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SOUNDS LIKE FUN FUN FUN! More fun than moping in my bedroom at least. And it’s right in the middle of spring break, so I won’t even have to skip more school to make it. How fortuitous is that?

By the way, he still thinks I’m a shoo-in for Columbia, which is another thing I needed to hear. He assures me that I shouldn’t worry, that the school is notoriously unorganized and famous for sending out its acceptances long after every other Ivy League school. I hope he’s right.

Leave it to a homosexual to get me out of my Guys Suck malaise. Is it me, or are gay guys the only good guys? Or am I just a masochist?

Fag-haggingly* yours,

J.

* I mean this in the most honest and least politically incorrect way possible. Really.

march

the fourth

Today was Len, Manda, and Scotty’s first day back to school after their suspensions. I had a week without them to practice conducting myself with quiet, dignified grace.

“That’s the classiest way of dealing with bein’ jilted,” Gladdie had assured me during my last visit.

“Gladdie,” I said skeptically, “I’ve never seen you conduct yourself with quiet, dignified grace.”

“That’s ’cause I ain’t never been jilted, J.D.!”

“Who would dump a gal with a mug like this?” Moe said, holding Gladdie’s face in his hands and placing a loud, smacking kiss on her wobbly, painted lips.

“I guess I have a dumpable mug,” I said.

That would have been the perfect moment for Marcus to come up to me from behind and offer me some kind of assurance that everything was going to be okay. Something like, “Jessica, I would never dump your mug.”

But he didn’t. He wasn’t anywhere to be seen in Silver Meadows that day, not that I was looking. (Okay. I was looking a little bit.) Marcus hadn’t said much of anything to me since our library chat. He avoided eye contact and barely said “Hey” to me. I figured his loyalties were with Len after all.

Anyway, I vowed not to give Len, or Manda, or the PHS gossipmongers the satisfaction of seeing me upset. However, I didn’t even get to homeroom before I realized how difficult this was going to be to pull off.

“Omigod!” Sara shrieked when she saw me in the hall before homeroom. “Don’t you just want to die when you see Len and Manda together?”

“I haven’t seen them.”

“Look!”

Then she grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me in the opposite direction, just in time to see Len gently kiss Manda on the hand in parting, like he was a knight and she was a goddamned damsel or something.

Quiet, dignified grace, I thought to myself.

“Omigod! Don’t you want to die?”

“No,” I said calmly. “Not really.”

“If my boyfriend humiliated me the way Len leveled you, I would want to die!”

“Well, it’s a good thing that you don’t have a boyfriend, isn’t it?” I replied in a tone as sickly sweet and artificial as Equal. “Come to think of it, you’ve never had a boyfriend, have you?”

That shut her up and sent her stomping into homeroom.

I had my eyes closed and my head pressed against my locker door when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I had a very definite idea of who I wanted it to be.

“Um. Jess.”

Instead I got the last person I wanted to see.

Quiet, dignified grace, I reminded myself as I opened my eyes.

“What is it, Len?”

“I just want to. Um. Apologize for hurting you.”

I held up my hands to cut him off.

“First of all, spare me your apology because it’s more about making yourself feel less guilty than it is about looking for forgiveness. Second of all, don’t flatter yourself by thinking you hurt me. You’re either an egomaniac or a psychotic like your mother if you think you hurt me.”

Yeah, that’s right. I sunk to a yo mama level. Whatever. He deserved it.

“You blindsided me, that’s for sure. And I was pissed off. Not so much about you hooking up with Manda, because everyone knows you’re just the latest trick in her hobag. No, I was pissed for only one reason: You broke up with me before I had the chance to break up with you. And that makes me an even bigger asshole than you are. But