Chapter Text
He learned early that names carried weight.
His was just heavier than most.
The first time he realized it, he was five years old, standing in the doorway of the Maybank house, clutching a fishing rod too big for his hands. Luke’s voice boomed from the kitchen, slurring over the syllables like he’d already been drinking for hours.
“Jesse Jack Maybank! You get your ass in here, boy!”
JJ didn’t remember what he’d done to earn Luke’s anger that day. All he remembered was how his full name felt like a slap, and later it became one, sharp and stinging, like it didn’t belong to him at all but still had the power to pin him in place.
After that, he decided it was easier not to wear it.
JJ hated roll call.
Every first day of school, it was the same. The teacher would stand at the front of the class, clipboard in hand, reading down the list of names like they were ticking off inventory. The air would be heavy with the hum of fluorescent lights and the shuffling of restless kids, waiting for the moment when the spotlight landed on them.
“Jesse…?” Mrs. Reynolds called during roll on the first day when JJ’s seven.
“Just JJ,” he said quickly, interrupting her before she even got to the second letter, before she could even look up.
Mrs. Reynolds smiled at him, her kind eyes crinkling. “Alright, JJ. Just JJ it is.”
He liked her for that—for not asking where the nickname came from, for not trying to turn it into a moment.
Other teachers weren’t so easygoing.
For JJ, it always came too soon but it never usually came like this.
“Jesse Jack Maybank?”
For fuck’s sake! He’s 13, he managed to get to 13 without having to deal with this, and this inbred new teacher has just announced it to the entire class.
He could feel the curious eyes turning toward him before he even looked up. The class have been itching for that. Always on at him.
John B kicks the back of his chair, comfortingly.
“It’s JJ,” he muttered, pulling the brim of his cap down, slouching lower in his seat, hoping the teacher would move on.
They usually did, but not without a look—a quick flick of the eyes that said they were filing the detail away for later. That this kid was one to look out for. JJ hated that look. It was the same one his dad gave him before launching into a tirade about “what it means to be a Maybank.” Like his name was some kind of burden he had to carry.
At lunch, the questions started.
“Jesse Jack? Like the guy from TV?”
“That’s Jesse Jackson”, John B pipes in and JJ’s grateful for him, always.
The other kids thought they were being funny, but JJ didn’t laugh. It wasn’t like he’d named himself. That was all Luke.
“Yeah,” JJ would say with a forced grin. “Not like the guy from TV.”
After a while, he stopped answering altogether.
By the time he hit high school, JJ had perfected the art of deflection.
“What’s JJ short for?” kids would ask, leaning against lockers or kicking at the dirt on the soccer field.
“Nothing,” JJ would say, flashing a grin that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “It’s just JJ.”
Most people let it go. The ones who didn’t learned pretty quickly that JJ wasn’t afraid to shut them down with a sharp insult or a well-aimed punch. He didn’t care if they thought he was lying. The truth felt too big, too awkward to explain.
Teachers were the worst, though. They didn’t drop it as easily as kids did.
“JJ, what’s your full name?”
“JJ Maybank.”
“No, your real name.”
“That is my real name dipshit,” he’d say, his voice a little too loud, his heart pounding in his chest like he was defending more than just a name. And as usual he’d be outside the classroom again, at the Principals office.
Every now and then, someone would push harder. A substitute teacher who didn’t know better. A school secretary who needed it for paperwork.
Once, in the fifth grade, a counsellor called him into her office, her voice sticky-sweet like she was offering him candy.
“JJ, honey,” she’d said, leaning forward with her hands clasped on the desk. “Can you tell me what your name really is?”
He’d stared at her, his jaw clenched so tight it hurt.
“It’s JJ,” he said finally.
“Is that what your friends call you?”
“Yeah.”
“And your family?”
JJ hesitated. He could still hear Luke’s voice in his head, thick with beer and anger, spitting out Jesse Jack like it was a curse.
