Second Helpings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [83]
Midnightish. Len’s face appears and Scotty fades away and Len’s hand is on mine and I feel like I’m immersed in a Jacuzzi all warm and bubbly and then we’re upstairs overlooking the crowd and even though I know it’s pure chaos, the party looks like a frame from a film, still and bright and overexposed, but then starting with “Ten!” the film moves in slow mo, then gets faster and faster and faster with each backward number, so when it reaches “One!” there’s an explosion of sound and motion that climaxes with Len kissing me, and his lips hit every erogenous zone, even ones I never knew I had, like my left nostril, and I look at Len and I love him, I love, love, love him and I don’t even think about Marcus or who he’s kissing as the ball drops . . .
??? Len and I are in his car parked on a dark indigo road in the woods where I hear each leaf shimmy against the bark as clearly as I hear Len’s breath and my own hums of pleasure coming up up up from deep inside me and my skin is searing and his mouth is wet and cold and everywhere and nowhere at once and it gives me chills it’s so good good good it’s all good and we’re together not quite here in the woods but somewhere else beyond Pineville beyond the globe even and it’s how I imagined it being like last year on the eve and I know it’s all connected last year this year it’s all connected not being with him last year was meant to be it’s all connected we’re all connected this is what the yoga book calls samadhi when you experience the entire universe as an interconnected whole and this is how it’s supposed to happen it’s my time to shed everything my clothes my inhibitions my regrets and just be with Len the way I’m supposed to be the way this is supposed to happen samadhi samadhi samadhi and as I’m thinking this in my head Len says something about how this is supposed to happen a question maybe waiting for an answer and I am euphoric because this is all the proof I need that Len and I really are connected we have shared a moment of cosmic telepathy and I think yes this is how it’s supposed to happen with Len yes Len and not with Marcus as I have deeply believed to be an inevitability every single day for 365 days half the time that Hope has been away and even though I didn’t want to believe it even though I shredded all the pages that proved it I still believed in Marcus and me until now right now and as I finish that thought I’m suddenly hurtling through the air crashing out of the sky smashing into stars as I tumble toward earth until the ground reaches up not in an embrace but to smack me hit me slap me for thinking all of this because when I finally recover from my fall I look up and see the sad sad sad expression on Len’s face and I realize that I’ve been saying all of this out loud and he’s heard every word especially the ones I never wanted anyone else to hear.
the second
I am never doing drugs again.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not about to start making public-service announcements against the evils of drugs. I think my troubles have more to do with being me than doing E. Heath’s death certainly wasn’t the only reason I’d never experimented. Even before I knew he was using, I had a feeling that my body chemistry would not take well to any illicit substances. I mean, I’m not a very good drunk, so why would I do any better at getting high? I think some people are more successful experimenters than others. (Take Marcus, for example. He was able to kick all his habits no problem.)
I was never afraid of turning into a character from one of the hilarious videos that Brandi shows in HHS class—you know, the tweak freak who thinks she can fly and flings herself off the roof with wildly flapping wings, or the innocent girlfriend who goes from pothead to smackhead to crackhead in one long, druggy weekend with her bad-news boyfriend. No, my concerns were far less dramatic than that. I was worried that any drugs, any drug,