Charmed Thirds_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [98]
The only response to such a sight?
“AIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
And the slam of the front door.
I stood on the front steps and contemplated my next move. Should I stare into the sun until my retinas sizzle? Or play dead in a snowbank and wait for the crows to pluck out my eyeballs? I could always stab myself in the corneas with an icicle hanging from the portico . . .
Of course, these solutions weren't solutions at all. I could destroy my vision, but I could never blind my mind's eye. The memory of what I had just seen (and heard! shudder!) would surely stay with me until the day I died. Oh yes. Let's just bypass the obvious, Freudian ways in which it would show up unannounced—BAM!—and ruin all my future sexual activities. It will most certainly pop up when it's most unexpected and inappropriate, like when I'm contemplating the long-term impact of right-wing appointments to the Supreme Court, just to remind me that it—BAM!—is still here. Years might go by, and I might be on the verge of not even remembering that I had been witness to such horror and—BAM!—the memory will surely come back in all its shame.
Then I had a thought: Maybe I was at the wrong house!
I'm still getting used to my parents' condo on the bay in the appropriately named Bayside section of Pineville. Yes, Pineville. You would think that with all this talk about following one's dreams, it might have led my mother further afield. But no, it brought her just five minutes away from their old house in Pineville, albeit in a decidedly higher tax bracket because many Manhattan commuters are buying in this area, one of the last underdeveloped waterfronts in the state.
They bought something called the Belize Royale model, which I thought was just about the most ridiculous sounding thing ever, especially when I found out that the only thing that makes it different from the regular old Belize model is an extra half bath (which prompted my dad and me to joke about “taking a Royale,” which my mother did not think was at all funny). The inside looks exactly like every other condo I've ever been in: white walls, hardwood floors, stainless steel appliances. Everything so new and so . . . cold. Obviously, I have another reason for not getting too excited about the place: I associate it with the education my parents aren't paying for. That Jacuzzi tub? Six credits! Those marble countertops? Nine credits! The vaulted ceiling upgrade? Twelve credits!
From the outside you can't tell the difference between a Royale and a non-Royale because association rules dictate that each two-story town house must look exactly like every other unit: a boxy, two-story structure with gray vinyl siding, white shutters, and a redbrick front porch. So it was entirely possible that I'd gotten confused and had walked in on some other geriatrics getting their freak on. It wasn't my parents after all! Whew!
I had all but convinced myself of this less nauseating reality when my mother came to the door in her robe, my father following close behind in a T-shirt and sweats.
“Jessie, honey,” she said, her voice straining for wholesome normalcy. “You came home early.”
And I was afraid to open my mouth, aware of how close I was to projectile vomiting on them. It was the most uncomfortable moment in my life, and any reader of the journal knows that this is saying quite a lot. Leave it to my mother to amp up the awkwardness to a whole new intolerable level.
“If we had known, we would have sped things up . . .”
“Moooooom.” My bowels bellowed inside me. “Don't say another word about it.”
“Since we moved in here it's been like a second honeymoon!”
“But you've lived here since September!”
She sighed and brought her hand to her chest in a swoon. “I know.”
My knees buckled. I liked it so much better when I thought my parents were headed for divorce. “Dad! Make her stop! She's killing me!”
My dad couldn't look me in the eyes. “It's obvious that Jessie is upset . . .”
“Upset? She should be happy!”
“I'm clinically dead,” I whimpered.
“You should be happy that you have