As happy as I was to be alone with him, I couldn’t stop myself from asking the question that needed to be asked.
“If I ask you to tell me the truth about something, will you?” Marcus propped himself up on his elbow so we would be eye to eye. “I have never not told you the truth about anything,” he said.
“That’s subject to debate,” I said.
“What subject isn’t up for debate?” he countered.
“An honest answer to the question I’m about to ask you is not subject to debate,” I replied.
“Okay. Ask me.”
“What about the girls?” I asked.
“The girls . . .” he replied.
“How many girls before me?”
He buried his face in my neck and groaned. “Why do you need to ask me that?”
“Why do you need to keep the truth from me?”
His mouth was still on my neck. “Because I don’t like to talk about it.”
“Why? Because you feel guilty?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then why?”
“I’m at peace with my moral failings.”
“So you didn’t think that anything you’d ever done is wrong?” I was about to gather my clothes and leave at this point.
“I just don’t see the point in beating myself up. I think it’s more productive to concentrate on being a better person right now than punishing myself for who I was in the past.”
This was it. I’d been holding back for years about this. Hope may have forgiven him, but it was time for me to get it out of my system.
“How can you not feel any guilt when my best friend’s brother— your best friend—died because of all the stupid things you did?”
“Heath is—” He caught himself. “Was not me. I was never into the heavy shit he was.”
“You weren’t?”
“No,” he said. “I smoked up every day, did quite a bit of E, a little acid, some ’shrooms. Not that any of this stuff was healthy, but I never shot up. Ever. It just wasn’t my thing.”
I knew it was the truth.
“Why did you feel the urge to do anything?”
“To heighten my senses. Or to feel numb. Depending on the day, and the drug.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Never,” he said.
“Really? Not ever?”
“Never,” he replied. “Life is actually more interesting without it.”
“Why did you let people think you were hard-core when you weren’t?”
“Because I’ve learned that you can’t control what other people are going to think about you. The best you can do in life is not piss yourself off.”
That was a very profound observation, I thought. I would be much better off if I lived by it.
Then I started thinking. If the drug stuff wasn’t true, maybe the stuff about the girls was all hype.
“So going back to my original question . . .”
“Jessica . . .” he said, biting into his pillow.
“How many girls? Or was that highly exaggerated, too?”
He gritted his teeth in an embarrassed smile that made it clear that the stuff about the girls hadn’t been exaggerated one bit.
“Oh, Christ.”
He took my hand.
“Jessica, since the first time we really spoke, that time in the Cadillac outside your house, you are the only one who has ever mattered. I don’t want to talk about the girls before you because none of those girls matter to me now, just like Len doesn’t matter to you now. Fortunately for us all, love does not work on an exclusive first-come, first-served basis. Think of Gladdie and Moe, and everyone else out there who would’ve missed out if it did.”
He wanted to say more, I could tell.
“What?”
I knew what he wanted to say. And I needed to hear him say it.
“So you aren’t the first girl I’ve slept with. But it’s the first time I felt like it was more than just fucking, it was making love, as hackneyed as it sounds.”
It was totally the cliché of the perfect thing for a reformed male slut to say to the girl he’s recently devirginized. But this time, I actually I wanted to hear it. I needed to hear him say it because I knew it was the truth. I finally believed it. I believed him.
“Knowing that you waited for so long, then picked me . . .” He stopped again. He pressed his face into the space above my navel, his hands grasping my hipbones, as it to brace himself for what he was about to say. “It means more than you will ever know that you picked me to be your first.”
He moved up and up until our bodies fit together like a living, breathing ying-yang symbol.
“I just wish I hadn’t been such a moron,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“We could’ve been together all year,” I said. “Think of all the time we wasted.”
“It’s like I said before. There’s no point in dwelling in the past,” he said.
“But we could’ve spent so much more time together—”
“Jessica,” he interrupted, pausing to lightly kiss the tip of my nose. “By going through what we have, we helped each other be the people we’re supposed to be.”
