Perfect Fifths_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [5]
He read them and, a week later, returned them. “They belong to you,” he said in a letter written on the second notebook’s final pages. Marcus had vowed to honor Jessica’s request to let her go, and let her be, and he had shocked her by actually making good on that promise. Some might puzzle for years trying to remember the final word exchanged with an ex-lover. But no such ruminations have been necessary for Jessica, because the last word from Marcus was definitively written in ink as the closing to that final communiqué:
WHATEVER
WHATEVER, as he explained in that letter, was the double-meaning irony that wrapped around his bicep in the form of a poorly executed Chinese-character tattoo, one that Marcus had wanted to spell FOREVER but that had gotten lost in translation. Since the return of those notebooks, since WHATEVER, Jessica hasn’t heard another word from him.
She has, however, heard the gossip.
He got into Princeton’s most prestigious secret society.
He failed out.
He won a Rhodes.
He lost his mind.
The most obstreperous rumors were inspired and spread by the usual suspects, Pineville High alumni such as Sara D’Abruzzi-Glazer and Scotty Glazer, whose social orbit barely extended beyond their hometown since the birth of their third kid in as many years. And Manda Powers, who (the last Jessica had heard) was couch-surfing around the world all by herself and had an uncanny knack for bumping backpacks with adventurous nomads who claimed to have met someone who met someone who met someone from her suburban New Jersey hometown, someone whose name is—What was it? Oh, right!—Marcus Flutie.
He’s fucking an eighteen-year-old freshgirl.
He’s fucking a forty-eight-year-old professor.
He’s not fucking anyone.
He’s engaged.
He’s gay.
The more legitimate updates were always provided by well-intentioned friends and family members who mistakenly believed that Jessica wanted to know what Marcus Flutie was up to. Like Paul Parlipiano, who e-mailed to express his surprise to find himself hammering alongside Marcus on a neighborhood rebuilding project in the Lower Ninth Ward. Or Cinthia Wallace, who swore she saw him in the audience during the opening-night performance of the off-off-Broadway musical satire of Bubblegum Bimbos and Assembly-Line Meatballers. Or Jessica’s niece, Marin, who, apropos of nothing other than the fact that she was a child and still begrudged the missed opportunity to be a flower girl, occasionally asked, “Do you think Marcus has proposed to someone else by now?” Or Marin’s mother, Jessica’s own sister, Bethany, who didn’t have the naïveté of youth to account for answering “Oh, I hope not,” followed by “But could you blame him if he has?”
He started drinking again.
He quit speaking again.
He started drugging again.
He quit cold turkey again.
Then there are those who indirectly court conjecture, like Bridget, who sent links to Found.com asking, “Could this be a page from Marcus’s journals that were stolen out of your car?” (To which Jessica always answered no.) Or Percy, responding to the schlub whose NBA half-court halftime marriage proposal was turned down on live TV, asked, “Jessica, you tell me, how’s a man supposed to recover from a rejection like that?” before being shoved into silence by Bridget. Or Len Levy, another one of Jessica’s lovers (a number best described as threeish, or three and two halves, the halves referring to two separate one-time-only nonpenetrative lapses in judgment involving two separate men and therefore not equaling a whole lover), who turned everything he thinks he knows about Jessica and Marcus into a song titled “My Song Will Never Mean as Much (As the One He Once Sang for You).” Despite college radio play and its current status as