Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [107]
“I can’t have fun because you’re scaring me,” I muttered to myself, though she didn’t hear me over the music. I just braced myself against the small windowsill, practically hiding behind the wholesome pink-and-white-checked curtains as I watched and listened to Dexy’s atonal disco ball bacchanal. I was worried that she was working herself up to a monumental breakdown. I’d seen Dexy break down before, the summer before our junior year of college, and it was preceded by an atomic-bomb flash of brief and immeasurable energy.
Dexy finally opened her eyes and saw me cowering behind the gingham curtains. Her expression turned serious in a way I was unaccustomed to seeing. She turned off the music.
“Okay,” she said in a defeated tone. “You win. I’ll tell you the truth.”
This promise of total disclosure caught me utterly by surprise. She took my hand and led me to the bottom bunk. We sat down together, so close that our knees bumped. She opened her mouth, and just when I thought she’d confess that yes, she’d been blowing rails all afternoon, she went a whole other way.
“I’m not boning a sexygenarian.”
“You’re not?”
“No,” she said glumly, resting her elbows on her knees. “Never was.” She placed her chin in the cradle of her hands, like a kid soured by a time-out for bad behavior.
“So you don’t live in his apartment with views of Gramercy Park?”
She looked up at me forlornly through her fake eyelashes. “The Gramercy Park part is true, but the daddy paying my rent is my biological dad, not some sick Freudian substitute. And it’s not a chic pied-à-terre, but a single room in the Parkside Magdalene Home for Young Businesswomen.”
“The wha—?”
“The Parkside Magdalene Home for Young Businesswomen,” she repeated. “It’s a hotel for women run by the Salvation Army.”
It took a second for this to sink in. And when it did, I crashed back onto the bed in hysterics.
“Dexy!” I blurted, in between bursts of laughter. “Only you would be more ashamed of living at a hotel for women than prostituting yourself to a geezer!”
“It’s worse than Bible college! No men allowed past the lobby! I haven’t been laid in three months! That’s my longest dry spell since I was fifteen!”
“Is anything on your blog true?”
“My name is Dexy,” she said. She tapped her wig in thought. “And I do work in retail, just not at a sex shop. I work…” She took a deep, deep breath. “You must promise not to laugh.”
I had barely recovered from my last fit, but I pressed my lips together and held up two fingers in Scouts Honor.
“I mean it, J,” she said sharply. “You. Can. Not. Laugh. Not so much as a giggle or a twitter or a snort.”
I nodded solemnly, seriously, but a smile already twitched in the corners of my mouth.
“I work at the Gap.”
There was one second of silence—my attempt to be the kind of friend who pledges not to laugh and actually makes good on it—followed by five straight minutes of hysteria because I am not the kind of friend who can not laugh at something so ludicrous as the idea of Dexy—dramatic, costumed, whole-wide-world-is-her-stage Dexy—peddling the khakis and cords and T-shirts that are the staples of my unimaginative wardrobe.
“You promised!” she exclaimed, before giving in to the laughter herself. The bunk bed nearly collapsed from the thunderous gut-busting reverberations. “I know! It’s the least creative job in the world. And Janeane Garofolo hated her job at the Gap in Reality Bites, like, a decade ago, so it’s not even creative as a form of humiliation!”
“So you make up all this stuff because—”
She interrupted me. “Because I’m so fucking boring!” she cried. “I’m not living this awesome, scandalous life. I’m living a boring, totally chaste life, and I’m required to wear hideously boring khakis and T-shirts while doing it!” We both glanced at the hideously boring khakis and T-shirts overflowing from the hamper. “No offense, Jess.”
“None taken.”
“Can you blame me for wanting drama? Inventing a life?”
At first I was mystified. How could she have possibly