“But . . .”
“As complicated and confusing as our courtship was, it happened the way it had to.”
“But . . .”
“Jessica, we were perfect in our imperfection.”
“But . . .”
“We are the way we are supposed to be.”
I placed my lips on top of his head, running my lips over his velvety crew cut. I breathed in his earthy and sweet scent and I needed to do more than kiss him. I needed to drink him. I needed to gobble him up. I needed—
“Jessica Darling.”
“Marcus Flutie.”
I want you to be the first and the second and the third and the last, I thought.
And then we looked at each other and started laughing. I loved that we were lying there naked and laughing for no reason other than the fact that we—and nobody else—were us.
Together.
The entire universe as an interconnected whole.
Samadhi.
the fifteenth
One last edition of Pinevile Low:
WHAT NOBODY FOOLED YOU ALL YEAR LONG?
TARYN BAKER, THAT’S WHO. SEE YOU NEXT YEAR IN THE SEAGULL’S VOICE.
I called Taryn to congratulate her on her very brave confession.
“Remember, don’t just slam people for the pure enjoyment of slamming them,” I said. “It’s fun for a while, but it gets old. And it isn’t good for your karma.”
“Right.”
“Try to do some good. Try to make a difference in this crappy cesspool we call school.”
“I’ll try,” she said. “Because someone has to be the next you.”
The idea of anybody wanting to be the next me was, of course, laughable. Especially when I had tried so hard to be the first me all year.
I was ready to hang up when Taryn—apropros of nothing—said, “You and Marcus.”
Me and Marcus. I still wasn’t used to hearing others saying that out loud.
“You’re together now.”
“Yes,” I said distractedly. I mouthed the words silently. Me and Marcus. Marcus and Me.
“That was a long time coming.”
“Yes,” I replied, without really thinking about what I was saying. “Yes, it was.”
There was a thoughtful pause before she said, “I don’t know how I didn’t see it until now.”
As soon as those words came out of her mouth, I knew that she knew the truth. I knew she knew that I had peed in the cup to cover for Marcus. But I also knew, just as confidently, that our secret would never be revealed in Pinevile Low, The Seagull’s Voice, or elsewhere—my reward for being the first person to listen to Taryn Baker, to treat her like a real person, to earn her trust.
“Thanks, Taryn,” I said. “For everything.”
“No, Jess,” she replied
with a tiny, tinny laugh, the first I’d ever heard escape her thin, repressed lips. “Thank you .”
the twenty-first
It was strange, meeting Marcus’s parents tonight. They weren’t any weirder than your average parents, it was simply hard to believe that someone like Marcus even had parents. It seemed much more logical for Marcus to have been the result of a lab experiment, to see what really happens when you mix snips, snails, puppy dogs’ tails, and Viagra.
I was nervous, of course, because I still haven’t recovered from the knowledge that Mrs. Levy loooooooves Manda—a certified whore—yet would’ve had me drawn and quartered if the opportunity had presented itself. I was afraid Marcus’s parents would automatically and inexplicably hate me, too. Before my arrival, I tried to find out something, anything, about them that would aid in the conversation. All I knew was that his dad refurbished old cars and his mom worked in a day-care center.
“My dad likes speed,” Marcus said.
“Speed? Like meth?”
“No, like stock cars and motorcycles,” he said. “It’s impossible for him to sit still.”
“Uh, okay.”
“And my mom is into quilting and crafts and stuff like that.”
It was interesting to think about how these traits manifested themselves in their son. The restless way he rattles coins in his pocket, or flicks open his lighter, or taps the table, etc. And how he personalized his T-shirts all year. I pointed this out to Marcus.
“I never really saw the connection before, but you’re right,” he said. “Now let me point out all the ways you are exactly like your parents.”
“That’s one analysis I really don’t need to hear,” I said before quickly hanging up the phone.
