Don't Let Me Go: Based on a True Story

By Jordan Pease

Tears from laughing, scars from jumping fences, bloody hands, tattoos, drinking games, best friends, new friends, losing friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, graduation, sex, house parties, fake IDs, night clubs, NYC, wrestling in pools, Jersey shore, waking up in bathtubs, dancing, depression, loud music, being confused, vulnerable, happy, and maybe in lovecoming of age in New Jersey

Dont Let Me Go is based on the true story of a young man whose boat was thrown more than a little off course. Jordan Pease is eighteen and falling in love with another guy. A good-looking varsity soccer player and the class clown, Jordan is a popular senior who is heading to California for college from his home in New Jersey. As he counts down the days to his upcoming excellent adventures in higher education, he meets Gabriel Bosque, and its all overlove at last.

Don't Let Me Go will make you want to cry, laugh, smile, and day dream.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Nov 10, 2010
• ISBN: 9781426942464

Jordan Pease

Jordan Pease came from a hidden, broken household, a circumstance that made him grow up fast. Like every other young adult, his life has been a twisty curvy road. He’s just an average college student from New Jersey, and this is his first book.

Book preview

Time

August 6, 2009

May 6, 2009

May 7, 2009

May 8, 2009

May 9, 2009

May 10, 2009

May 11, 2010

May 21–May 26, 2010.

May 30, 2009

June 6, 2009

June 10, 2009

June 26, 2009

June 27, 2009

June 28, 2009

June 29, 2010

June 30, 2010

July 4, 2009

July 13, 2009

July 14, 2010

July 31, 2009

August 2, 2009

August 3, 2009

August 4, 2009

August 5, 2009

August 6, 2009

Have you ever gotten the feeling that there were a million fire ants pushing tiny ice particles all over your body when someone touched you? What about when you hate someone’s guts so much, but for some reason when they look at you, you can’t help but smirk and laugh a little? How about when someone walks into sight and your brain automatically starts playing Don’t Want to Miss a Thing by Aerosmith? Thank God, I thought I was the only one. Well, imagine having all that. Now imagine crumpling it all up in a McDonalds cheeseburger wrapper, shooting it into a garbage can, and moving three thousand miles away. Well, that’s what I did, and this is exactly where it starts.

May 6, 2009

Fuck, T, humanities poems are tomorrow, and I haven’t written a single word yet.

Jord, you should just write your poem about how you hide all your shitty family past, about your dad and stuff.

Yeah, I would, I said. Damn, I could write pages, but I want it to be something about me. Everyone writes their poems about how they hate their lives or how their sister got raped in the sixth grade. I mean as horrible as that is—

So true, Terry said. I wonder who the rape victim is this year.

We’re terrible.

Just do it, Jordan. You know you want to tell everyone. Don’t be a pussy, bitch.

See, it was much easier for my already-half-drunk best friend, Terry, to tell me to write about being gay than it actually would be. One, am I gay? Who knows? I don’t even exactly know. I have never had sex with a guy before. I was more sexually confused, if anything—not the big gay. Two, as much as I am a fan of gossip, me being on the JV Gossip Team myself, word would spread like wildfire. Faster than the rumor that Cathy B. had a two twin buns in the oven from a mall rent-a-cop. I can see it now: the faces and the stares, that blank looks in acquaintances’ eyes when you glare back, clarifying you knew they were just whispering about you. My luck, I go to school with three thousand students, too. Three, I have a lot of close guy friends scattered throughout grades and towns. I’ve played varsity soccer since I was a sophomore. Shit, bro, they would say, it’s senior year already. That means Jordan has had three years to look at our cocks in the locker room!

Vomit.

I was not letting that humiliation happen. I was popular, goddamn it!

