Page 54 of Finding Jack
“No.”
“Stubborn.”
“For the third time, I’m not. I’m realistic. Jack is whatever. A bonus. If we fake hang out, we fake hang out. If we don’t, we don’t.”
“He’s ‘whatever’?” She repeated the word with the exact skepticism she’d had when I announced I was going off coffee. I’d lasted a day-and-a-half. She’d been right then. And she was right now.
“There’s no point, that’s all. So that’s why it’s just gravy if we talk. That’s all it’s going to be.”
“You act like airplanes don’t exist. This is a solvable problem.”
“You act like there’s some simple end to this road somewhere off in the sunset of Happily Ever After Land.” I waved my hands to indicate some serious airy-fairyness. “Let’s say Jack and I meet in person. Let’s say it goes perfectly, and we have amazing chemistry, and we fall in crazy love. Then what?”
“Then you’re in love and it all works out.”
“In the sunset of Happily Ever After Land. Not in real life, where one of us has to uproot entirely to make this work. It requires a one-sided sacrifice that neither of us is willing to make.”
“You aren’t, it sounds like. But how are you so sure he isn’t?”
“Because he won’t even tell me boring details about himself. I don’t think he’s hiding any deep dark secrets, but he’s also not willing to open up all the way. And you know what? That’s fair. He doesn’t have to, not when this road ends in a fork, one leading to Portland and one to San Francisco, and that’s that.”
She sighed. “You know I try not to mind anyone else’s business except yours, which is why I haven’t said much about why Jack is kind of touchy about that stuff. It’s not like I know his whole life history, but I know him well enough to know you guys are perfect for each other. I was trying to be all protective of his privacy and let him tell you things in his own time, but he’s being an idiot, so I’m going to give this a little nudge. I know you googled him, but did you try an image search? That might get you somewhere.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What do you know?”
“I know that people need to tell their own stories. Try that and see where it gets you.”
“No. He needs to tell me himself. You just said so.”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t act like you’re not dying to google his picture now.”
I crossed my arms. “Nope.”
She didn’t say anything. We stared at each other for about thirty seconds before I hopped up to get my laptop. “I’m image googling him.”
“Dig,” she called after me. “It may not be front page news.”
What was “it”? Some sort of incident I should know about? I mean, obviously yes, or she wouldn’t be pushing me to search.
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought to google images. It was the kind of thing I did when I wanted to know what kind of bird or flower I’d just seen, so it should have occurred to me. I went through our old DMs to find the pictures Jack had sent me of himself when we first started talking, the absurd Photoshop creations of him on the back of a unicorn, or the ones I’d made of him to tease him.
The first surprise was exactly how many old messages I had to scroll through. We’d had dozens of conversations, long and short, but always daily for over a month now.
Finally I found a picture that would make a good candidate if I cropped out the fake wreath of Cheetos he’d made around himself.
I pasted it into the image search and Google gave me some results. On the first page, half of the results were him. That gave me hope that the search might work. But all of them were photos he’d posted as part of his social media alter ego. They were on par with his riding-a-unicorn masterpiece. That made me despair that I’d never find anything besides the persona, but I clicked through the next page, and the one after. All of them were reposts of the same handful of pictures.
How deep was I supposed to dive? I decided to go twenty pages. After that, I’d march into the living room and beat Ranée with a pillow until she spit out whatever information she was dying to tell me anyway.
But it didn’t take twenty pages. It took fourteen, and there, on the second to last result, was a picture of Jack I hadn’t seen yet. It looked like a formal picture, the kind people sometimes had to take for work if management wanted everyone’s headshot on a lobby wall or something. Jack had short hair in the picture, but it was definitely him. His cheekbones and jawline would have given him away even if his smile hadn’t. I’d memorized it during our Scrabble session on FaceTime.
It was a shock to see him there, smiling back from the screen, clean cut and so very Jack. Except that when I clicked it open to view it more closely, the name in the caption didn’t read, “Jack Dobson.” The guy in the picture was Dr. Jack D. Hazlett.
What was going on?
I immediately Googled the full name Jack D. Hazlett. More images popped up, including one linking back to the online version of his old high school newspaper in Bend, OR. It was his senior portrait, showing him in a suit and tie, his hair a little shaggy over his ears and hanging down to his eyebrows, his cheekbones and jawline already showing the promise of the handsome man he would become.
He’d graduated five years before me, which made him around thirty-six now. The article was an interview with the class salutatorian. No surprise that someone who went on to become a doctor was a high school brainiac. He was also a two-sport athlete lettering in cross-country and swimming, and he was his senior class president.
