Charmed Thirds

“Do the kicks, Jessie—I mean Pinky!” my mother shouted from the sidelines. “One, two, three!”

  “Boooooooooooooooooooooo!” the anklebiters wailed as they pelted me with Jelly Bellies.

  “No! No! No!” Bethany chastised the toddlers with a wag of her finger. “We are not unkind to animals!”

  Oh thank you, Bethany. Thank you.

  Then she turned to me. “Come on, Pinky! Shake that tail of yours!” She twitched her juicy peach of an ass, almost obscenely perfect in a denim miniskirt. Often mistaken for Marin's au pair, my sister is the textbook definition of a MILF. If I had it in me to lift my hind leg, I would've pissed on her.

  My father was the only one who seemed concerned for my health. “Take it easy on her,” he said. “Jessie's not in the peak physical condition she used to be, back when she was a serious athlete.” Christ. It's been two years since I gave up competitive running, and he still can't resist any opportunity to remind everyone of my deteriorating muscle mass. Of course, he himself was still spandexed and sweaty from a ninety-minute bike ride because dangerous weather is never a deterrent for one of his yellow-jersey jaunts around town.

  And so, I wasn't driven to my room (which doesn't feel like my room) by the heckling or heat exhaustion or even anaphylactic shock from an allergy to synthetic poodle fur. I'm here because I had forgotten just how much I can simultaneously love and hate these people called my family. When I was at school, I kind of missed them. Not as actual people, but for their comfortable predictability. My dad always asks if I'm still wasting my time with my Psychology major or if I get bored clocking seven-minute miles around Columbia's one-tenth of a mile indoor track. My mom always asks if every girl at school dresses like a lesbian. Bethany always asks if I've gone to some invitation-only velvet-roped club. G-Money always ignores me because he's too busy coming up with new and creative ways to profit from the recession-proof futures market of American obesity.

  I've gotten so used to these and similar familial annoyances that I wouldn't know how to react if my family members didn't play their parts. Plus, I'm always more forgiving of their flaws when I'm still in the thrall of the hygienic and nutritional comforts of home. Here, I not only have unlimited access to a washer and dryer but a willing laundress who skillfully separates the darks from the whites and folds them up for me when they're finished. Here, the cabinets are stocked with genuine Cap'n Crunch—not the generic Colonel Crunchies bought by the ton at SaveCo. Here, the fridge overflows with Coke Classic.

  But now that I've enjoyed a few weeks' worth of April freshness and a steady intake of vitamins and minerals, it's getting more difficult to overlook the tension created by what has been the most controversial subject in the household. Rather, it's a nontopic, one so taboo that it never gets brought up at all, as is customary in the Darling household.

  Only once Marin had been scooped up by her doting Granny Darling and swept across to the other side of the yard did Bethany break the silence.

  “I've been dying to ask you,” Bethany said, flipping her golden hair, puckering and unpuckering her glossy lips. Sometimes I wonder if she realizes that she's flirting with her own sister. “Did you win the money?”

  That's her way of asking if Marcus and I are still together. Only Bethany is brave enough to ask That Which Can't Be Asked. And even she waits until my mom is out of earshot and hides behind a euphemism referring to the money up for grabs in the Breakup Pool. Since I didn't document this (or anything else) for myself this year, I will explain the rules of said pool.

  I was one of a few lucky first years to score a sunny, spacious single in Furnald, which is arguably the most beautiful, most conveniently located dorm on campus. Built in 1913, it was renovated less than ten years ago, so it's both traditional (with its granite façade and soaring, crystal-chandeliered oak entry hall) and state-of-the-art (air-conditioned!). It's got views of the campus action on one side and of Broadway's hustle on the other. Furnald is also known as a bit of a party dorm, with each floor boasting an expansive lounge that lures even the most antisocial A-types away from their rooms with ample afternoon sunlight, cushy furniture, and free cable TV.

  On my floor, there were fifteen first years and ten sophomores. It was quickly discovered that most of the first years on my floor were still involved in high school relationships. It wasn't difficult to figure out who the ten were, as they (okay, by “they” I really mean “we” but I hate to admit to this type of behavior) often began sentences with the phrase, “My boyfriend/girlfriend . . .” As in “My boyfriend loves Coldplay, too!” Or “My boyfriend has a sweater like that, too!” Or “My boyfriend eats and sleeps and excretes waste, too!” Since no upperclassman would ever, ever, ever put a confining label like “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” on the person she/he was hooking up with on a semiregular basis, it was obvious that anyone making such a bold declaration of commitment was referring to a youthful union forged in the halls of her/his former high school.

  The world-weary sophomores all looked at us with contempt. “You won't make it through fall break,” they said. “And if you do, you're just doing it to prove us wrong.”

  Of course, we of the High School True Love Society were outraged. “We're different!” we all said. “We're not like the rest of them!”

