Second Helpings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [12]
I’m afraid that Hope will still be as vital to my sanity but I won’t be as important to hers, simply because she will have made new friends to fill the void. I don’t think she’ll forget me, but she’ll move beyond me, because that’s the healthy thing to do when your best friend lives a thousand miles away and you can only talk to her once a week, and see her once a year.
Maybe I should try to get used to this now. Maybe I should accept that this journal is the only place that’s safe to express what’s really going on inside my mixed-up mind. Or maybe I should give others the benefit of the doubt. Maybe, just maybe, I should stop blaming SPECIAL or Pineville for not serving up my soul mate on a silver platter with caviar on the side. Drop me anywhere on the map and I’d quickly prove that location isn’t the problem—it’s me.
the seventeenth
My trial run for college is still not going well. My classmates hate me. I should have known SPECIAL would be a haven for Noir Bards, and that they would have no tolerance for a fraud like me.
Pretentious and depressed, a Noir Bard is very big on the fact that he/she is a writer. They write a lot about writing, often rhyming words like verse and hearse. To them, black is always the new black. They spend a lot of time at poetry slams and other literary events, chain-smoking and washing down Paxil with (black) coffee. Their intricate facial hardware and Goth getups are painfully obvious cries for help. Here’s a brief archetypal member profile, very much tainted by my cynical analysis. (But that’s okay because cynicism is in keeping with the true, blackened spirit of the Noir Bard.)
Name: Rebecca Adams (aka the Female Nosferatu).
Hometown: Cherry Hill, by way of Transylvania.
Long-Term Goal: To be the next Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton. (Read: Suicidal, then dead.)
Short-Term Goal: To creep me out.
Aesthetic Icon: Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice.
Telltale Quote: “Why is/Anyone/Anywhere?” (From her poem “Dying All the Time.”)
Potentially Troubling Fact: She has fangs. Genuine fangs, not those detachable ones that club kids wear to torment their elders.
Positively Troubling Fact: She bares them whenever Mac calls on me in class.
I admit that there are certain aspects of my personality—my chronic, low-grade depression, for example—that would prompt Pineville High classmates to vouch for my card-carrying status in the Noir Bard camp, despite the lack of funereal tones in my wardrobe. But now that we’ve shared our work with one another over the past few weeks, it is clear that I am not one of them.
Take today’s assignment, for example. We were asked to write a dramatic monologue in which the character talked about a Life-Changing Experience. Proving the theory that writers are a tortured bunch, I was the only student in the writing program who didn’t write about being rehabbed, raped, or rejected by a parent in a viciously ambivalent child-custody case. I’ve never felt so normal in my entire life. Of course, SPECIAL is the one place on earth where being normal is a liability.
My monologue, told from Hope’s perspective about moving to Tennessee, was not very well received. After I read it out loud, Mac made it clear that I am probably the most sunshiney, superficial student he’s ever had. This, by the way, is making it much more difficult to have a crush on him, but not impossible.
“ ‘The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph,’ ” Mac said. “Thomas Paine.”
“Uh, okay.”
“Dig deeper, Jessica. Work harder. Struggle with your writing. It will be worth it.”
“Uh, how?”
“Tch.” Mac grabbed two handfuls of his curls, right above both ears. “Any suggestions?”
“Use her departure as a metaphor for man’s journey to the grave,” urged Loser.
“Make the narrator a voice from the grave,” suggested the Grim Reaper.