Terry and I walked to our cars parked in the teachers’ lot. They had been doing construction on the student parking lot basically all year so far, and there was no way we were parking a mile and half down the road at the Shoprite with the juniors. Besides, we both had nice enough cars to blend in as teachers’ vehicles. A brand new 2008 Mazda 3 and a brand new 2008 Audi A4—we obviously got our masters in education. We strolled out into the 70-degree weather, immediately sweating from the 100-percent humidity that Jersey loved to represent. It was disgusting. The air was this thick, wheezy, asthma-inducing oxygen that made you want to drive your car into the nearest pond possible. Who am I kidding? Pond? It was New Jersey—I mean the nearest in-ground pool.

With sweat on the tips of all five of my finger pads, I burnt the fingerprints off my hand, easing my hand onto my black door handle.

"Don’t forget to come over for The Hills tonight at ten, fag."

I won’t, you pale whale, I said.

Good luck being Dr. Seuss later. Call me if you need help.

Will do, Queen Latifa.

Texting, singing, weaving through traffic, dodging underclassman, and changing CDs all at the same time was something easy for me to accomplish. Writing a poem—not so much. As I went fifteen miles per hour over the speed limit in the opposite direction of my house, everything started to blur together in my side-view. Have you ever been in such deep thought and so zoned out that you literally forgot you were driving? But somehow, you were driving better than Jeff Gordon? If I went home, my lazy ass would just get on Facebook, bullshit with friends, eat nine sloppy joes, and probably pass out at 4:00 PM and then wake up five hours later with a bunch of false energy. Driving always helps me think. Is that Wendy’s? I thought. Yum.

Get serious, Jordan, I said to myself. Come on.

That was my problem. I couldn’t take anything seriously. I laughed at everything, and I meant everything. Grandma crossing the street—laugh. Baby collapsing and rolling down the hill into a thorn bush—laugh. Someone farting in class—damn, that was the end of my day, laugh for four hours straight. I could always just get a shitty a grade and make my poem a rhyming one, short, about forty words, with nothing to do about being sexually confused, and then, just at the end, go out with a bang: I think I like boys, too, bitches! So suck on that! followed by a loud Xena the Warrior Princess call. Sounded incredible.

As I pulled up my driveway, I could already visualize exactly what my mom was doing. She was probably gossiping on the phone with my aunt about last night’s Dancing with the Stars episode, of course. See, my mom was kind of the Paris Hilton of moms. Fifty-six years old, and she could easily pass for forty-three. She had a kickin’ little body that she kept in shape by eating one crouton a day and washing it down with lemon water. She attended to her bi-daily schedule in the following order:

1.   Hair appointment

2.   Manicure

3.   Crouton/lemon water

4.   Laundry

5.   Bills

6.   Tan by the pool (substituted with seasons)

7.   Judge Judy

8.   Repeat every other day

She was hysterical. If you ever wished for one of those moms who was your best friend, then you would consider me a lucky kid. She should have been the easiest person to tell. Knowing her, she would have jumped for joy and asked me to give her highlights. I had no idea why I wanted to tell all my friends first, though. I always liked the bad news before the good news, so maybe I was just damned to do the harder thing first.

Home!

Me, too!

No shit.

She laughed, Okay, crabby Cathy.

I smirked and chuckled like a chipmunk. I actually hate you.

Love you more, Jor! she said with her upstate New York, Boston-sounding accent.

There it was. This mere forty-inch, flat-screen, Dell-produced object that I once loved, now switching teams. Kind of like myself. "Focus! I told myself. I pulled my belt off like a chipendale, nearly slapping my pussy across the face. Pussy was my cat. She was a fierce boogey-boarder and an impeccable tanner. She was the Cameron Diaz of cat world. I needed the perfect playlist that would make me think and not want to completely stand on my computer desk and rock-star kick off while I took a shot of Patrón in midair. That eliminated my Let’s get really fucked up playlist. With a sigh of relief, I slid depressing emo shit" onto my iPod. It was made up of a mixture of Lifehouse, Flyleaf, some acoustic Mayday Parade, Missy Higgins, and some tracks from the Garden State soundtrack. Phenomenal movie.

Before I knew it, I had six pages of doodles and lines from songs playing written in red pen and scattered in a weird, artsy way, covering front and back.

Lifehouse:    Broken clock is a comfort, it helps me sleep tonight.