Mr. and Mrs. Flutie are indeed real people. They are also abnormally tall. Even Marcus’s mom tops six feet, which kind of shocked me. I was expecting a delicate china doll wielding a Bedazzler or something.
“Finally we get to meet the famous Jessica Darling!” she exclaimed, crushing me with a hug.
Mr. Flutie was zipping around the room, barbecue tongs in hand. “We kept waiting for you to shoot on over here,” he said in a rapid-fire rat-a-tat-tat tone. “I kept on saying to Marcus, ‘When’s this new girlfriend of yours gonna shoot on over here?’ Just the other day we shot past your house and I wanted to pop in for an introduction, but my son here said that wouldn’t be cool, and the last thing I would ever want to do to my son is be uncool, so I said we’d just shoot on over there another time.”
I learned very quickly that Mr. Flutie is always “shooting” to or from one place or another.
Marcus just stood there, massaging a wrinkled brow. I was seeing him in the midst of a brand-new emotion: total parental humiliation. It was very endearing to see that even the cool, calm, and collected Marcus Flutie could lose his shit in his parents’ presence.
During dinner, I discovered where Marcus inherited his schizophrenic conversational style. Over hot dogs, burgers, baked beans, and corn on the cob, Marcus, his parents, and I discussed, among other things, Crossing Over, pedophiliac priests, drilling in Alaska, Jews versus Palestinians, obese babies, and the New Jersey Nets.
The whole time, I was totally, completely myself. What’s more, I didn’t even have to concentrate on being myself. I just was. And you want to know the goddiggitydamnest thing? They loved me. Let me rephrase that: His parents LOOOOOOOOOOVED me. I know they loved me because, as I was getting ready to leave, Mrs. Flutie turned to her husband and said, “I just love this girl, don’t you?”
“Marcus finally brought home someone who is smarter than he is.”
“We love you, Jessica Darling!” enthused Mrs. Flutie as she bear-hugged me again.
Over her shoulder, I watched Marcus turn purple with embarrassment. Then he mouthed the words “I love you, too.”
“And I love you,” I replied, but I wasn’t afraid to say it out loud.
the twenty-fourth
The only reason I am still in school is because extra days were tacked on to the school year to make up for the time wasted in September on account of the messed-up scheduling. I aced out of all my finals, so it has been a particularly useless week at Pineville High for me. Could there be a more fitting end to my academic experience, or lack thereof?
With the prom over, yearbooks signed, and finals a joke, seniors are compelled to be even more nauseatingly nostalgic than they would be.
“This is the last time I’ll ever eat school pizza!”
“This is the last time I’ll cut Spanish!”
“This is the last time I’ll put out a cigarette on this toilet seat.”
Manda and Sara have been particularly mopey, walking around with tears in their eyes all week. I think they know the truth: This was the best time of their lives, and it’s almost over.
As much as I’ve bitched about not fitting in, and being an outsider among the insiders, I now realize that it was probably for the best. I mean, is there anything more pathetic than peaking at eighteen? Someone who counts down the decade until the next reunion? Someone whose mantra is “Remember when?”
I imagine Manda trying on her Prom Queen tiara when she’s thirty, Sara wanting to relive the days when her brainless scoop was a commodity, and Scotty, thick with frat fat, unable to run to the closest keg without getting winded, crying along with “Glory Days” on the radio because what Springsteen is singing is so true, so true.
If I ever, ever, ever miss Pineville High—with its dingy cinder-block walls, moldy, asbestos-filled ceillings, and gray hot-dog water cafeteria stench; with its clueless administration and counterintuitive zero-tolerance policies; with its hallways you can’t walk down, bathrooms you can’t use, and tables you can’t sit at because of its oppressive social zoning laws that put Upper Crusters at the top of the high-school hierarchy, followed by Jocks, Groupies, Wiggaz, Hoochies, I.Q.s, 404s, Dregs, Hicks, and Other Miscellaneous Bottom Dwellers Deemed Unworthy of Names; a place where any actual learning was purely by accident, and never took place inside the classroom—you have my permission to kill me.
