Charmed Thirds_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [20]
“That's the point of an internship, to find out if it's something that you'd like to do for a living,” he said, pushing my bangs off my forehead with his fingertips. It was a gesture that was supposed to let me know that he didn't care about my hair, but it made me feel more self-conscious about it than ever.
“Stop,” I complained, flicking his hand away from my face.
He rubbed his temples. “Stop pretending this has nothing to do with me.”
Total body clench. “What do you mean?”
“You don't want to be the type of girl who doesn't do things because of her boyfriend. But I'm the only reason you don't want to go.”
Marcus placed his hands on my shoulders and gently kneaded my defenses right out of me.
“You're right,” I admitted. “I don't want to be that girl. I hate that girl. But I hate being away from you even more. So why don't I spend this summer with you? We've never been able to spend more than a few weeks together before being separated . . .”
Marcus laid placidly in the pillows, waiting for me to finish before asking, “Why do you want to do this internship?”
I thought about it for a moment. And then I told him.
True is the only magazine for women that is satirical and irreverent and funny about the types of things that I really think about. It's Cosmo with a brain cell. Bust without the in-your-face feminism. The Onion with ovaries. As a free publication only available on the coasts and nowhere in between, its marketing strategy reflects an inclusive yet elitist worldview that I can relate to.
True devotes each issue to a single topic. The first I ever saw was True on Computers. On the cover was a photo from the early sixties of a bunch of scientists with crew cuts in horn-rims and lab coats examining data on a floor-to-ceiling-sized machine. What sucked me in was an essay about the tyranny of IM, how it's not just the content of the message that's being scrutinized, but the message behind the message, and how responding too quickly or too slowly or two long or too short can destroy an otherwise solid relationship. There was a page of blog reviews, all comprised of minutiae (“kings of leon are **sex.** i stuck my used tampon inside a sour patch kids wrapper and put it in my wastepaper basket because i'm too tired from slaving away at taco hell to get up off my futon and walk to the bathroom and flush it in the toilet. do you think the followills would love me any less? ;)”) that is interesting only to the self-important writers who put them out there for the blogosphere in the hope that they will get noticed by and linked to other self-important blogs. Finally, there was a Q&A with a twenty-five-year-old guy named Duane who spends eight hours a day playing a MMORPG called ZooKwest. His avatar, a half-man, half-wolf warrior named AlphaLupis, is the most powerful in the Kingdom of Animals and has insane orgies with online groupies (“zoopies”) of all sorts of half-and-half permutations of the species. In the “dead world” otherwise known as real life, he's an aspiring assistant manager at Kinko's.
Subsequent issues—True on the 80s, True on Politics, True on TV—were as perfect as the first. I read this magazine and wanted to be friends with all the editors because every issue was filled with the kind of snarky thoughts that fill my letters to Marcus and Hope, and my journals. I felt like they were writing for me, which, in turn, inspired me to write for them. When I saw an ad for interns in the back of the magazine, I wrote a fawning letter, enclosed clips from my Pineville High editorials, and hoped they wouldn't notice that I hadn't published a damn word at college.
When I finished talking, Marcus put his mouth in the bony valley of my clavicle.
Then he lifted his head and said, “You really want to do this.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Then you should,” he replied.
“But—”
“Go.”
And so I will.
* * *
June 30th
Dear Hope,
I'm waiting for Marcus to arrive in the Caddie. He's driving me to my sister's place. I've convinced her to let him stay overnight so we can add another