Charmed Thirds

by Megan Mccafferty

  But Sierra made Marcus's past seem all too present. He did it with her, he did it with all of them, and now he's doing it with me. Or not doing it with me. Which makes it even worse.

  “Jessica?” he asked, squeezing my knee with calloused fingers.

  “I understand,” I said, arching away from him so I could rest my head on the window. “I just don't feel like talking right now.”

  And then he drove me home with nothing but the blast of the air conditioner to drown out the din of our silence.

  the nineteenth

  I blamed it all on physical logistics, but I now know why I'm turned off by the idea of sex in Marcus's car: It evokes all the girls I don't want to think about. The girls who were splayed and layed across the backseat. The girls before me. Girls like Sierra.

  So now, I'm lying in this bed and I'm thinking this: I have had sex exactly four times. Three out of four occurred within the first two weeks of my sexual initiation on June 7, 2002. The fourth took place last New Year's Eve on the Columbia University campus, as the ball dropped from one year to the next.

  Considering how I'm the anti–teen queen, it's ironic that I lost my virginity not only on prom night, but in a scenario straight out of the eighties teen movies I love so much, with Marcus, the reformed bad boy, boldly declaring his love in a song written for me, yes, me the Brainiac virgin, in front of the gaping mob otherwise known as the Pineville High Class of 2002. Prior to the act, I'd even made fun of the type of girl who fantasized about losing her virginity on an “event” night like her birthday, homecoming, or prom. I'm redeemed only because we never made it to the prom proper, and sped straight from a preparty to his bedroom, where he slowly lowered the zipper on my red dress and let it fall in a satiny whisper onto his floor. That night, Marcus loved me in ways worthy of overwrought adverbs—rapturously, deliciously—but most of all, tenderly. He took great care in making my first time as painless and passionate as possible, with a kiss for every sublime yearning that I didn't have the power to articulate.

  I kept these details to myself when I called Hope to tell her that I lost my virginity. I was only peripherally aware at the time that this secret-keeping would intensify as my relationship with Marcus deepened. Women will always choose the man over the best friend. This is a sad but true fact of life, and it's only this certitude that makes me unashamed to admit it.

  I have yet to get a reciprocal phone call from Hope because she still hasn't done it. Sometimes I admire her for holding out. But more often I pity her for not finding someone who makes the preservation of her virginity seem utterly pointless.

  the twenty-second

  Oh, thank God. Mr. Flutie got off the couch. And Marcus and I finally fucked.

  Would you prefer a prettier phrase, like made sweet love? Well, that's not what we did. Marcus might argue that we're in love, so we're always making love—even when we're just plain ol'-fashioned fucking. Yes, even with my limited experience, I know there's a difference. And if you don't know what it is, well, I feel sorry for you.

  Semantics aside, any sexual activity is a miracle considering the neutering effect of the run-in with Sierra. And the state of my hair. Not to mention that the Accutane is failing and I had a throbbing bubo on the tip of my nose. Buboes are the red, raging, open sores that marked the Black Death, my favorite of all the medieval plagues. When the bubo turned black, you were doomed (hence the name), and no one would dare come close to the infected corpse, not even for a burial. You were lucky if someone even bothered to throw a sheet over you.

  I babbled about all this as Marcus recovered from coming because it was better than a conversation comprised of apologies. (His for fucking Sierra, mine for retroactively punishing him for it.) He didn't react to my rambling, so I didn't think he was listening. Or rather, I was hoping that he wasn't capable of listening after being laid so powerfully by the love of his life. But then he sat up in the twisted sheets and put his lips to my nose, lightly kissing my cyst.

  “I'd bury you,” he said.

  I looked at him. In postcoital calm, his heavy-lidded eyes were even deeper, sleepier than usual. His arms and legs were so long that there seemed to be no end to them in the sheets. I crushed my body against his so intensely that I squashed his internal organs and he yelped in pain. I didn't want to injure him, but I couldn't help myself.

  Why am I leaving him for a month? I'm insane! Insane!

  the twenty-seventh

  So I didn't write anything in my journal during the school year because Marcus was gone. And now I haven't written because he's here.

