Killing Robby Jenkins

The world as we know it is ending, and I am in a bathroom in Terminal 1 at Chicago O’Hare, huddled in a corner by the hand dryers, hugging my sobbing, seventeen-year-old daughter, Jess, as she burrows into my chest like a puppy. Her newly-exed boyfriend, Robby Jenkins, posted a sex video of them on Snapchat, which Jess saw twenty minutes ago when our plane from Vermont touched down. And while the rest of the passengers were finding out that World War III started during our flight, Jess was finding out that, in her words, Robby’s entire fraternity at NYU and the whole of New York and probably even the entire world just jacked off to a video of her ass, and now she wants to die.

 “It’s going to be okay,” I say into her hair, picturing NYU in flames, while she wipes her nose against my shirt. I recall the TV screens in the gate area when we disembarked; some poor soul on the Staten Island ferry had recorded the missile hit that toppled Lady Liberty. Jess didn’t see it. She was too busy pinballing between anger, despair, and self-pity to see anything other than her own crisis. I can’t decide if that’s a good or bad thing.

 “I’m never going back to school,” Jess says. “Ever,” she adds, in case I misunderstood the word never.

 “Okay,” I say, and tuck her hair behind her ears. I’m pretty sure no one’s going back to school.

 “Excuse me,” a woman says, trying to get past us to wash her hands. I shuffle Jess and our two suitcases out of her way and look. There’s a queue of women waiting to get in, everyone staring at their phones, toilets flushing behind us, as if it’s a typical Saturday afternoon. But the faces in the mirror, the faces in line, are drained and pale, eyes red-rimmed, mascara-streaked.      

Jess looks up, and she seems surprised by the abundance of misery in this claustrophobic bathroom. “I need to fix my face,” she murmurs and takes her makeup bag out of her backpack. She moves to the closest sink and peers at her reflection.

It feels important to give her all the agency she wants right now. “I’m going to make a few calls,” I tell her. “I’ll be right outside.”

The TV screens in the concourse flip between dramatic drone footage of the White House engulfed in flames and airplanes dumping red fire retardant on the Hollywood sign. The names of bombed cities scroll along the bottom of the screen, cities where our friends and family live: Boston, New York, San Francisco, Seattle. I press my back up against the wall of the terminal and try to focus on something manageable: the Arrivals and Departures screen across from me. All flights flash red. Cancelled. Okay.

I call Kevin again, but it goes straight to voicemail. I’ve tried him at least a dozen times since our flight landed. I hang up and try texting him again. I wait for the three dots to appear. Nothing. I call my mother, but she doesn’t pick up. We were on our way to spend Spring Break with her in San Jose, where I grew up, a city less than an hour from San Francisco, which is on fire, which may or may not exist anymore. Bile rises in my throat, and I bring my hand to my mouth.

Jess emerges from the bathroom, pulling her suitcase. I take a deep breath and swallow as she approaches. I know I need to tell her what’s happening, but instead, I say our flight is cancelled, as if it were any other day at the airport. I even shrug, the way Kevin would if he were here. He’s the easy one, not bothered by delays, cancellations, or unexpected nights in airport hotels.

 “Are you hungry?” I ask, my go-to mothering move. I have a bag of healthy snacks in my purse.

 “No, I’m never eating again,” she says, and my heart races, making me dizzy.

 “Don’t say that,” I scold, but only barely. I can’t handle her spiraling right now.

 “But Mom, the whole world saw me having sex!” she says, her eyes welling up with tears. She has a point.

I make a soft shushing sound and tuck my hand into my sleeve, using the edge of it to dab her eyes. “Careful, you just did your face,” I say softly.

Meanwhile, at the gate across from us, I hear a mother panicking. Her husband tries to calm her down, gesturing at the kids who are at her feet, staring at her. She is pointing at a TV above her that displays a map of the US, red bullseye after red bullseye, lining either coast. The map disappears, and the screen shows a list of resources people can turn to for more information. I know I should be standing in front of one of those TVs, capturing those QR codes, looking up those websites. I should be texting and calling everyone in my contacts to see who’s okay, who’s not. But, the thing is—

—No one is texting or calling me, and I’m not yet ready to find out why.

 “Mom?” Jess’s voice breaks into my trance. “Since we have some time to kill, there’s a Kylie Cosmetics vending machine in Terminal 3.” She shows me a map of the airport on her phone. Then looks at me expectantly. “Can we go?”

I look around for those overhead directional signs and see arrows for Terminals 2 & 3 in the distance. I point in that general direction.

 “Let’s go,” I say.

We’re standing on the moving walkway when the power goes out. We go from moving to not moving instantly, and Jess grabs my arm to stop from falling.

 “We’re okay,” I say, and take her hand. We start walking. The people behind us start getting pushy; they want us to walk faster, so I let them pass. I take out my phone, but nothing loads because there are no bars at the top of the screen. “We’re okay,” I say again, and my mind drifts to Kevin at home. I picture him in the kitchen listening to music. Taking Buddy for a walk. It was raining when we left this morning, but maybe it’s cleared up.

