Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [113]
Me: That sucks! I totally know what you’re going through!
Cinthia: You do?
Me: Oh, yeah! Totally!
Cinthia: Your foot got caught in a bear trap? And it turned gangrenous?
Me: No!
Cinthia: No?
Me: No! But one time I got a pedicure and the bitch clipped my pinky toenail way too low.
Cinthia: Gee whiz, I’m so lucky to have such an empathetic friend like you.
Okay, this conversation never happened, but honestly, I wouldn’t put it past me. As this fictional yet totally possible example illustrates, all my “empathy” accomplishes is taking the conversation away from the aggrieved party and back to me, me, me. Surely this has always been a deficit in my personality, and it’s why I’ll never further my studies in psychology to become a professional counselor/therapist/psychoanalyst. So I was speaking from experience when I told Cinthia that she was talking out both sides of her mouth.
“You can’t throw parties like this, with tabloid favorites like her,” I said, pointing to the stage, “and then lament about the death of serious discourse. You can’t have it both ways. Your intentions are good, but your execution could be better. And I should know, because I feel like my entire life is comprised of good intentions with suck-ass execution….”
“What did you just say?” Cinthia asked, eyes afire. She didn’t sound angry, but I was afraid I’d offended her. I suddenly got all flustered.
“Uh…Suck-ass execution?”
“No, before that. You said my intentions were good but that I could do better! That’s amazing! Amazing!”
“Uh…”
“Because that’s what I want to name my new association.”
“Amazing?” I asked.
“No!” Cinthia was shaking her head so wildly, her chandelier earrings slapped against her cheeks. “Do-Better.”
“Do-Better?”
“As in better than do-gooder. As in make the world a better place.” She slapped her hands on the table. “I knew it!” She beamed at me with her Baccarat teeth. “I knew I could count on you to tell me the truth. I have always admired your candor, Jessica. I wanted you to come here tonight and tell me what no one else had the balls to say. I’m looking for people like you to help me get Do-Better off the ground.”
“Uh, what exactly is Do-Better?” I asked.
“As you probably know, I inherited an obscene amount of money from my capitalist pig of an absentee father.”
Dexy broke in, unable to stop herself. “How much? I heard it was fifty million.”
Cinthia didn’t bat an eyelash. “More.”
“More, more, more!” Dexy squawked. “How do you like it? How do you like it?”
“Way more,” Cinthia said, already learning how to ignore Dexy. “The media analysis was all about, you know, the wayward paterfamilias trying to overcompensate for leaving me and my mother when I was still in preschool, but they were wrong. He knew the money would make me uncomfortable, and he just wanted to make me squirm, even after they sealed his tomb.”
Yes, Cinthia’s family is so dysfunctional that even a multimillion-dollar inheritance could be interpreted as a wicked “Fuck you!”
“Anyway, I wanted nothing to do with it. Don’t get me wrong, I know that even without his blood money I’m still grossly wealthy. But how much money does a person need? Seriously. I knew right away that I was going to give it all away.”
“All of it?” I asked.
“Every penny,” Cinthia said.
“Can I have some?” This from Dexy, of course.
“The people with power are the people with money….”
“I WANT THE POWER!”
“There aren’t enough of us trying to improve life, not just for the select few but for everyone. We live in the richest country in the world and we are only serving the top one percent of our own citizens. The majority of people in this county can’t afford health insurance. Or quality child care. They can’t pay for college without going into catastrophic debt. And I can’t even get into our appalling attitudes about poverty abroad.” She sipped her club soda.
“It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the things going wrong in the world.” This from me.
“I know. So many fucked-up things, and even with my inheritance, not enough money to fix them