Perfect Fifths_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [10]
nine
Marcus is peeking out from behind a cylindrical floor-to-ceiling metal column roughly seventy-five yards away from Gate C-88.
A hand yanks at his shirttail. “Let’s go.”
Marcus shoves it away. “I’m just waiting to see what happens to her.”
“Ten more seconds, and you’ve crossed the line between bittersweet reunion and restraining order.”
Marcus watches Jessica’s plane pull away.
“And I’m crouched behind you because … ?” Natty asks.
“Because she might recognize you.”
“I doubt it,” Natty snorts, standing up to his full height, which, in truth, isn’t that high off the ground. “She only met me that one time. Remember? Right before she rejected you. Remember that? Remember when you thought you wanted to get married at twenty-fucking-three? Remember when you proposed and she said no? Remember how our room reeked like sweaty balls because you were too depressed to pick up a bar of goddamn soap and get in the shower … ?”
“Yeah, Natty,” Marcus says. “I remember.”
“Good times.”
Marcus watches as Jessica palm-heel massages her eye sockets, ignoring the Clear Sky Airlines rep drawing an air map with her fingers. When she’s finished, Jessica takes a whole-body breath, one visible from seventy-five yards away, and sets out in their direction.
“Duck!” Marcus whisper-yells.
Natty instinctively dips behind Marcus and feels like a sycophantic jackass for doing so. Yet in deference to his friend, Natty waits until Jessica passes before commencing with the brotherly emasculation. “Have you lost your balls?”
“Calm down, Tater Tot,” Marcus commands sotto voce.
Natty will not calm down. He is outraged by this turn of events. “What are you? Twenty-six going on twelve? Wanna write her a note asking her to check the box if she still likes you? I’ll pass it to her during recess!” Natty is just getting started. “This is not acceptable. Not at all. Not from the same guy who rode his anthropology professor so hard she lost tenure.”
Marcus ignores this last comment especially, then waits until Jessica turns a corner before addressing his friend. “I liked you better before you got rid of your accent.” Natty’s parents had paid a vocal instructor two hundred dollars an hour to “deregionalize” their son’s speech so he’d be taken more seriously in the realm of international business. “When you were all ‘aw shucks’ and scared of me.”
“Ah hah-vaynt lahst mah raid-nake ak-say-ent,” says Natty in a deep-fried squirrelly drawl. “Ah jus choos naht t’ yooose eee-it.” He double-time scurries to keep up with Marcus, whose stride is twice the length of his own. “And I was never scared of you,” continues Natty, returning to his foreign tongue, the neutral dialect known as Standard American with a strong hint of college-male braggadocio and puerility. “I was scared of the smell. Of. … your… balls.”
“Now who’s the one acting twelve, Junior High?” Marcus asks, pausing to look around the bend before turning the same corner. He catches sight of Jessica’s back just before she enters the glass doors of the Clear Sky customer service center. He can relax now, seeing that there are at least twenty people on line in front of her. She’ll be there for a while.
Natty steps right in front of him, but it’s a symbolic gesture of protest at best. With a twelve-inch height advantage over his friend, Marcus’s view of Jessica is still unobstructed. This is not lost on Natty, a tenacious flea who leaps into the air to block the sight line between him and her. Marcus sidesteps left, Natty bounces right. Marcus sidesteps right, Natty bounces left.
“That’s right, Professor,” Natty taunts. “I can do this shiz all damn day.” To onlookers, it looks like an outmatched game of one-on-one, only without a ball or a hoop. Had Marcus not so carefully hidden himself around the corner and out of her view, Natty’s gamesmanship surely would have attracted Jessica’s attention, too.
Marcus gives up. Stops. “Are you really a Rhodes Scholar?”
“Never forget,” Natty says, puffing up his birdcage chest, “that the primary export of Nathaniel