Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [121]
“You have to imagine the worst that could happen,” Hope said. “How would you feel if you found out Marcus had fallen madly in love with someone totally unlike you?”
I opened my mouth, then shut it just as quickly. I didn’t have the nerve to tell Hope the truth about her hypothetical. That I had already, in fact, imagined the very worst thing that could happen. I had already imagined you falling madly in love with someone totally unlike me.
I had imagined you falling in love with her.
“Let Marcus go,” Hope said softly. “Say no.”
Hope is the first, the only, person brave enough to say it.
“Let him go without assuming he’ll come back anytime soon, or that you’ll even want him if he does. Because clinging to each other is only making both of you unhappy. It’s preventing you both from living the lives you want to live right now, and being the people you want to be.”
“But we let go of each other in college,” I tried. “We didn’t speak—”
“No you didn’t,” she interrupted. “He might have left, but you never let each other go.”
“But—”
“The postcards, Jess. Him sending them. You receiving them. That was not letting go.”
She’s right. I never let you go. I never stopped thinking about you. My mind was with you, three thousand miles away, and not in Manhattan. It’s no wonder that my most significant relationships predate my college years—I was never fully committed to creating a whole new life for myself at Columbia. And you don’t need a psychology degree from an Ivy League university to tell you that those unpacked boxes in the corner now reflect an unabated ambivalence toward Brooklyn.
“I’ve been thinking about those postcards a lot lately,” I said, running my finger along those images—the medical eye chart, the starry sky, the globe, the Parisian lovers, the hourglass, the ©, the National Organization of Women—pinned to the corkboard next to my bed. “I thought for sure Marcus would send me one while he was away.”
“‘Forever,’” Hope said.
“What?” I asked. “Did I tell you about that?”
“No,” she said. “But it makes sense. ‘Forever.’ That’s what he said when he proposed. It’s just so…”
“Marcus,” I said.
A car alarm suddenly whoop-whoop-whooped outside our window and was silenced just as quickly.
“He really hasn’t changed since I’ve known him,” Hope said. “None of us have.”
“I’ll try not to be insulted.”
“Think about it,” she said. “You’ve always had the cynical eye of a skeptic, but the optimistic heart of—”
“Of a fanny-packing tourist.”
We laughed into our pillowcases for a moment or two.
“You don’t think Marcus has changed? Even though he’s been clean for six years?”
“I know Marcus is drug-free,” she said, her voice rising slightly. “His behavior has changed, but I don’t think he has changed.”
“How can you say that?” I said, getting all twitchy and hot. “All Marcus does is change!”
“Right! He’s always changing,” she said with an emphatic kick of the mattress. “He’s constantly changing.”
“That’s an oxymoron,” I said.
“One that applies to his need for peak experiences,” Hope said simply.
“What?”
“Marcus is always chasing peak experiences,” she said. “The high of the good-bye, the rush of the reunion. He doesn’t do well with the mediums or the in-betweens. He never has.” She exhaled deeply. “When we were kids, months would go by when he would suddenly stop coming over my house. He wouldn’t even talk to me in school. And just when I would give up and think our friendship was over, he’d be on our front-door step with a crushed daisy in his hand, begging me to come out and look for dead bugs for his Venus flytrap.”
A few days ago, such a comparison would have sent me into a rage. How dare Hope equate your playdates to a proposal. But now I can see it’s all part of the pattern, one your own brother had warned me about:
CONNECTION
SEPARATION
CONNECTION
SEPARATION…
“You don’t have to agree with me, but I think the heart of who we are stays pretty much the same,” Hope said. “What changes is how these core traits manifest themselves over time.”
“The heart?