Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [11]
A betrothal, even one as simple as yours, is a pretty theatrical gesture. And you love theatrics. I think of you at seventeen, fresh out of rehab and standardized-tested into the realm of misunderstood genius, making your debut in our junior honors classes wearing an über-nerdy jacket and tie. You’ve always gotten a lot of shock value out of embracing, and thereby subverting, the mainstream. Young marriage has come full circle, from an act of tradition (marrying to unite family assets), to an act of rebellion (marrying to escape the family), back to tradition (marrying to have a family), and now rebellion once more (marrying because why the fuck not?). What’s more punk rock than getting married? Why else would so many barely legal celebrity skankbots make and break so many engagements?
So that’s all your proposal was to me at that point, just another entertaining act in the ongoing performance art of being Marcus Flutie.
“Marry me,” you repeated.
“Sure!”
“Sure?”
You were skeptical of my speedy acquiescence.
“Sure! I’ll marry you and we can adopt Young Natty and raise him as our own!”
“I refuse to be fazed by your sarcasm,” you said. “Marry me, and we’ll work out the details later.”
“Okay, Marcus. Har-dee-har-har. Game over.”
“This isn’t a game.”
“You’re trivializing what was not an easy decision for me….”
“I wouldn’t call a marriage proposal trivial.”
“It is when you’re asking me to marry you just so I won’t break up with you!”
“I’m simply following your all-or-nothing rule.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Let’s choose all over nothing.”
You wanted to get a reaction out of me and you were succeeding on a biological level. My palms were sweating, my pupils were dilating, my nostrils were flaring. And goddiggitydammit, my heart was booming.
“Don’t take this the wrong way…,” I began.
“I’ll try not to.”
“But I can think of a bizillion reasons why marrying you is the worst idea ever.”
“Now, how could I possibly take that the wrong way?” You smiled. “Just give me five.”
“One: You are a twenty-three-year-old college freshman. Two: I don’t want to move to Princeton and you hate New York. Hello? It’s 2006, not 1956! That makes three. And you’re only asking me to marry you because you don’t want me to break up with you. Four. And then there’s number five.” I took a bracing breath. “I don’t even believe in marriage.”
(Not only do I not believe in marriage, but when I looked down at my newly adorned finger, I couldn’t stop myself from conjuring morbid till-death-do-us-part metaphors, like The leather string hangs from the ring like a slackened noose. How’s that for romantic?)
When it was clear that you were just going to keep smiling at me, I was forced to fill the silence with stupidity.
“I mean, there’s a reason it’s called the institution of marriage….”
You mercifully cut me off before I finish the hackneyed joke about the mental instability of brides and grooms.
“Okay, you can think of—how many was it, a bizillion?—reasons why you shouldn’t marry me. But I can think of one reason why you should.”
“And what is that?”
The sun had shifted through the slats, adorning your serene, smiling face with an orangey-gold halo.
“Forever.”
You said it without hesitation. “Forever” is how you have signed most of your correspondences with me, from your short entry in my senior yearbook (“There is nothing that I can write in here that I won’t be able to tell you in person….”) to the dedication to this very notebook. But it’s the as-of-yet unwritten FOREVER that immediately sprung to mind.
nine
Your postcards are tacked to a corkboard beside my bed, picture-side up. The seven images