socks on her feet. Her name is Sammy, like you wanted, Pia. Each morning, she finds new ways to waste minutes we don’t have. She’s like you: impossible; a clown; persistent. If only you could’ve held her. I sip my tea, waiting for the caffeine to pry open the bear-trap that is my mind before the drive to kindergarten.

I’m trying to focus on here, on the life I’ve made since you.

*

Of all the rock goddesses there are to worship, ours was Jenny B. She wasn’t the only Jenny. In fact, she was one of five. That was the band’s thing: The Jenny’s. Everyone had the name but with different initials: Jenny A., Jenny F., Jenny K., Jenny C., and ours. Her bangs covered her face. She had a smile like yours. None of us knew her real name. Then again, none of us were asking. We were finding the unreal, the Ab7, the slippery cool of tipsy bodies against metallic bathroom stalls that smelled like piss, fighting our way through elbows. You tried to leave early, but because I drove, we stayed. I, swaying hips in time to her drumming. And you, my love, saying, “Jesus, Jaime. Let’s go.”

*

I look at Sammy; she’s impersonating a tiger. She’s missing a front tooth, so every roar comes out with a whistle. Her forehead is wide like mine, so wide that when she was born I cried that she looked like an alien. You would have laughed if you saw. “Sammy,” I say. “You have until I count to ten.”

“Tigers can’t count,” she roars. Her brown pigtails shake as she sprints around our kitchen. “They have paws!” She leaps onto my leg, pawing my calf so I have to walk like a pirate to travel the distance of two feet to the sink. “You can’t walk if a tiger caught you!”

I sigh. “Mommy’s can’t fall on tile or they get hurt.”

“Fall light,” Sammy says. “Play dead!”

“Sammy.”

“Rawrrrrrr.”

“One.”

“Tigers don’t know numberssssss.”

“Six.”

“Hey! That’s not fair, you skipped.”

“Twelve.”

“Hmph!” Sammy exclaims, letting go of my leg and pointing her finger at me in the same way that I do to her when she’s in trouble. “Mommy, you’re the worst at playing dead.”

Eventually, Sammy breaks her concrete-like hold on the cabinets and we’re on the road. All the while, she sighs. Another bad habit I know she has learned from me. I can hear myself sighing between hers; I think we have daily sighing contests. “Samantha,” I say.

Sammy sits up in her car-seat, looking in the same way she does when I catch her climbing on top of the fridge to reach the cabinet where I hide cookies. “What?”

“I promise we will play later.”

“You always say that,” Sammy lifts her hands up above her head then lets them drop as if I’m the exhaustible one. “I want time away from Mommy.” It takes all my energy to not stop the car.

I look at her in the rearview mirror. I know that she doesn’t really mean it. I know she’s only saying it because she hears me say that when she needs a timeout. Yet, it still feels like the kind of thing that I’d want to tell you about late at night. “Oh, honey,” you’d say. And you wouldn’t have a real goddamn answer but it’d be okay because you called me honey. You’d push all the feelings you could into those two words. And it’d make a difference enough.

I walk hand in hand with Sammy up the steps to her school. She doesn’t say bye, technically. She wiggles her hips back and forth as if she’s debating how to leave without leaving me. I kiss her on her forehead so that her little brain doesn’t have to be on fire anymore. She leaps up and wraps her arms around my neck. Her hands are sticky like she didn’t actually wash them like she said. It’s the kind of thing that makes me want some time away from her too. Feeling how tight she can hold on to me and knowing at the same time how you, Pia, will never feel it, her stickiness, her mistakes and wins, how she will never feel how you held me when she was coiled up inside me like an unspoken prayer; it makes me want to run.

“I love you, Mommy,” Sammy says. “Forever and ever and always?”

“Amen,” I say.

Yes, I taught her that one too. Least she gets some part of us, of you.

*

In the car, I plug in my iPhone so I won’t have to fall into the hole of reading emails that I’ve missed in the past six hours of being awake. Instead, I put on The Jenny’s. In memory of you, I blast it. I make it onto the highway, a good two miles away from the possibility of running into a PTA mom, and roll down the windows. I scream out the lyrics like it’s a prayer I actually believe will heal me.

A horn blares. Some truck behind me. The light is green. I’ve been drumming my hands on the steering wheel for at least ten seconds. I wave an apology, and lower the music to a humming sound.

