Perfect Fifths_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [33]
She asked them to please call her cell phone at any time—night or day—if there was a change in Sunny’s status. They promised someone would call her, if not them. There were, after all, a lot of people who would need to be called. Jessica has been waiting for that call ever since.
Sunny’s mom escorted her by the elbow to the elevator. As Jessica stepped inside, her mother said, “Thank you for coming by. Sunny thinks the world of you.”
The doors closed before Jessica could return the sentiment.
And it was that final fleeting glimpse of Mrs. Dae’s torment that had driven her to drink too much last night. The first time since the last time she drank too much, which is a time she also prefers not to think about but for entirely different reasons.
“Miss! Miss!”
Jessica knows Sunny was plugged in to her MP3 player when it happened. She just knows. But what song was she listening to? What was the last thing she heard before that driver blew through the stop sign, plowed into her in the crosswalk, and just kept going? It’s questions like these that drove Jessica to the bottle last night. Not the questions, per se, but her fear of never having an opportunity to hear them answered.
So what’s her poison? Jessica has no idea. She drank her mother’s zin because that was all her parents had in the fridge. It’s been so long since she was in a bar that she can’t settle on what to order once she gets there. She recalls a time when she tried to impress or maybe intimidate the opposite sex with her masculine requests for brutal shots of whiskey. She’d tip her head back, down the shot in a single gulp, shake off the fire in her chest, place the shot glass mouth-down, then wait, never too long, for a male onlooker to order another round. Now, just a few years later, she’s embarrassed by the very idea of that lonely girl at the bar who wasn’t fooling anybody. Not even herself.
“MISS!”
The insistence of this voice, and the impression that it’s gaining on her, is what compels her to slow down. Maybe I’ve got the face of a “ma’am” but the ass of a “miss,” she muses. In retribution for the compliment she’s just paid her ass, she’s now half expecting a kind stranger to tell her that she’s tucked the toilet seat cover into her jeans and it’s trailing behind her like an unhygienic peplum. This is what she’s thinking when she turns to see two Port Authority police officers flanking … Marcus Flutie.
The earth rumbles.
Collapses beneath her feet.
The stable foundation she has painstakingly constructed since their breakup (and hastily reassembled after their earlier run-in) has been instantly and powerfully unmoored.
She wobbles in her sneakers.
She wants to shout, “Don’t panic, everyone! It’s just my world being pulled out from under me!”
She searches through the rubble for a rational explanation that will explain this second run-in with Marcus Flutie in as many hours, digging for a grounding bit of evidence that will help her recalibrate and retain a semblance of control.
“Excuse me, miss,” the first officer says. “This man claims to know you. He says he’s waiting for you.”
Marcus is still here. And so is she.
“Do you know this man? Or do we have a security issue here?” barks the pit bull.
“No,” Jessica croaks, still reeling. The answer isn’t the right one, and alarm careens across Marcus’s face. She zeroes in on that split seam in Marcus’s sweater, the tiny thread. Jessica thinks of a song she hasn’t heard in years by a band she was never that into, though she did think the lead singer was tortured and adorable in a geek-cute kind of way, a way, it is worth noting, that Marcus Flutie himself is flaunting these days. What were the lyrics? If you want to destroy my sweater … Hold this thread as I walk away …
That tiny thread from a cashmere sweater she suspects—no, knows for certain—was purchased by