Lifehouse:    I am damaged at best, like you’ve already figured out.

Lifehouse:    In your name, I find meaning, so I am holding on. Barely holding on to you.

Sick Puppies:    Wrong or right, black or white, it’s all the same.

Anouk:    I was wrong, I guess, I confess.

Paramore:    Convince yourself it’s not the reason you don’t see the sun anymore.

I convinced myself that I would probably be most successful if I first just wrote down exactly what I was thinking. Uno Problemo: I wasn’t thinking anything. I legitimately was just feeling three hundred different emotions. My stomach was in knots. It felt like there was an obese woman jumping on my head, and I was sweating. Well, my air-conditioning was broken, so that explained the sweating at least. Just do it, Jordan, I thought. Stop being such a pussy. Don’t make it rhyme yet. Just jot down exactly how you are feeling then. My red pen started moving back and forth, creating a bunch of adjectives and verbs in unfinished sentences on my unlined computer paper. As if I was in third grade again, I quickly covered the five Ws of writing—who, what, where, when, and why. Then the how came along. How did I feel about hiding the fact that I might have been gay? How did I feel growing up confused? How was I going to feel once I had gotten this off my chest? Four pages later, I opened up rhymezone.com and started turning my emotions into rhyming lines of poetry. Then, of course, I totally cheated and typed my boring phrases into Microsoft Word and synonymed most of them.

Did you know a final copy of only two pages of phenomenal poetry can take about five and a half hours? I had no fucking clue. Neither did the episode of American Idol I had just missed. My first intuition was, of course, to make this oh-so-serious paper into something fun and jokey. Should I have pulled a Legally Blonde and made it pink and scented? Or perhaps I should have just walked in with a poster that had a huge penis drawn on it with an arrow pointing to my mouth. Then I wouldn’t even have to tell them I had made out with my roommate at soccer camp. Wa-bamm! (You know who you are. Sorry I just put you in a book. And by the way, you give shitty back massages. At least try to get the knots out!)

Oh, hey, Shrek, you’re finally coming out of your cave? my mom asked.

Surprisingly, I was doing homework.

Homework? You don’t do homework.

I do when it counts as my final for my class, I said.

Does my hair look flat on the top? I think Kim cut it a little too short.

Mom, I might be gay.

If it was only that easy. But I was sure that if I had pulled a trick like that right in the moment, she would probably have responded, No, honey, I didn’t ask you if you were a homo. I asked you if my hair looked flat!

After I ate my mom’s idea of a home-cooked meal—in tonight’s case, quesadillas filled with ham and cheese—I headed up to my room. There was absolutely no way in hell I was sleeping tonight. Not only was my life pretty much going to change completely in less than twenty-four hours, my room was at least 100 degrees Celsius. I kept the light off. I was afraid that if I added anymore heat that my cat would implode. I slowly eased onto my bed the way a dog stretched in the morning. At least my ten-foot-by-teen-foot army-green room felt big for once. It must have been from the six hours I had spent staring at my computer screen. I put my iPod on shuffle and kicked my feet up straight in the air, making my body into an uppercase L on my bed. Tomorrow, these feet are going to walk my abnormally large, white-boy ass into H14, past my five ex-girlfriends in that class, down the three-foot-wide aisle, up the steps to the podium, and give my teacher a blowjob. I smiled to myself. Why was I so creepy? It was a good joke, though. Mr. Letz was repulsive. My iPod threw on Use Somebody by Kings of Leon. Typical. Rub it in, God! The song reminded me of that gay-love montage on YouTube that I secretly watched once a week. Okay, once a day. This would have been so much easier if I had known I had someone to run to after I finished reading my poem. I could cut all the rest of my classes, because I would present during first period, I could run into my mystery man’s arms, go to the beach, swim till I was so exhausted that I nearly fell asleep in the water, sit in the passenger seat as he drove me home, and then pass out in his arms. Okay, that was a push. But how about someone who could stick his tongue down my throat while he told me how proud he was of me? That seemed reasonable.

