Charmed Thirds_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [43]
“You're my best friend in the world!”
She spread her arms wide and crushed me with a hug.
I categorize my friends, which is unnecessary because it's not like I've got so many that I need extensive record keeping to get a handle on them. But I've always referred to Hope as my best friend in the world. And when I've referred to other friends, I'd put a qualifier on it, like Marcus is my best friend who has sex with me. Or Bridget is my best friend from childhood.
Jane is my best friend at Columbia.
So I wasn't quite sure how to respond, until she pulled away from me and said, “Hey, J! Don't leave me hanging!”
And that's when I told her that she was my best friend in the world, too.
Afterward, Marcus came over to my house. I sat on the diving board and dipped my toes into the deep end of our pool as he voluntarily skimmed the leaves off the top.
“Did you have fun with your friend?” he asked. As he extended his arms, muscles popped up like surprises underneath his (white) T-shirt.
“We sort of got into a fight,” I said.
“About what?” he asked, dumping the slimy brown clump into a garbage can.
“About you.”
“Really?” he asked, but he didn't look surprised at all.
And then I told him everything she'd said about the shirts being his shtick and how it annoyed me because she made him sound so fake and calculating. I guess I was expecting Marcus to defend himself. I know I would have, if someone had said something like that about me. But he seemed unfazed by Jane's analysis and didn't stop skimming.
“So why do you wear the white T-shirts?” I asked. “Is it because anyone with ten bucks can buy a fake vintage ALABAMA: SO MANY RECIPES, SO FEW SQUIRRELS T-shirt from a sidewalk street vendor? Because what once might have been an authentically quirky find in a secondhand store has become manufactured for the masses, which makes it anything but funny? Because to combat this crass commercialization, a small but growing segment of the population has, like you, started making their own one-of-a-kind T-shirts? And the T-shirt makers have a lot of pressure on them to put a grand statement on their chests, or at least a really clever one, which is tough to do, so rather than get caught up in this walking billboard competition, you've decided to opt out and—”
“Jessica!” He rapped the skimmer against the patio to get my attention. Tiny droplets caught the sun, making miniature, split-second rainbows. “Sometimes a T-shirt is just a T-shirt.”
Everything Marcus did was deep with meaning. There had to be more to it than that.
“Okay, Freud, but why the white ones? Why?”
He sighed. “My mom bought them for me.”
I didn't say anything after that. Marcus kept dragging the net along the surface and didn't stop until the pool was clean and pure. Then, without any ceremony, he stripped off his controversial T-shirt and jumped in. The water splashed up and hit me in the face. I watched him swim underwater, his image ripply and distorted beneath the surface.
His head popped up. “Want to join me?”
“Nah,” I said with a shiver. “It's too cold.”
the sixteenth
It didn't hit me right away. Not even when I saw my mom slumped at the breakfast bar in her pink bathrobe, her blond hair flat and matted, her face reluctantly showing its age.
“Hey, Mom,” I ventured. “Are you feeling okay?” My mother never came downstairs in the morning until she was fully dressed, blown out, and made up.
She made a murmuring sound that was neither affirmative nor negative. It was a thoroughly indistinct sound, made by someone who didn't give a shit about the question that had been asked. She wasn't sipping her morning tea while simultaneously perusing the Fall Preview Pottery Barn catalog and talking to my sister on the phone as was customary at this hour. She was just sitting there, staring at the splotchy granite countertop, an unreadable expression on her naked face.
“Mom?” I asked, with more urgency.
A few seconds passed before she swiveled her head and looked through me with dead-eyed, drug-induced zombification.
And then I remembered: Today would