Stalking Jessica

After I’ve walked the dog, checked and rechecked that I have my lecture notes and student critiques ready for the 10:00 a.m. class I teach at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop, I sit at my desk with my second mug of coffee and open my laptop for my final morning ritual: Facebook. Quickly, I get to my most important reason for being on Facebook, checking up on Jessica Morrow (not her real name).

It has been a couple of days since my last visit, and in the interim, Jessica has written on a friend’s wall that she will be on Cape Cod this weekend. Why don’t they plan a play-date for their babies, and for themselves? Jessica—both a newly minted mother and registered nurse—has taken one of those ubiquitous quizzes to find out “What Kind of Mommy” she is (laid-back) and another to discover her most suitable stripper name (Candy Stripe). But best of all, she has posted some new photos. They are what interest me. I wriggle my hips in my ergonomic chair, take a sip of coffee, and scoot a few inches closer to my desk.

The first few images are of her pudgy son, in one of those baby trailers that people hitch to the back of their bikes. He is at the beach, gleefully raising a tiny plastic shovel. Cute, cute, cute, snooze. I click through the images with increasing speed. Finally, I find one that interests me. There is Jessica, in a blue bikini. Her arms are thin and tanned, her belly is as smooth as when she was fourteen, the year we became lovers.

My girlhood was punctuated by friendships like ours: a collapsing of two worlds into one, the vacuum of total intimacy. As I entered my teenage years, this intimacy slipped into sex. Jessica Morrow was the first.

A few shots later, there she is again, squinting at the camera, one hand spooning mush into her son’s mouth. There is her husband, a man of ordinary looks, though her beauty renders him homely by comparison. She smiles big for the photographer, surely her mother or brother, both of whom I remember well.

Jessica and I were early bloomers, and in eighth grade, we fell in love at first awkward meeting. I had returned to public school after a year in private school. My return was prompted by my parents’ panic at discovering my newfound adolescent facility for lying and drinking. “There’s a girl here who reminds me of you,” a boy I had known since elementary school told me on my first day back. Jessica reminded me of me, too.

Weekends, we smoked seedy joints, listened to the Go-Go’s and Pearl Jam, and scavenged our basements for old pictures of our mothers looking beautiful in bell-bottoms (hippy, mine; disco, hers). We sewed the cut-out fronts of worn band T-shirts onto other T-shirts and pronounced loudly in the school cafeteria that if we weren’t best friends we’d surely be lovers. Before meeting Jessica, I had thought that I was the only bisexual adolescent on the planet.

From the start, we talked very much like lovers, whispe...