Second Helpings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [48]
This question didn’t make much sense, so I don’t blame Haviland for not answering. I’m much better making my arguments on paper. But not this paper.
“When you first persuaded me to write for the newspaper, you told me that The Seagull’s Voice needed my voice. I guess you were wrong. I quit.”
And for the second time in less than two weeks, I turned my back on the face of gaping-mouthed shock. My words and actions are finally getting in sync. Paul Parlipiano would be so proud!
I’ve totally reversed my attitude about quitting, by the way. For me, quitting isn’t a sign of weakness. The weak thing to do would’ve been to keep on running, keep on writing. It takes a bigger set of balls to do the exact opposite of what everyone expects me to.
Only one problem: What to do with all this free time?
the seventeenth
I think my mom is secretly psyched that I quit the team and the paper because now I’m not at practice or meetings all the time. It provides more opportunities for her to torture me with trivialities.
“We got a letter from your sister today!” my mom sang before I had a chance to take my backpack off my shoulder.
“How’s the cult?”
My mother’s jaw and neck tightened. “I told you to stop saying that,” she said. Then her smile widened and her eyes brightened, a facial presto-chango as quick and authentic as Mr. Potato Head. “She wants us to come out to California for Thanksgiving.”
“California? Are you insane?” I cried. “Even if I was willing to get on an airplane, which I’m not, there’s no way I’m going back to the dot commune with those freaks.”
“Don’t make me reprimand you again. You know it upsets me when you call it that.”
“It upsets you because it’s the truth,” I said.
I went out to California during spring break last year to visit Stanford and Berkeley. However, one visit to the dot commune convinced me that I could never spend another four days, let along four years, in that state.
Bethany and G-Money lost a bundle in the tech crash but still had more liquid in their account than my parents have earned in their entire lives. Instead of seeing themselves as members of the under-thirty leisure class that they are, B&G fancy themselves as forerunners of a spiritual/financial movement in which former Internet impresarios shun conspicuous materialism in favor of “the simple life.” Only their idea of simplicity is . . . expensive. Bethany’s letter was probably written with ink hand-squeezed out of imported Indian Ocean squid on thick linen paper cushiony enough to wipe even the most hyperallergenic ass.
The stationery is just the tip of the iceberg, one made, no doubt, by purified well water pumped in via an elaborate irrigation system that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to install. B&G’s definition of a simpler life also means selling their condo and moving into a brand-new 10,000-square-foot ranch in the Marin County countryside with two other dot-bomb couples. That’s 3333.33 square feet per couple. I don’t need my real-estate maven mother to tell me that’s still a grotesque amount of footage. They have this notion that it is somehow more noble and less wasteful to buy necessities of life like salmon roe and Veuve Clicquot in bulk for six, instead of for two. Their whole oxymoronic existence makes me want to hurl. If you want to be rich, just be lousy, filthy, stinking rich!
Even worse than their ostentatious minimalism was all the B.S. I was forced to listen to every night at dinner. They’ve been brainwashed by Francis T. Upbin, Ph.D., cult leader and a self-described Economical Downturn Doctor they met at a seminar called “Invest in Yourself.” Dr. Frank is helping them cope with Loss of Sudden Wealth syndrome.
“As Dr. Frank says, your portfolio isn’t the only thing that takes a beating when you tank ten million dollars in an afternoon,” said G-Money, taking a bite of organic guinea fowl. “I’m grieving the loss of my lifestyle, my identity, my self-worth.”
Bethany and the other dot-bombers looked on, hypnotically.
“But that