Second Helpings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [134]
The whole time, I was totally, completely myself. What’s more, I didn’t even have to concentrate on being myself. I just was. And you want to know the goddiggitydamnest thing? They loved me. Let me rephrase that: His parents LOOOOOOOOOOVED me. I know they loved me because, as I was getting ready to leave, Mrs. Flutie turned to her husband and said, “I just love this girl, don’t you?”
“Marcus finally brought home someone who is smarter than he is.”
“We love you, Jessica Darling!” enthused Mrs. Flutie as she bear-hugged me again.
Over her shoulder, I watched Marcus turn purple with embarrassment. Then he mouthed the words “I love you, too.”
“And I love you,” I replied, but I wasn’t afraid to say it out loud.
the twenty-fourth
The only reason I am still in school is because extra days were tacked on to the school year to make up for the time wasted in September on account of the messed-up scheduling. I aced out of all my finals, so it has been a particularly useless week at Pineville High for me. Could there be a more fitting end to my academic experience, or lack thereof?
With the prom over, yearbooks signed, and finals a joke, seniors are compelled to be even more nauseatingly nostalgic than they would be.
“This is the last time I’ll ever eat school pizza!”
“This is the last time I’ll cut Spanish!”
“This is the last time I’ll put out a cigarette on this toilet seat.”
Manda and Sara have been particularly mopey, walking around with tears in their eyes all week. I think they know the truth: This was the best time of their lives, and it’s almost over.
As much as I’ve bitched about not fitting in, and being an outsider among the insiders, I now realize that it was probably for the best. I mean, is there anything more pathetic than peaking at eighteen? Someone who counts down the decade until the next reunion? Someone whose mantra is “Remember when?”
I imagine Manda trying on her Prom Queen tiara when she’s thirty, Sara wanting to relive the days when her brainless scoop was a commodity, and Scotty, thick with frat fat, unable to run to the closest keg without getting winded, crying along with “Glory Days” on the radio because what Springsteen is singing is so true, so true.
If I ever, ever, ever miss Pineville High—with its dingy cinder-block walls, moldy, asbestos-filled ceillings, and gray hot-dog water cafeteria stench; with its clueless administration and counterintuitive zero-tolerance policies; with its hallways you can’t walk down, bathrooms you can’t use, and tables you can’t sit at because of its oppressive social zoning laws that put Upper Crusters at the top of the high-school hierarchy, followed by Jocks, Groupies, Wiggaz, Hoochies, I.Q.s, 404s, Dregs, Hicks, and Other Miscellaneous Bottom Dwellers Deemed Unworthy of Names; a place where any actual learning was purely by accident, and never took place inside the classroom—you have my permission to kill me.
Did I just write my graduation speech? Ha!
the twenty-eighth
I had already imagined how it would be next year.
I’d be at Columbia, and Marcus would move to Manhattan, or maybe one of the outer boroughs. I would study hard, and he would make money playing gigs at dingy bars. We’d spend countless hours going to clubs to see bands on the verge, touring obscure art exhibits, and sipping pot after pot of black coffee in hole-in-the-wall cafés. Many more hours would be spent lounging under the covers. We would never run out of witty and fascinating things to say to each other. Eventually, he’d apply to Columbia, and we’d be the type of well-educated, cosmopolitan couple that confuse the suburbumpkins who never leave Pineville.
I should have known not to get my heart set on anything.
“Jess, I’ve been meaning to tell you something.”
While the rest of the senior class was celebrating their Pineville emancipation