Perfect Fifths_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [1]
There is pure goodness awaiting her in the Virgin Islands. Her best friends are all together to “celebrate the rarest love between two people, the flawed yet fearless union that everyone hopes to find but almost always turns out to be illusive if not elusive.” (Quotation marks needed because it comes directly from the speech Jessica has prepared for the occasion.) Jessica knows her friends will forgive her if she misses this flight—as they have forgiven so many of her unintentional slights and oversights—but she won’t forgive herself.
I can’t miss this flight, she silently says once more before choosing to trust her own two feet over technology, the last in a series of synchronistic decisions that contribute to everything that happens afterward.
three
“This is a final boarding call for passenger Jessica Darling.”
After Marcus hears it the first time, he makes sure to listen extra carefully the second time, just to confirm it is her name being called over the public address system and not a phantom echo in his mind.
“This is a final boarding call for Clear Sky Flight 1884 with nonstop service to St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. Final boarding call for passenger Jessica Darling.”
Jessica Darling. It’s been years since he’s heard her full name spoken out loud. Not that Jessica Darling hasn’t been analyzed, assailed, or alluded to in conversations with family, friends, and near strangers from their shared past. As a subject of discussion, Jessica Darling has been elevated by—not reduced to—pronoun status. Have you seen her? What’s she up to these days? Whenever anyone asks these questions, there’s never any doubt as to whom the “her” or “she” refers. But those questions haven’t been asked lately, not since Marcus has—by all actions and outward appearances—finally gotten over her.
Even after hearing her name once, now twice, Marcus still needs a confirmation from somewhere outside his imagination. He seizes his friend Natty by the lapels and asks.
“Dude, no,” Natty insists. “I didn’t hear her name. And neither did you.” Natty’s sharp tone can’t burst the pop-eyed, expectant expression on Marcus’s face. “And even if you did hear her name, there’s no way it’s her. Now let go of me, because I gotta take a piss.”
Natty strands Marcus between the entrance to the men’s restroom and the fiberglass Betty Boop sculpture boop-boop-be-beckoning customers into the faux-retro Garden State Diner for a greasy preflight meal. Marcus feels overexposed, overstimulated, as if his whole body is on extrasensory alert. Marcus’s nerves rattle and clang like the dirty silverware carelessly thrown into plastic takeaway tubs by the too-busy busboys. He tries to calm himself with a series of deep inhalations and exhalations, but breathing cheeseburger smog only makes him more queasy and ill at ease. The alarms going off in his nervous system evoke the erratic animal behavior that precedes natural disasters: a mass exodus of elephants seeking higher ground, dogs wailing under door frames, rabbits clawing at cages, snakes shaken from hibernation slithering through the snow. His instincts, too, urge him to flee. He half jogs away from the diner and heads for the blue-screened monitors announcing arrivals and departures.
As Marcus searches for Clear Sky Flight 1884 on the departures board, he makes an effort to accept Natty’s logic. After all, didn’t his Jessica Darling often joke about being confused with a porn star also named Jessica Darling? Perhaps it’s the X-rated Jessica Darling being called over the public address system, or maybe even a third unknown Jessica Darling who shares nothing but a name with the other two. A newborn Jessica Darling. A granny Jessica Darling. An African-American, Asian, Hispanic, Pacific Islander, or Other Jessica Darling. It must be one of these alternative Jessica Darlings flying out to St. Thomas on Clear Sky Flight 1884, not his Jessica Darling, not the one he proposed to over three years ago, not the one he hasn’t seen, spoken to, or otherwise