Charmed Thirds_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [56]
He breathed in deep and hummed happily on the exhale. Then he started talking. Marcus had a lot to talk about. I did, too, but I let him go first. As if it made a difference.
Proving that they are their father's sons, Hugo and Marcus bonded through adventure. In three days they managed to go skiing (cross-country and downhill), ice fishing, and dogsledding, and do several other activities with “snow” as the prefix, including, but not limited to, -boarding, -mobiling, and -shoeing. In the middle of an anecdote about almost running over a moose during one of these pursuits, he paused long enough for me to pose my question.
“Marcus, why didn't you ask me to go with you?”
“I had no idea you'd be interested.”
“Of course I'm interested in meeting your brother,” I said. “I'm your girlfriend. I feel like I should know your flesh and blood as well as you know mine.”
He rubbed his hands through his bed-heady red knots. “I'm sorry, Jessica. I guess I'm not well versed in boyfriend-girlfriend protocol. I forget that you're this person I'm supposed to introduce to my brother. I just see you as you.”
I was about to ask him what exactly he saw, so I could hear for myself all those things he had so willingly confessed to Bridget. But we were both stopped dead in our tracks by an unexpected sight.
“Our park!”
“They changed it!”
“They changed everything!”
The Park That Time Forgot was no longer. Gone were the swings, slide, and sandbox of my youth. All were replaced by a plastic FUNTASTIC PLAY CENTRE.
This was a cosmic joke. The Park That Time Forgot was the Fifth Wonder of Pineville. Wonders one through four—the wine-bottle-shaped cement eyesore known as The Champagne of Propane, the VW bus on the roof of Augie's Auto Parts, the purple dinosaur statue in front of the carpet store, and the hot-dog-shaped truck known as Der Wunder Weiner—have all been immortalized in the pages of the Weird N.J. coffee-table books. The Park That Time Forgot was the only wonder that had been kept our little secret, which was fitting as the most significant stop on the tour.
Three years ago this very night, it was the setting for the infamous “Fuck you!” New Year's Eve. On The Park That Time Forgot's rusty merry-go-round, Marcus confessed that he had eavesdropped on my angsty conversations with Hope while getting high with her brother. That he had used our mutual angst as a devirginization tactic, just to see if he could bed the school's biggest goody-goody. That his dirty intentions were purified as he'd gotten to know me.
Until this revelation, I had been ready to sleep with him. But I wasn't ready for the truth, so I told him to fuck himself. It was such a devastating blow—for him to hear it, for me to mean it—that it would take us another year and a half to overcome.
And come together.
Only to return here, to be torn apart.
“I hate this!” I yelled, kicking the purple kiddie climbing wall that had replaced the dinged-up merry-go-round.
“The old one wasn't very safe,” he said, skimming his hand along the curves of a twisty slide. “I wouldn't want Marin playing on any of that old equipment anyway.”
“You're missing the point!” I screamed. “This was our park! And it's gone! Gone!”
Marcus took a step back. “What's going on with you? Are you all right?”
No, I wasn't all right. I was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
And that's when I ruined everything with a whisper.
“What?” he asked. Though from the stricken tone of his voice, I knew he had heard my words above the breeze.
“I cheated on you.”
And then, as quickly as I could, I told him everything I should have told him over the phone, months ago. How I thought I was pregnant and how it terrified me, not only because I wasn't ready to be pregnant, but because I didn't feel ready to be in the kind of relationship in which a pregnancy would be a significant mistake, a love that was already so deep that it wouldn't be easy to just forget and get back to normal. And how this fear had something to do with why I fooled around with this other guy, but I wasn't exactly