People around us are crying, running, searching for gate agents or anyone who looks like they’re in charge. My instinct is to park us somewhere quiet. “Let’s find a place to sit for a minute,” I say, and I lead Jess to Gate 32, which is mostly empty. I set our bags against the window. It’s sunny outside. We sit on the floor.  Jess starts snapping her bracelet, a gift from her father and me for her last birthday. At the time, she had barely said thank you, but she came down for dinner wearing it that night and hasn’t taken it off since. I wonder if she was wearing it when Robby filmed them. My chest tightens. I hate Robby Jenkins. I hate him more than I’ve ever hated anything in my entire life.

 “Did you know he was filming you?” I ask. Jess closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. If we were at home, this would be my sign to leave, to walk out of her bedroom or the kitchen or wherever before she screams, “Stop treating me like a baby!” or “You have no idea what it’s like to be me!” But we’re not at home, not in her purple bedroom or in our kitchen, with its mismatched stools and the KitchenAid mixer we never use and a couple of bananas that we all promise to eat but never do, so Robby Jenkins, who I pray to God is dead, feels like a pretty good distraction.

 “He promised me he wouldn’t share it,” she says, picking at the colored beads of the bracelet.

I think about the argument I had with Kevin last night over Jess. Our fights are always about Jess. I can’t remember what started it this time, only how angry we both were, how I told him I was done and stomped out of our room. He yelled, “Done with what? What are you done with?” I had meant that I was done with the argument, but all of a sudden, I didn’t know, and in that moment, maybe I meant more, or maybe he wanted me to mean more, and I got so scared that I couldn’t move and I couldn’t breathe, and then he was there,      in the hallway, rubbing my back, saying, “Breathe, it’s okay, breathe,” and then we heard the door open downstairs and Jess yelled, “I’m home!”

 “So, what do you want to do about Robby?” I ask her now, needing to focus on something real, something solvable.

 “I want to kill him,” she says.

 “Okay,” I say.

When Jess was little, the three of us spent a month in Northern California with my mom after my dad died. My parents had moved to a little house next to the county park. It was remote, rolling hills of dried yellow grasses, scraggly Madrone trees, and oak trees whose bark resembled alligator skin. One morning during breakfast, we heard more high-pitched yipping and howling than usual, and Jess ran to the window. My mom joined her and stood there for a while, scanning the hillsides. Even from the table, I could tell Jess was about to cry. She was bouncing on her toes and hugging herself. My mom put a hand on her back and told her it was okay, that coyotes weren’t scared, they were just talking to each other, locating everyone.

 “They’re checking in on each other,” she told Jess. “Like a family Zoom call.”

Later, when we found a coyote dead on the side of the road, I thought back to that conversation and wondered if the coyotes we had heard knew they were missing one. We were on our bikes: Kevin in front, then my mom, Jess, and me pulling up the rear. Kevin and Mom rode right past, but Jess stopped, got off her bike, and walked over to the body. I came up behind her and hugged her, prepared myself to answer her questions about death. But instead, she tipped back her head and let out a howl the coyotes could have heard all through the park.

For the rest of the trip, we Googled coyotes. We watched nature shows and YouTube videos. Jess wanted to know absolutely everything about coyotes. And for weeks after that, she communicated through yips and howls, calling to us from her bedroom or the bathroom or the yard, letting us know where she was. Kevin and I laughed at our feral little animal, this creature who was loud and determined and afraid of nothing.

But then in eighth grade, she hit puberty and nature transformed her into a breasty, pubey, pimpley, beautiful mess, and a boy who was not Robby but could have been, kept calling her fat on social media, which is when the stomachaches started, then the migraines, then cramps, anything to stay home.

Freshman year of high school was a blur of crying and scrolling and refusing to leave the house, of nights she didn’t sleep and days she didn’t get up, of friends who stopped calling, and school threatening failure. Kevin and I watched her fade, begged her to eat more than just cucumbers. We shut down her social media accounts, took away her devices, took her to doctors and therapists, hid anything she could cut herself with.

Then, a couple of weeks before sophomore year started, she emerged from her room and said she was better. She said she wanted to go to school, but first, could she dye her hair blonde and get her nose pierced? Of course, Kevin said yes; he was so relieved she wanted anything again; he said we needed to trust her, and I went along with it. On that first day of school, she looked so different: thin, blonde, and all made up. So I told her she looked beautiful, because she was. But the way her face lit up felt wrong. And it made me want to throw up, to think how in less than two years she had gone from predator to prey.

Now two more years have passed, and my little girl is hurting again, and I want Robby Jenkins dead more than I’ve ever wanted anything. And if he’s already dead, I want him dead again.

The jet bridge door flies open, and passengers stream into our quiet little gate area the same way Jess and I streamed into the airport over an hour ago, in shock. I turn around to get a look at the airplane just in time to see two pilots and three flight attendants run down the jet bridge stairs, the ones that normally only baggage handlers use to take car seats and strollers down to the cargo bay. One of the flight attendants falls, and the other two stop to help her back to her feet. They are all crying. Meanwhile, no baggage people have come out to unload the airplane. I have a terrible feeling that no one ever will.