  Thus, the Breakup Pool was born. I can't remember who came up with it first, but F-Unit perfected it. F-Unit is a group of guys all enrolled in the Fu School of Engineering, who want to break the stereotype that all engineering students are nerds. Of course, F-Unit's gangsta engineers spend an inordinate amount of time on projects like the Breakup Pool because they don't have girlfriends themselves, which does little to thwart the nerd stereotype.

  Rules of the Breakup Pool

  1. Participants in the Breakup Pool are restricted to those residing on the fifth floor of Furnald during the 2002–2003 school year. Couples comprised of a First-Year student and a High School Beloved (HSB) are referred to as Daters. Single First Years and Sophomores participating in the Breakup Pool are referred to as Haters.

  2. After paying a $25 entry fee, bettors are asked to predict which of the ten couples will last the longest, thereby winning the title The Couple That Outlasted All Others and Showed the Haters Who Said That High School Relationships Don't Last.

  3. Daters cannot bet on themselves. (A rule designed to prevent Daters who have grown to detest their boyfriend/girlfriend from sticking it out just for the cash.) However, any mercenary Dater doubtful of the strength of his/her own relationship can pay a $25 fee to bet on another couple's union outlasting his/hers.

  4. Daters in the Breakup Pool are asked to operate on the Honor System, by which it is the Dater's responsibility to report any breakups or hookups with anyone other than the HSB. (Second-person eyewitness testimony will also suffice.) For the purposes of the Breakup Pool, the term “hookup” refers to activities including, but not limited to, kissing, oral and manual stimulation, intercourse, and any other physical activity that is generally considered to be more than platonic.

  5. If only one bettor puts money on the last couple standing, he/she wins it all. Should more than one bettor choose correctly, they split the take. In both cases, The Couple That Outlasted All Others and Showed the Haters Who Said That High School Relationships Don't Last doesn't win any money, but proudly wears said title.

  6. If no one bets on The Couple That Outlasted All Others and Showed the Haters Who Said That High School Relationships Don't Last, the winning Dater keeps all the cash, but only when his/her relationship makes it to the end of the 2002–2003 school year. (Otherwise, all bettors get their money back.) Likewise, if there is more than one Dater still in the running at the end of the spring semester, the money is split evenly among the remaining couples. (These rules seemingly contradict Rules #3 and #5, but it is widely accepted that any Dater desperate enough to stick with a detested girlfriend/boyfriend an entire year deserves a piece of the prize.)

  Once the rules were established, F-Unit created o
dds using ancillary data, such as geographical distance between Dater and HSB and length of the relationship before separation. (They wanted to include other variables that could help determine the probability that one would be led astray, but “Hotness” and “Horniness” were too difficult to quantify.) The odds wouldn't affect the payout but were devised merely to enhance the gaming experience.

  Marcus was my first love and my first sex partner. I was his first love and his forty-somethingth sex partner. We were together only two weeks before he left for California. I have done one tab of ecstasy and attend one of the most acclaimed universities in the world. He has smoked enough pot to be put in the High Times Hall of Fame and is attending Gakkai College, an unaccredited Buddhist school at which it is possible to major in Chanting and Purification. He was best friends with my best friend Hope's brother, Heath, whose heroin overdose was the tragic catalyst for her parents' sudden defection to Tennessee on the eve of Y2K. Our convoluted courtship was rife with his contradictions: He made out with his girlfriend but kept his eyes on me as I passed them in the hallway. He wrote seductive poetry but claimed he didn't want to sleep with me. He acted as Cyrano for his best friend, Len, telling him exactly what he should do and say to win me over, but shed a single tear when I obliged. He confessed that I was the woman who changed his life but chose to go as far away from me as he possibly could within the continental United States.

  No wonder our odds were a hundred to one.

  Yet, despite the promise of a full payout, no one bet on us. I thought they were all suckers. I was certain we would stay together. Marcus and I had been through so much that our lasting union seemed like the only logical reason for it all.

  I wasn't tempted to stray. I mean, there were a few guys at Columbia who were the geek cute kind of guy I go for. But—oh!—those bright-eyed, death-cab cuties, I didn't even get a chance to be dashbored by them all. Because they weren't just my type, they were many girls' types, which is why they were all married off before the end of orientation. But that was okay. I had the real thing. I had Marcus. And I tried not to worry about him and other girls, but it was kind of difficult to believe that someone with a carnal history as long and varied as his would be able to subsist on school-break sex fests alone. Especially when he told me about Butterfly, who just doesn't understand us silly girls who still live in the “textile world.”

  But all things considered, I didn't blame people for not putting their money on us. And I couldn't help but feel vindicated when Marcus and I were only one of two couples who made it through the academic year. That we split $375 with an Indian couple who is in an arranged marriage situation made the victory even sweeter.

  I had just finished explaining this all to Bethany when my mother swooped in with Marin to “get in on the girl talk.”