When I get into the office, I still hear the drums beating behind each thought. I fill my coffee and don’t even try to make small talk with the receptionist standing there, Jill, who’s always slightly hungover and picking the polish off her nails, saying things like, How hard is it to be a single mom? Do you regret taking money out of your retirement fund to be inseminated with your child? You look really tired today.

*

She’s the kind of person you’d hate, Pia. You’d call her a paper person, the insult you gave anyone you didn’t like. “They’re about as interesting as making paper from paper.”

*

My desk isn’t in an office but it’s next to a window, which makes it almost one. I work in Cambridge, MA as an Assistant Publicist. I am the person emailing, tweeting, calling for someone who actually gets to shake the hands of famous people. Mainly, I work in film. Lower budgets but with wider market appeal like rom-coms or family dramas about seasonal holidays with a moral twist that can’t cost more than sixteen million dollars to make. I’ve never been to Burbank nor toured the lot of a movie, but I’ve emailed with enough assistants of assistants to have a-three-person removed coffee with Hollywood stars who, for the most part, seem completely incapable of knowing how to speak for themselves. Every once in a while, my work might end up crossing paths with a musician who wants to star in an indie flick for a change, but I’m not in music like I swore I’d be. No backstage pass, tell-all. No rock-biography. No byline.

Feeling how tight she can hold on to me and knowing at the same time how you, Pia, will never feel it, her stickiness, her mistakes and wins; it makes me want to run.

“Jaime, my girl,” my boss Richie says, slapping my desk. He’s two years younger than me. His shaggy hair makes him look like something the ’90s threw up and slung an ill-fitting tie onto with a bowler hat. His father is a founding partner of our firm so he gets the better title, wears jeans to work, and sadly exists.

“Morning, Richie,” I say.

“Kicked your inbox’s ass yet? Cc’ed you on at least three home-runs.”

“No, no, I haven’t, um, kicked ass yet.”

“Jaime, you gotta get going! You can’t play if you’re not in the game, you feel me?”

“Get in the game, yes. I can game. I game all the time.”

“Yeah, but are you always winning? Or are you running the clock? Are you hogging the puck?”

I am positive that Richie has never played an actual sport in his life. Nor have I.

“I am . . . shooting the hoop?”

“Right, that’s right! You shoot the hoop and girl, you gotta get that goal.” He walks back to his office and slams the door. He doesn’t get angry but he wants to give the impression that he could.

For the next hour, I do my best to catch up on emails, coordinating times to send other emails and copyediting releases that were sent without Richie letting me know, a typical day bicycling backwards up a fucking mountain. Then, I notice an article on a site featuring one of our releases. Not very large, and not not clickbait. Where Are They Now, ’00s Rock Stars? Richie’s door is still closed. The lights are off, which means he must already be at lunch and could take at least two hours to return. I click. The article lists a bunch of has-beens that I’m sure most people read about because they want to know they’re doing better than their idols, but then I see the third name listed: Jenny B.

Jenny B. Age: 29. She’s in her third year of Harvard Law School. Really? I refresh the page twice, but it says that our drummer gave up drumming because of a shoulder injury. Apparently, all of her life, she had held the drumsticks incorrectly. Now, she couldn’t hit a beat on a drum without pain.

*

You’d say, “What is she supposed to do, not age? Not want cash? Can she help it that she was made for skinny-ties?” And that’s fair—except the tie part. It just seems like such a sad thing to happen. “Whatever,” you’d say, but not really mean it. You’d just want me to stop obsessing.

*

In the bathroom, I look at myself for the first time today. My hair’s in a ponytail. The dark circles under my eyes are like little craters I could fall inside. I’m in a blouse with frills on the sleeves. I used to hate frills. You used to hate them too. My lipstick is nude. Not scarlet or black or purple. I am everything that we pointed at as kids and thought of as boring. I wear orthopedic sneakers. I put my hand on my stomach as if I’ve forgotten my own hunger.

*

In the car, I try to plug in my phone for music but it’s dead. I channel surf for a while and come across another Jenny’s song. “They made a lot of songs,” you’d say. “It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

Except, it does. It does to me. And it did to us.

I text my sister who is probably just waking up from yesterday’s closing shift. Laura hasn’t changed too much since you last saw her. Still a bartender. Totals a car every other year, and wracks up credit card debt like it’s her second job, but she’s real good with Sammy. Almost as fun as you’d be.

