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Stanley Rordale started a stupid rumor in seventh year, that Jude was retarded or something. It was because of that day when she cried for hours and started throwing up from how much her stomach was heaving. I sat with her in the girls’ bathroom but I didn’t care. Then her parents came and they let me come to the emergency room with them. My brother says I didn’t want to leave there when he came to pick me up, says I started yelling at him about Stanley Rordale and how I was going to kill him. 

I remember her asking me then, back in the bathroom with her face all red and too exhausted for a kid to look, if she was an idiot. I couldn’t look her in the eye, knowing how much she needed me to make things ok, how easily I could have reassured her. But I didn’t. I just shook my head and went silent. She laughed then but her eyes unfocused like she wasn’t looking out anymore, even though her eyes were open. It was like she was tunnelling into herself.

That tunneling look, I didn’t understand it back in seventh grade but I know it now. Jude was never good at hiding things, it always comes out on her face some way. Like in cartoons when the robbers are trying to be quiet but end up dropping glass vases and bumping into tables, and everyone knows they’re going to get caught--that’s how she is. Always dropping vases and things, letting you know she’s there. 

I don’t know that I’m her friend, really. Not because I’m not willing to be but because she doesn’t know how to have them. At least, when she gets all messed up in her head she knows to come to me and after a day or two she’s just Jude again. Before you start imagining, I’ll just tell you so you won’t have to wait around all stupid and anxious like you know where this is going. Because it already went. In the last year of high school and the first year of college we were together. Fuck-full of the kind of love that would make you believe you’ve never been happy before. It didn’t work, though. I knew it wasn’t how other people were and she knew it, too. It got bad, where she would start repeating the same thought over and over and would call me in the middle of the night, scared and in tears. I stopped talking those days, except for when I was with the new friends I was making at school. I couldn’t handle it again, the way she needed me. Anyways, I had to tell you so you wouldn’t wait for something like an idiot. That’s why we aren’t friends--in her book it would be like stepping into a minefield. I don’t know how it is in my book. Plus, she doesn’t like people knowing her, so she hates me most of all. Not hate like kill the firstborn; hate like the kind that comes when something nauseates you too much to like it anymore.

I know how you think of all this, like I’m her protector or something and she needs me and I pine for her or something, like from cheap movies. But you’re wrong because all we do is disappoint each other, and the only reason I’m even telling you about it is because it's like the way it is. I need to show all the ways it isn’t like a movie. I’ve thought a long time about what she is but have only come up with a feeling like she’s got no center. I think she gave that role to me way back in seventh year for when she’s all messed up and needs somebody to remember.

The only reason I’ve been thinking about her so much is that she’s been needing me again. Found out today when Anna came bounding down the stairs yelling about her stupid fantasy, her crazy stalker notebook clutched in her hand. 

She burst through the garage door and started talking without pausing for a second, the way she does when she starts talking about her “investigations.” 

“Jude’s back, Will. That’s the second time this morning already! I saw from the window, she just walked up to the house and then stopped for a whole minute and then ran away. Twice, Will. She wants to talk to you. You have to go talk to her.”

I don’t even try to stop her. Anna isn’t worth stopping--she doesn’t ever listen to me anyways. She sees I’m not gonna say anything so she just continues as if my silence meant I needed some more nagging. 

“Will, she wants to talk to you but she’s so nervous because you never go talk to her. She doesn’t even know if you care at all! Will, she loves you!”

Anna watches too many movies. I couldn’t take her yelling at me like a crazy person this early in the morning so I got up and started to push her toward the door.

“She doesn’t want to talk to me. If she wanted to talk then she would come and talk. So stop stalking her already, and if you’re so curious you can go talk to her yourself.”

Anna huffs, leaving the room--thank god. But she yells as she goes.

“You know she won’t talk with me. Every time I try she just goes quiet and starts that laughing and smiling stuff . . . She doesn’t trust me, Will. I hate you for never helping me out with her, I swear.” 

