Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [78]
“I hope you haven’t changed your mind about the bike trip.”
As you already know, Dad had this big idea about leading us on a bike expedition along the densely wooded dirt trails that wind through Princeton and other towns in Mercer County.
“I’m not sure we’ll be organizing that trip with Marcus after all.”
“Why not?”
“Things are…” I paused here. Not for effect, but to find the right word. “Unsettled between us.”
My dad rubbed his head. “Do I even want to hear more?”
“I’m not sure,” I replied. “Do you?”
He nodded reluctantly, a gesture that resembled more of a wince than an affirmation.
“It’s been something that’s been coming for a while, I guess. We’re at different places in our lives….”
“You two always seemed like you were in different places in your lives.”
“Well, maybe it always seemed that way to you, but our differences are just more…uh…pronounced now than ever before.”
My father surprised me by looking right at me when he said, “That’s such a shame.”
“What?”
“That you and Marcus are having problems. That you’re unsettled.”
“Wow…I didn’t expect you to react like that….”
“How did you expect me to react?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I wasn’t even sure if you ever got around to, you know, liking Marcus or not.”
“Look, Jessie,” he said. “I’m not going to lie to you. When I caught wind of his checkered past, the drugs and all that trouble he got himself into in high school, I wasn’t happy that this royal screwup of the first order was dating my daughter.”
“But he was clean when we got together.”
He waved his bagel in the air to stifle me. “I know,” he said. “But I still didn’t like it.” He then chucked his bagel into the nearest garbage can with a resounding clunk. “If I had tried to step in and put a stop to you two, it would have backfired. Just like it did with Bethany and Jerry.”
Jerry.
Wow.
Jerry.
I had not heard that name in almost two decades. How could I have forgotten Jerry? He was my sister’s first serious boyfriend, from her sophomore year of high school. I was only five years old during the Jerry Years, so when I think of him, I can only conjure his junior yearbook photo, which I studied intensely and with great interest. He had a rectangular flattop haircut, a conniving underbite that was apparently impossible to unhinge into any semblance of a smile, and thick black eyebrows like two censorship bars trying to block out his dirty thoughts. He was two years older than Bethany, and drove, I kid you not, a silver I-ROC tricked out with a neon-pink underbelly that made our driveway glow like a seedy no-tell motel whenever he honked for my sister. The horn was barely audible above the strains of Def Leppard’s Hysteria, the only cassette he ever listened to, which, naturally, as these things happen, became the only cassette Bethany listened to for like six months straight. To this day, I know every goddamn lyric to every goddamn song on that goddamn album, and not just the givens like the title track, “Armageddon It,” “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” and “Love Bites.” I even know all the words to the less obvious cuts, such as “Excitable”:
(Oh) (Whoa) Oh, you know I get so
(Excitable) I really get so (Excitable)
(Okay. Maybe those lyrics don’t seem so hard to commit to memory, but you try to put every “Oh” and “Whoa” in its proper place and see how easy it is.)
Anyway, to say that my parents hated Jerry is an understatement, one that requires me to consult my thesaurus to pile on the synonyms reviled, loathed, detested, abhorred, and despised, none of which do justice to the hatred they felt. They hated him with a passion that was only outdone by its inverse.
Oh, how Bethany loved him.
“Then you and Marcus broke up,” my dad continued. “He went to that crazy Buddhist camp in the middle of the desert, and you had that other boyfriend at Columbia. The prep school brat from Greenwich, Connecticut…The philosopher…What was his name?”
“Kieran.”
My dad all but rolled his eyes, because he knows it’s undignified and lamely Laguna Beach for a senior citizen