Perfect Fifths_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [13]
“Oh,” Jessica replies, unzipping the bag that holds her phone.
The fan club president and VP (designated as such by their personalized baseball caps) are arguing with the Clear Sky customer service representatives at the desk. “This is not our problem! This is your problem! And it’s gonna be an ever-bigger problem for you if you can’t get all twenty of us there before the curtain goes up tonight!”
Meanwhile, the eighteen members without titles have cell phones pressed to their ears, hoping to talk to someone, anyone, who can get them on the next flight to Vegas. Few speak; most commiserate with huffs and upthrown hands as they endure the interminable hold that has been put on them by the Clear Sky automated customer service system. They are stuck in both virtual and real-life standstills.
Jessica fumbles around inside her bag, thinking, as she always does when she’s looking for something inside this bag—usually her cell phone, a stick of gum, or a pen—that there are too many pockets within pockets. Multiple options has always been a problem for Jessica, in luggage and in life. She imagines that this pockets-within-pockets design is meant to make things more convenient for the traveler, as it’s possible to designate a specific pocket for each and every item one could possibly need on the go. But Jessica has never had the inclination to devise such an organizational system, though it would hardly take that much time to assign the slanty side pocket on the left FOR GUM ONLY, or those skinny tubular pockets FOR PENS ONLY, especially in the case of the latter, when it’s obvious that those pockets are indeed meant FOR PENS ONLY because nothing else would fit inside them. But no, she’s never bothered to put anything in a specific place, choosing instead to stuff items in the bag at random, which always results in moments like this, when she is pulling out an unusable tampon half emancipated from its protective paper wrapper, a bottle of generic medicinal-smelling hand sanitizer, a fossilized trick-or-treat-size Baby Ruth bar … everything but the cell phone she’s looking for. She usually curses the pockets, but today she’s grateful for them, if only because contemplating the pockets helped waste brain time that might have been devoted to other subjects.
“Where is my ph—?”
The phone. Bridget and Percy had told her about the wedding over the phone. They had grabbed the phone out of each other’s hands to relay the story of how he had convinced her to make good on their engagement and get married already.
“I want a wedding,” Percy said.
“He’s the bride in this scenario,” Bridget added.
“I want a public ceremony, a celebration of how much I love her …”
“I was, like, why do we need a piece of paper?”
“I told her that we didn’t need it. I just wanted it…”
“I needed Percy to point out to me that my fears weren’t really about us but about my parents …”
“Their divorce really messed her up …”
“It did, it really did …”
“She was afraid that getting married would somehow complicate things, make things worse …”
“I was afraid of history repeating itself. I mean, my parents must have liked each other at some point, though it never seemed to be while they were actually married to each other …”
“We are not our parents …”
“We’re just us …”
Jessica was happily mum during their back-and-forth banter, speaking up (“What?!”) only when they asked her to be the ministress of ceremonies.
“Um, I’m a nonbeliever,” Jessica reminded them.
“We know!” they chorused.
“You can get ordained over the Internet,” Bridget explained.
“By the Universal Ministry of Secular Humanity,” Percy added.
Jessica found it interesting that Bridget and Percy had assumed she was referring to her lack of faith in God, when she just as easily could have been referring to her lack of faith in the institution of marriage. Of the two, Jessica actually considered the latter a greater obstacle to overcome for the purposes of performing a marriage ceremony. She kept this