Getting Over Jack Wagner by Elise Juska

underwear or socks. Mom upped her hours to full-time at the doctor’s office where she typed and filed and made pots of coffee. As soon as she got home the sweatpants and tube came on, a spasm of light and sound in the dim living room.
    I have to admit, I understood Mom’s TV attraction. The burst of energy, the endless menu of channels, the sensation that your life is not empty or lonely or repetitious when in fact it is all of those things. Mom favored the shows with happy endings: happy couples disembarking cruise ships, happy families frolicking in prairies. Preprime time, she was partial to the game shows, with their promise of sudden fortune or, at the very least, parting gifts.
    In the afternoons, before she got home, I still watched General Hospital. Naturally, since my father disappeared my crush on Jack Wagner had grown only more intense. At the supermarket, I grabbed up every soap opera mag that had his face on the cover. I wrote out every lyric to “All I Need” in varying fonts and sizes. And on Saturday afternoons, as always, I headed to Hannah’s.
    â€œGoing to Hannah’s,” I informed Mom. “For the Club.”
    No response.
    â€œProbably staying for dinner.”
    Still nothing.
    â€œMight even sleep over.”
    Finally, Mom looked at me. “Are you sure you’re not imposing?” she would say, forehead knotting up. After all those years of criticizing us, her hard shell had collapsed like a tarp, exposing a mush of nerves underneath. Both parts of her personality derived from the same impulse—the need to look right, to act right, to not stray too far from the norm—but after my father left, what was once snapping and nitpicking was reduced to its embryonic state: worry.
    I, however, had no patience for whatever my mother was going through. As far as I was concerned, my dad had gone away because she’d driven him away. “Yes, I’m sure. They like having me there,” I said, with an emphasis that seemed to miss her completely.
    â€œWell, okay…” she drifted, hands restless in her lap. “When will you…” she began, but didn’t finish, distracted by something on the TV screen. It appeared that, caught between husbands, my mother was unable to finish anything.
    At Hannah’s, interest in the ORSFC was rapidly fading. The others were getting more and more interested in real boys, less and less enthusiastic about the intimate details of Wang Chung. Cecilia stopped attending, giving us some bull-crap story about piano lessons. Katie came but brought her own agendas, which included teaching us how to give hickeys to our forearms. Even Hannah was getting preoccupied. She officially “like-liked” Eric Sommes, her partner in science lab, who had staged a one-man sit-in to protest dissecting earthworms (“Hell, no, they won’t regrow!”).
    Some weeks, I would get stubborn and try to keep our meetings focused, like they used to be. I reported the most revealing rock-star details I could dig up. Hannah and Katie waited politely until I was finished, but I could tell neither of them was really listening. They knew my father was gone, my mom was getting weird, my sister was dating that Ivan guy, and they should be really nice to me.
    At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I wrote letters to Jack. I propped a flashlight against my pillow (an unnecessary move, since Mom had stopped checking lights-out) but which made the letters feel more illicit, impassioned:
    Dearest Jack,
    Me again. I had another bad day.
    Only you would understand.
    I scribbled until the pen hurt my hand, then drifted off to sleep with the flashlight glowing under my Garfield blanket, dreaming of my life at eighteen: a life of “careless whispers,” “first real six-strings,” and a boyfriend who would immortalize me in song—“Oh Sherrie” or “Sister Christian” or “Jessie’s