Something that Jack, assuming he knew, had conveniently forgotten to share.
“It’s your uncle’s fault that we even had to lie about all of this in the first place!” Javi hissed.
“You think I don’t know that? When I found out that he was basically the one behind all of this, it made me feel like shit! But there’s nothing I can do, Javi. It’s not like the guy ever talks to me, unless he’s asking for a favor. And even if we did talk, he wouldn’t listen to me.”
“But you’re still his family! There’s got to be something you can do.”
“He is my family,” Jack said. “Which is why I can’t exactly tell him to stop running for president, when everyone else in the family is out actively campaigning for him.”
“Well, you can at least tell him to stop making life harder for people who are already suffering,” Javi urged.
“Look, I know that he seems like the ringleader here, but clearly he’s not the only one who feels this way,” Jack said quietly. “I’m not trying to excuse him, but . . . maybe he’s just tapping into something bigger.”
“Then he should be using his platform to change people’s minds! Not pouring fuel on the fire,” Javi said. He couldn’t understand why Jack wasn’t equally furious. “Unless you actually agree with him?”
“Jesus, man, of course I don’t agree with him!” Jack exclaimed, raising his hands defensively. “I just don’t really see the point of going up against my uncle. He’s gonna do whatever he wants, no matter what you or I say.”
Jack’s pathetic acceptance, his resignation, was making Javi even angrier.
“But don’t you care that actual lives are at stake here? That doctor who got shot in New York is only dead because of your uncle!”
Javi could tell from Jack’s face that his comment struck a nerve.
“What happened to that doctor is horrible,” Jack said. “But if I start criticizing my uncle now, I could get myself disowned by the entire family. Who do you think they’ll side with? The kid who barely made it through the academy, or the man who might be president? And I don’t see why he’s my responsibility to fix. I didn’t ask for him to be my uncle, he’s just an egomaniac who married into our family. His fuckups shouldn’t be my problem.”
“Well, they became your problem when he stood on that stage and told the whole world about you,” Javi said harshly. “About us.”
The gym manager was walking toward them now, keys jingling in his pockets. “Everything okay here, boys? We’ve had a few complaints.”
“Yeah, don’t worry,” Jack said. “I’m leaving anyway.” He spit his mouth guard into his hand, then stormed off toward the locker room. And Javi watched as the door swung shut behind Jack, the final punctuation on their first real fight in more than four years of friendship.
Despite Jack’s wealth and connections, Javi always felt a bit sorry for him, knowing that his childhood hadn’t held the same happiness as Javier’s own, that he had grown up feeling lost and abandoned. Javi knew that Jack’s family was demanding, that he carried his last name like a burden, always laboring to live up to their expectations. So Javi couldn’t understand why, in this crucial moment, Jack would side with them over his best friend.
Was he that afraid of their reproach? That desperate for their approval?
Or was he just that good at compartmentalizing, that he could somehow separate the people he loved from the pain they had caused?
Perhaps there was something else entirely, something Javier was missing.
Javi was about to leave the gym himself when he spotted a tall punching bag hanging alone in the corner, and struck it angrily with his clenched fist, sending the bag flying into the wall behind it.
Dear B,
Dear B,
I think you’re right about long-stringers. Some of them may not even realize what they’re doing. They just want to distance themselves from sadness, or from guilt, or from any reminders of their own mortality. No matter how much time they may have left, nobody wants to think about the end.
It’s strange, because society used to be so much more comfortable with death. In our unit on the Victorian era, I explain to my students that people back then were surrounded by death. They wore lockets with dead relatives’ hair, they kept the casket in their living rooms during a wake, they even took photos with deceased loved ones to keep as remembrances. Nowadays, we want to avoid the idea of death as much as possible. We don’t like to talk about illness, we isolate our dying community members in hospitals and nursing homes, we relegate cemeteries to remote stretches along the highway. I suppose short-stringers are the latest group to suffer from our death-averse ways, and perhaps more than any before.