Charmed Thirds_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [146]
I WISH OUR LOVE WAS RIGHT NOW.
It is. It is.
I kissed him until I heard the tiny hairs prickling on his belly.
“You must be a long phase for me, Marcus Flutie.”
“The longest, Jessica Darling,” he replied.
Yes. Love has the longest arms.
the thirty-first
Hope and I are about to embark on the most haphazard cross-country trip in history.
“Can you believe it's been six years since I moved?” Hope asks as she inspects our bag of backseat snacks. Fun-sized Baby Ruths. KC Masterpiece Baked Lay's. Sour Patch Kids.
“Yes and no,” I say, rummaging through my duffel for my sunglasses. I can't start this road trip–cum–senior thesis without them. Who cares if it's December and the sun can barely be detected in the dull sky? I've always imagined embarking on a cross-country trip with sunglasses. “Sometimes, when I think about six years ago, it feels more vivid, more real than all the stuff in between.”
“I totally know what you mean,” she says, throwing the last of the bags into the trunk.
This trip started as a joke, as most things between us do. In one of our last phone calls before she left for France and we lost touch, Hope reminded me how she's always been fascinated by a particular road sign en route to her cousins' house.
“Can you believe there's a place called Toad Suck, Arkansas, and people actually live there?”
A paper-dodging, time-wasting Google search quickly revealed that Toad Suck was in bad company. Monkey's Eyebrow, Kentucky. Nipple, Utah. Satan's Kingdom, Rhode Island. There were just too many ridiculously named towns out there. Pennsylvania alone was host to Muff, Blue Ball, and Dick.
“I wouldn't mind telling people I'm from Hell, Missouri,” I said.
“I'm feeling very Uncertain, Texas, myself,” Hope replied. “But I'd like to be Yeehaw Junction, Florida.”
Thus, her senior project, “Mental States: A Cross-Country Tour of My Emotions,” was born. For the next month, Hope will take self-portraits next to appropriately expressive town names and use the photos in some sort of multimedia installation that she had yet to devise. She not only convinced her department head to give her class credit for the trip, but somehow got the school to subsidize most of it in some work-study agreement that only Hope could wrangle. When she asked me to ride shotgun a few weeks ago, I didn't hesitate.
“Thank you, Rhode Island School of Design!” she says now, lifting her Coke can to the sky before popping its top.
“Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Darling, for refusing to pay my tuition and making this trip possible!” I reply in kind, actually meaning every word.
“To Virginville, Pennsylvania!” Hope whoops.
“To Virginville!”
And then a voice says, “I'm not sure you two will make it past the Virginville border patrol.”
I turn to see Marcus standing in front of me, holding a red box.
“I thought you didn't want to say good-bye,” I say.
“I still don't,” Marcus says. “I'm not here to say good-bye. I have a going-away gift.”
“You already gave me a going-away gift,” I reply, gesturing toward the Barry Manilow toilet seat that we've propped on top of our bags in the backseat. Hope has deemed it our good luck traveling totem.
“That was a coming-home gift,” he explains. “This is a going-away gift.” And then he hands me a raw silk box meant for holding photos. It's heavier than I had expected. I don't realize that I'm just standing there staring until he says, “Open it.”
I do what I'm told. Inside are at least a dozen black-and-white-speckled composition notebooks exactly like the one I'm writing in right now.
At first, I think, How did you get my journals? But then I notice that the spaces reserved for Name, School, and Grade, have been left blank, where on my notebooks they have all been inscribed with the start and end dates of the contents within.
I open one.