His first words to her were, "Hi. I'm Jon", as a way of introduction. He hung around with Ricky and a whole bunch of other pot-heads. That was their biggest vice, drinking and smoking pot. They're pretty nice, I thought at the time, except I didn't approve of their extra-curricular activities. They were sort of like modern-day Huck Finn/Tom Sawyer types. On their big list of no's was education, jobs, and conforming to society. On their yes list was smoking pot, drinking, and listening to rap. All of these were a remedy for their crappy home lives.
Those were the hardest times I ever had as a parent. Send Josie's friends away, and risk her being even more attracted to them and their lifestyles. Or let her figure things out for herself and watch her very closely. As it turns out, that's not a very good option either. When you live in town, it's hard to limit any kind of activity. Just go out your front door and there's everybody, good and bad alike.
Josie took to Jon just like that girl took to James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause. A good girl from a good family with the boy from the wrong side of the tracks. Jon's dad was a former meth-cooker who was run out of town and resides in North Carolina; his mother is hooked on drugs of all kinds, including meth, living with a boyfriend twenty years her senior. Jon lived with his grandparents, who are clean but were raising their great-grandchildren, Jon's sibling and uncle. Four generations under one roof. Jon had anger issues to boot.
So many times I wanted Josie to break clean of him. So many times I suggested to her that she needed to get clear of him because he would take out his anger verbally on her. She would cry, and that was heartbreaking. Josie did try to break up with him at least a couple of times, but somehow he would end up grabbing her heart again. Young love is stupid and inexplicable.
My animals, suspicious to most, loved him. That told me a lot. He was just angry. And because he didn't have a good familial support system, the only way he could keep his feelings down were to smoke pot.
Josie helped him with his homework. She jokingly called him a fresh-more, because he was supposed to be a sophomore but failed and was taking the ninth grade over again. Josie was only in eighth grade. She told me, "I feel sorry for him, Mom. He doesn't even have his own room to study in. There's no place for him to sit with his homework. His room is a hallway. Jenna's baby and Jenna have to have the other bedroom." So I guess that made the both of us who felt for Jon, and wished to help him be a better person.
I felt a tad of affection for him, because even though he smoked pot and drank, he never wanted Josie to do it. He would call and make sure she was at home. He didn't let certain people around her. He punched a kid who offered her a cigarette. He told her he didn't want her to have a bad life like himself. And he said he'd never do meth, not ever. And he meant it. That was because meth stole his childhood away from him. When he was eight years old, all Jon wanted to do was play baseball, but his dad wouldn't play with him because Jon senior was too busy cooking meth.
I didn't know how to help him, that was the trouble. I was frightened for him. I saw him not doing right towards himself, and I could see the path of his life. Like the trajectory of a ball, you can see the arc of it and where it's going to land. Jon was going to crash. He had no respect for the law. Josie, even though she loved him, would tell him he was stupid when he admitted his shoplifting sprees from the electronics department in Walmart and Best-Buy. To this day, I don't know where his friends got the money for gas to get to these places. They hadn't a dollar between them.
The last time I saw him, I tried to talk him into going to church with us. Josie had almost talked him into it. We'd been working on him for a few months. He didn't want to go because he felt like people would be judgmental towards him. His family was poor. He didn't think he believed in God. I knew he needed a support system to change his path.
The last time I talked to him it was via phone; he was angry at Josie. She was crying, he was accusing her of being unfaithful. I knew this was Angry Jon, the Jon who needed help. I told him, "Why do you say that? Don't you know if she was, she wouldn't cry? She wouldn't care what you think at all, don't you understand? She's your best friend, you are breaking her heart." He thought about it and then conceded the point. It was stuff like this that caused me the most stress, that made me wish the two would break up friendship and be done with it. But things have to play out to the end, too, no matter what anyone wants.
I told him to go to bed, the next day was a big day. He had a court date where he'd gotten into trouble months previous, and they were expecting he'd be sent to boys school (again). He said, "Naw, I ain't worried about tomorrow." That's all I remember. He talked to Josie some more, and everybody was calm until the next morning at 7:15 am, and Josie was screaming and crying. "Jon's DEAD!" she cried. I told her no, we just talked to him last night. It wasn't possible. But it was. He'd gone drunk driving with Ricky in the passenger seat. Neither of them wore seat belts, but for Jon, it proved detrimental as he flew out of the car when it flipped and was under the hood when the vehicle came down. Ricky lived although he was shaken around in the car like beans in a can.
The next moments, the next days, were very odd for me. The observer in me saw and commented, but the rest of me, the mother, was mortified. A child died. It could have been my child. The phone was quiet; no more Jon drawling, "Is Josie there?" Perfect silence.
Jenna, Jon's sister, was the one who told Josie that Jon died. Josie: "Where is Jon?" Jenna: "He's at the coroner in Princeton." Josie: "The corner? What's he doing down there? Why doesn't someone go get him?" Jenna: "[pause]The coroner, Josie. You can't just go get someone's body from the coroner." Josie: "Why did they leave him on the corner? We need to go get him! Let's go now!" Jenna:"[pause]No, Josie. Coroner. Cor-o-ner. Not corner." Josie: "Oh."
More on Jon later, because his is a long story.