I turn back to Jess and grab her shoulders, a little too roughly. “If we’re going to kill Robby, we’re going to need a plan,” I say. But she’s wide-eyed, like she’s only now noticing the people around us in the terminal, families sprinting down the concourse, passengers yelling at crying gate agents. There’s a woman near us with her suitcase open, removing clothes so she can pack bottles of water and cans of Pringles. And at the magazine store across the way, two female employees are lowering the store’s metal security grille and apologizing to customers who are demanding to be let in. A guy actually throws his backpack under the grille to wedge it open, and I feel a surge of relief when one of the women kicks the backpack out again.

Jess starts scratching at her arms and yanking down the sleeves of her jacket, and I’m transported back to that very bad year. If she starts spiraling again, I won’t be able to handle it. I’m not sure I can stay calm even if she doesn’t spiral. I mean, how do I pretend I’m capable of keeping us safe if I don’t believe it first? And how do I not show it on my face that I’m terrified everyone we love is gone?

 “Mom,” Jess says, and before she can say anything else, I put my hand on her knee so she looks me in the eye and I say again, only louder, “If we’re going to kill Robby Jenkins, we need a plan.”

Jess is organized. She loves lists. She has a label maker. She color codes everything. At home, her accessories and cosmetics are arranged by size, shape, and function. She even has a tiny fridge in her room to keep her serums and lotions cold. She takes a deep breath and holds it. She could tip either way here, into panic mode or executive functioning. Then she takes another breath and I hold mine, too.

 “Okay,” she agrees, “We need a plan.” She goes into her backpack and pulls out a spiral notebook.

 “We could run him over with our car,” I say, which turns out to be the absolute wrong thing to say because thinking about our car makes me start to cry. I was going to leave our car in long-term parking, but at the last minute, Kevin said he’d drop us off, which was a surprise considering the fight we had last night. And the thought that I might never wait at the airport curb again, never see Stella, my sweet, old Subaru pull up, never see Kevin pop out to help load our luggage into the back, or hug us like we’ve been away for years, or ask if we want to stop at Al’s on the way home because we must be starving, or hear Jess say, Dad, you know I don’t eat Al’s anymore…

 “We’ll make it look like an accident,” I say, wiping away tears with my palms and digging in my purse for a tissue pack. “Doesn’t he work at Ken’s Pizza in the summer? We could wait for him to get off his shift, then you stand across the street and call to him, and when he crosses to you…”

Jess’s eyes are jumping between me and the guy with the backpack, still cursing through the metal grille, like she can’t decide who is more alarming. She’s biting her thumbnail, the same way Kevin does when he’s anxious. I’ve given up trying to get either of them to stop it.

 “Or we could poison him,” I say as I blow my nose. “Fentanyl,” I add, because isn’t that the thing we’re supposed to be most scared of as parents? The thing that is supposedly killing our children?

Jess is holding her breath again. It’s something she used to do as a toddler when she was scared, as if it could stop time, which we both know it can’t, and I fear when she realizes time isn’t stopping, she’ll go into full panic mode, because we’re at a gate in an airport in a city that’s not ours, surrounded by strangers who are running and crying and yelling, and if the power was on we’d know which of the cities we loved were gone, which would remind us how far away we are from everyone we love, and even worse, we might guess who is maybe alive and who is probably dead—and maybe Kevin, my Kevin, is dead, only how could he be, because wouldn’t I have felt that somehow? Some stabbing pain in my body?—but the power’s not on, and may never be again, which is kind of a blessing not to cross that bridge yet, but regardless we will have to worry about food and water very soon because all we have is what’s in our bags, which is basically nothing—a few granola bars, a baggie of apple slices, a couple of meat sticks—and I feel the dread pooling in my gut, because this kind of thing has kept me up at night, wondering what I would do if Jess and I were faced with a wild animal or kidnapper or natural disaster or, who would’ve guessed, bombs dropped from drones or even Robby Fucking Jenkins—would some Mama Bear instinct magically kick in and help me do whatever I needed to do to keep Jess safe? and the only reason why I have always doubted myself is because I once saw a show on TV where a swarm of wasps was attacking a child, and my initial thought process was (shockingly) if that was Jess and she was going to die anyway, would I still dive in to try and save her? But such life-or-death matters always felt ridiculous, almost comforting in their improbability.

Which is when Jess bursts into tears, which makes me burst into tears, so I pull her to me and I say, “I’m here, baby,” and I say, “You’re stuck with me till the end,” and she makes a noise that sounds a little like a giggle. And because her giggle is the absolute best thing I’ve heard in years, and because I’m scared shitless, and there’s nothing logical left to do, I howl. Jess pulls out of my arms to look at me, then she belly-laughs, which feels so good, and for just a moment she looks like Kevin, so I’m laughing too, and we both tip our heads back and for all the things we’ll come to know in time, and for all the things we won’t—we howl and howl and howl.