Second Helpings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [131]
Notice how I’m playing games instead of writing about the most important thing in my life. It’s because I haven’t found a way to say it yet. Not right, anyway, which is why I’m glad Marcus did not buy a yearbook. He says he’ll just look at mine whenever he’s compelled to remember these people, which he does not anticipate happening very often. This spares me the humiliation of writing something sticky-sweet sentimental and trite.
This is what he wrote in mine:
Jessica:
There is nothing I can write in here that I won’t be able to tell
you in person.
Forever,
Marcus
the fourteenth
Tonight, when I came home from Marcus’s house, I went upstairs to my bathroom. Showered. Dried off. Towel-squeegeed my hair. Put on boxers and the COMINGHOME T-shirt that still smells like him. Meticulously applied zit crap to my facial landmines.
All of this before sitting down and writing about an emotion I cannot express.
I cannot write about love. It’s harder than writing about sex.
I found it even more impossible to talk about it with Hope on the phone, but I had to. I needed to know that she was okay with all this. I needed her to believe in Marcus and me as much as I do.
“If I didn’t want you together,” Hope said, “I wouldn’t have gone through all that trouble.”
That made perfect sense, of course.
“Are you okay with, you know, me not being a virgin anymore?” I asked.
Hope cackled into the receiver. “You were the one with the virgin complex, not me. I’ll do it someday. But until then, I’ll just have to live vicariously through you. You little vixen, you.”
I’m so relieved that my relationship with Marcus won’t come between me and Hope. Still, there are things that I will keep to myself. Like how I cut Senior Cut Day and spent it with Marcus instead. In his bed. Not the whole day, but the afternoon hours before his parents came home from work, which, quite frankly, was about as much as I could handle, as I am afraid of turning into a nymphomaniac.
As happy as I was to be alone with him, I couldn’t stop myself from asking the question that needed to be asked.
“If I ask you to tell me the truth about something, will you?” Marcus propped himself up on his elbow so we would be eye to eye. “I have never not told you the truth about anything,” he said.
“That’s subject to debate,” I said.
“What subject isn’t up for debate?” he countered.
“An honest answer to the question I’m about to ask you is not subject to debate,” I replied.
“Okay. Ask me.”
“What about the girls?” I asked.
“The girls . . .” he replied.
“How many girls before me?”
He buried his face in my neck and groaned. “Why do you need to ask me that?”
“Why do you need to keep the truth from me?”
His mouth was still on my neck. “Because I don’t like to talk about it.”
“Why? Because you feel guilty?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then why?”
“I’m at peace with my moral failings.”
“So you didn’t think that anything you’d ever done is wrong?” I was about to gather my clothes and leave at this point.
“I just don’t see the point in beating myself up. I think it’s more productive to concentrate on being a better person right now than punishing myself for who I was in the past.”
This was it. I’d been holding back for years about this. Hope may have forgiven him, but it was time for me to get it out of my system.
“How can you not feel any guilt when my best friend’s brother— your best friend—died because of all the stupid things you did?”
“Heath is—” He caught himself. “Was not me. I was never into the heavy shit he was.”
“You weren’t?”
“No,” he said. “I smoked up every day, did quite a bit of E, a little acid, some ’shrooms. Not that any of this stuff was healthy, but I never shot up. Ever. It just wasn’t my thing.”
I knew it