Charmed Thirds_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [135]
Then Sully got up and lumbered back to Wally D's, where he will work every summer until he dies.
I rose off the bench, kicked off my flip-flops, and sprinted onto the beach. I ran and ran and ran across the sand and straight into the cold crash of the breaking waves. I must have looked crazy to those bennies, splashing and whooping in my Wally D's uniform, but I didn't care. The ocean was rough and it knocked me around and made me feel dizzy and reckless and alive.
I thought to myself, Why didn't I do this all summer?
I will die someday. No duh. Nothing can change that, so I might as well fill my life with whatever joys it has to offer. What difference does it make if a spontaneous ocean dive or a Betty Boop decorative license plate cover only temporarily diverts attention from the morbid Truth? Isn't that better than the alternative?
I need to be more in the moment, like when I was wet and wild in the waves. Being in the moment—right now!—equals freedom. It can't be scrutinized, analyzed, rhapsodized, mythologized. It can't be desecrated, debated, prognosticated. Right now can only be lived. Isn't this the same message I tried to get across to the kiddies in the lecture that got me fired? Isn't this the same advice Gladdie gave me right before she died?
Why is it that the most fundamental life lesson—LIVE!—is the one I continually forget to put into practice?
the twenty-seventh
Today was G-Money and Bethany's fifth anniversary party. Their actual anniversary was more than two months ago but—to shamelessly borrow from his biggest rival—it was always time to make the donuts. Held at the spectacular beaux arts Palm House at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the party was replete with white-gloved service, an audiovisual tribute to their love, and a five-tiered cake made exclusively out of crullers and chocolate custard that had Marin zoom, zoom, zooming. It was a gala affair, the kind that used to be thrown for unions lasting ten times as long, back when golden anniversaries weren't as unlikely as they are now.
On a more cynical day, I'd be merciless about this. But not today.
Of course, I wasn't looking forward to this soiree. But the usual antisocial reasons were compounded by the fact that I hadn't spoken to my sister since the Ahhh . . . Spa and that her silence had everything to do with me being so bitchy about the very love for her husband that I was here to so publicly celebrate. To make things even worse, I had also been harangued into being a spotlight participant in one of the evening's cheesier spectacles: The Not-So-Newlywed Game.
“No,” I said, when my mother told me yesterday that I was going to be the emcee. “Let Sara do it instead. She loves the limelight.”
Sara was bound to be at the party. The D'Abruzzi/Darling-Doczylkowski families would be linked for as long as there is a consumer demand for twenty-four-hour access to conveniently packaged fats and sugars.
“You're the only one we call Notso! How will it look if someone else hosts the Not-So-Newlywed Game?”
“It's not named after me, it's just a coincidence,” I said. “Call it the Oldiewed Game instead.”
“Anyone who's ever been on a cruise will know that it's supposed to be called the Not-So-Newlywed Game!” she exclaimed. “You just can't go changing names willy-nilly. It's just not right! Not right at all!”
This is the closest my mother has ever come to civil unrest. If she could carry a picket sign, it would say NOT-SO-NEWLYWED OR NOTHING! But if this game is my mother's Betty Boop decorative license plate cover, so be it. I gave up and gave in, figuring my participation might help smooth things over with my sister. However, until my unwanted moment at the mike, I stayed out of the way, on the fringes of the party, playing babysitter to Marin.
“What's the story, morning glory?” I asked her.
“I hate this stupid dress,” she said, avoiding our usual joke and jutting her lower lip like a diving board over the dimple in her chin.
The dress was a pink flowery confection