Charmed Thirds_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [15]
She spit out her ponytail. “I have a boyfriend I haven't seen in ages and I still made an effort to see you!”
She had, too. She'd called and IMed me about a half-dozen times in the past few weeks. Whoopsie.
“Bridge, I'm sorry!” I dropped to my knees.
She waved me away. “Well, you can grovel for forgiveness on the way to graduation, which is today in case you didn't remember.” She sounded so much like my mother that it might prove the babies-switched-in-infancy theory that explains how Bridget wound up living across the street instead of in the household in which she truly belonged.
“Of course I remembered!”
“And that's how you chose to dress for the occasion?” she asked, thrusting a finger at the SIZE DOESN'T MATTER T-shirt I'd gotten for free during Safer Sex Awareness Week. (For the record, I don't know if size matters because Marcus is all I've had. But I can certainly say this: Size sure helps. Whoo boy, does it help.) “Come on, Jess. Percy's my boyfriend, but he's your friend, too!”
Percy's my boyfriend. When will that sound normal coming out of Bridget's mouth? Bridget and Pepe make a ridiculously handsome couple, and yet I still have difficulty thinking of them as a unit. Part of me still remembers him as the prepubescent black kid in my French class who lusted after me in a goofy Pepe-Le-Pew-like way. (Hence his private nickname, Pepe.) But that was more than three years, forty pounds, and six inches ago. (Six inches in height. Get your mind out of the SIZE DOESN'T MATTER gutter!)
“Give me two minutes,” I said, heading toward my closet.
She gestured toward my head. “Should I even ask what, like, happened?”
“I cut it off during finals.”
“It's not that bad,” she said in a tone that implied the opposite.
“It's bad,” I corrected her as I pulled on a tank top and a cargo skirt. “It makes me feel like a mental patient.”
“You always feel like a mental patient,” she said, rifling through my sock drawer. “Don't blame your hair.”
Within seconds, she fashioned a headband out of a pair of fishnet stockings I'd bought but had never had the courage to wear, even in the city. “Use something like this to push your bangs off your face until they grow out. Whoever told you that bangs were good for your face should, like, have her cosmetology license revoked. It's too severe for you.” She smoothed my hair with her fingers until she was pleased with what she saw. “Cute,” she said finally.
I looked in the mirror. It wasn't quite cute, but it was a huge improvement.
“Thank you, Bridget.”
“That's what friends are for,” she said.
Some friends. Other friends are too busy with their own workloads to even notice my hair, let alone offer solutions for it. My friends at school sometimes make my brain hurt. Sometimes it's fun to talk about hairstyles instead of, say, string theory. Not that we don't talk about crap, too, because we do. But even when we're talking about crap, there's always someone with something to prove. There's this need to be an authority, and the more obscure the area of expertise, the better. I love my friend Jane, but when we're talking crap television, she claims that she can name the Brady Bunch episode before a single line of dialogue is uttered, based solely on the opening camera shot and entrance music. Or when we're talking crap music, she mentions how she's got the Sex Pistols' extremely rare cover of “Stayin' Alive” on vinyl. Jane is only trying to keep the conversation interesting—and most of the time she does—but it can still be very annoying. Being friends with Bridget is a relief because she lets me be shallow and there's nothing more to it than that.
It was a good time to be preoccupied with shallowness, since I would surely run in to people at graduation who hadn't seen me in a long time. As Bridget and I approached the sprawling, architectural mish-mash of styles and materials that comprised the Pineville High campus—the