Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [43]
“Hey, Jess!”
“What?”
She raised her arm in the air, as if she were making a toast with an invisible mug. “Coughs on your anus!”
“Coughs on your anus!” I said, seized with gratitude for our friendship. “And Percy’s, too.”
twenty-seven
A Brief and Meaningful Conversation with Marin
“You know what would be awesome?”
“I don’t know, Marin. What would be awesome?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m going to invent it. And if I tell you, you might inventit before I do.”
“I wouldn’t do that!”
“You say that now, but once you hear how awesome it is, you won’t be able to stop yourself, because my idea is just so awesome.”
“Okay, then I’ll just have to wait.”
“Auntie J? Just out of curiationosity…”
“Curiosity.”
“Cure-ee-oss-oh-tee. That’s what I said. Anyway, has anyone ever tried to make a doll that totally knows you and talks and plays like a real sister but you can turn her off when she gets annoying?”
“Like a robot?”
“Yeah! Like a robot sister doll.”
“I think something like that has been invented. But that shows you what an awesome idea it was….”
“Darn it. Grown-ups get to do everything first.”
“You’ll be a grown-up someday.”
“Who cares? By the time I’m a grown-up, everything will already be done already!”
“Marin, I totally know what you mean.”
twenty-eight
I’m aware that the preceding oh-so-twee exchange with Marin is nothing special, the fodder of a bizillion blogging mommies trying to out Dooce one another with tales of their precious, precocious spawn. Or worse, something straight out of the cornball Metropolitan Diary in the New York Times. But such conversations are meaningful to me, if only because I never expected them to mean so much. I love Marin, and value all the time we’ve spent together. She has single-handedly restored the term “awesome” to its fundamental awesomeness, and back from the meaninglessness of mundane misappropriation.
That said…
I’M SO RELIEVED THAT I HAVE A JOB INTERVIEW TOMORROW.
Seriously, after eight months of sponging off my sister, I’ve absorbed about as much guilt as I can handle. I’d hoped that moving out of her place and living on my own would help me feel less like a deadbeat and more like a sister again. This was an idiotic notion. How independent can I feel when Bethany’s exorbitant babysitting wages are the only thing keeping me doggy-paddling above the poverty line? I’m embarrassed for myself every Friday afternoon when I accept a check in the amount of three hundred dollars for ten hours of playing with my niece. This is twice the going rate (fifteen dollars) for babysitting services. And it’s almost one and a half times more than my hourly wage (eighteen dollars) at my “real job.”
I can’t help but use quotations. It feels like a fake job, one I can explain using terms of negation: I’m (minimally) paid for my (quasi) employment at a (micro) magazine with a (barely-there) audience. I am virtually employed in every sense of the word. I don’t commute. I don’t have a cubicle. I don’t have coworkers, which means no office rival to bitch about, no commiserating underling to gossip with, no clueless coworker on the other side of the divide who blasts his iPod too loud, no secretary with Dilbert clippings and I DON’T DO PERKY coffee mugs. It also means no coffee breaks or water-cooler conversation about last night’s episode of, uh, The Office. No staff meetings. No performance reviews. No punching in late or punching out early. There’s scarcely any evidence that I’m actually employed by Think magazine other than the assignments messengered to my apartment, the weekly time sheets I fill out and turn in after messengering back said assignments, and bimonthly paychecks for completing them to my editors’ approval.
Because you displayed a decidedly European indifference to my job, I will now answer all the questions you never asked about it. Every day I get an electronic message (or several) telling me what needs to be done: journals