Sloppy Firsts_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [52]
At their request, I tried calling Hy at her aunt’s house last week. She simply said Hy was vacationing with her family for the summer. I asked her where they went, and she got all flustered and hurried me off the phone with the suspicious "someone’s at the front door" routine. As a phone phobic, I saw right through this. Something is up, for sure. I just don’t know what. Family problems, I bet. Kids are always sent packing somewhere secret when there are family problems. Or an unplanned pregnancy. Ooooh. What if Fly knocked her up?
Ugh. I sound like Sara.
I can’t help but think of the last thing she said: No matter what I do, don’t take it personally. Maybe she knew then that she was leaving. As much as Hy disappointed me toward the end of school, I hope whatever is going on, it’s nothing bad.
Of course, the most conspicuous absentee from my life is Marcus Flutie.
I know he’s still at Middlebury, but I can’t shake the feeling that I’m going to see him again. The boardwalk is swarming with Marcus mirages. I fall for them every time. I catch split-second glimpses of his dreads, his slouch, and his tattoo. They last long enough for my heart to bang against my insides, like it wants me to expel it from my chest cavity. Every time I think I see Marcus, it turns out to be someone who looks nothing like him. One time the Marcus was a black guy. Another time the Marcus was a girl. It’s like I need to see Marcus so badly that I’m trying to turn him into everyone. And everyone into him.
the twentieth
Still no Marcus. No Hy either.
I’m on Bridget’s mass E-mail list, which pisses me off. You would think that after making such an annoying request, she would at least take the time to personalize her correspondence, or at least have the common sense to bcc the other people so I don’t know that she’s sending the same I-just-missed-getting-a-tampon-commercial-but-I-saw-Freddie-Prinze-Jr.-at-Trader-Vic’s message to everyone in our class.
I’m still keeping my eye on Burke. The only girls I ever see him talking to are me, Manda, and Sara. He’d better keep it that way.
I see Scotty all the time, but I wish I didn’t. It reminds me of the whole Cal thing.
I was seven hours and thirty-eight minutes into my eight-hour shift when I saw Scotty for the bizillionth-or-so time last night. He was standing by a blinking neon sign that persuaded passersby to take ball in hand and Whack Our Kats. He was talking to the pruny man who had worked at that boardwalk stand for twenty-five summers and counting.
Scotty lifted his red Funtown Pier employee T-shirt up to his chest hair. There was a girdle binding his newly acquired beer bulge. He’s been kicking kegs all summer with the football team. The old man coughed a laugh as Scotty explained the need for the fat-sucking contraption. It was called a Gut Buster, the amazing machine that would sweat his gut away. He seemed okay with the fact that it would take an entire summer of intense weight training and wearing the Gut Buster to undo what it took only opening his mouth and chugging, chugging, chugging to do. The Whack Our Kats man watched and listened and laughed until it was clinically dangerous to laugh any harder.
I knew that this was the story that Scotty was relating. I knew the story because a few days ago, he had acted it out for me. Word for word, gesture for gesture—it was all the same. I had laughed, too. Seeing his repeat performance tonight, however, almost made me cry. Somehow it confirmed what I already knew: I’m no different than the Whack Our Kats man in his eyes.
This is a delayed reaction. I should have had this epiphany three weeks ago, when Scotty stopped carpooling with Burke, Manda, and me and started getting rides from a girl named Becky who goes to Eastland. There was no reason for it to bother me. So it didn’t.
Until last night, that is. We were stuck at the sixth