4:44 pm: I can’t Mommy today.

4:45 pm: Are you ok? What happened?

4:45 pm: Please pick up Sammy from school? Sleepover? Pick her up noon tomorrow?

4:48 pm: Ok . . . only because it’s today. Next time, more notice plz? I bartend 6-2 AM tomorrow.

4:48 pm: Owe you sis, thanks a million

4:50 pm: I’ll settle for lunch. And a bottle of wine. Where you off to?

            4:51 pm: Cemetery

And that stops all questions.

*

I’ve found a bench in Harvard yard. The cool October air tastes like steel and cinnamon. Around me, the leaves are turning a burnt gold. Old brick buildings sit in neat rows, encircled by iron gates and archways that made the campus look more like a temple than a school. Any second I expect a woman on a bicycle to drive by with a basket of books and men to argue philosophy over tea.

After a minute, both happen. You’d laugh at how predictable it is.

*

The odds of finding her are low, but I always take the low odds. Like when I first sat next to you in honor’s chemistry. I got switched into the class because I said I wanted to be a doctor. Really, I just wanted to be tutored by you. Remember when I asked? You hesitated, like you somehow knew if you said yes, it would be saying yes to a lot more, even before I did. Still, you said yes.

“Jaime, don’t you think this is desperate,” you would say to me now.

*

I saw her before I knew it was her. No more bangs. Her hair had outgrown that and was pulled into a messy blonde bun. She had earbuds in and was listening to something that I could only imagine was better music than I knew. Her clothes looked expensive and shabby at the same time. Her smile looked thinner, worn at its seams. Instead of sitting on a bench at a school I do not attend, I move to follow her. I’m careful to walk a couple steps behind, checking my phone so I look like a busy student. We find the dining hall. In pace behind her, I follow her to the lunch line that has gluten-free pizza and take a slice, like her. It takes horrible, like a slice of cardboard sprinkled with pepper. Soon, I’m in earshot of her and her friends. They’re talking about a party. The other friends shrug, debating whether or not it was worth it. They’ll least make an appearance. It is Friday night. So will I.

*

Not sure what I was expecting, but I’m disappointed when I arrive. Loud beats of electronica slash the air. Red solo cups sit piled on a table. Ping pong balls and crushed blue beer cans of Bud Light trash the floor. Laughter rises from the gazelle pack of women huddling in the kitchen. And there in the hall, there’s fucking Richie.

“Richie?” His head swirls around to face me. His smile is too wide, like a watermelon rind.

“Jaime! I didn’t know you knew these people. Happy Fri-yayy!”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

“What?” Richie asks, craning his ear towards me, trying to hear over the loud music.

“People know me,” I say.

“Oh, badass,” Richie says. “My niece is here. She’s pretty cool.”

“What?”

“I said, my niece is here, but she doesn’t want me to know she’s here. I’m not like hitting on her or something weird. Just promised my brother that I’d look out for her first semester.” He sways, drunkenly, and much too close.

“I’m sure she’s fine,” I said. “She’s an adult. You’re probably the oldest guy here.”

“What?” Richie asks.

“Don’t you think that’s weird? Can you let her be?”

“I hate that song.”

I sigh. “My wife died today.”

“That’s not how Let It Be goes!”

“Five years ago. Embolism.”

“Antebellum?”

“Do you know where the bathroom is?” I yell.

“Oh, yeah,” he points down the hall.

“Sure,” I say, doing my best to smile and maneuver past him in the narrow hallway without giving him the impression that I want to dance.

From my spot in line, I see the kitchen and a group playing beer pong unsuccessfully. A sheet of white ripped paper hangs behind them and whoever is Tiger Claw is sure as hell losing by a lot. I abandon my bathroom post and walk towards the game. A woman slams the table with her palm, mid-laugh, flipping her hair back and for a moment, my heart stops. It’s Jenny throwing the white little ball, angling her shot up and over and horribly missing each time. Unlike the others in their Red Sox hats and cargo shorts, she laughs when she misses. I inch closer to that sound.

When I look closer, I see the subtle flinch when she throws even this tiny ball. Her shoulder must still be acting up, even after all these years of not drumming. No one else seems to see it.

Behind her, there’s a small table of boxed wine and more shitty beer. I take a red cup and fill it with as much wine as it can hold. “This is only gonna end badly,” you’d say, and I’d only drink faster to that.

