Second Helpings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [125]
Only twenty days left of school. When I think about everything that happened in the past month—my first family death, my first birth, my first real conversation with my father—I realize that twenty days is more than enough time for anything to happen . . . almost. You know what I’m not talking about, the only rite of passage that I—that we—have yet to make. But I’ve sexiled myself to bystander status on that front, too, and twenty days is definitely not enough time.
Wistfully yours,
J.
june
the second
KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK. It was my mother’s knock, one that went from the knuckles straight to my skull.
“Jessie, Bridget is here to see you,” Mom said. “She said it’s urgent.”
I popped out from under the covers.
“Send her in.”
The last time Bridget arrived at this early an hour on a Sunday, it was to break the news about Miss Hyacinth Anastasia Wallace. So I knew whatever it was that was bringing her to my door was indeed urgent.
Bridget walked in, her face as deep and red as a gash without a Band-Aid.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
She coughed up her ponytail.
“What? Did you see a trailer for Bubblegum Bimbos on the Internet or something?”
“No. It’s . . . like. Okay.”
“Bridget, what is it?”
“I can’t go to the prom with Percy!”
Of course. What could be more important than the prom?
“Why not?” I asked.
“I’ve got, like, this really big audition in L.A. for a TV movie about OxyContin abuse the next day,” she said. “It’s like a really juicy part, and as much as it kills me not to go to the prom, Percy is insisting that I don’t pass up the opportunity.”
“Okay, so what does this have to do with me?”
“Will you go with him instead?”
I shrank back under the covers.
“Jess! He’s already put down his deposit for the tux, and I’ve already paid for the ticket, and we don’t want them to go to waste.”
“Why would Pepe want to go to the prom with me when you’re his girlfriend?”
“Because you’re, like, his best female friend,” Bridget said. “And you’re, you know . . .”
“What?”
She sat down next to me on the bed. Her eyes got a little moist. “Well, you’re, like, my best friend, too, and I’d like to see you go to the prom with someone fun.”
I didn’t quite know what to say. I had never really thought about my relationship with Bridget. With Hope’s best-friend status still secure, who was Bridget to me? My childhood playmate? The one friend who has known me since diapers?
But thinking back over the past year or so, Bridget has been more than my former best friend. She was the fallback person I went to whenever I needed to have a face-to-face heart-to-heart. But I had obviously penalized her for one reason: She wasn’t Hope. So what if she wasn’t my intellectual equal? So what if she’s sometimes more ditzy than I can handle? Bridget was still the only person at Pineville I completely trusted, even if she wasn’t my actual best friend. She was indeed, just as she had said, “like” my best friend. Sometimes that’s good enough.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go to the prom with your boyfriend.”
She clapped her hands enthusiastically, proving that you can take the girl out of cheerleading, but not the cheerleader out of the girl.
“And I’ll try not to sleep with him, too.”
With that, Bridget squealed and smacked me in the face with a pillow. I yelped and whacked her back. Thus began a very girlie pillow fight, the kind that’s the fuel of countless adolescent boys’ fantasies.
the fifth
I very intentionally did not tell my mom right away that I was going to the prom. As it is my mother’s custom to obsessively ask about any school-spirited PHS function, I figured I would just