Did I just write my graduation speech? Ha!
the twenty-eighth
I had already imagined how it would be next year.
I’d be at Columbia, and Marcus would move to Manhattan, or maybe one of the outer boroughs. I would study hard, and he would make money playing gigs at dingy bars. We’d spend countless hours going to clubs to see bands on the verge, touring obscure art exhibits, and sipping pot after pot of black coffee in hole-in-the-wall cafés. Many more hours would be spent lounging under the covers. We would never run out of witty and fascinating things to say to each other. Eventually, he’d apply to Columbia, and we’d be the type of well-educated, cosmopolitan couple that confuse the suburbumpkins who never leave Pineville.
I should have known not to get my heart set on anything.
“Jess, I’ve been meaning to tell you something.”
While the rest of the senior class was celebrating their Pineville emancipation at yet another one of Sara’s boot-and-rallies, Marcus had insisted on taking me to the Seaside Heights boardwalk.
“Come on, if it’s good enough for MTV, it’s good enough for us.”
“I still can’t believe that of all the resorts in the entire world, MTV chose Seaside Heights, New Jersey, as its summer HQ,” I said, shaking my head.
“It is the Home of Sunnin’ and Funnin’,” Marcus said, quoting the motto printed all over the boardwalk’s brochures.
“Easy for you to say,” I said. “You never had a toothless obese man in a wife-beater order a chocolate cone, then blow a burrito belch in your face.”
“This is true,” he replied.
“Millions of kids across the country are going to be sitting in front of their TV sets this summer thinking Seaside Heights is the coolest place on earth, wishing they could be here for all the sunnin’ and funnin’—”
“When all you’ve ever wanted to do is get out of here,” he said
, completing my thought.
“Exactly.”
“There’s a lesson in there somewhere,” Marcus said, sliding into a smile.
It turned out that MTV wasn’t taping when we got there. If we had thought things through carefully, we would have figured this out before we got there. No way would Sara throw a party at her house when she could party in front of television cameras. She’s promised to be such a fixture at the MTV house that her lust for nationwide attention might even threaten to cut into her tanning time. Anyway, the beach house was surprisingly dark and quiet, though that didn’t stop dozens of TRL hopefuls from hanging around it anyway, hoping for a glimpse of Carson or Quddus.
“Oh, well,” Marcus said. “I guess tonight’s sunnin’ and funnin’ won’t be televised after all.”
Marcus beat me by 120 points in Skeeball, but I redeemed myself by thwacking the bejeesus out of the little varmints in Whack-a-Mole. We both humiliated ourselves on the Dance Dance Revolution by not being able to keep up with the disco choreography that went with K.C. & the Sunshine Band’s “That’s the Way I Like It.” We shared funnel cake and orangeade. We giggled at countless fortysomething broads wearing age-inappropriate clothing in flammable fabrics, and the hirsute Guidos who beer-goggle them. We even checked out how the Geek from Shoot the Geek was doing, though we refused to pay a dollar to launch paintball bazooka bombs at him, even if he was dressed like Osama Bin Laden. He was not as charismatic a geek as Pepe was two summers ago, but he had mastered Pepe’s most impressive somersault escape maneuver.
With Marcus’s help, I turned into what I thought I would never be when I slaved my sophomore summer away at Wally D’s Sweet Treat Shoppe: someone who came to the boards to have fun. So yes, there was a lesson in all this. Who needed MTV? All I needed was Marcus.
It made me think about all the other possible places in the world that Marcus could help make fun for me. Little did I know that on the sky ride, a cable car suspended high in the air that afforded a gorgeous view of the ocean and an escape from the crowds and the chaos down below, the amusement would be short-lived.