Charmed Thirds_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [90]
“This,” Paul said proudly, as we approached a petite woman with perfect posture and jet-black hair cropped in expensive face-framing chunks, “is Cinthia Wallace.”
Well, I'll be goddiggitydamned. They say politics make strange bedfellows, but I couldn't imagine a more unpredictable threesome than Paul Parlipiano, Miss Hyacinth Anastasia Wallace, and me.
She floated toward me on the gossamer wings of her red-white-and-blue cashmere cobweb poncho.
“Hey there, Jess.” Her smile was more dazzling than the diamond chandelier earrings shooting off fireworks under the lights.
“Hi, Hy,” I said. “Uh, I mean, Cinthia. Small world.”
Hy embraced me warmly.
“But I wouldn't want to paint it,” I added, backing out of her arms.
“Huh?” said Hy and Paul.
“Uh,” I replied. “My grandmother Gladdie used to say that. Uh, because the world is small, but it's still pretty big.”
I can always be counted on to say something corny at the precise moment it's required of me to assume an above-it-all air.
“My mother says that if the world seems small, it's because your world is small.”
Hy's mother, it should be noted, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet.
“Did you know that Hy wrote a book about Pineville High School?” Paul asked. “How wild is that?”
What? How could Paul not have known?
Then I remembered: When the news hit, I was only a junior, still gasping from the social stranglehold Pineville High had on me. Paul was about to start at Columbia, about to come out of the closet, about to embark on his new identity as a social activist. He had already put petty Pineville life behind him. Basically, Paul has been so busy acting globally that he's had no time for thinking locally.
Hy clenched her jaw, not in anger, but as if to prepare herself for whatever I might say in response. Her book, as embarrassing as it was when it first came out, had little effect on my life now. How could I still harbor a grudge all these years later?
“I know,” I said, finally. “It was pretty good, too.”
Hy groaned. “No, it wasn't. They should have a law against seventeen-year-olds publishing novels. It was just so . . . uninformed.”
When she said that, I suddenly realized that Hy had dropped the round-the-way-girl dialect immortalized in her novel and was talking in plain English. I had never had a conversation with this person before.
“Would you want your thoughts at seventeen read by the world?”
I shook my head as I recalled the journal from my own seventeenth year, the one I shredded because I didn't want anyone to read it, myself included.
“I'm lucky Miramax is tanking,” she said. “The film will never get released.”
“Was it that bad?” I asked.
Hy held her nose. “A stinker.”
Bridget will be so disappointed that she'll never get to see it.
“The irony is,” she said, “now that I have something important to write about, publishers don't want anything to do with me! I pitched a book about inspiring political activism in young adults, and the editors were all, like, ‘Will you pose naked, draped in an American flag for the cover?'” She shrugged in that fatigued way that beautiful women do when they are only wanted for their bodies, not their minds. Bridget shrugs like this a lot.
“So how's Columbia?” she asked.
“Awesome,” I replied, like I always do.
And then she told me that she'd love to talk to me more but as the founder of Beautiful People Against Bush and the organizer of the party, she was expected to mingle. As the collegiate cochair, Paul was obliged to do the same. I was sure they were blowing me off. But then Hy squeezed my hand in an unexpected, sincere way.
“I really hope our paths cross again, Jess.”
“You know, they almost crossed once before,” I said.
“I'm sure they have. But when?”
“We almost overlapped at True.”
“Really? I never knew you worked there.”
I sheepishly looked at the floor. “I never wrote anything.”
Hy laughed. “Neither did I! Tyra wanted me to do this piece about guido culture that was just so derivative of my badly written book. I turned her down.”
“Hm,” was all I could say. I thought the idea had been swiped