Page 22 of Finding Jack
My phone sent me an alert around lunch. “Jack Dobson has tagged you in a picture.”
Chapter 10
Jack. Jack had tagged me.
Jack had tagged me because—since I was still in the 24-Hour Super Honesty Cycle—I had tagged Ranée with the sneaking suspicion that he might see it since she was a mutual Facebook friend.
Even though I hadn’t done anything more strenuous than toss stale pasta in the garbage, my pulse suddenly jumped to mid-workout speed.
I pulled up the photo. It was the boat picture, but now it had a seagull the size of a Buick hovering in the air in front of it in an oddly regal pose, like an ancient thunderbird, and Jack captioned it, “When you’re trying to hang out but things get transcendent.”
I burst out laughing. I wanted to type back something funny, but that seemed too…I don’t know. Like I’d just been sitting and waiting for him to say something about it. Which I had.
My thumbs hovered over my keys, twitchy to type something smart-alecky, but instead I hit “like” and set the phone down. I didn’t want to play games, but at the same time, I wasn’t sure why I’d wanted him to see it. I felt the way I did before I dipped into my grandparents’ lake for the first time each summer. Why had I opened my timeline to him?
Because I needed a good laugh this post-breakup morning and thought he might deliver, that’s why. And he had. So that was good. Hitting “like” was a way to acknowledge him without turning it all into A Thing. This wasn’t A Thing. I pushed him out of my head for the rest of the day.
Monday morning on my coffee break, I put up a new picture of the view from my office window. It was a cruddy view of half the facing building and a giant billboard advertising bail bonds. I captioned it, “Fancy executive suite.”
After lunch, Jack tagged me in a photo. It was my office window, only it had the transcendent seagull outside of it again, blocking the billboard. His caption read, “Am I being…followed?”
We were one step away from a DM flirtation. I was kinda sorta doing exactly what I had told Ranée I refused to do. And I didn’t care.
Tuesday morning I lined up my action figures along the window ledge. Jane Austen, General Leia, my Amelia Earhart Barbie, and Wonder Woman now looked back at me. I took a new picture captioned, “There. I fixed it. The view is 100% better.”
Tuesday at lunch, I had a comment on it from Jack. “This picture can’t be improved.”
Oh, man. That’s the one thing he could have said that I had no defense against.
Then another comment popped up. “But I’ll try.”
Of course he would.
I tried not to refresh my notifications obsessively all afternoon. I failed. Just before I was ready to pack up for home, Jack tagged me. This time, the seagull was floating in front of my office window, bowing to the action figures. It said, “Transcendent Seagull salutes you.”
I thought about the picture all the way home. Half the time I was smiling at Jack, and the other half I was frowning at myself. What was I doing? I mean, really? I was setting out pictures as deliberate bait for Jack to Photoshop because…why? Did I want the attention?
No. I wasn’t an attention seeker. And I’d had attention from Paul, so it’s not like I’d lacked it. Maybe…I…
I couldn’t come up with a good reason. I liked the way he turned the ordinary into the absurd. That was it. Everything about him was absurdity: his long hair and the way he made it the butt of his jokes, the way he introduced transcendent seagulls into ordinary photos. Something about it appealed to me.
Not the hair, to be clear. The hair was ridiculous.
But the other stuff…I didn’t remember the last time that I’d had so many laughs startled out of me. Ranée was funny, but not in a laugh out loud kind of way. More of a subtle, dry way. Jack…
At home, I headed straight for my bed and turned on my laptop so I could send him a DM. Why not? I mean, besides the obvious drawback of listening to Ranée say “I told you so”? It had been a cruddy few days in the post-Paul breakup funk, and I liked how Jack breathed a little life into—
Oh. No. Nope. Lots of nope.
I shut the computer off again. What I did NOT need to do was get caught up in flirting with Jack just because I was at a romantic low point. That was dumb. I’d never been the kind of girl who needed or wanted to get over one guy with another one. I preferred the old-fashioned method of ice cream and Hallmark movies.
I picked up my phone and opened Jack’s profile. I scrolled through the transcendent seagull in front of the boat, appearing again in front of my office window, then again bowing to my girl power action figures. That was gold. And suddenly I was laughing again. I couldn’t help it.
I flipped over to his Twitter feed. Today some smug-looking bro-dude had sent him a picture of himself standing in front of an old, tired Volvo and asked Jack to Photoshop him in front of an exotic sportscar. Now the bro-dude stood smugly in front of Lightning McQueen.
Ha. Pretty good, Jack. Pretty good.
I scrolled through a few more of his tweets and stopped on one that didn’t look funny at first glance. It was a tween girl with an adorable wash of freckles on her pale skin. Her request broke my heart. “Can you get rid of the freckles so I look prettier?”
