Perfect Fifths_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [29]
By the way, this letter is a plagiarized mash-up of quotes attributed to Plato, Peter the Hermit, Hesiod, and vintage Dear Abby that I found on the Internet. So, um, I guess my generation isn’t any more spoiled, entitled, or narcissistic than teens who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago … or those who grew up in the 1960s and ′70s, for that matter, LIKE YOU.
Your daughter,
Sunny
P.S. This cut-and-paste approach is intentionally ironic. Thank you.
Jessica’s eye roll, as fantastically executed as it was, barely registers with Sylvia. As an overworked mother of a bitter son not much younger than Jessica, she has developed a high tolerance for parental disdain as a means of survival.
“We can put you on a flight that leaves tomorrow morning at nine A.M., connects in Miami, and gets you into Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, at one P.M.”
Jessica is already shaking her head in protest. “The wedding is tomorrow morning,” she pleads. “Is there any flight that can get me there tonight? I don’t care how late.”
“Ooooh!” exclaims Sylvia. “A destination wedding! How fun! Who’s getting married? I love weddings! I wish my son would get married.”
Jessica sighs before responding, wondering if she passed up her best opportunity by eschewing the “Copacabana” segue. “Two of my oldest and dearest friends.”
The description is inadequate. Bridget and Percy aren’t merely her friends, they are the two people who make her “believe in love. Not just love but love in all its mutinous mutations over time.” Over the course of their nine years together, Bridget and Percy have taunted lovesick cynics like Jessica by “serving as flesh-and-blood proof of the impossible: Two young people can fall in love, stay in love, and continue to choose loving each other over everything and everyone else … and still be deliriously happy with that choice.” (Again, all quoted passages come from Jessica’s sermon.) It’s the last part that seems to trip up other long-term couples, like her parents, who fight monotony by traveling all over the world, or her sister’s husband, who fought monogamy by philandering all over the city until her sister finally came to her senses and dumped his trans-fatty ass for good.
“Well, the last flight out today leaves in three hours,” Sylvia explains. “It connects in Miami and will get you to St. Thomas by ten P.M. tonight.”
Jessica flexes and poses like a victorious prizefighter. “Yesssss!”
“It’s overbooked,” Sylvia buzzkills. “I’ll confirm you for tomorrow’s flight, but you could try standby for the one that leaves today.”
“What are my odds of getting a seat that way?”
Sylvia gives her a thumbs-down and a full-face frown.
“So what you’re saying is, I can only hope there’s someone like me who is stupid enough to miss her flight.”
“Yep,” Sylvia says with a shrug. “Someone like you.”
Someone like you. Jessica’s wayward attention drifts yet again. She thinks about someone like herself, as she was during hospital visiting hours last night. She remembers the shaved head (Jessica prays for the opportunity to joke about a whole new awkward hair-growing-out phase) halved by one-sided train-track stitches; the unresponsive face, unrecognizable and grotesque from bruising and swelling (another joke: about how she’s lucky she looks good in purple); the thin, small body (more childlike than ever) attached to too many tubes—breathing, feeding, excreting—connected to too many machines keeping her alive for too many hours already: thirty-six.
Jessica glances at her new watch, a gift from her mother, who, in one of the more harmless intergenerational differences of opinion, still believes that it’s unprofessional to check one’s cell phone for the time. It’s almost two P.M. It will be near dark here in Newark when the next plane to St. Thomas takes off. Two days ago, in another