Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [20]
The city’s stratospheric rents make for bizarre living arrangements. And I know you’ll disagree, but by New York standards our story is not at all unusual. One of the twins’ two mommies is Manda’s aunt, the out-of-the-country academic. Manda and Shea met posing in an all-nude photo shoot for Rut, “the high-minded hard-core magazine for the Rutgers University community.” After graduating in May, the former sexhibitionist offered the latter the opportunity to share bedroom #1. For a little more than a month, the second bedroom (ours) was occupied by a barista of Swedish stock and his vegan-chef boyfriend, until they suddenly decided that they’d rather tour the country promoting alternative fuels in a VW bus pimped out to run only on recycled vegetable oil.
News spreads fast around our small hometown, especially around college graduation time. All parents want proof that the diploma they paid for was a smart investment, and they need to find out whether the neighbors’ kids have better post-college prospects than their own. My mother will shamelessly grill any Pineville mom on how and where her child is making a living, which is fairly infuriating because my parents stopped paying for my Columbia education after my sophomore year. But if it weren’t for that Pineville parent-to-parent gossip hotline, it’s unlikely that Manda would have discovered that Hope and I were tired of living with my sister (me) and crashing on floors and futons (Hope) and were looking for an affordable (ha!) apartment just about anywhere in the city. Manda texted me: apt 550 mo. r u/hope swdsh?
Yes, I needed an apartment. And $550 was a price I could sort of afford, that is, until my student loan payments bumped up to match my “elevated earning potential,” as the loan officers very optimistically put it. But was I or Hope…what? Single White Divorcees Seeking Husbands? Swinging Women Doing Sexy Homos? Single White Dick Sucking Heteros?
It’s indicative of my desperation for affordable housing that I didn’t ignore Manda’s cryptic and possibly kinky message altogether. ok. wtf swdsh?
After Manda explained Ursula’s Swedish clause via e-mail, I called Hope in Rhode Island to give her the bad news.
“We can’t get the apartment unless you just so happen to be part Swedish.”
“I am part Swedish,” she said. “On my mother’s side.”
“No way.”
“Yes way,” she said. “Her maiden name is Johansson.”
I loved that I didn’t know this about her, as it hinted at all the other things I had yet to discover about my best friend of ten years.
As I just documented, one week later Hope and I traveled to Brooklyn and fell in love with SAMSS. We were nervous about the prospect of moving in with Manda but figured it was safer than finding someone through Craigslist. (“Better the nympho you know,” was our motto at the time.) We moved in two weeks later, constantly joking about how Manda and Shea might try to seduce us into their ominsexual union.
Manda and Shea work the eight P.M. to four A.M. shift at Cave, a hipster sinkhole in Bushwick known for hosting a retarded carnival of pointless posturing known as Fuckyomomma.
WILLIAMSBURG=HIPSTERS WITH TRUST FUNDS
BUSHWICK=HIPSTERS WITHOUT TRUST FUNDS PRICED OUT OF
WILLIAMSBURG
I have kindly declined Manda’s invitations, but I’ve bled out the eyes as she’s shown me digital picture after picture of wannabe or slumming Williamsturdburgers trying too hard to outdo one another in their kaffiyeh neck scarves, scraggly crustaches, and Jheri-curl mullets. This morning Manda was wearing the omnipresent terry-cloth headband with a red velour strapless booty-short romper. It’s an altogether frightening