Three text messages appeared in my phone, blowing up my speaker with some Lil Wayne. Luckily, it was Terry.

Her message said, "Too busy jerking off to the water polo team? You missed The Hills. lol."

Then, I texted, Were you spying on me?

Terry:    You’re hot. It’s all good. Plot was retarded. That’s about all you missed.

Jordan:    Love it. My poem is pretty baller.

Terry:    Don’t want to toot your own horn, BUT TOOT, MOTHA FUCKIN’ TOOT, BITCH.

Jordan:    Ha-ha. Meet me in the usual teachers’ spots tomorrow?

Terry:    Will do.

My eyelids finally felt heavy enough to close them. What a joke. It was only 11:30 PM. I should have gone for an Olympic run to make myself so fucking beat that I would just immediately doze off.

You know that I can use somebody. Someone like you, I mumbled the lyrics.

It does look flat? my mom said. Why wouldn’t you tell me before?

She was out of her mind. I flipped my pillow over to the cold side and passed out.

May 7, 2009

It was pitiful that my mom still physically walked into my room in the morning to wake me up, even though I was eighteen years old. You know when you get woken up in the morning and you basically shit your pants in surprise? Even though I had to wake up every day—it wasn’t anything new—why was it so startling sometimes? That always confused me. It was one of those mornings. My mom came in and did her typical wake-up technique and said, "Jord, it’s 7:15. Get up! She could never fully grasp the concept of waking me up at 6:45 in the morning so that I wouldn’t have to completely haul ass and rush. It felt like I had only slept for seven seconds. I was pretty rested, but I didn’t even remember falling asleep or even breathing or dreaming throughout the entire night. I was not nearly tired enough to forget that today was going to be the day my life would drastically change. Supposedly. See, there I went again, doubting myself and debating whether or not I was going to follow through with the Hey, everyone, I might be gay" poem.

Use Somebody was still stuck in my brain. I ran around my upstairs like a five-year-old child on an Easter egg hunt. Unlike the average teenager, who filled their closets, drawers, dressers, and bedroom floor with clothes, I slowly accomplished filling not only those but my brother’s drawers and my sister’s closet as well. Add that to my Gay side checklist. This had to be an incredible outfit today. This would be my coming-out outfit! I had to look sexy and trashy but refined all at the same time! Luckily, with my assortment of clothes, I easily had it covered—black V-neck shirt from Guess, some dark blue Hudson jeans, and black high-top Air Forces. A common morning often consisted of my mom and I battling over whose music could be played louder. Fortunately, the country-music channel on her television did not go nearly as loud as my iPod speakers. Hmmm, think gay. Lady Gaga was something upbeat and danceable. If being gay was absolutely in the cards for me, I was just going to say that I had quite the ass. All those years of soccer had really paid off. Maybe those two times my ex-girlfriend and I had had sex had paid off, too. Lets play a love game, play a love game. I always laughed out loud at my thoughts. It was extremely creepy.

As I did my hair and placed a whitening strip on my teeth that tasted like a mix of paint, hamster food, and cat shit, I wasn’t feeling nervous exactly. I was a pretty good public speaker, and I was only addressing about thirty people, most of whom I could consider friends, so it wouldn’t be that miserable. I was feeling anxious, that feeling you got when you saw a small, elderly Asian woman behind the hood of an SUV. I actually felt like I should have been more scared than I currently was. I hoped this confession was not a bad a thing. I wished there was a way I could have mentally prepared or something. Perhaps I could have someone read me one of their poems about something secretive so that I could compare mine to theirs and see how maybe being gay—it was 2009 after all—was not that big of a deal. Wait, I said to myself. "I just said it. Being gay. Being gay. Gay. Gay. Gay. Gay." Holy fuck. If only I could just say it out loud on a megaphone while I had the charisma. This was the first time I had ever really thought to myself, Jordan, you’re gay. Fuck, having a moment took up some time!

Though I basically fell down my flight of steps, I rushed into the kitchen with my poem folded in my back pocket. It would have been nice if I had been surprised with the scent and visual stimulation of breakfast, but there was just a glass of milk and an Entimans box waiting for me downstairs.

