Second Helpings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [111]
“What are you talkin’ about?”
“Well, how you took a lot of artistic license with the Jenn Sweet character, you know, making her a lot of things I am, only better.”
“How better?”
“Better. Cooler. Someone who stands up for what she believes in, yet everyone still likes her, anyway.”
She squinted at me, then shook her head in disbelief. “Girl, that’s how I always saw you.”
“What?”
“I always saw you as the girl who had it going on,” she said. “But you just didn’t know it because you were stuck in an area code where your bean ain’t never gonna get the respect it deserves.”
“Are you on crack?” I asked, in utter disbelief.
“Not anymore,” she laughed.
“How could you say that Jenn Sweet is me?”
“I can,” she said, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and tapping it against her hand. “Because I’m the one who wrote it.”
It’s unreal, isn’t it? How other people see you versus how you see yourself? Ever since I read Hy’s book, I’ve felt inadequate when compared to my cooler alter ego. And here Hy was telling me that I was my alter ego.
I was about to protest, when I thought about what had happened an hour before this conversation. I had told off my crush-to-end-all-crushes, my former obsessive object of horniness, the gay man of my dreams. Yet he still seemed to like me, anyway. What more evidence did I need that she was right? Hy was right. I am my alter ego. I’m just not used to seeing myself that way. Powerful. Confident. And not a social outcast.
I may feel like a social outcast, but I’m not really one. Taryn, now, she’s a social outcast. I think I’m an outcast inasmuch as I want to be left alone by people I can’t stand, which isn’t really the same thing as true social ostracization, now is it?
I dare say not.
Why did it take me until my last marking period of high school to figure this out? Because I’m me, and I’m a moron. That’s why. (You probably had this all sorted out a bizillion pages back.)
“ ‘We are what we pretend to be,’ ” I said, with finality.
“Kurt Vonnegut,” Hy replied.
“Of course you knew it. That’s a pricey private-school education for you.”
“Speakin’ of education, where you headed next year?”
The Question. How odd that my first face-to-face with Hy in over a year had so quickly become so comfortable as to follow the required conversational patterns for seniors in high school.
“I’m still waiting to hear,” I said. “I’d rather not jinx it by telling you.”
“No big,” she said. “But you’re stressin’ for no reason.”
If only she knew. “What about you? Harvard?”
“Maybe,” she replied. “I don’t know if I’m down with Cambridge. When you’re born and raised in the dopest city in the world, livin’ anywhere else just ain’t an option.”
Funny, how living in the least dopest city in the world could make me come to the same conclusion.
Hy’s “people” soon came over to tell her that she was late for her next appointment.
“I’m out,” she said.
“Yeah, me, too,” I replied.
“Later,” she said.
And you know what? I knew that she was right.
“Later, Hy,” I said. “I’ll see you around.”
When I met up with Bridget back on the bus to Pineville, she was hanging her head in shame.
“I bailed,” she said. “I, like, totally bailed when I saw her.”
“It’s okay, Bridge,” I replied.
“I couldn’t do it,” she said. “I couldn’t go off like I wanted.”
“It’s okay. I couldn’t go off on her either for some bizarre reason.”
“I guess we don’t have it in us to be bitches,” she sighed with resignation.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” I replied.
“Well, in high school,” she concluded, while pensively chewing on her ponytail, “being too nice can get you in more trouble than being a bitch.”
Again, Bridget spoke the truth.
April 1st
Dear Hope,
Let me say it again: I AM SO HAPPY FOR YOU! Congratulations on getting into the Rhode Island School of Design. I still wish that you had picked Parsons, but if I get into Columbia, we’ll be eight hundred miles closer than we’ve been in the past two years! Whoo-hoo!
See what’s happened? I wrote “if.” If I get into Columbia. With every day that goes by, I am less