“Yeah,” JJ said again, but it came out quieter this time.
The counsellor smiled like she’d won something. “Well, okay then, JJ. But if you ever feel like telling me your full name, I’m here to listen.”
He never went back to her office.
Now, the questions didn’t come as often. People just knew him as JJ—loud, reckless, always the first to pick a fight or crack a joke. His reputation became a shield, something he could hide behind. Nobody cared about his real name when they were busy laughing at his antics or groaning as his terrible behaviour got the class a collective punishment.
Except for John B.
John B found out when they were 9. They were forging their father’s signatures for some day trip. Luke was a drunken write off and Big John was off on whatever adventure he was on. JJ swirled the pen bringing the R for Routledge up with a flourish, it was a nice name Routledge, you wouldn’t get sent to the principal for that. Beside him John B hums then freezes.
“Jesse Jack?” John B had said, his voice full of disbelief.
JJ’s spine straightens. He goes still.
‘What?’
John B is waving the form in front of him around, giddy, ‘It says right here, are you serious? That’s the JJ?’
“Shut up,” JJ had snapped, shoving him lightly. “It’s not my fault.”
“Dude. It’s just... I didn’t see that coming. Why don’t you go by Jesse?”
JJ shrugged, his fingers picking at the peeling wood on the table before him. “It’s just... not me, you know?”
John B nodded, like he understood something that JJ couldn’t quite put into words. “Yeah. JJ suits you better.”
“Yeah, exactly dumbass.”
The retort is enough to stoke the teasing out of John B and he stands, all gangly 9 year old limbs, with a theatrically high-pitched tone, ‘Jesse, time for dinner!’
JJ socks him a little harder than he should. ‘Stop it!’ He says, throat catching. Not funny. There’s an edge now and John B as usual sees right through him. Considers him quietly, before he goes back to finish Luke’s signature. Eyes down.
“Okay,” John B had said, “JJ.”
And that was that.
By fourth grade, JJ stopped telling people his real name altogether.
“What does JJ stand for?”
“Junior Jedi.”
“James Bond Junior.”
“Janis Joplin.”
The answers were never the same, and that was the point. He made a game of it, throwing people off the trail until they gave up asking. The more ridiculous the answer, the better.
“Don’t you think people are gonna find out eventually?” John B asked once, sprawled out on the floor of the Chateau while they waited for the storm outside to let up.
“Maybe,” JJ said, tossing a ball up and down. “But by then, they won’t care.”
John B didn’t argue. He never really cared about the name thing—just called him JJ like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Even Pope and Kie didn’t know. Pope had asked once, offhandedly, while they were fixing the boat.
“What’s JJ short for?”
“Short for ‘none of your fucking business dude,’” JJ had said, grinning as he chucked a wrench at Pope’s feet.
Pope had rolled his eyes and let it drop.
Now, sitting on the edge of the dock with his feet dangling over the water, JJ wondered why he cared so much. It wasn’t like his name changed anything. He was still the same kid, still a god forsaken Maybank, the latest in a long line of wasted degenerates with no future no matter what anyone called him.
But every time someone said Jesse Jack, it felt like a weight he couldn’t shake—a reminder of all the things he couldn’t control, all the low expectations everyone expected him to fall to.
“Hey,” John B called from the boat. “You gonna sit there all day, or are you gonna help me with this rope?”
JJ shook his head, a grin tugging at his lips. “Yeah, yeah, I’m coming.”
He pushed himself to his feet and jogged over to the boat, the sun warm on his back.
High school was always the trickiest.
Teachers and counsellors had access to files, to full names printed neatly on forms that JJ wished he could burn.
“Jesse, can I see you after class?”
JJ would stiffen every time, clenching his jaw so hard it ached.
“It’s JJ,” he’d correct, his voice clipped.
Most of the time, they’d apologize and move on. But some didn’t.
“Why do you go by JJ?”