Take your allergy medicine, my mom said.

I did upstairs.

I ran toward my laundry room door, heading for the garage and hurdling over my cat. My MILF mom rushed behind to kiss me off to school at the door. It was adorable how she would always do that.

Jord, wait!

What’s up, Ma, I said. I’m in a rush.

You okay? You seem paler and kind of all over the place.

I’m fine. I’m just fucking rushing.

Weird. Did I leave Microsoft Word up or something? Was she smart enough to press reprint on the printer and read what I had been working on all night? Wait. No, she couldn’t even work the DVD player. I was just jumping to conclusions. It was just that mom gene thing she claimed they all had. As I pulled down my driveway, I could see my mom saying to herself, Drive with angels, like she does every morning. I really needed to tell my mom that I could have been gay. She was way too amazing to lie to. Plus, she was like a hot Mother Theresa.

Nurwick was a medium-sized, central New Jersey town. Well, it commonly smelled like the surrounding landfills. It had a million traffic lights, a million stop signs, a tanning bed, a Rite Aid, a rich husband cheating on his wife, nine-year-olds playing soccer in the street, underage drinking parties starting in seventh grade, and landscapers. It rained a lot, too. My school looked like an airport. One of the three main hallways was literally called the terminal.

In a blink of an eye, I was parked in the teachers’ lot, but Terry was nowhere to be found. I had completely zoned out again, this time driving to school. I thought I had been so into that song that I had put on a CD last night, the one they had done a contemporary dance to on So You Think You Can Dance. It was incredible. The music on that show always has such good lyrics. Come on, Terry! The one day you’re going to be late is the day I need you! You’re probably at Dunkin’ Donuts with your younger sister, bitching about how the chocolate glazed is unproportionally frosted. Or as Terry would often say, That fucking DD on Route 18 chimseys out on putting on the icing. Bitches. I laughed to myself visioning her hand gestures.

I wish I could just receive some kind of sign from God or something spectacular that would let me know that I was doing the right thing, that today was the right day, that everything was going to be fine, and that I was going to read my poem through as easy as a hot, humid, Jersey Shore summer breeze. Let me find a penny with my birth year on it right before I go up to present, I thought. Or have the hot gym teacher, Mr.Santiago, tell me that he is head over heels in love with me and that after my poem and graduation, he will take care of me. Is that illegal? Fuck it! I was eighteen. It could happen! No, but the best thing that could possibly happen was to walk through the classroom door and see my older brother, John, and my sister, Jamie, sitting in the audience. I could read my poem and sit right between them after I had finished, just to have that comforting feeling that no one would say anything to me after I was done. Not only because my brother and sister were more intimidating than Vin Diesel but because I wanted that comforting feeling of family. I wanted to feel at home while finally being myself at the same time. We could leave school together and go to IHOP across the street and just talk for hours on how outrageous and hysterical my mother was and what a fucking nut-job, heroine junkie our father was too.

As I imagined all this, I was still sitting in my car in the nurse’s parking spot.

It ended up timing out perfectly. I had three minutes to get across the entire school to H Hall. I got five minutes in between classes, but that only gave a person about a minute and a half of gossip time. With three other minutes, my friends would see that I was on a mission, walking through the halls like I was in Jurassic Park or something. Just enough time to ignore everyone, including the hall aides, who checked our useless ID security system. As is I stepped out of my car, I noticed it was surprisingly nice outside. Not too humid yet, but not too hot, either. There was still dew on the grass. It kind of felt more like a fall morning than a spring one. I passed by the foods instructors as I cut through the teachers’ lot. Ms. Gramstein knew exactly who I was, and my blacked-out, tinted Audi couldn’t really pass for a substitute teacher’s car. They had just given up on me and my group of friends at that point, and besides, it was May already. In a month, I wouldn’t even be student anymore. No sign of me. Well, except for the JP carved into numerous desks, the gym floor, the sub-gym floor, the wrestling mats, and the multiple volleyballs and birdies my