Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [73]
“Oh, it’s okay,” I said, meaning every word. “I’m not surprised. Marcus got in some serious play before he met me, and I don’t doubt that he hit on you when he was still using. He probably doesn’t even remember doing it.”
(Do you? Actually, forget I even asked. It really doesn’t matter.)
“Hmm,” Manda said, “casually” extending her arms toward the ceiling. “Would he remember something that happened a few days ago?”
Hope’s eyes swelled and her mouth hung open. And that’s when I realized that she and Manda were having a totally different conversation.
“Is there something going on here that I don’t know about?”
“No!” Hope said.
“Yes!” Manda said.
Outside, the skies rumbled and rolled like an express train barreling through a local station.
“It’s not what you think,” Hope said quietly.
“I’m not thinking anything!” I said loudly.
(This was a lie. My mind was reeling with sordid possibilities.)
“Marcus knew,” Hope said.
“Marcus knew what?” I asked, getting more desperate by the second.
“He knew that you wanted to break up with him,” Hope said.
“How?” I asked.
“Because I told him.”
On cue, a thunderbolt tore open the heavens, unleashing a torrent of rain.
forty-three
And that’s when Hope told me everything, or rather, her adaptation of “everything.” And I was going to document it for you word for agonizing word, you know, for posterity, but I just don’t have it in me. Besides, I don’t need to transcribe Hope’s version of your conversation because you were there. Here’s what I know:
After the Shit Lit Hissy Fit, you came back to the apartment all by yourself. You didn’t have a key. You were lucky Hope was there.
Lucky, indeed.
You were upset. You didn’t understand how an evening that had offended you on so many levels could be fun for me. You needed someone to talk to about the growing distance between us, and not just in terms of geography. Since coming off of the silence and solitude of Death Valley, you just couldn’t handle the city’s relentless overstimulation, or understand why I thrived on it.
When I think about you having your Shit Lit Hissy Fit, I can still see you twitching and fidgeting, all five senses shaken up from the inside out. You clasped your hands over your ears, closed your eyes, and tried to curl yourself into a semi-fetal position in your chair. A full-grown man with thick, wooly facial hair, you still looked like a child petrified of the imaginary monster under the bed. If the crowd hadn’t been as loud as it was, I probably would have heard you intoning comforting mantras to yourself.
I should have wanted to take you away from there, to protect you from the monster and return you to safety. It should have been instinctual. But since it’s all coming out now, I’ll tell you the truth: I didn’t feel bad for you at all. I felt embarrassed by your babyish behavior. But above all, I felt burdened by it. By you.
So you were totally justified in wondering whether it would be best for both of us if we broke it off before you went off to Princeton. But it would have been so much better if you had said it in front of me.
As it was, Hope confirmed that I had been contemplating the same. Yes, I had been thinking about it, though I had never told her that. She just knew, as friends know these things. And her uncanny ability to see right through me is what makes her betrayal so devastating: My best friend would have known to keep this unuttered secret to herself.
I must admit that it’s almost a relief to hear I wasn’t imagining our problems. But no part of our revelatory conversation explains how your breakup turned into a proposal. And yet even this absurd mystery makes perfect sense. Such perplexing developments are, after all, your stock in trade.
forty-four
There is only a page left in this notebook, which I will devote to the low point of the conversation.
“Nothing happened,” Hope pled. “I swear.”
That fear crouched shamefully in the deepest, darkest, furthest corner of my mind. It hadn’t leapt to the