Second Helpings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [116]
I crossed off a box that completed the middle horizontal row on the grid and held it up for my grandmother to see.
“BINGO!” Gladdie howled, her voice reverberating throughout the restaurant. We were victorious.
April 30th
Dear Hope,
I’m going to have to put in about fifty years of indentured servitude to my parents to pay off our last phone call, but I’m not quite done venting yet.
Marcus’s latest intrusion is about as surprising as a cardboard box of devil heads at the Osbournes’. He just cannot stop mucking up my life. He intentionally told Gladdie about Columbia (something he wasn’t even supposed to know about) in the hopes that she, in her uncensored, double-stroked senility, would spill the news and cause much parental pain and suffering. It didn’t quite work out that way—my parental pain and suffering came via an alternate route—but that doesn’t make his inability to stay out of my life any less infuriating.
I don’t know how you expect me to believe that it’s “his way of showing he cares.” No offense, but that’s easy for you to say because you’re not here to see what he’s REALLY like. He’s the GAME MASTER, Hope. He’s an EVIL GENIUS who messes with my mind and my life because he has NOTHING BETTER TO DO now that he’s (allegedly) living a life of chastity and temperance. Thank God there’s only two months of school left, because I really don’t know how much more of this I can take.
I have to ask you this on paper because I’m a wuss and couldn’t bring myself to ask you on the phone: Why don’t you hate Marcus? Don’t you hate him for doing everything Heath did, but living to tell about it? Don’t you hate him because he’s still here and your brother is gone?
Here’s the thing that’s keeping me awake: If you don’t hate Marcus, then it’s difficult, if not impossible, for me to make a case against him. And where does that leave me?
Bafflingly yours,
J.
may
the second
I saw her just four days ago. Alive.
And now she’s dead.
Gladdie died the dream death, in her sleep, at ninety-one. Yet that doesn’t make it any easier for me to accept that she’s gone.
Grandmothers die. Matthew and Heath and other brothers who are too young to die, die.
Read today’s obituaries: A college girl playing beach volleyball on a cloudless spring day gets struck by lightning in front of all her teammates and dies. A thirty-six-year-old nonsmoking father of four gets lung cancer and dies. A seventy-five-year-old retired police officer gets hit by a drunk driver and dies.
Everybody dies, eventually. We’re all doomed, and I don’t like it. I don’t want to die.
You might think that’s an obvious thing to say, but the truth is, I didn’t always have this aversion to death. Not that I was suicidal or anything, but if I died, I thought, I wouldn’t be that upset about it. Not that I’d have any conscious thoughts about the matter, because I’d be dead.
But I really don’t want to die. Not now, when I finally feel like I’m so close to escaping Pineville and finally living my real life in New York, the life I’ve been waiting for so long to live.
Then I remember: Thousands of innocent people whose only mistake was showing up for work early on a September morning died.
No one in my family has ever been religious. I always saw religion as a kind of a crutch, something people used to make themselves feel better about their own mortality. I don’t blame anyone for doing this— in fact, I wish I were able to buy into it all. But I can’t. I wish I believed in the afterlife. I wish I believed that Gladdie was up there on a white puffy cloud, her husband at her side, entertaining all the angels with her stories.
But I don’t believe that. I don’t believe in anything. I believe that when you’re dead, you’re dead. And sometimes, as Gladdie prophetically pointed out to me the last time I saw her, sometimes you’re dead even when you’re alive.
Why is it that the place I fear the most is the only place that can set me free?
It doesn’t make any sense.
Four days ago, Gladdie was laughing, joking, playing games. Today she’s