Ben Kassoy

Jimmy

It must have been Jimmy’s idea to go into the woods behind the pool where the girl would untie her bikini and reveal herself to us, because it wasn’t mine. And it always seems like the best friend dies at the end of the story but in this one he dies near the beginning, and I hadn’t talked to his parents in years but one day they called me and took me for pad thai with Jimmy’s infant sister who had become a teenager, and I didn’t know how he had died and I didn’t ask that night and I haven’t found out since, but I know it wasn’t when he scorched his face trying to light the fireplace in his parents’ living room, the same living room where I first saw Ocean’s 11 and felt like anything was possible, and I don’t remember if Jimmy and I watched The Parent Trap together, but whenever I think about the movie I think about him, and I was just on the phone with my niece who told me she’d watched The Parent Trap and I told her that Lindsay Lohan had played both roles and she was like “Yeah, I knew that.”