“Because I like it better,” he’d say, daring them to press further.
If they did, JJ would flash his sharpest grin and say, “It’s JJ, or nothing. Your choice.”
Nobody ever picked “nothing,” but it usually shut them up.
One afternoon, in the middle of sophomore year, JJ was called to the principal’s office.
The secretary, a round woman with a kind smile, handed him a form. “We just need you to confirm your legal name,” she said.
JJ stared at the line where his full name was printed. Jesse Jack Maybank.
For a second, he thought about scribbling it out, replacing it with something else. But the woman was watching him, and he didn’t have the energy for a fight.
He signed it quickly, shoving the paper back toward her.
“Thank you, Jesse,” she said, smiling warmly.
“It’s JJ,” he snapped, before he could stop himself.
Her smile faltered. “Of course. JJ.”
He walked out of the office, his heart pounding, wishing he could leave that name behind forever.
Over the years, JJ realized that names weren’t just about what people called you. They were about what they expected from you, what they thought they knew.
“Jesse Jack” sounded like his cousins, his waster family, the salt lifer pond scum destined for the gutter. ‘JJ’ was his shield, the name he created, the one that his father hadn’t named him, it was the name JJ picked for himself. Something unconnected with the Maybank line, it was control.
JJ was chaos and salt water, a little mystery and bad decisions, stitched together with just enough humour to get by. And maybe, in a different life, he’d have worn Jesse Jack proudly. But in this one, it felt like a weight he couldn’t carry.
Sitting in the police station for whatever drama they’d decided to stick him for that week, with Plum, or Peterkin making him sign his full name felt like another form of torture. Jesse Jack, Jesse Jack, Jesse Jack. Every time he felt sick. Shoupe god bless him never made him do it, let him get away with the scrawled two J’s, haphazard, messy. Him. He’d even sometimes let him leave off the Maybank, on some level the moustached motherfucker knew the suffocating weight that name carried for JJ. Sometimes JJ truly loves Shoupe. But sometimes he remembers the DCS, the screaming, the arrests, the department payoffs to turn the other cheek and he’s back to wishing he would drown again. They’re complicated like that.
He leaves his name behind, buried under years of jokes and deflection, known only to the few people he trusted not to use it against him.
Just JJ was enough.
He's at the beach, his fellow surfer friends pledging their support for the town hall meeting when he stops dead. He feels sick and thrumming with this feeling of dread he used to get before one of Luke’s drunken binges. He can’t go home yet. JJ stops off at the local library. In all his 19 years he’s never stepped foot in there. He feels out of place, stretched too thin in his own skin. The woman behind the desk peers at him like he’s about to rob the place. He winks at her obnoxiously.
Fuck it maybe he will. There’s enough books in here to help Pope with his studies, to sell at Poguelandia. Whatever, the old hag deserves it. His fingers trace the books as he heads to the archive section. Dusty layers of history.
Lessons in investigating death – JJ swipes that one, into his bag. That’s for you Pope.
He’s at the archive. File after file stretches out before him, it’s not long before he finds the box. 2004, Outer Banks Sentinal. He leafs through, it doesn’t take him long.
Kildare Island Tragedy, Postpartum Mother Dies with Infant Son
‘Larissa Genrette, suspected drowned with her infant son Jackson Jesse Genrette.’
His fingers itch. The paper sits on the table before him, the edges curling slightly in the humid library air. JJ couldn’t stop staring at it. His name—this might actually be his real name—was there in black ink, clear as day.
Jackson Jesse Genrette.
It didn’t feel real.
“You’re lying,” JJ had said, his voice flat.
‘How in the hell could I be Chandler Groff’s son, Larissa’s baby everyone knows that baby died with her dad.’
‘That baby…that baby was you JJ’.
