Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [14]
“I love you, too.”
But this hopeful farewell does little to bring peace of mind, even now. Loving you has never been the problem. What’s troubling me is how loving you may never be enough.
And I have a week to find out why.
sunday: the third
eleven
When I woke up this morning, the first thought that registered was my position. I was on my stomach, legs splayed wide across sheets, arms reaching up and around my pillow. It’s my preferred sleeping pose, one that is impossible to achieve when I’m squeezed into my twin-sized mattress with you, as I found out when I fitfully kneed and elbowed you through the seven nights leading up to your departure.
This sleeping position required the left side of my face to smoosh up against my pillowcase, which prompted the second thought in this particular sequence, in which I remembered my mother’s stern warning that sleeping on my face would destroy my skin’s elasticity, causing deep nasolabial creases and adding years, nay, decades to my appearance.
My customary first-thought-of-the-morning —Goddamn, it’s bright in here!— was bumped to the third spot. As you know, Hope and I have dubbed our sublet bunk bedroom the Cupcake because it is decorated in the juvenile style preferred by its usual tenants, twelve-year-old twin girls whose preference for supersweet ’n’ creamy pastels brings on excruciating visual toothaches. I imagine there’s an ongoing flame war on ParkSlopeParent.com about how these sugary hues reinforce the gender stereotypes that are at the root of all female oppression. I don’t know them, but I love the twins’ two mommies for not giving in to the neighborhood dictum, even if that decision makes for unpleasantly cloying wake-ups.
The significance of the ring on the fourth finger of my left hand was, in fact, my fourth thought of the morning: Marcus asked me to marry him.
I slowly rolled over, looked up, and smiled. Grinning right back at me was none other than Kirk Cameron, so dreamy with his brown puppy-dog eyes, his signature mullet puffing up and over the popped collar of his acid-washed jacket. Kirk had a personal message for me, scribbled with a Sharpie.
JESSICA:
NO “GROWING PAINS,” NO GAINS!
XO, KIRK
I love these messages. I look forward to them the way I used to look forward to getting Hope’s daily e-mails, weekly phone calls, and monthly handwritten letters—the Totally Guilt-Free Guidelines for Keeping in Touch, as they were known—when she moved to Tennessee.
I thumped the top bunk with my foot.
“Hope?” I whispered to counterbalance the kicking, bringing the annoyance factor of this wake-up call down to a more forgivable level. But there was no sign of life coming from above.
I returned my gaze to Kirk’s molten chocolate eyes. Hope and I had only recently inherited a whole archive of late-eighties teenybopper mags —Teen Beat, Tiger Beat— from my sister. They date back about fifteen years, to Bethany’s middle school days, and were in one of the last boxes dragged out of long-term storage after she settled in Brooklyn Heights with her family. As a thirty-three-year-old wife and mother, Bethany determined that she was too grown up for “10 Things You Don’t Know About Ralph Macchio,” and it was finally time to let go of these remembrances of first lusts. Hope and I, at twenty-two, had no such delusions of maturity.
When we hauled them off, a wistful, slightly worried expression dinged my sister’s delicate beauty. She regretted her decision to give them up. She tried to distract herself from the truth by pinching imaginary lint off her crisp pin-tuck capris, or fingertipping stray blond highlights back into place—both hereditary tics passed down from our mother.
“What’s Ralph Macchio’s favorite color?” Hope asked. “Anyone? Anyone?”
“You have visitation rights,” I assured my sister as Hope and I lifted the cardboard box.
Bethany nodded brusquely before providing Hope with the correct answer.
“Ralph Macchio’s favorite color is blue.”
Hope originally said she wanted the magazines because she had some vague idea about using them in