Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [6]
I met Young Natty’s parents briefly that morning during the move-in. His dad was an alum, Princeton Class of 1970, a doctor whose substantial belly and crimson face were at odds with his profession. He looked more like a suckling pig on a spit than the go-to guy for medical advice. Young Natty’s stepmother was about twenty years his father’s junior, and most of her remastered face and body were significantly younger than that. Her lips were inflated into such a trout pout that I didn’t know whether to offer lip gloss or tarter sauce. Mrs. Addison hadn’t mentioned her career, but if this hot-rollered platinum blonde wasn’t a former beauty queen—Miss Alabama Blackberry 1985—then she had tragically missed her true calling. Dr. and Mrs. Addison were professionally pleasant, and yet their rhinestone smiles couldn’t hide the horror—oh, the horror—over their son’s being randomly assigned to room with this hirsute and tattooed man of sketchy provenance and dubious sanitation who arrived on campus parentless, with little more than two dusty duffel bags and an unsmiling girlfriend. Perhaps Dr. Addison should have contributed a more substantive alumni gift to Princeton’s coffers.
I gave you a look heavy with meaning. It’s the type of look that only long-term couples understand, or half-understand in this case. You knew what I wanted you to say, but alas, not why I wanted you to say it.
“Natty?”
He looked up at you, then me, then again at you. I didn’t get a gay vibe from Young Natty, but that wouldn’t stop him from falling totally heterosexually in luuurrrve with you.
Young Natty caught on quickly. “Sho-wah thang,” he said affably, but I’m pretty sure that he says everything affably. “Ah was a-baht finished up he-ah anah-ways.” He slapped his laptop shut, grabbed his messenger bag, and headed out the door with a goofball grin. You offered a convivial pat on the shoulder as he passed.
“Thanks, man.”
“Sho-wah thang,” he said to you. Then to me: “Sho-wah was a pleh-shuh, Jess Darlin’…”
I blinked hard in disbelief.
Young Natty’s words transported me back six years, to one of my first encounters with you, in the principal’s office of Pineville High School. A cornball secretary, not usually graced by the presence of straight-A students with spotless transcripts, had just expressed surprise to see me. “Well, if it isn’t Jess Darling!” Moments later, you—whom no one was ever surprised to see in the principal’s office—mimicked her hokey delivery. “Ain’t you Jess Darling?” But it came out sounding like “Ain’t you jus’ darlin’!” A drawling, Confederate mockery of my name.
Months later, when the Brainiac and the Dreg were talking every night on the phone yet still not acknowledging each other in school, you said my last name over and over and over again —darlingdarlingdarlingdarling— until it morphed into something else: Darlene. For a while, that was my nickname, which you claimed was a representation of my trashier alter ego. This was still a year before we slept together, and I’m sure you were using the powers of nomen et omen to hurry up and get inside my pants already.
I looked at you today, hoping for a mutual, miraculous remembrance that might have given me a reason not to fulfill the breakup prophecy. It was a futile wish, as I knew that such mind-melding was impossible, even among symbiotically entwined lovers, even among soul mates, as my thirteen-year-old self would have earnestly put it. And yet I was still disappointed to see no sign of the shared recollections, only you smiling at Young Natty’s back