Anna’s only been living here for a year and she’s already found a way to poke her head in where it doesn’t belong. Anna thinks herself a reporter, and she’s latched onto Jude as the story that will give her her big break. She has a notebook filled with all of these weird stories she makes up about Jude, and she never stops nagging me to tell her stuff. Mom doesn’t help much, always talking with Anna for hours on the phone and stopping by for dinner, which always turns into an investigation about Jude. But, I can’t kick her out or anything because she’s still in school, and anyways you don’t kick family out. 

I sat back on the chair near my workbench and massaged my forehead with my hand. It was still too early for all this. I saw Jude. Saw her finding me like she always did and curling up like a cat. She was always seconds away from falling asleep, but she never actually slept until she was in bed. She’d just close her eyes and rest, letting me fall asleep. Maybe she saw it was me who needed the rest. I don’t know. I saw her kissing me and I stopped. I felt nauseous and tired all of the sudden and I left the garage, finding the bathroom and washing my face in the sink. 

Then I was leaving the house, closing the door and I started running fast to where I knew she would be. Only a few blocks away, I finally saw her sitting on the big rock in the park. She had her forehead on her knees. 

Sometimes I wonder why she picked me. She only ever talks about herself. It used to make me angry but then it just became clear how sad it was. I don’t really mind it anymore. For some reason I think she can only get all the sad stuff out of her head when she’s with me. She’s always apologizing too. She doesn’t like it, whatever comes out around me but she always comes back. She said something to me once, when we were still in school, and it made my stomach sink. 

“It’s a sad thing,” she said. We were sitting, her with a book open but ignored, and me drawing some sketches of the park. She wasn’t looking at me--she never does when she talks, like she’s scared of all the ways my face could go. 

“What?” I was barely paying attention, but was aware enough to see her shift away from me. 

“That I can only see myself through your eyes.” She paused, looked at me, and laughed. “It’s like watching a train wreck.” 

She said a lot of stuff like that. My mom liked Jude a lot. She said Jude had “a sad heart” when I asked her about the park. 

“Sometimes, when people who are sad fall in love, they start to meet themselves for the first time. When they are alone, it’s easier to avoid it all.” 

She paused and looked at me for a moment, real deep. With Mom that always meant that she wanted me to see something important. 

“She loves you very much, Will. And she feels loved by you-- you’re good to her. Otherwise, Jude would never try to see herself, and she wouldn’t be able to get back to you through it all.” 

I don’t know, but I think my mom was wrong. I don’t think Jude was ever trying to get back to me. Except a few times, but it scared me. She was more happy than I had ever seen a person be. I felt bad but I preferred it when she was sad. 

She wasn’t what I thought sad would look like. Every time she spoke, I could imagine all her words falling out of her mouth like rocks. I could see the stones pile up around her until she was a mountain of a million pieces. There was a lot of crying, yeah, but there were also silent days which were worse than the crying. After she cried it would be like all the stuff tormenting her just left for a while. Left her enough time for the day, enough time for me. The silent days you felt in your gut. She would just sit. I would try to hold her but nothing would help. It was this anger, but not not at me. She would be so still, like she was using all her energy to push all of this pressure in her, push it back down. It got worse when I was around, or anyone was, like she was protecting me from something. If I got curious she’d just go blank and be so far away. It was the first time I ever saw a body. Not a person, but just the skin that holds them, like they were suffocated inside. I could never sleep after those days. I preferred when she cried. 

I walked over to the rock where Jude was sitting and she looked at me. I cursed myself for running over there, still panting. In a second she hopped down from the rock and hugged me and quickly made her way onto the rock. Her hair was short again and her nails painted green. She was beautiful, like a face you already know, and her eyes looked like how animals do when they meet you the first time. I decided to speak first. 

“I ran over here I thought you’d be here. Uh, Anna, she said she saw you come by the house and I figured maybe you wanted to say hi. It’s good to see you.”

She looked embarrassed about having been caught by Anna and I kicked myself for coming at all. If she wanted to talk she would have told me. Stupid Anna. 

“Ah, yeah I guess that must have looked funny. Sorry I didn’t mean to act weird or anything. I was just thinking about if I should come talk to you. It’s been a while. It’s good to see you.”