  I prefer the latter excuse.

  Similarly, I've been spending so much time with Marcus that I haven't hung out with anyone else. (And maybe I'm in hair-related hiding, too.)

  Today Bridget showed up in my bedroom all shrieky and annoyed. Even when she's pissed off, she radiates a golden aura that is soothing to the senses.

  “Jess! I'm only, like, your oldest friend! Where have you been?”

  She extended me the courtesy of not gawking at the brunette horror that protrudes in all directions from my scalp. I, of course, totally checked out her tits.

  They looked the same to me, in all their perky, slightly bigger than B-cup splendor. I was so relieved that I gave her a huge hug, one that would not have been possible if her boobs had been upgraded to LA proportions. The rest of Bridget was as blond, blue-eyed, teeny-nosed, clear-skinned, and impossibly, if unimaginatively, pretty as ever. In a flirty, light-as-air floral sundress and flip-flops, she had perfected the sloppy-sunny-sexy style preferred by starlets-in-training, those whose greatest wish is not to win an Oscar but to be voted into the Winners' Circle by the Fashion Police in the pages of US Weekly.

  “I'm so sorry that I haven't called you, Bridget!” And seeing her there, chewing on her ponytail, I felt genuinely bad about abandoning my only real female friend in Pineville. “I've been spending as much time with Marcus as I can.”

  She spit out her ponytail. “I have a boyfriend I haven't seen in ages and I still made an effort to see you!”

  She had, too. She'd called and IMed me about a half-dozen times in the past few weeks. Whoopsie.

  “Bridge, I'm sorry!” I dropped to my knees.

  She waved me away. “Well, you can grovel for forgiveness on the way to graduation, which is today in case you didn't remember.” She sounded so much like my mother that it might prove the babies-switched-in-infancy theory that explains how Bridget wound up living across the street instead of in the household in which she truly belonged.

  “Of course I remembered!”

  “And that's how you chose to dress for the occasion?” she asked, thrusting a finger at the SIZE DOESN'T MATTER T-shirt I'd gotten for free during Safer Sex Awareness Week. (For the record, I don't know if size matters because Marcus is all I've had. But I can certainly say this: Size sure helps. Whoo boy, does it help.) “Come on, Jess. Percy's my boyfriend, but he's your friend, too!”

  Percy's my boyfriend. When will that sound normal coming out of Bridget's mouth? Bridget and Pepe make a ridiculously handsome couple, and yet I still have difficulty thinking of them as a unit. Part of me still remembers him as the prepubescent black kid in my French class who lusted after me in a goofy Pepe-Le-Pew-like way. (Hence his private nickname, Pepe.) But that was more than three years, forty pounds, and six inches ago. (Six inches in height. Get your mind out of the SIZE DOESN'T MATTER gutter!)

  “Give me two minutes,” I said, heading toward my closet.

  She gestured toward my head. “Should I even ask what, like, happened?”

  “I cut it off during finals.”

  “It's not that bad,” she said in a tone that implied the opposite.

  “It's bad,” I corrected her as I pulled on a tank top and a cargo skirt. “It makes me feel like a mental patient.”

  “You always feel like a mental patient,” she said, rifling through my sock drawer. “Don't blame your hair.”

  Within seconds, she fas
hioned a headband out of a pair of fishnet stockings I'd bought but had never had the courage to wear, even in the city. “Use something like this to push your bangs off your face until they grow out. Whoever told you that bangs were good for your face should, like, have her cosmetology license revoked. It's too severe for you.” She smoothed my hair with her fingers until she was pleased with what she saw. “Cute,” she said finally.

  I looked in the mirror. It wasn't quite cute, but it was a huge improvement.

  “Thank you, Bridget.”

  “That's what friends are for,” she said.

