Charmed Thirds_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [3]
So. Stress? Naaaaaaaaah.
Sitting in the booth in front of me is a cutesy young couple still in the honeymoon phase of their relationship. Or they're lovers recently reunited. They're annoying to everyone who isn't them and haven't stopped pecking each others' faces since they sat down. Back and forth and back and forth across the booth, peck and peck. I prefer juicy tongues to these passionless kisses that are as dry as my needy lips.
I just tried Marcus on my cell. Topher, one of his “cottage-mates,” told me he was out “cleansing.” He told me this the way other roommates at other schools would say someone is out getting shitfaced. Marcus's world is so foreign to me that I can't help but feel that the person who inhabits it is a stranger. I love when I reach Marcus on the phone and as he says hello, I can hear the music he's listening to in the background. That music is the sound of him without me. How he surrounds himself when I'm not there, which is almost all the time.
And will be for three more years.
the seventh
I'm sitting in the room that was my bedroom for the first eighteen years of my life. It's still called my room but it really isn't my room anymore despite all the evidence to the contrary. The John Hughes movie posters are curling up at the corners yet are still mostly stuck to the bruise-colored walls. The plaques and trophies with my name inscribed in celebratory script still topple over one another on the shelves. And the framed mosaic of Hope and me—made by the artist herself and given to me on the day she moved, eighteen days before my sixteenth birthday—is still in its showcase spot over my bed. When packing for college, I intentionally left these things behind in Pineville, just so I could return to someplace that felt like home.
But after nine months at school, I'm seeing this room and its contents as through a haze of psychological, if not actual, dust. It's like examining the artifacts found at an archaeological dig, where I can study the CD player on which Jessica Darling once listened to Morrissey, or the desk at which she once completed her college applications. The carpet on which she once failed to twist herself into impossible positions during her brief flirtation with yoga, or the skinny bed on which she once succeeded in twisting herself into the very quietest of possible sexual positions with her boyfriend while her parents sat downstairs on opposite sides of the ultrasuede couch watching a Tom Hanks movie.
And yet, my dorm room, which was decorated in much the same way, isn't my room anymore either. I'm a refugee, one seeking asylum from my niece Marin's first birthday party.
Make that her second first birthday party. My parents insisted on throwing a soiree for Marin's “New Jersey friends.” Bethany and G-Money failed to persuade any city folk to come out to our “house in the country,” a seventies bilevel in a bilevel/split-level subdivision that my mom describes as possessing “a retro charm, with every modern amenity” when talking it up to her real estate associates. That means the architectural ugliness is redeemed only by new wood siding, extensive landscaping, and upgraded kitchen and baths.
But Jersey being Jersey, nothing could lure the New York City hipocracy that make up B&G's social circle, not even their offer to charter a luxury bus equipped with TVs for every seat, all tuned