Jude smiled and I felt less angry at Anna. 

“Look, Will, this is super out of the blue and maybe I shouldn’t even mention it but maybe I should, anyway I have this show coming up. You know the theater on Shawnee? I’ve been working there in exchange for some classes and I wrote something, a bunch of short plays and well my teacher liked them and well I’m putting on a show. And I’d like if you came to see it, you don’t have to and it's really weird I feel nervous but yeah...” 

She trailed off and I put my hands in my pockets. 

“I’ll be there.” I looked at her and smiled. “You have your own show! That’s amazing! I’ll be there. No way I’m missing that.”

“Oh, yay! Ok, yeah, oh I’m glad, It’s going to be good I think. I’m glad you're going to be there. Well, not there at the theater I mean we rehearse there but the actual show is gonna be here in the park.” She quickly glanced at my face. “Will, some of the show, well it's never said outright and only a few people who know us would even know or even guess and they probably won’t, and I felt uncomfortable before but I didn’t know what to say or if I should say anything but the writing, it was a lot about you. I’m sorry. I should have told you before.”

My hands were already in my pockets so I took them out of my pockets. Then I put them back.

“Oh, uh well that’s ok. I can’t tell you what to write or anything, and it's your play, and-”

“You don’t have to come, Will. I know it's strange. But it’s nothing bad, really, I wouldn’t do that. But you should come, I think maybe it will be good for us, help me to show you what I mean. And, well I was thinking that you could create a poster? That way, you can show your prints all over, and I can give you the script, so you have an idea of what to do for the artwork.”

She stepped aside on the rock and pulled her bag up from the ground, taking out a stack of papers and handing them to me. I took them and looked at the title. Then Spring Came. I felt a chill on my arms and I thought about how we got together in the spring. I looked up at her.

“It’s ok that I read it?” I asked, aware of how much I liked the weight of the papers in my hands. 

“Yeah, I want you to.” Jude smiled and it wasn’t nervous anymore. 

I read the whole thing that afternoon. I didn’t tell Anna about the script but I invited her to come with me for the show if she promised not to say anything stupid. I thought about my mom, and what she had said to me about Jude that day a long time ago. She was right. The play was all about having a best friend. And about how real life best friends aren’t like the movies, and that it's full of disappointments. And she wrote about her head and how I fit into it. And she wrote about timing, and how she was terrible at it, and she wrote about me. She wrote about all the times I sat with her and how I make stories up that fill in blanks that she can’t fill. And she wrote about how she saw me smile brighter than she had ever seen when I was with my friends in college. And she wrote that she had never felt alone before she had met me. And she wrote about my mom. She wrote about hoping one day she could be like her, on the other side of being young. 

The show was good, but the actors stumbled on some lines every now and then. I imagined that everyone in the crowd was gone and it could be just me and Jude, watching this movie of our life, stopping every now and then to point out the moments when things got wrong and explain them and laugh at how silly we were, and how little it mattered anymore. I imagined us rewinding it over and over until I could memorize the way that we unfolded. Jude wasn’t on the stage but I saw her in it. Then, at the very end, when the script she had given me would have been over, everyone cleared the stage and Jude stepped up with a guitar. She sang a song about houses and she looked at me. She sang to me. 

Anna leaned over to speak in my ear. “She’s looking at you, Will.” 

I didn’t have to peek at the audience to respond because I knew it was true, “And everybody’s looking at Jude.”

Bridget Ashvil's story won second prize in the Ninth Annual Humanities and Sciences Writing Contest. She is a sophomore in the Visual and Critical Studies Department at SVA. Bridget's love affair with reading and writing were inspired by the works of Judy Blume. Now she enthusiastically pontificates about the comedic genius of Kurt Vonnegut, the pioneering spirit of Virginia Woolf, and The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. " I am always creating “snapshots” or moments of characters, finding that approaching personalities through a series of experiences (internal and external) rather than describing characteristics allows for a more ambiguous and therefore infinite representation of the constant process of being human."