For the first time in half an hour, Jenny gets a ball into the cup. She cheers. Her partner, who’s much shorter, has decided to sit on the floor and take a nap. Karen, they call her. Karen is out.

“What’s a girl to do?” Jenny asks. Before I realize it, I’m there, all smiling purple lips. I say something but whatever comes out is a rushed slur of words. Jenny tilts her head. “You sure you’re ok to play?”

“Sure as a parking ticket,” I say, and if you were here you’d of face-palmed. You’d tell me that you can’t just quote someone’s lyrics to them in conversation.

“What did you just say?”

“Um,” I say. “How do you play?”

Jenny flips her hair. “Oh, it’s easy, especially if you don’t win. Just watch me and you’ll get it.”

I put my hand on her arm. “Is your shoulder ok to do this?”

She shakes me off. “What are you talking about? I’m fine. A little drunk.”

“I, uh,” I lean closer, “I saw you wince.”

“Ok, mom,” she says and someone behind us laughs. “Someone needs a shot.” And just like when she was on stage drumming, the crowd gives her what she wants. A shot finds its way into my hands, then mouth. Fiery hot whiskey warms my insides on its way down to the pit of me. Jenny giggles at my sudden unsteadiness and puts her arms around me. “That’s what you need, girl.”

Her touch isn’t like yours, but it’s something.

At the other end of our game-table, two men in Red Sox caps with shaggy hair watch us. They’re whispering something and gesturing large with their hands. I undo my ponytail, shaking out my hair too like Jenny. “Girls, you in or you just gonna talk?” The one that didn’t speak high-fives the one that did. “Think you can make a comeback, Alex?” The other asks, revealing a toothy grin again.

Alex? That was her big secret name? I feel let down, but I try not to show it.

She hands me the white ball and winks at me.

I feel possible. I feel feathery. I throw the ball and it ricochets off the table and hits one of the men in the eye. The toothy one. He cries out. All the while, Jenny laughs. She even pulls me into a hug.

She lifts my chin, “Couldn’t have done it better myself. See that, Derrickkkk?” She tosses her hair. “You didn’t even made me feel this good bed.” The crowd “ohhhhs” and erupts into laughter. Feeling the room spin beneath me and my heart jack-hammer, I reply, “Thanks, Jenny. I really needed this.”

That’s when the dream ends. Her nostrils flare. She pushes my face away and raises her voice so the buzzing kitchen and what feels like the entire city of Boston stops, looking at me, in anticipation. She is all glare. And I’m an ant under a magnifying glass. “What. The. Fuck.”

“I’m sorry?” I add.

Jenny looks around the room. “Who put her up to it? Was it you, Derick?” She walks over to the man still cradling his eye and shouts into his ear. “It’s not funny, you asshole.”

“Jenny, I, I didn’t mean to . . . I always wanted to see you.”

She spins on a dime, facing me. “I don’t care what the fuck you want to say to me. I’ve heard it all. You’re dying. Your mother has a rare disease. All of this shit from people who just want me to sign some rare photo, to just unload all their problems onto me like I’m your fucking therapist and guess what? I’m not. I can’t handle your shit. I can’t even handle my shit. And most of the time you’re just trying to sell my autograph. I can’t play shit, that was like a decade ago! Get a life. Get the fuck out of here.”

“I, um,” I try to speak but my speech abandons me too.

“See how pathetic you are,” she says, creeping closer. “You don’t even have a reason, do you?”

“Please. Today is a really hard day for me.”

Alex takes a deep breath and whatever fire she was about to unleash on me halts. Of all people, Richie enters the room. “Alex,” he says. “Don’t be a jerk to my girlfriend. I told her to call you Jenny. She just doesn’t remember.” Alex looks to Richie then me, and shakes her head.

“Whatever, Richie. You’re such an ass.”

“You know me,” he says, lifting up his beer. He takes me by the arm and says, “Come on, honey. Let’s get some air. Some people can’t take a joke, huh?”

“No,” I say. “No one gets it.”

*

Out on the balcony, Richie sits beside me on the floor next to a mug of cigarette butts. No one else is outside but us. I weave my fingers between the iron bars, leaning my forehead against the cool metal.

“Was it that bad?” I ask.

“Well, what do you consider bad?”

“Do you remember that scene in She’s All That when the girl gets all made-over, even though she was already pretty and the hot girl comes in and is all you’re the worst!!! Like that?”

“Wow. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you drunk.”

