Sloppy Firsts_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [85]
I really couldn’t say that I did.
"I’m not like, expressing myself very well," she said. She stuck her ponytail between her mouth and her nose, like a mustache. Then she let go.
"Do you know the real reason I went to L.A. this summer?"
"Uh … to be an actress?"
"Sorta," she said. "You said it yourself before I left. I’m not an actress," she said, sweeping her arm in the air at the icons on her walls. "Not yet anyway." She stuck her tongue out at her reflection in the mirror.
"Oh." I had no idea where this was going.
"That was like, the excuse for the trip. The only way my mom would agree to it."
"Uh-huh." I still wasn’t getting this.
"The real reason I went was because I thought that if Burke missed me while I was away, he’d appreciate me more when I got back," she said. "Like, what a duh move."
"Things weren’t cool between you and Burke before you left?"
Bridget shook her head.
"What was so bad?"
"I don’t really want to get into that," she said. "It wasn’t bad. It was just like, boring. We’d been together for three years and things had gotten boring."
I don’t know why this surprised me. Burke was boring. I just assumed that Bridget was boring too, and therefore didn’t care. Much like Bethany and G-Money don’t mind.
"I should have just broken up with him."
"Why didn’t you?"
She took a deep breath and held it for a few seconds before answering.
"Because I was afraid of being alone."
The words resonated inside me, like a favorite song. I was afraid of being alone.
"But you had Manda and Sara.…"
She sighed. "I know you were too busy being miserable about Hope to notice, but like, I hung out with them outside of school like about as much as you did."
"What?" How could that be?
"It’s true," she said. "I was left out on as many things as you were."
Then she pointed out a bunch of examples that I had missed: Bridget wasn’t invited to the spring-break ho-down. Bridget didn’t make the N.Y.C. shopping trip. Bridget wasn’t at the post-prom party. During the Hy heyday, Bridget had become an innocent bystander. But because she wasn’t Hope, I’d seen her as being as guilty as Manda and Sara.
"The tighter they all got, the more like, desperate I got to stay with Burke."
I thought about how close I’d come to getting back together with Scotty just so I’d have something to do in my downtime. And I really couldn’t blame Bridget for what she’d done. Not one bit.
"I just don’t see why we have to go on not talking to each other," she said. "It’s like, duh. Especially like, when you’re one person who I know relates to what I’m going through. We both hung out with one person all the time. And now that person is gone."
Whoa. I’d never once considered the similarity of our situations. At least Hope was still around in the emotional sense. For Bridget, Burke was obliterated. Permanently.
I thought Bridget had a better shot at inventing cold fusion than surprising me in a good way. I can admit when I’m wrong. And I was wrong about Bridget. She’s no genius, but she’s not as brainless as I thought she was.
There. I said it.
Still, this conversation doesn’t change things in a monumental way. Bridget and I are not going to be best friends again. But there’s one less person in the world who hates me. And that can’t be a bad thing.
the twenty-third
Everything happens earlier on Thanksgiving.
You get up at eight A.M.(a full four hours ahead of what’s normal) to watch the Rockettes get rained on in the corny Macy’s parade. By nine A.M. you’ve already pissed off your father by telling him you’d rather rebreak your leg than don red-and-white face paint and accompany him to Pineville’s homecoming football game. At eleven A.M. you point out to your mom that she’s prepping way too much food for four people, which drives her to the first of many glasses of chardonnay. At noon, your grandmother Gladdie has already asked you a bizillion