  Some friends. Other friends are too busy with their own workloads to even notice my hair, let alone offer solutions for it. My friends at school sometimes make my brain hurt. Sometimes it's fun to talk about hairstyles instead of, say, string theory. Not that we don't talk about crap, too, because we do. But even when we're talking about crap, there's always someone with something to prove. There's this need to be an authority, and the more obscure the area of expertise, the better. I love my friend Jane, but when we're talking crap television, she claims that she can name the Brady Bunch episode before a single line of dialogue is uttered, based solely on the opening camera shot and entrance music. Or when we're talking crap music, she mentions how she's got the Sex Pistols' extremely rare cover of “Stayin' Alive” on vinyl. Jane is only trying to keep the conversation interesting—and most of the time she does—but it can still be very annoying. Being friends with Bridget is a relief because she lets me be shallow and there's nothing more to it than that.

  It was a good time to be preoccupied with shallowness, since I would surely run in to people at graduation who hadn't seen me in a long time. As Bridget and I approached the sprawling, architectural mish-mash of styles and materials that comprised the Pineville High campus—the result of several additions built by the lowest bidder—my stomach cinched tighter than a straitjacket.

  “It won't be that bad,” Bridget said, pulling her old Jetta into a parking space between two colossal mud-covered pickup trucks.

  “I know I'm going to see someone I don't want to see . . .”

  Sure enough, we'd been out of the car for approximately five seconds before we were sonically assaulted by none other than Sara D'Abruzzi, daughter of my brother-in-law's business partner, Wally D, but better known as the slightly less skanky half of the Clueless Two. Thankfully, her whorey counterpart, Manda, did not seem to be with her. (Perhaps she was busy battling the patriarchy in her own unique way, which seems to rely heavily on fellating other girls' boyfriends while not having sex with her own.) Manda's absence also meant that I would be spared from a bump-in with Len. I know that it's been more than a year, and I'm in love with Marcus and I didn't even like Len very much, but it still stings to think that he preferred that pseudo-feminist hobag over me.

  “Omigod!” Sara shrieked, swinging her Louis Vuitton Murakami bag. “Bridget! You look so quote Hollywood unquote. And Jess, you look—omigod!—so quote New York unquote.”

  “And you look so quote Harrington unquote,” we replied in unison, which is not something Bridget and I often do. Hope and me, yes. (That is, when Hope and I used to see each other, which afforded us the opportunity to say things simultaneously.) But Bridget and me, no. This is an indication of how it was the obvious thing, the only thing to say.

  Sara looked exactly like a privileged princess attending a country club joke of a college should. Her hair was dyed an expensive blond (the kind Bridget and every Darling woman but me was born with) and Japanese-straightened into geishalike submission. Her skin was fake baked to the point that it was practically a racial slur. And she was the skinniest I'd ever seen her, which is not a compliment. Through all of her weight ups and downs, Sara hasn't realized that she actually looks better with some extra pounds softening up her beady-eyed, beak-nosed features.

  Sara is not cute. And with this hack job–whack job haircut, I know from not cute.

  She was wearing a sorority T-shirt with the season's ubiquitous Juicy miniskirt and überubiquitous Ugg boots, the latter being the best example of onomatopoeia that I can think of: Ugh.

  “Your shirt's a joke, right?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” Sara asked, looking down at the pink and green Greek letters on her chest. “I'm proud to be in a sorority.”

  “But the letters,” I began. “Omega Mu Gamma . . .” I trailed off, assuming she'd fill in the rest. She didn't. “O.M.G.”

  Still nothing. I offered a hint.

  “Omigod!” I squealed.

  “Omigod!” Sara's face exploded with excitement. “I never thought of that before. Wait until I tell my sisters!”

  I found it difficult to believe that not one sister in the history of the sorority had put this together before. I suppose they're just too busy taking topless pictures of themselves for collegehumor.com.

  “Omigod!” Sara paused, pointing at her shirt as if to say, Omigod! How funny is this? Omigod! before continuing. “I'm on the CCR Ageless Body diet.”

  “CCR?” I asked. “Creedence Clearwater Revival?”

  “Carb and Calorie Reduction,” Bridget explained.

  “Aren't all diets about carb and calorie reduction?” This is an area I know nothing about. I have never met a cheeseburger I didn't like, and, unfortunately, have the heart-attack-high cholesterol to prove it.

