I Loved J.J. Dufresne's Best Friend

I met J.J. Dufresne through his best friend.

I was in love with his best friend. Serious love. Love that had me up all night. Love that had me writing poetry about J.J.'s best friend's socks and ankle bones. I wrote things like, I want the sweetness of possibility, the curl of night against skin, the dark scrape of teeth on bone.

If J.J. ever read those poems and knew they were about his best friend he would pretended to gag. "I don't get it," he would say. "He's kind of a douche."

Even so, that douche introduced me to J.J. Dufresne. Back then J.J. had spiky hair. He wore t-shirts with holes in them, t-shirts that had the words PORK CHOP SANDWICH or BEN'S CHILI spelled out in big letters on their fronts. When he got drunk he let me do things to him. He allowed me to pull his hair into a tight ponytail at the top of his skull, and he also let me drape my purple boa around his shoulders.

I did all those things because I wanted to appear fun. I wanted J.J.'s best friend to notice me and say, "Hey now. That Brandi girl, she's not so bad."

That didn't happen. J.J.'s best friend noticed another girl, a girl with nicer breasts and hair, and he brought me to a bar one night to let me down gently. We ordered some drinks. He told me about his new love and their exciting new love life. He told me he hoped I'd be able to cope with my grief because he knew how much I liked him. Then he suggested that as a first step in getting over him, I should go on a date with someone.

"You know," he said, "J.J.'s single."

I wanted to put a knife through his eye, but I somehow restrained. Instead, I went back to my apartment, stopping first at the Kwik-Trip for a gallon of orange juice. When I got home I dumped half the juice down the drain and filled the rest of the bottle with vodka. Then I sat on my couch and drank it and cried and talked on the phone with people who listened to me cry.

I spent at least a month thinking the rest of my life was going to be hell because I couldn't have J.J. Dufresne's best friend for my very own. Then one day I was sitting in a class, sitting right next to J.J., and he was drawing his trademark big-chinned, warty cartoon man that went on everything from birthday cards to workshopped short stories. I watched as he looped the big loop for the chin. I watched as he drew in a hairy mole and a heart-shaped tattoo. Then, without missing a beat, J.J. Dufresne extended his drawing hand to my notebook and he scratched the word FART in bold letters across the notes I'd just taken on contemporary schools of poetry. After he finished flourishing the T, J.J. resumed the shading of his big-chinned man. And that's when I realized that the real prize in my coming to Minnesota was not meeting J.J. Dufresne's best friend—a boy J.J. would go on to refer to as not only a douche but also an asshole, jackass, cock-knock, jizz-mouth, and fuckhead—but meeting J.J. Dufresne himself. That was worth everything in the world.