Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [72]
“What was once the future is now the past…”
Then you took Hope’s hand and you sang together.
“On and on and on we go…And every day we grooooooooow…”
Make no mistake. It was a terrible song. It was a terrible song that has been written countless times by countless hacks before Mrs. Kornakavitch came along. But when you two harmonized, I not only found religion, but I swear I was in rapture. You took the high part and Hope took the low part, and together you created the purest sound I’ve ever heard.
The symphonic ecstasy was short-lived, however, because the rest of the class joined you on the cacophonous chorus:
“School memories we hold so dear, year after year after year!”
You and Hope were still center stage, holding hands under the spotlight. It was the first time I’d ever noticed that you were redheads from opposite sides of the color wheel. Hope’s hair was a yellow-red, closer to orange, hot. You were a blue-red, closer to purple, cool.
“You and Marcus were always so cute together,” Manda said to Hope.
(It was the “always” that first captured, and then refused to relinquish, dominion over my imagination.)
“Those two were inseparable back then,” Manda said to me with a know-it-all air.
“Really?” I asked, looking at Hope, whose eyes stuck to the TV screen.
“Oh, yeah,” Manda said, answering for Hope. “Hope and Marcus were quite the little item at our elementary school.” She assumed a guise of openmouthed, wide-eyed innocence. “You didn’t know?”
“No,” Hope and I replied. We then glanced at each other with a mutual but rare and strange unease.
“I know you don’t like to talk about the whole proposal thing,” Manda said to me, “but you should know that Marcus has been married before…to Hope!”
Hope muttered a faint complaint. “Manda, please…”
Manda was having too much fun to be stopped. “We had a little ceremony on the baseball diamond in fifth grade. The altar was home plate. Hope wore a toilet-paper veil. Marcus offered a ring made of one of those pull-tops off a soda can. I was a bridesmaid with a yellow dandelion bouquet.”
Hope blinked her eyes slowly, almost too slowly to be considered a blink.
I had never heard about any of this. From either one of you. As far as I knew, your only connection to Hope was the dishonorable, drug-addled friendship with Heath that began when you were thirteen and ended when he died. As far as I knew, you had only exchanged unpleasantries with Hope on a handful of occasions, and always in the context of having nothing in common other than your admiration and adoration of her deeply flawed but charismatic older brother.
As far as I knew.
“Well, I’m sure they both forgot….” There was a sly, singsongy lilt to Manda’s voice. She was dropping hints no one was picking up, so she clapped her hands to indicate an abrupt change of subject. “I never forgot the time Marcus totally tried to have sex with me.”
Hope’s head almost unscrewed from her neck. “Manda!”
“It was a beach party the summer after freshman year,” Manda buzzed. “He was high on God knows what, and spouted off poetry to try to impress me.”
I said nothing, somehow intuiting that this wasn’t the big secret destined to be revealed. I mean, of course you tried to have sex with Manda. Of course you read poetry to her, because you often read melancholy poetry to your would-be conquests, ripping off lines from Rimbaud (“Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter…”) or Jim Morrison-ripping-off-Rimbaud (“The days are bright and filled with pain…”) and trying to pass them off as your own. Sometimes, though not as often, the verse was your own (“We are Adam and Eve, born out of chaos called creation…”). These seductive tactics usually worked wonders, though not on the spectacularly dumb ones who thought you were a freak, a Dreg, and would have preferred *NSYNC (“How can it be that right here with me there’s an angel…?”) instead.
Manda’s bosom heaved in heavy-breathing anticipation of my response. Hope sat in a—could it be?—lotus position, with her eyes cast down at her hands tucked inside the bottom of her paint-stained T-shirt.