Charmed Thirds_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [65]
Jessica—
WISH
—Marcus
I WISH, I WISH, I WISH . . . You know those magic photos that look like a blobby nothing, then you stare at it until your eyes cross and suddenly a dinosaur or whatever pops up and reveals itself and you can't believe you didn't see it right away? That's how I felt when I read this word, instantly realizing that these weren't one-word messages Marcus was sending me, but part of a larger message that he wanted to reveal bit by bit over time.
I WISH . . .
I WISH I KNEW WHAT THE HELL HE WANTED.
“He wants me to know that he's thinking of me, but he doesn't want me to know what he's thinking.” I was sounding more and more like someone you'd cross the street to avoid. Meanwhile, my friend Dexy was rummaging through the piles of un-put-away clothes on my floor, humming a tune as inscrutable as Marcus's postcards. She was in a key that Philip Glass wouldn't even think to invent, like Q minor.
“Am I supposed to use these as mantras for Buddhist meditation or something?”
Dexy held a note. F bumpy.
“At least I know he's out there somewhere.”
Dexy stopped humming and started singing. “Somewhere out there, beneath the pale moonlight!”
Dexy has lyrics for every occasion. She is a very enthusiastic singer. This is unfortunate because she is also a very terrible singer, which, coming from me, is saying a lot about her lack of musicianship. So, so, so painful are the sounds that assault us from the depths of musical hell, which, apparently, has a studio located directly inside Dexy's voicebox. She makes ears bleed, and yet she just loves to sing, and so she sings loudly and often and one day hopes to be good enough to make the bad singers montage on American Idol. She was rejected by every a cappella group on campus from the badly punned Uptown Vocal to the even worsely punned Clefhangers. But there were no hard feelings. Dexy is an a cappella groupie and sleeps with tenors and basses and those who “percuss.” Unless Spelling Bee bitches exist, this makes her the geekiest kind of groupie one can possibly be.
“Wanna go to Tom's for a black-and-white?” Dexy asked, uninspired by my collection of T-shirts and jeans. This chocolate and vanilla shake is the magical elixir, the cure for any problem, be it a bombed exam or the endless aftershocks of a nonbreakup breakup. It must be nice to be such a blithe spirit.
“We can't,” I said, glancing at my watch. “We have the hall meeting.” Dexy and I were lucky enough to be assigned rooms on the same floor for the summer, and we were supposed to meet with the RA.
Dexy buzzed a loud, wet raspberry in my direction. “There's plenty of time!”
Dexy is unmoved by such pedestrian concerns as punctuality. She's always late because she's always cramming just one more thing into a life with a staggering surfeit of places to go and people to see. That I am one of those people still surprises me. I was just one in a classroom full of students fulfilling their course requirement with a Biology class, and I'm not sure what inspired her to sit next to me. For my part, I was kind of looking for a new best friend at school after Jane proved to be less than sympathetic, I daresay enthusiastic, about the nonbreakup breakup.
“He's so pretentious, J,” Jane had said when I told her about Marcus's departure. “And so self-absorbed! He couldn't have been less interested in getting to know me.”
When she was unable to see that she had just effectively and unintentionally described her own heinous boyfriend, I realized I didn't have it in me to pretend I was her best friend anymore. I cowardly used “stress” (academic stress, work stress, breakup stress, terrorist stress, fill-in-the-blank stress) as a convenient, catchall excuse for not hanging out. It didn't take long—only a few weeks—before Jane finally gave up and moved on, which pretty much proves how tenuous our friendship was in the first place.
Dexy, on the other hand, lent a supportive, albeit tone-deaf