Charmed Thirds_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [54]
“PEE! POO!” Marin can say “Pinky the Poodle” but prefers the scatological shorthand because it makes her very immature aunt Jessie laugh. And I laughed even harder when I saw that Jesus' mama had red Magic Marker “makeup” smeared across her face, and Pinky's bikini and feather boa over her robes. Mary looked like a hooker after a bad trick.
“Nothing is sacred,” Marcus said.
And I silently agreed.
the thirtieth
Marcus isn't here. He'll be back tomorrow to ring in the New Year with me.
Marcus is in Maine visiting his brother, Hugo, whom I have never met. All I know about him is that he's twenty-two, never went to college, works in construction, and lives in a log cabin on a lake in a salt-of-the-earth Ashton and Demi arrangement with a woman named Charlotte who is twenty years older than he is and has two teenage sons from a previous marriage and ekes out a living making pottery that she sells in a tent pitched on the side of the road. Marcus has never offered to take me with him to meet them. I've been his girlfriend for almost a year and a half now, so I considered it beneath me to ask to be brought along. Or maybe I felt like I didn't deserve to ask. At any rate, I didn't. Which is why he's in Bangor and I'm here.
Pepe is also away until tomorrow. He's visiting assorted aunts, uncles, and cousins in Chicago. Bridget felt too guilty to leave her mom alone during the holidays and declined when he asked her to go. (She now regrets that decision since her mom is always working overtime at the Oceanfront Tavern because she gets paid double to cover for servers or hostesses or bartenders who—ahem!—take time off to spend with family.) So Bridget and I have been hanging out with each other because we hate everyone else in town.
The weather sucks. It's not cold enough to snow, but still soggy and gray—like hugging wet construction paper. Bridget and I have stayed indoors, mostly at my house because she fully appreciates all of my mom's manufactured holiday cheer. A single, working mom, Mrs. Milhokovich doesn't have any time for it. When we were ten, my mother was shocked—SHOCKED!—to discover that since the divorce, Mrs. M. didn't even bother trimming the tree anymore; she just stored it in the basement fully decorated, and dragged it back out as-is every third weekend in December. Since then my mom has encouraged Bridget to spend as much time with our family over the holidays as she wants.
“You know that Bubblegum Bimbos is supposed to come out in a few weeks, right?” she asked on the day of her boyfriend's departure.
“How can I forget when you forwarded me a bizillion articles from Ain't It Cool News?”
I'm not looking forward to seeing the film version of Hy's book. Bridget needs to see it because she auditioned for a role and was justifiably miffed when she wasn't considered “seasoned” enough to play the “Gidget Popovich” role inspired by . . . herself.
“To give a totally honest review, I need to be schooled in the art of the teen movie. You know, for, like, a base of comparison.”
And so, for the past five days, Bridget and I have seen every eighties teen movie in my DVD collection. The Best of the Genre (Sixteen Candles, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Real Genius), The T&A Romps (Private School, Porky's), The Stupid Supernatural Comedies (Teen Wolf, Weird Science), The Brat Pack Dramadies (The Breakfast Club, St. Elmo's Fire), The Dark Social Commentaries (Less Than Zero, River's Edge), and—of course—The Against All Odds Romances (Say Anything, Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful).
“You know what's, like, totally annoying about these movies?”
I shrugged, picked up the remote, and shut off the DVD player.
“All these couples are, like, supposedly so into each other but all they do the whole movie is talk about how they're such opposites and how it's so cruel that their friends and family just can't accept their love and how tough it is for their romance to survive and wah-wah-wah-wah.”
“Hm.”
“Percy and I have had a lot of tough stuff to deal with and you don't hear us wah-wah-wahing about it all