“You’ve never asked.”

Richie laughs. “Ok, well, I haven’t seen that. But it was close.”

“Ughhhh.”

“It’s ok. Still can’t believe you brought up Jenny B. Do you know how far Alex went to take Jenny B. websites down? Sued so many people over a name.”

“I thought she was cool.”

“Did you ever even talk to her? She’s not, trust me.”

I shrug. The air around me starts to register as too cold. “Can I lean on you? I’m not straight, so HR won’t get mad at you for it. It’s just cold and I don’t want to go inside and you’re alive.”

“You’re really charming when you’re drunk,” he says.

“You sound almost intelligible,” I say, resting my head on his shoulder.

Richie smirks. “Just the whiskey. Gives me more nerve.”

I breathe in his clothes that smell like bonfire and after-shave. “Richie, why’d you help me?”

He shrugs. “I thought you were straight.”

I laugh. “Really?”

“No. I just don’t know how to talk to you. We work together. And I know not everyone has to be bros. I’m not an idiot, but I’d like it if you didn’t hate me. Did it work?”

I look up at his blue eyes and tug his stupid bowler hat over them. “It’s a start.”

He smiles. “I’ll take it. So what, were you a teenage groupie?”

“Not really. It was the first rock show I saw with my wife.”

“Too bad she couldn’t see tonight’s shitshow.”

“My wife is dead,” I try to snap my fingers but fumble. “Embolism.”

“Oh, oh. That sucks.”

“It does suck! She didn’t even like The Jenny’s. I can’t even remember what songs she only pretended to like anymore. Just thought if Jenny could meet me, then it’d be like she met Pia too.”

“I think I do know.”

I pull away from him and try to take his hat off his head. “What do you know?”

“Don’t…don’t you have a daughter?”

“Richie.”

“Just saying,” he says. “You still have someone.”

“Pia could speak sign language and Spanish and tie a knot in a cherry stem with her tongue and she could hold you in a way that squished you but also made you feel like you shouldn’t be anywhere else.”

“Say, why don’t I call you a cab?”

“No,” I say. “I need air.”

*

On the walk home I stop into CVS. I find the hair coloring aisle. I choose Cyber-purple. This was the one Pia liked. I clench it to my chest as I walk, as the sun bleeds above me, filling the sky with light.

*

In our kitchen, I wait for her. Our little hurricane will soon rush in and grab me by the waist and tell me about her Friday night sleepover with Auntie Laura and their chocolate chip pancakes for dinner.

When she arrives, I’m sitting on the counter. Something that I always yell at her for doing, so she tilts her head at me as if she’s not sure if I’m me or an alien. The box of hair dye sits beside me.

“What would you say to playing rock-star?” I ask. “Mommy wants to play today.”

Sammy’s eyes widen. “Like Taylor Swift?”

“Not exactly,” I say. “Like Pia.” I jump off the counter and take our photo out of my wallet.

*

Confession: I haven’t shown a picture of you to Sammy. Sure, she knows who you are. She knows we were married like her dolls. Little by little, I will give her pieces of you. Not all at once. I can’t keep them all inside me. Can’t keep spilling over into two lives.

*

In the photo, your hair was a jagged black with purple chunks. Your eyes were narrowed with black winged eyeliner. I was smiling so wide I thought my face would crack in half. We met at Lupo’s because you worked as a waitress there on the weekend. You played bass. You made me mix-tape after mix-tape of music that I would never find on my own; in the music, I can still find you.

“Is this you, Mommy?” Sammy asks, pointing to my freckled face.

I nod. “Yes. And that was your mom, Pia.”

“She’s so pretty,” she says. “Do you think she’d think I was pretty too?”

“The prettiest. Say, you want hair like hers? I think she’d love that.”

Sammy nods. I put on The Jenny’s. As I prepare the water in the sink to be warm but not too warm, Sammy is playing the air-guitar. She’s laughing so hard that she’s crying. For three minutes and twenty-three seconds, we cry in laughter together. Our girl’s a spinning top of rock. We splash each other’s faces with our wet hair. We dance in circles around the kitchen table. There is no point to it. No word to sum us up, to put you, us, back in a shoebox kept hidden under my bed. There is just opening the blinds, letting some light in too. Now. We’re the only promise I believe could last longer than you. Longer than Jenny B. That’s what a love like ours gets in the end: a little piece of heaven told in power chords.