This was insane. This whole thing was insane. But on some level JJ knew he wasn’t lying. He knew his father, knew every one of Luke’s tells, hell he’d mirrored half of them, he wasn’t lying here, it was true the second his father had said it. Something shifted inside him, like some awful tectonic plate crashing into his entire being. Luke had just watched him with the tired eyes and blurred vision of an addict, and of someone who’d carried a secret for far too long.
JJ grips the paper. It’s a surreal experience he's hovering over his own body, watching someone else’s life. The paper is old, sepia toned in a way it probably shouldn’t be for something that happened less than 20 years ago. His mother’s face faded, a sickly brown colour even with all her beauty staring right back at him. His mother.
He can’t stop picturing the painting, that painting that had peered down at him, all seeing, taking up so much space in the darkness of Goat Island. He hadn’t been able to look away back then when they’d first walked in. He’d heard the stories like everyone else had, young woman goes mad, drowns herself and her baby, only she didn’t, and she hadn’t, had she?
He looks at the picture next to her. Of the baby staring back. Huh? He doesn’t even recognise himself.
Jackson Jesse Genrette.
So Luke hadn’t been particularly careful with the old fake name then. He’d swapped them around, swapped Jesse for Jackson and just shortened it down to Jack. That’s the kind of stupidity that is so Luke it makes JJ feel sick. Nobody had ever connected the dots? Not a single person?
He feels hot and cold all over. Jackson Genrette is the kookiest shit he’s ever heard. He pictures him now, he’s the guy who’d probably piss in JJ’s sneakers, own a Grady White, pay off the cops any chance he’d get, another Rafe Cameron.
Ain’t no way that’s him.
The kook connotation alone makes him feel like setting this entire library alight. He’s got his lighter. He could do it right now. Burn the place to ash, head to Goat Island, burn that house down too, burn it with all the secrets and the horrors and the endless, endless years of lies. He pictures Wes, so he’d be his grandad then? John B said he was dead, cursed by a ghost (because why wouldn’t he be?) and Larissa, his mother, drowned, dead.
He hears Wes, tastes the blood on his tongue as he gnaws on it, ‘Generations of Genrettes are cursed to die a violent death’.
If this is who he is now, he doesn’t feel better off.
Why did this have to be the one time in his life Luke tells the truth. Because it is. And JJ knows it.
He folds up the newspaper carefully because fuck it this might be the only picture he ever has of his mother, discounting that frankenstienesque portrait and walks.
He’s through the library security when it beeps at him obnoxiously. He’s this close to losing it.
The lady behind the desk pipes up ‘excuse me young man, come back here.’
He turns on his heel, she’s still looking him up and down like she’s seen him somewhere before, like he’s nothing.
‘What?’
She gestures to his backpack, ‘I need to take a look in your bag’.
Fuck it, JJ shoves it to her a little too aggressively, he’d welcome the violent death curse right now, he really does not care anymore.
She finds the book, peers at him behind her glasses. ‘You know you have to sign these out you can’t just take them’.
‘Lessons in investigating death’ stares up at him, mockingly, the irony.
‘I’m going to need you to sign here’ she tuts, biting her lip disapprovingly.
JJ takes the paper, smirks as she hands him the pen ‘sure thing sweetheart.’ He wiggles his eyebrows just to rile her more.
Screw the Genrettes, screw Luke, screw Chandler, screw Larissa and screw this god damned town and these god damned kooks getting away with murder.
He signs it, spins on his heel and if he shoves down a shelf or two as he walks out then what about it?
The librarian stands shocked, the aggressive blonde boy has just hurled over a bookshelf like it’s nothing. She will have to get in touch with his parents. She looks down at the sign out.
There in red pen, scrawled across the page
Jackson Jesse Genrette.
He doesn’t know what to do with it. With the last few days. With the name. With the parentage. None of it. And he doesn’t want John B to know.
He had had a hard enough time with Jesse Jack back when they were nine, what the hell is he going to do with Jackson Genrette, the god damned kook name of all kook names.
