Charmed Thirds_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [108]
“Seriously, I want to give you some money. You'd be helping me out.”
“How so?”
“According to Plato, it's impossible to be both good and rich at the same time. So you would be doing me a favor.”
I grumbled under my breath and the pot boiled over. Water on the range top sizzled and hissed.
“What?”
“You didn't need to invoke Plato, you know. You could have just as easily used any train-wreck socialite to make the same point.”
“I am such a pretentious, ambitionless ass,” he said, dropping his head in shame.
“Pretentious, ambitionless assclown,” I corrected.
I clanged the lid back on the pot to draw attention away from the smile that had slipped across my face with the stealth of a bank robber in broad daylight.
“I'm not taking your money,” I said seriously. “But I will take some salsa, if you've got it.”
“I don't,” he said.
“Then you,” I said, “are useless to me.”
And then I patted his head like he was one of those skeletal puppies pictured on those fund-raising cans placed next to cash registers.
I touched him like I didn't want to catch something. Something serious.
the seventh
I was sitting on my bed, listening to The Cure and shuffling Marcus's postcards into alternative messages:
I WISH OUR RIGHT WAS LOVE
LOVE I WISH WAS OUR RIGHT
I LOVE OUR WISH WAS RIGHT
RIGHT OUR LOVE WAS I WISH
when Kieran knocked on my door. I had gotten into the habit of propping the suite door open, to encourage visits from my fellow refugees. The only one who'd taken me up on it was Kieran, so I knew it was him even before I heard his familiar flip-flopping shuffle. I stashed the postcards under my pillow and grabbed a National Enquirer from the stack on my desk.
“Hey,” he said, sulking and slinking into the room. “It's darker than Plato's cave in here.”
Wallach's rooms are all inadequately lit with weak, humming bulbs that give everyone a sickly complexion. But I don't think that's why he said it.
“I hope you name-checked Plato as a joke,” I said.
“I do have a sense of humor. Though it's hard to come by these days because I'm so sad about my girlfriend. My ex-girlfriend. Yeah. My ex . . .” His voice trailed off and his eyes took on that wandering look. “Are you still sad about your boyfriend?”
“Oh no,” I answered, ignoring the postcards under the pillowcase that said otherwise. “Being here has been very cathartic. It's kind of like a monastic retreat, complete with solitude, poverty, and chastity.”
“And knowledge,” he said, holding up the National Enquirer. He glanced at the cover, graced by Loni Anderson and Burt Reynolds. “This is from 1988.” He rifled through the stack. “These are all from the eighties.”
“I buy them from a homeless guy on 103rd Street for a quarter. It's my one indulgence.”
“Why would you read about gossip that's almost older than we are?” he asked, skimming through an issue that devoted four pages to Delta Burke's weight troubles. “About has-beens and never-weres who have no relevance in today's society? Isn't it depressing?”
“Actually, it's not,” I said. “I take great comfort in these old pages. The skyrocketing fame, the scandalous falls from grace. None of it matters anymore.”
“But doesn't that just remind you of the futility of life?”
“Are you for real? Wait, don't answer that. That's only the worst question one can possibly ask a Philosophy major.”
“I won't refute that,” he said.
“Thank you,” I replied. “Anyway, these magazines remind me that everything is fleeting, the good stuff and the bad stuff. And no one is immune. Not Roseanne then, not Lindsay Lohan now, and not me. And that helps me take things less seriously. At least that's my goal. I can't say it's totally kicked in yet.”
“It makes you think of the temporality of human existence,” he said. “But in a good way.”
“Right.”
He was standing in a shifty way that indicated that he wasn't sure whether he should have a seat or show himself to the door. I gestured toward my