Sloppy Firsts_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [37]
"No."
She sighed for about ten minutes.
"I’m not going to tell your father about this. It will only upset him, too," she said, picking up speed on the highway. "What I don’t understand is what you have to be so worried about in the first place. And why you feel the need to take it out on us …"
I love that she twisted this around to make it about them and not me. That’s when I zoned out, listening to the hum of the tires. Staring at the yellow dashes on the road, I reveled in my contentment and my decision to keep my mouth shut from now on.
May 6th
Hope,
Period Watch 2000 continues. Of course, my amenorrhea anxiety has reached an all-time high ever since I found out that there’s no legit diagnosis.
So it’s no coincidence that my tolerance for the Clueless Crew has hit a new low. I’ll spare you a torturous travelogue of that shopping trip I told you about. Suffice it to say that Mr. D’Abruzzi’s credit card got quite a workout; the four of them have been sporting new gear and makeup all week. Blatant buddy-buying at its best. Or worst.
And now Hy is the ringleader. She knew Wally D would pay up if Sara told him she’d been crying all the time because she was the only one left out on all the prom-related fun. No one noticed or cared that I wasn’t going to the prom. They were so completely suspended in their own collective delusional reality that they were oblivious to the fact that they’d left me out of their prom-related fun, and that the real reason Sara had been crying was because she thought she’d gotten knocked up. In one of her first acts of solidarity, Hy had rechristened Sara’s devirginizer That Frat-Boy Fuckhead.
Hy now jokes with them like she enjoys it. As I’ve said many times, she wasn’t best-friend material for me. But I was cool with that as long as she wasn’t best-friend material for the Clueless Crew either. Hy changes personas as often as she changes the color of her highlights (currently shades of purple). Maybe she never was who I thought.
Oh, and Scotty still isn’t talking to me. Combine all this with about three minutes of sleep each night, and the fact that prom hysteria is at its shrieky peak, and you’ll understand why I’m feeling psycho and not at all ready to run in the qualifying time trials for the state sectionals this afternoon. Hopefully, I’ll be cured before our next convo.
Schizophrenically yours, J.
may
the fourteenth
This is how I spent my Saturday, instead of running in the state sectionals or participating in all-day prom prep:
I woke up at 1:45 P.M.The only reason why my eyes opened is because my mother tore into my bedroom, whipped up the shades, and yelled, "It’s one-forty-five p.m.—well past time to wake up!" before swirling out the door in a blur of pastel and perfume. My tongue was too weighed down by nocturnal mouth muck to give her the lashing she deserved for destroying my slumber. Unfortunately, I couldn’t pretend that she was just a cheerfully terrifying nightmare. Once I’m up, I’m up.
So I got out of bed. I looked out the window. The sun was shining and it was seventy-one degrees—perfect for prom photos. And track meets. I put on a pair of board shorts and a tank top and twisted my hair back into two lopsided pigtails. Then I grabbed a hand mirror and bounced my real reflection off the full-length mirror on my door.
All of this took about forty-five minutes.
"Jessica Lynn Darling! Are you up yet?"
I went down to the kitchen.
"Nice of you to join us," my mom said as she sorted through the Accepts and Declines, with regrets that arrived in today’s mail.
My dad, who was still mad about me blowing my race last week, just grunted and pretended to read a computer magazine. I mumbled some sort of greeting and poured a mammoth breakfast-and-lunch-size bowl of Cap’n Crunch.
"Maybe if you had a better diet you wouldn