He won’t be able to stand it. He won’t be able to deal with it if John B looks at him with that kook look, if he sees it for even a second, he won’t be able to handle it. He’s not a Genrette. He’s not. Only he is, his blood, his bones, his genetic makeup is infected with that curse, with dead mothers, dead grandfathers, goat island and everything in between and he can’t even let himself think about Chandler.
‘JJ I’m your father’ he’d almost laughed, after he’d said it, treading water in the murky depths, he’d seen Star Wars at John B’s one night, he knew the drill. The evil warlord here to throw your world upside down. The least he could have done was gotten a twin out of the deal too. But he’d gone back for him, for Groff. Because he ain’t calling him dad. Fuck that shit.
He’d left him on the boat though because there’s only so many times he’s saving the lives of fathers who constantly and consistently throw him away.
They had pulled up at Poguelandia, Kie and Sarah think this is a terrible idea coming back here, the whole town is still smouldering from JJ’s little destruction tour, the cops will be here. JJ doesn’t care. He’s so done with everything. Jail isn’t sounding like a bad option anymore. But his feet are still running, and he can’t tell his brain to listen to that, so conditioned it is to never trust those cops.
So here they are. Sarah and Kie head inside. JJ docks the boat, it’s like someone has cut his strings. His legs give way, running on adrenaline and sheer white out for 24 hours. He hits the deck hard.
John B is beside him. God bless John B that boy is always beside him.
‘Whoa’ he says. ‘J you ok?’
JJ puts his head in his hands. No. I think I might want to die John B. My whole life. All of it.
I’m a fucking kook.
I hate myself.
I hate myself.
I hate myself.
‘All good man’.
John B huffs, he’s fluent in JJ always has been.
‘Yeah, that’s bullshit’.
JJ shudders, John B’s hand finds his neck, squeezes it. ‘Man you’re trashing the town, running off with Groff, getting yourself kidnapped, I need you to be straight with me right now. What’s going on with you?’
JJ keeps his head down, shrugs dejectedly, because if he looks at John B he’s scared he’ll see the kook all over him, the kook that runs through his blood now. The Jackson Jesse Genrette bleeding out all through the JJ Maybank lines.
‘What Luke did was so low J…’ John B starts.
And JJ clings to that, sure let him think it’s all about Poguelandia, that that’s the reason for all of it. That’s the easier option. He clings to it.
‘Freaking Luke man.’ Because the word dad no longer sits right. Because he doesn’t even know who that is anymore but that word has always meant nothing but pain to him anyway.
‘I’m sorry’ John B says quietly, and it’s so sad the way he says it, so deeply sorrowful that JJ has the absurd feeling he might just cry. John B takes care of JJ. He always tries to and he will always be grateful for that.
He swallows down the lump in his throat. Removes his hands from his face and fixes John B with his best performative blasé attitude. ‘We really should have seen that coming’.
‘Yeah’ John B says softly, ‘doesn’t make it feel any less shit though’.
JJ nods. John B slopes an arm around his shoulders. They sit for a beat on the dock, JJ Maybank Charters behind them, the sign lights up in the moonlight, it had been such a nice dream for a minute there, such a perfect thought, but like all the good moments in JJ’s life it was bound to crash down around him eventually.
‘I need you to talk to me’ John B’s voice breaks through the silence, ‘I need you to cut the bullshit and talk to me.’
And just as JJ opens his mouth, just as he steels himself for a deflection John B blows it all up.
‘Kie told me’.
The world just stops. JJ shoves himself up. Out from under John B. Turns his back. ‘Don’t’.
‘Kie told me that…’
‘John B don’t say it.’ It’s a warning now.
‘That Groff…that he might be…’
‘Stop’.
‘..your father.’
JJ hits him. Straight in the mouth.
Because while John B Routledge may be fluent in JJ Maybank, he doesn’t seem to have much of a handle yet on Jackson Genrette.