Second Helpings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [114]
I hadn’t run in about six months. And for the first few hundred steps, my body rebelled.
OM SHANTI!!!! OM SHANTI!!!! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?????
But I forced myself to keep going. By the time I was out of sight of the house, I fell into an old but familiar rhythm. I realized how much I missed doing this. Not the competitions, just this. For myself. This is who I am: a runner.
For the duration of my forty-five-minute run, I barely thought about the Answer to the Question or anything else. Little did I know that it would be waiting for me with clenched teeth, sweaty brows, and a lot of yelling.
“WHAT’S GOING ON HERE?” my father yelled as I walked through the door.
“I felt like going running,” I replied, assuming that’s what he was freaking out about. After all, if I could run the streets of Pineville, I could certainly run circles around the track. But that’s not what had incited this riot.
“WHAT IS THIS?” my father screamed while wildly waving an envelope in the air.
I grabbed it from him. A thick envelope from Columbia College, Columbia University.
“Jessica Lynn Darling! What is this?” my mother shouted.
It was already torn open.
“Well, you’ve already violated my privacy by opening it, so why don’t you tell me?”
“You are not going to school in New York City!” they yelled in unison.
I pulled out the letter on top. It began, “Congratulations! You have been offered a spot in the Columbia College Class of 2006.”
Oh my God.
“We apologize for the delay. The late mailings and website postings were the result of a technical error . . .”
OH. MY. GOD.
“. . . and we regret any inconvenience this might have caused.”
Inconvenience, schminconvenience! The torture of waiting was nothing compared with the torture of getting accepted, as my parents’ reaction was about as awful and close-minded as I had imagined in my worst nightmares.
“You are going to Piedmont on scholarship.”
“No I’m not. That place sucks.”
“We are not paying for you to go to a school located near Ground Zero!”
“Columbia is nowhere near Ground Zero! It’s more than a hundred blocks away!”
“You know why?” my father asked. “Because the terrorists wouldn’t bother bombing Harlem! It’s already a demilitarized zone!”
The fighting stopped only when we’d all screamed ourselves into laryngitis.
I am not backing down. No way. I don’t care if I have to take a bizillion dollars in loans, work a thousand minimum-wage jobs. The struggle will be worth it. I just know it.
the twenty-eighth
I thought bridal showers were the most excruciating custom in modern society, what with all the paper-plate bow hat traditions and break-a-ribbon, make-a-baby superstitions.
But today I discovered that there is one thing worse.
Baby showers.
No one likes them, especially the mama-to-be, whose sweaty tumescence was extremely disconcerting to me but didn’t seem to bother anyone else. Bethany couldn’t unwrap more than three presents in a row without having to waddle to the ladies’ room to pee. This made the already slow and excruciating ordeal even slower and more excruciating.
As if the shower didn’t suck enough, my mother was putting on her super-dee-duper nicey-nice tone to cover up the fact that she is still supremely pissed off about Columbia. Whenever a great-aunt or a second cousin or anyone else with whom I am blood related (but barely know) asked me the Question, my mother singsonged the same annoying response.
“Jessie got accepted to every school she applied to!” she’d say, putting her arm around my shoulder, squeezing a bit tighter than necessary. “She’s still undecided. We’ll let you know as soon as she considers her offers.”
And I would just stand there smiling a wax dummy’s frozen, artificial smile.
Finally, Gladdie came to my rescue.
“J.D.! Park yourself over here!”
She was wearing a baby-blue pantsuit with a baby-pink beret. Her walker was still St. Patrick’s Day green, which really bothered me. Couldn’t