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I shrugged.

“Percy is helping me to write a script,” she said. “So my telling her off will be like a role I’m playing. That way I won’t, like, screw up or lose my nerve.”

Bridget is the only other person who remembers that Hy’s book came out at all. It’s funny how little impact Bubblegum Bimbos ended up having on our school. The sad fact is, Pineville’s population doesn’t read. We’ve got six Wawas and eight liquor stores, but you have to drive twenty miles outside town limits to find a bookstore. PHS students just couldn’t take a time-out from their kegging to read it, opting to wait for the movie, which is due in theaters sometime in 2003. But who knows if they’ll even go see it? With the exception of Sara, who never forgets anything, Pineville High has a notoriously short attention span. If Hy really wanted to make maximum impact, she would’ve sold her rights to MTV and had Bubblegum Bimbos turned into a twenty-two-minute mini-movie wedged between Cribs and Becoming.

I’m still sort of working through my whole Jenn Sweet identity crisis. It’s been pretty depressing to admit that I will never be one-bizillionth as cool as my alter ego. Jenn Sweet is not the kind of girl who gets publicly humiliated by her ex-boyfriend and the resident hobag. That’s because Jenn Sweet is not the kind of girl who would have gone out with Len in the first place if she knew deep down that he was not the right person for her. Or maybe she would have given him a chance, but she certainly wouldn’t have stuck it out with him as long as I did. I don’t know. I still find myself asking, “What Would Jenn Do?” even when I know that trying to be like her (like I did on New Year’s Eve) will only lead to certain disaster.

But it’s not like being myself does me any better. Maybe I should ask Pepe to script my whole life, so I never screw up or lose my nerve.

the seventeenth

After the Piedmont fiasco, I thought my parents would refuse to go out in public with me ever again. Unfortunately, I was wrong. They joined me at Silver Meadows today for its annual St. Patrick’s Day celebration.

I was happy to see that Gladdie’s outfit and walker were completely color-coordinated in shades of green. I had started to worry—that her mismatching was a sign that at ninety-one, she was finally slipping. But there were no signs of any new slippage today as she did a modified, walker-aided jig with Marcus to a tin-whistle ditty about sassy Irish lassies.

Marcus was wearing a KISS ME I’M IRISH T-shirt.

“Nice shirt,” I said.

“It was a gift from your grandmother,” he said.

“Pucker up, J.D.!” Gladdie bellowed.

What my grandmother lacks in subtlety she makes up for in volume.

“I’m not convinced that Marcus here is really Irish,” I said.

“I’m one-quarter Celtic,” he said, tipping his green plastic hat. “And just take a look at this red hair.”

“PUCKER UP!”

“I’ll give you one-quarter’s worth of a kiss,” I said, kissing my palm and blowing it in his direction.

“Oh, you disappoint me, J.D.,” Gladdie said, shaking her head.

And Marcus, very uncharacteristically, didn’t say anything at all. That is, until my mother swooped in and asked the inevitable question.

“Sooooooooooooo, Marcus,” she cooed, fluffing out her highlights. “Where are you going to college next year?”

I had been wondering the same thing. The last I had heard from Len, back when we shared these things, was that Marcus hadn’t even taken his SATs.

“I’m not going to college,” he said.

“What?!” my mom, dad, and I asked simultaneously.

“I’m not going to college.”

I played along. “Why aren’t you going to college?”

“I don’t need a degree to get by in life.”

“Well, that’s convenient,” I replied. “Now I can visit you and Bridget at McDonald’s next year.”

“Just because you’re conflicted about your college plans doesn’t mean you should project those fears on me.”

My parents jumped on that one.

“She is conflicted, isn’t she?” my mom pried.

“One minute it’s Piedmont, the next it’s Williams!” Dad said, turning purple with frustration.