Second Helpings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [31]
3. I will be nicer to Bridget and any other misguided individual who— for reasons I can’t comprehend—pursues a friendship with me despite the inevitable incompatibility at its core.
4. I will ignore the Clueless Two. This requires herculean effort, as Manda and Sara’s skanked-out adventures are too front-page tabloid to go unnoticed.
5. I will refuse to read, watch, listen to, or take in through any other means of sensory absorption as of yet undiscovered by man, anything related to Miss Hyacinth Anastasia Wallace and her so-called Gen-Whatever masterwork, Bubblegum Bimbos and Assembly-Line Meatballers.
6. I will accept that it is my primordial nature to focus all my hormones on one guy as opposed to taking the sluttier scattershot approach. I will learn from my mistakes and make a wiser choice for my OOOH (Obsessive Object Of Horniness) for the 2001–2002 academic year. Specifically, one who is not (a) a homosexual or (b) He Who Shall Remain Nameless.
Dogmatically yours,
J.
september
the fourth
My first period class is gym. My second class of the day, which starts at 8:35 A.M., is lunch—or should I say, brunch. It takes place in the gymnasium, which is convenient because it’s followed by two more back-to-back gym classes. After that, I have freshman-level basic-skills English and another lunch. The last period of the day is blank. I interpreted that as a study hall.
This slacker schedule is not a manifestation of early-stage senioritis. A wonky 404 hacked into the guidance department’s new scheduling program, and now not one of Pineville High’s students has a schedule that makes any sense. Approximately 25 percent of the student body was in my first gym class. We all squeezed into the bleachers in a flagrant firecode violation and sat there for the remainder of the day while the guidance department tried to sort out the glitch.
“What up, my white soul sista?”
I turned around and was so happy to be face-to-face with someone I actually wanted to see.
“Why, if it isn’t my token black friend!”
Pepe and I bumped fists.
“I thought this scheduling mistake was the administration’s way of keeping the brothas down,” he said. “But I see that you crackas are getting harassed by the Man, too.”
This ongoing joke about his “blackness” and my “whiteness” never gets old. I don’t find it annoying or offensive when Pepe acts ghetto, because (unlike Miss Hyacinth Anastasia Wallace and countless Wiggaz at Pineville High) he’s doing it to be funny, not to keep it real. (Also, unlike Hy and the PHS Wiggaz, Pepe benefits from actually being black.) There is much fun to be had upsetting too-uptight, politically correct people.
Last spring, Pepe and I also bonded over the stupidity of everyone else in our French class. He’s a big fan of my editorials in The Seagull’s Voice, too, which I totally appreciate. We even got over our first totally awkward moment, crucial to the well-being of any friendship. I was sure that his Pepe Le Pew-on-E crush would fizzle as soon as he got to know me better as a person. I mean, it’s a lot easier to have a crush on me when you don’t know what a total psycho I am. So I was shocked when after eight months of daily conversations, he asked me if I’d like to go to see a French flick that was showing at the local library’s International Film Festival. I was even more floored when he decided we could still be friends after I turned him down, which I did because (say it with me now) I will not get obsessed with anyone who is anything less than perfect for me. This mandate pretty much guarantees that my hymen will continue to stay so intact, so airtight that it could be used as a flotation device in case of an emergency.
“Hey, Jess!”
Bridget was also in the ridiculous gym class. She was flapping her arms in the air to get my attention.
“Over here!”
Bridget was sitting alone in the gym bleachers. Sort of. She was surrounded on all sides by a ring of fawning freshmen who kept a very safe distance. The very fact that