Second Helpings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [96]
Bethany watched me for a few seconds before shaking her head slowly with pity.
“I know how you feel,” Bethany said in a soothing, big-sisterly voice.
“YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL?”
“I do.”
“How? Nothing like this ever happened to you!”
“How do you know?”
“Because you loved high school! You were the type of person who makes high school hell for people like me.”
“That’s not fair, Jess. I had problems. Life was not always a bowl of cherries for me.”
“Whatever.”
I knew better. Bethany was the Manda of the Class of 1991: Most Popular, Best Looking, and one-half of a Class Couple who broke up immediately after graduation. Sick. Sick. Sick.
“Do you still have Trapper Keepers?” she asked.
“What?”
“Trapper Keepers. Do they still make them?”
“Yeah, I guess so. But only the TMR kids use them.”
“TMR?”
“Trainable Mentally Retarded.”
“Oh,” she said, shifting her girth. “Well, when I was in school everyone had Trapper Keepers. And the thing to do was to cut open the plastic and replace the boring Trapper Keeper background with a collage of all the labels from the brand-name clothing you wore. If you didn’t have enough ESPRIT, Benetton, or Guess? labels, forget it. You were over socially.”
She mistook my silence for understanding.
“I was desperate to keep up. No matter how many labels I had, it wasn’t enough. Especially since we didn’t have as much money back then and Mom always insisted we buy things on sale. Or at Marshalls, which was just not cool. Not cool at all. So I’d go through the mall, secretly ripping the labels off clothes and slipping them into my purse. I was shoplifting labels for my Trapper Keeper!”
I let this sink in.
“Bethany,” I said.
“Yes?”
“That is the most moronic thing I have ever heard.”
I thanked her for her company, grabbed a new box of Cap’n Crunch and a bottle of Diet Coke for sustenance, and shuffled back upstairs. There I stayed for the rest of the day.
I know that Bethany was trying to bond with me over the Tyranny of the Trapper Keepers and all, but it so paled in comparison to what I was going through.
the twentieth
Six Fun Activities for When You’re Playing Hooky and Feeling Very, Very Sorry for Yourself
Count the bleeps on Jerry Springer.
Arrange your tresses into a Mohawk. Then—using a stopwatch from your running days—time how long it stands up, unaided by any hair products other than your all-natural scalp grease.
E-mail your gay mentors to find out if they are aware of any hypnosis that cures people of heterosexuality.
Play toe-lint football.
Lie on your back on the floor for hours. This is known as savasana, the corpse pose. It’s the only yoga asana you have truly mastered so far, which is okay because it so aptly describes how you feel.
Write in your journal about your virgin ex-boyfriend who dumped you on the most lovey-dovey of holidays so he could bang the class slut. Write about how you never saw this coming, and how you never thought it would hurt this much even if you did. Then tear out all the pages you’ve just written and torch them with a Zippo. If you don’t have a Zippo because it’s downstairs, and you can’t go downstairs because that’s where people are, tear the pages into tinier and tinier and infinitesimal pieces until not even a single letter of a single word is discernable, not a trace of this thing that has made you into the mess you are for no good reason at all.
the twenty-Second
In my entire academic career, I have never, ever stayed home from school for more than one day in a row. I rarely get sick. My white blood cells kick ass, which is one thing I’ve got going for me, I guess. Playing hooky was out of the question in elementary school because I loved school so much and couldn’t stand the thought of my classmates learning without me. As I got older, I realized I’d be smarter if I stayed home, because doing so would spare the obliteration of countless brain cells. But then my participation in cross-country