Second Helpings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [33]
I still can’t believe that he was my first and only ex-boyfriend. Of course, this was back in eighth grade, years before he became junior prom king, All-Shore point guard, and All-Around Cool Guy that he is today. I never really wanted to date him. Still don’t. But when I saw him and Manda, I almost belly-flopped right out of the bleachers. Manda. I wonder if she’ll change her name to Mandy, to match up with the rest of his bimbocious girlfriends: Kelsey, Becky, Corey, Lindsey, and Tory. Ack. I didn’t really know any of those girls, and that made their girlfriend status easier for me to take. Nevertheless, Scotty with Manda was too incestuous. I knew them both too well.
“Ack.”
I continued to freak out in this manner for the next half hour, until Bridget found a better source of distraction.
“New hottie alert!” she exclaimed, pointing to an intriguing guy on the opposite side of the gym. His hair is a deep, deep brown, a color I can’t help but hope is a reflection of his deep, deep intellect. It’s cut short on the back and sides, kept long on top, so it flops onto the wire-rims of his brainy specs. He possesses a subtle musculature, the kind you get from hiking alone for hours in the woods, not from pumping iron with a bunch of goons in the weight room, and a nervous smile he takes back as soon as he gives it away. Pale, perfect skin, not unlike that of the naked Nevermind baby swimming across his T-shirt, reaching for the dollar bill, taking the bait.
OOOH. My kind of cute. Geek cute, with an emphasis on the cute part. Yes, siree.
Oh, please let him be the new Honors Hottie Sara told me about. PHS has about a thousand students but seems much smaller. By the time you’re a senior, you either know all nonfreshmen personally or know something about them that may or may not be true. Clearly, he wasn’t freshman meat. No, Nirvana was fresh man meat. A transfer student from another district. Or maybe he’s a confused foreign-exchange student who needs a native Jerseyan like myself to give him a glorious guided tour of the Garden State.
Mere milliseconds later, I didn’t give one goddiggitydamn about reaching Nirvana anymore. Because next to this Honors Hottie, I saw . . .
The person I had hoped to see in homeroom, but didn’t, because our messed-up schedule had replaced some of the Ds-through-Fs with kids from all over the alphabet, reassigning some of the Ds-through-Fs (and one F in particular) to homerooms unknown.
I saw . . .
The Boy Who Shall . . .
Oh . . .
Screw it.
SCREW IT. I GIVE UP.
My mind games aren’t working. Removing his name from my vocabulary has not removed him from my memory. This cognitive behavior therapy crap I read about in my Psych book is officially over. Done. And to prove it, I will say and write his name.
Marcus Flutie.
That’s when I saw Marcus Flutie.
There, I wrote it. I said it.
MARCUS FLUTIE! MARCUS FLUTIE! MARCUS FLUTIE!
Christ, that feels good. But not as good as if felt to lay eyes on him. I gasped when I saw him, sucking enough air into my lungs to suffocate everyone else in the stadium.
“Oh, Jess,” Bridget said. “No.”
Oh, Jess. Yes.
“No,” she said, quietly but firmly.
Yes.
“Not Marcus Flutie again,” Bridget said.
Yes. Marcus Flutie. Again. Andagainandagainandagainandagainandagain.
His shirt-and-tie uniform had been replaced by a plain white shortsleeved T-shirt, with something too distant, too blurry for me to read printed across his chest. The summer sun had brightened his russet hair to a new-penny shade of copper, and he’d grown out his buzz cut, so tufts rise off his scalp like a rooster. OOOH. Cock-a-doodle . . .
“Don’t.”
Cock-a-doodle-don’t.
“What is it about him that makes you, like, totally lose your shit?”
I wish I knew. It’s more than the late-night conversations we used to have about everything and nothing, the only thing besides running that helped calm me down and get a decent night’s sleep. It’s more than the way he seems to make things so complicated, yet helps me see