Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [102]
There’s no sign that Hope had even been here while I was in Pineville. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that she’d pulled an all-nighter at the studio. I have no idea whether Wynn is coming to Sammy for her opening tomorrow night, or whether I need to prepare for a third-wheeler or, perhaps, find alternative accommodations for the weekend.
I don’t know because I didn’t ask.
And I can’t ask now because the battery is still dead on my cell phone, and the Sammy has no landline. And I just tried checking my e-mail for the first time in thirty-six hours, but my laptop is inexplicably frozen, surely infiltrated by an al-Qaedan script kiddie who has deftly hacked through my firewall and is now using my system, and a bizillion others, to bust up Wall Street’s technological infrastructure, shut down the world’s economy, and take out Western civilization once and for all.
Oh, well.
I’ve got about six (or seven because she’s always late) hours before Dexy is supposed to meet me here for the Care. Okay? party. Six (or seven) unfilled hours. And after everything that’s happened this week, I’m taking this opportunity to do nothing at all.
sixty-one
I was having a dream about you and me. About you and me, together, in the bottom bunk. We weren’t having sex, but we were pressing the lengths of our naked bodies up against each other. It was a very vivid dream; I could feel the heat passing between our bodies…the heaviness of your weight on top of me…the hot-wet warmth of your breath on my face…Too vivid…This wasn’t a dream at all…I was…I was being molested in my sleep!
“AHHHHHHHHHH!” I bolted upright, using all my adrenaline to push the rapist off me.
“AHHHHHHHHHH!” Dexy screamed back as she tumbled out of the bottom bunk and onto the ?oor.
Dexy. It was Dexy. In my bed with me.
“Dexy! Christ! I thought you were a rapist!”
“You looked so snuggly!” she said, straightening her platinum-blond feathered wig, which had gone askew in the fall. This was as close as she would get to an apology. Dexy doesn’t believe in apologies. “I’m so happy to see you!” she said, scrambling to her feet. “Aren’t you proud of me? I’m on time! Which means I’m early!”
“How did you get in?” I said, still groggy.
“Manda let me in!” She leaned back and appraised my cutoff jean shorts and the DONUT HO’ T-shirt I had put on out of utter necessity because I still hadn’t done my laundry. “I love that T-shirt! Donut Ho’!” She tipped back her head and laughed: HAW HAW HAW. “But you’re not wearing it out tonight. Oh! I love donuts with sprinkles! I’m starving. Seriously, where did you get that shirt? Do you have anything to eat?” Dexy’s conversation ping-ponged more than Marin’s. And even more so than usual. “I brought you a fabulous outfit!” She held up a plastic shopping bag, and then, as always, she broke out into a horribly off-key song. This time, Madonna.
“Gonna dress you up with my love! All over! All over!”
She pulled me up out of the bunk by the shoulders and steered me into our kitchenette. Then she opened up the refrigerator door and started foraging for food.
“Speaking of fabulous outfits…,” Manda spoke up from her favorite spot on the couch. Dexy had poured her curves into a liquid gold asymmetrical minidress, looking every bit the Studio 54 coke whore. “You’d totally fit in at Fuckyomomma in that. I could get you in, if you’d like….”
I couldn’t tell if Manda was being friendly or, uh, flirtatious. Manda had said that she was drawn to Shea’s liberated id. Well, Dexy has been celebrating the emancipation of me! me! for as long as I’ve known her. And since first finding out about Manda’s own robust sexuality, Dexy has been competing against her in a one-sided HOlympics. (“You’ve only got room for one token slut in your life…and that’s me!”) If they ever got together—oh, sweet baby Jesus—it would be a most unholy alliance: The Axis of Skeevil.
“Oh, this old thing,” Dexy demurred, still half inside our refrigerator. She picked up one of Manda’s organic yogurts, frowned at the expiration date, then put it back. Then to me: “I was