Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [74]
“Nothing happened!”
You have always been the great unspoken between Hope and me. I thought it was because you were guilty by association. You and Heath did drugs together. Heath overdosed and died. You cleaned yourself up and lived. Why remind Hope of this irreversible truth? I now realize that it was much more complicated than that. You and Hope had a shared history that had nothing to do with me. Your silence—not just over these past few weeks, but for the past ten years—indicates that you both wanted it to stay that way.
How many secrets exist between you?
“Nothing happened,” Hope kept on saying. “Nothing happened.”
I believe that nothing physical happened between you. But you two have colluded and collided as emotional coconspirators. And I swear to you, Marcus, that’s even worse than if you had fucked.
note book
number two
september 6–10, 2006
wednesday: the sixth
forty-five
I was dizzy and disoriented when I woke up this next morning, and not just because I had rather dramatically spent the night on the common-room couch instead of the Cupcake’s bottom bunk.
The proceedings documented in Notebook Number Two will only make sense when taken in consideration of those recorded in Notebook Number One. However, I have a proven history of losing/destroying journals like this one. In the event that this new composition notebook gets separated from its slightly older twin, here are:
MY MINDFUCKS: A QUICK AND HANDY REFERENCE GUIDE
(In chronological order)
1. You preempted my breakup with an absurd marriage proposal I could not refuse.
2. Bridget and Percy are not getting married, which just confirms my lack of faith in the whole institution. If there’s any couple who could make me believe in marriage, it’s them.
3. My sister asked me to be Marin’s legal guardian. If I say yes, this could make me—the least maternal woman I know—a de facto mommy for the rest of my life.
4. I lost out on a job because I was too busy thinking about how much you would hate the job once I got it, instead of focusing my attention on the job interview itself and actually getting the job before I started worrying about your reaction to it.
5. I can’t blame you for this hypothetical disapproval, because I couldn’t see myself working for Dr. Kate, either. I only went on the interview because I need to get a real job soon because my fake job doesn’t pay me enough to survive without pity handouts from my sister.
6. But I can blame you and Hope—my two best friends—for betraying my trust. You chose to confide in each other instead of in me. What other secrets are you keeping?
These are just the major mindfucks. A complete list of petty psychic fornications (Will Manda skank her way back into Len’s life? Does Shea still have a key to our apartment and will she use it to host a Pimpz N Playaz party while we’re out? Should I become a DONUT HO’? Do my eyebrows look like sperm? Have Scotty and Sara achieved a simple happiness that is out of our reach? How will I pay an extra $166.33 a month in rent?) would require too many volumes for any library.
I thought for sure the number would hold at six. Alas, I’m only midway through the week—“hump day,” as it is referred to in real offices where real workers work real jobs for real bosses. It should not have surprised me when my mother called this morning to add another item to the list, officially making it a cranial orgy.
7. My dad is in the hospital because he crashed his bike into a parked car.
My mother was strangely calm about it, exhibiting the kind of emotional detachment that is number three on the list of Bethany’s Signs That My Mom Is About to Leave My Dad.
“He’s fine,” my mom said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“But he’s in the hospital, right?”
“Well, yes,” my mom said. “That’s where I’m calling from.”
“People who are fine don’t go to the hospital,” I railed. “That’s kind of the point of hospitals. It’s where people who are not at all fine go….”
“Calm down, Jessie. He’s not going to die. He didn’t even break any bones.”
“Then