Charmed Thirds_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [37]
And by “we” I really mean “me,” since this sums up my whole life.
“So how do we stop the cycle? How do we learn to accurately predict what will really make us happy?”
“Well, if I could answer that,” Marcus said, “people would be praying to me.”
He squinted because he faced the sun, but also because he was smiling. And right then, sitting cross-legged in the sand, with the sea and the sky serving as a backdrop, Marcus did look like a golden god. One this atheist would gladly bow down and worship. Which made me think.
“So everything we believe about happiness is wrong,” I said.
He nodded.
“Everything?” I asked, when what I meant was, Everything? Including you? Including me?
And Marcus, being Marcus, knew what I really wanted to know, and answered my silent, more significant question. He held up his hand to shield the rays and looked me in the eyes.
“Almost.”
the eighth
Jane is here for the weekend!
She called me yesterday, said she was arriving by bus today, and now she's here. I can finally prove to my parents that, yes, I do have friends at Columbia.
Despite (or perhaps because of) the diversity of our campus, students of the same race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and gender (and so on) tend to stick together, often through campus organizations designed to define us through similarities with one another and differences with everyone else. Jane and I didn't form an official club, but as White, Anglo-Saxon, lapsed-Catholic heterosexual females, we made a perfect pair.
The similarities run even deeper. She, too, was a distance runner in high school who had no desire to run in college. She also came from a suburban wasteland close to (yet so far away from) a major city (Boston). She was an only child, and I felt like one because my sister was out of the house for most of my formative years. We had both been brutalized by the high school rumor mill, though her reputation (“Ride the Jane train!”) had been more damaged than my own.
In fact, Jane and I are so tight that one of the F-Unit nerds who dabbled in music snobbery gave us the nickname 2 Skinny J's, inspired by an underground rap/rock group Jane and I had never heard of. Yet it was an appropriate nickname because of our similarly prepubescent builds. We often shared each other's jeans, cords, and T-shirts, and until I chopped off my hair, we both wore our brown hair in careless ponytails. No wonder we were constantly mistaken for each other. Hope and I were tight, of course, but we never inspired nicknames.
When I picked Jane up at the bus station, she clamped her hands above my ears and shook my head from side to side. “Your hair is growing wide before it grows long!”
I swung my leg around and kicked her in the butt.
“Hey! If I can't tell you the truth, who will?”
It's so ironic that someone so ruthlessly honest spent her whole summer lying for a living as an “undercover spokeswoman” for ALPHApups, a guerilla marketing firm. She was paid $8 an hour to loudly extol the virtues of new liquors in trendy bars. (“This Yellow Jacket cosmopolitan makes me want to dance all night!!!”) Or she'd spritz on an experimental fragrance before flirting with weary but horny nine-to-fivers. (“This mesmerizing perfume makes me feel sooooo sexy.”) She has no