Charmed Thirds_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [109]
“You should teach a course about this,” he said. “Get it added to the Core Curriculum.”
“Everyone should hope to be as enlightened as I am.”
And then it got quiet and Robert Smith's plaintive wail filled the room.
“Go on, go on just walk away . . .”
“I can't believe you listen to The Cure,” he said. “Where's your ankh?”
“Oh, I'm sorry,” I mocked. “Where's your Emily the Strange T-shirt?” I thrust my finger toward his birdcagey chest. “Oh there it is, you emo boy, you.”
His eyes narrowed. “I am not emo.”
“Oh give it up,” I said. “No one admits to being emo, but emo is still out there. Someone has to be emo. And that person is you.”
“I am not emo.”
I was clearly getting to him and it brought me much pleasure. I leapt up, got him in a choke hold, ripped off his wool cap, and knuckled a noogie right into his skull. We're practically the same size, and his reflexes have been delayed by so many blunts, so it really wasn't all that difficult.
“Say it! Say ‘I'm sensitive emo boy'! SAY IT!!!”
“Never! I'll never say it!” He broke free, fled to the corner of my room, and cowered in the corner behind a pile of dirty laundry.
He whimpered. “I . . . feel . . . so . . .”
“Emo?” I suggested.
“Violated . . .”
And there was a moment . . .
(“Without you . . . Without you . . .”)
. . . before we both started laughing our asses off. It was all so dumb.
“Anyway, talk to me in twenty years and we'll see if anyone is still listening to Death Cab for Cutie, okay?”
“Twenty years?” he asked. He took out his combination cell/ camera/Palm and tapped away. “It's a date.”
And then we both settled into the pillows and thumbed through National Enquirers and spoke when we had something to say and were quiet when we didn't and he hardly annoyed me at all. And it was so nice that I forgot about the postcards. For a while, anyway.
Without you . . . Without you . . .
the eighth
I just woke up from a classic anxiety dream in which I'm supposed to be taking a very important math class over this winter break, the kind that covers whole chalkboards in formulas and sines and cosines and daunting stuff like that, a class I need to pass in order to graduate but that is only available during this two-week vacation period. In my dream, I sign up for this class, but never show up because I'm too busy hanging out with The Winter of Our Discontents. And when I suddenly realize that I'm supposed to be in the Mathematics Building with the rest of my classmates, huddled over our final exam in this subject I know nothing about, I start running around the Living and Learning Center screaming, “My life is over! My life is over!”
And then Kieran shrugs and asks, “How do you know your life exists at all?”
And then I stop running and screaming and say, “Shut up, assclown.”
And that's when I woke up.
the ninth
Take note: This is how bad things happen.
Yesterday, I got a call from Bridget.
“We're back!” she said.
I didn't know they were gone.
“We spent the holidays with Percy's extended family in Chicago,” she explained. “But we're back in New York now, and we called your mom and she said you're in the city, too, so we should hang out.”
And so that's how Pepe and Bridget joined The Winter of Our Discontents. It's only been nine days, but it seems like we haven't left Wallach in years. And it's the first time any “outsiders” have entered our little world, so they were treated like exotic explorers from distant shores.
“You're a Metropolitan Studies major at NYU? What's the program like?? Do you think I should transfer???”
“I love your coat! Where did you get it? You got it downtown, didn't you? Oh, the shopping is so much better down there. Tell me about it, please? Please?”
“Take the last two shots of Ketel One. We'll take the Brita-filtered Vladimir.”
And so on.
In honor of our special guests, ALF had dragged a TV and a PlayStation into the usually low-tech lounge. He and Pepe got along famously over Grand Theft Auto, as guys often do. And Tanu and Kazuko had a slightly delayed, but