Charmed Thirds_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [139]
“What's your major?” he interrupted.
“Psychology.”
“Psychology?!” he blurted in disbelief. “You want to help sort out other people's mental health problems?”
I was not offended by this. “Honestly?” I asked, taking a furtive look around before I whispered the truth. “No! I don't!”
“Then what do you want to do after graduation?”
I shifted uneasily in my seat. “I'm still . . . uh . . . kind of figuring that one out . . .”
He grabbed at his curls. “Then why did you major in Psychology?”
“I didn't really consider a career when picking a major,” I said. “I wanted to learn about what makes people do the crazy things we do.”
He leaned back in his chair and said, “Tch.”
“You can say that again,” I replied. (He didn't.)
I didn't want to waste any more of this important man's time. I was just about to get up to leave when he suddenly snapped to attention.
“What about your journal?”
“My journal?”
“Yes,” he said. “Do you still keep a journal?”
“Uh . . . yeah.” And I pulled this very tattered, black-and-white-speckled composition notebook out of my bag. Until he said it, I'd forgotten all about everything I'd documented in here, because I don't really think of this as serious writing.
“May I take a look?”
Mac had read another journal of mine, the one I was keeping when I was seventeen years old and attending SPECIAL. It was my journal, not anything I'd written for class, that had convinced him I had promise. (A promise I have, heretofore, unfulfilled.) But I didn't want him perusing my private thoughts this time around. These moments are my own. Fortunately, I had a substitute—I handed over a few loose pages that I'd stuffed in the back of the notebook and never bothered to remove.
“Read this instead.”
“Persuasions: A Cheesy Slice of New Jersey in the Heart of Manhattan,” he read. He cocked an eyebrow in bemusement. “I thought you said you hadn't written anything this year.”
I shrugged sheepishly.
For the next eternity or so, he read. He gasped. He moaned. He winced. Every few seconds, he'd mutter a phrase that I'd hardly remembered living, let alone writing about.
“‘Homemade Bikini Contest.'”
“‘Telekinetic titty-flexing.'”
“‘No cushion for the pushin'.'”
And he laughed. And laughed. Oh, how he laughed at me.
While I slowly died.
He put the pages down. “‘I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking,'” he began. “‘What I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.' Joan Didion.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And I think,” he said, tapping his fingers on his desk, “that if you do it well, you give others the opportunity to do the same.”
“Uh . . . Sure.”
“You would benefit from a more disciplined approach to your craft. You should take my advanced creative nonfiction class.”
“But I don't have a writing portfolio!” I protested.
He waved the essay in the air. “This is the only portfolio I need to read, Ms. Darling.”
“But I haven't taken any of the prerequisites.”
“I can see to it that you get in, regardless of prerequisites.”
“But . . .”
“You have the eye of a reporter and the heart of a novelist,” he said. “But you have much to learn, Ms. Darling. I'll make sure that you don't throw away your gifts.”
For someone like Mac to believe so deeply in my potential, well, it nearly made me weep with gratitude. Even now, I don't think he has a clue just how much his words have done for me. Mac instilled hope in me, and not only that I won't end up a tragic waste of potential, but hope in general, which is something I've been sorely lacking for a long, long time. (In more ways than one.)
“What are your thoughts?”
“My thoughts?” I replied, before I even realized what I was saying. “My thoughts create my world.”
Mac sat up in his seat. He scrunched his curls with his hands, perplexed. “Who said that?”
I told him the truth.
“Oh, just someone I used to know,” I said, stroking the naked skin on my middle finger.
* * *
December 15th
Dear Hope,
No, I don't think it's strange that I was the first person you called when you lost your virginity