Charmed Thirds_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [64]
Speaking of ugly Americans, when you consider how much I dislike most people and how I cringe at small talk, you can see why this will be the hardest six dollars an hour I am ever likely to earn.
Empathetically yours,
J.
the second
I was rereading the postcard that I received in the mailbox today, the second of its kind. I've pinned these messages to the wall of my otherwise unadorned dorm room. I haven't had time to unpack my stuff for the summer, yet I've had ample opportunity to obsess over his minimalist missives. It's a matter of priorities, you see.
This is somewhat healthier than my other hobby: Google stalking. This is something everyone does but no one owns up to because it's just so pathetic. And yet, I can't stop. Every night before I go to sleep, I plug “Marcus Flutie” into the browser and pray that a new result will pop up. Unlike “Jessica Darling,” “Marcus Flutie” is alone in the Googleverse, and is therefore easy to track down, or would be, that is, if there were anything to track. (Note to anyone who wants to Google stalk me: Use the advanced option, and remove the word anal from your search.) He's got five listings, and three of them refer to his participation on Gakkai's Frisbee Golf Intramurals Squad. Another is from the Gakkai College's campus newspaper, the Mahayana Weekly, in a story about some baby fowl that were ducknapped from a petting zoo. (“All unhappiness stems from desire,” says Marcus Flutie, twenty, a first-year student. “These thieves must be miserable.”) And finally, the last listing, the most telling and most frustrating, the one I often fixate on for hours at a time, is from a mercifully short-lived blog called freetobeme.com written by none other than Butterfly the Nuddhist. A simple caption (“The infamous Marcus Flutie. ZZZZZZZ. 2–18–03.”) beneath a blurry, too-close photo of Marcus's face, unself-consciously crumpled up in a deep, deep slumber. Such a little thing, this photo, this caption, and yet it alone has inspired so many sleepless nights of tortured inquiry. (Why is he “the infamous” Marcus Flutie? I know why he's notorious around Pineville, but what had he done at Gakkai to earn such a distinction? Or was Butterfly being glib? And why was Butterfly there while he was sleeping? Had she just woken up herself? Had they been sleeping on that couch together . . . ? Etc., etc., etc.) I'm lucky that there are so few paths to search, otherwise I could find myself in an endless labyrinth of links, all yielding more questions than answers. As it is, I find myself poring over these same five listings, over and over and over again until I feel dirty and ashamed, as if I'd spent the whole night jacking off to porn, which, in a way, this has become for me. And yet I can't stop doing it. I compulsively type his name, hoping for a new connection to something, anything related to “Marcus Flutie” because even the most inane tidbit of information would be more than I already have.
Which, I know, will never be enough.
I imagine that I wouldn't be driven to such desperate measures if Marcus had written me letters like he said he would. Instead, he wrote postcards. The first was an old-fashioned black-and-white picture of a medical eye chart, postmarked February 22 from Nuevo Viejo, California:
Jessica—
I
—Marcus
That's it.
Was it a roman numeral one, to signify the first in a series? Or a lowercase L to stand for . . . oh, any number of words that start with L like in that “La La La” song sung by Bert and Ernie? Lightbulb? Lemon drop? Linoleum?
Or . . . love?
Nope. It's none of these. Because it's a capital I, as indicated by the homonymal hint on the front of the card. By “I” was he referring to himself, as the writer of the card? Or was I to read it aloud, so the message refers to the first person “I” as in me?
All this conjecture, you see, is exactly what he, being the Game Master, wants.
Today's postcard is a color photograph of the sky