  “It's not about the perfect body,” Sara said. “It's about extending your life through dramatic reduction of food intake.”

  “It's big in LA,” Bridget said.

  “I'm sorry,” I said. “The last time I checked, starvation killed people.”

  Sara ignored the dig. “So how are you?” she asked Bridget in her most patronizing voice. “Are you still with Percy?” She turned to me. “Are you still with Marcus?”

  We both gave her the answers she was looking for, which she would surely tack on to her gossip bulletin: Everything I Know About Everyone. And then for the next infinity or so, Bridget and I stood silently as Sara told us Everything She Knew About Everyone. Not surprisingly, she had her own revisionist take on her cheating. (“Omigod! I totally did not cheat. The TA I was quote bang-a-langin' unquote told me I was allowed to bring notes to the exam!”) Other highlights of the rundown were her confirmation of what I had already heard about Scotty (“Omigod! He's fat, but that doesn't stop him from quote bang-a-langin' unquote everything that moves!”) and what I refused to believe about Len and Manda (“Omigod! They are totally not quote bang-a-langin' unquote!”).

  “Bang-a-langin'” is, apparently, her new and third-favorite phrase, one she probably picked up at Harrington. If you have to ask what her first- and second-favorite phrases are, you haven't been paying any attention at all.

  When all the important issues had been covered and I was floating about a foot off the ground because of the mass exodus of brain cells from my cerebellum, Sara asked The New Question. If you recall, The Old Question, asked by teachers, friends' parents, and grocery store check-out clerks alike was, “What school do you want to go to?” The New Question is, of course, “How's school?”

  Last winter break, when I inevitably collided with former classmates, I got used to answering the The New Question with a smile and an upbeat, “It's awesome.” And the inquisitor would beam and say, “Cool!” and move on, having no clue that I'd used a word that I always use when I never mean it.

  I was inspired by Marcus, who would answer The New Question with a note of genuine intellectual and spiritual enlightenment. (“Gakkai students and faculty are unified by our commitment to becoming global citizens.”) I admired Bridget, who replied with lackluster candor. (“UCLA is okay, but I miss Percy.”) I could relate to Len's somewhat disaffected pragmatism. (“Cornell is stressful. But. Um. Good for my career.”) I was unmoved by Manda's claim of academic rigor. (“There's no way Columbia is that much harder than Rutgers. Puh-leeze!”) I was unsurprised by the simple truths from Scotty. (“We party so hard at Lehigh!”) And Sara. (“Omigod! We p
arty so hard at Harrington!”) Finally, I outright envied Hope, who could answer The New Question with unbridled enthusiasm. (“I love RISD! It's changed my whole concept of creativity! Plus, there're a lot of really hot artsy guys.”)

  But for me, the truth has always been far more complicated than the boundaries of small talk permit, even when the listener is actually interested in hearing what I have to say, unlike Sara, who is only interested in her own adenoidal drone. If I had the time, and the right audience, I might explain that Columbia would be awesome if I were the type of person who could embrace awesomeness. But I'm not. I'm certainly happier than I was at Pineville, but it's hardly perfect. I've learned not to complain, though, because it's obviously selfish and ridiculous to complain about attending one of the best educational institutions in the world.

  However, less obvious is how selfish and ridiculous it is to complain about one of the worst educational institutions in, if not the world, then New Jersey. Aka Pineville High School.

  I found this out the hard way.

  Early in the year, when everyone on my floor was still in the getting-to-know-you phase, a few of us had gathered in the lounge to play Who Hated High School the Most? Tanu hated high school because she was the only Indian girl in school. That's Southeast Asian Indian, not Native American Indian, which is why her nickname, “Tonto,” was doubly cruel. William, one of the members of F-Unit, hated high school in Texas because he was the only pasty-faced punk in a school full of preppy cowboys. Jane hated high school because she got drunk at the wrong party as a freshman and was rumored to have fucked half the football team. It was a false accusation—she had blown one of them—yet she still spent the next three years hearing “Ride the Jane Train!”

  So when it was my turn I said, “High school was torture after my best friend, Hope, moved away.”