  “What money?” my mom asked, briskly wiping her hands of nonexistent dirt. An aspiring GILF, she was dressed similarly to Bethany in her silk halter top and denim skirt, though she had the sense to lower the hemline by about six inches.

  “Well, I doubt you'll be interested, because I was just telling Bethany how Marcus and I were one of only two couples on our floor to stay together all year.”

  Disgust would have dented her forehead; that is, if my mother hadn't recently Botoxed the spot between her brows. (I can't even comment on this latest vanity, so disturbing is it to me.) My mother must have learned a sudden-change-of-subject approach to Handling Your Daughter's Bad Boyfriend on a shrinky segment of The View or something, because the next thing she said was, “Jessie! Is Len back from Cornell? You should call him!”

  My mother just can't let go of Len, who dumped me senior year—on Valentine's Day of all days—to be with Manda, the Official Revirginized Reformed Slut of Pineville. (Really. It's in the brochures and everything. Okay, not really. But that's only because Pineville sucks too much to have a brochure.) Len and Manda have been together for more than a year and still claim they haven't had sex. They're very proud of their chastity, which is why it's common knowledge around here. Want to hear something people don't know? Earth? It really is flat! And the Sun and planets revolve around it, not vice versa! I know this because a fleet of winged space monkeys just flew out of my butt and took me on an intergalactic tour of the cosmos! Wheeeeeeeeee!!!

  Needless to say, I think their celibacy is suspect.

  “Scotty's also back in Pineville,” my mom continued, her eyes straying toward the snack table on the opposite side of our swimming pool. She was clearly torn between her two favorite hobbies: playing Martha and torturing me. “He had a tough year, Jessie. He always liked you. You should call him! You could help him get through this difficult time.”

  Everyone knows Scotty spent the whole basketball season on the bench and quit the team shortly thereafter. Unlike Len and Manda, Scotty didn't go out of his way to broadcast this news. But his grotesque face puffery said everything anyone needed to know about his participation in the ritualistic alcohol abuse that inspires his fellow Lehigh University students to brag about their perennial top-five spot on Playboy's ranking of biggest party schools. (This is an apocryphal honor because Hef has only published the list twice. In 1987, Lehigh wasn't mentioned at all, and in last year's rankings it was number twenty-three—far from the top five. I go out of my way to mention this because it makes their alcoholic pride all the more hilarious. Or sad. Depending on how you look at it.)

  I doubt Scotty's fall from grace or inflated face negatively affects the onslut of willing sex partners. Indeed, the Mother of All Gossipmongers still considers him “quite a catch.” She has a sycophantic devotion to Scotty, who just happened to be my first boyfriend, if you can call him that when our entire relationship lasted for eleven days in eighth grade. It ended when he mistook my mouth as a repository for his saliva; you know, to avoid a global crisis should there be a worldwide shortage of this valuable natural resource in the future.

  I will never quite understand what Scotty ever saw in me.

  “Oh! And did I mention that Mrs. Milhokovich said Bridget will be back in a few days?”

  I'm actually looking forward to seeing Bridget for the first time since winter break. But I'm worried, too. She said she couldn't visit me at school during spring break because she was still recovering from the removal of what she calls “ugly marks,” aka benign moles. She had been talking a lot about how cosmetic surgery is a fact of life in LA, and no more out of the ordinary than, say, brushing one's teeth. So I'm troubled by the possibility that the moles were just a front, and she now has the artificially pneumatic look favored by starving starlets and the horny casting directors who bang them.

  “Oh! Grant said that Wally and his daughter are supposed to stop by later. Sara graduated with you, right, honey?”

  Of course my mother knows that Sara graduated with me. It's just one of the asinine questions she asks as a means to launch into the meaningless conversations she holds so dear. But my mother may not know that Sara was caught trying to cheat on her Introduction to Fundamentals of Conceptual Finite Mathematics (aka Numbers for Dummies) by copying the formulas she had written on the inside label of her water bottle. She should have failed the class and been put on academic probation, but Sara's dad—the legendary Wally D'Abruzzi himself—promised to open a drive-through combo Papa D's Donuts/Wally D's Sweet Treat Shoppe on the Harrington campus and all was forgiven. I find it hilarious that Harrington prioritizes fast-food funding over an endowment for like, oh, I don't know, a library or something. And knowing Sara's love/hate relationship with hydrogenated fats, it's even funnier. Because G-Money and Sara's dad have made it their joint mission in life to take Papa D's Donuts and Wally D's Sweet Treat Shoppe national, I will bear unwilling witness to Sara's foibles for a very, very long time.

  Thankfully, Sara was the last of my mother's name-dropping material. When she trotted out of earshot, Bethany leaned in conspiratorially.

  “If you and Marcus are still together, why isn't he here?”

  And that
's when I decided I needed a break from the festivities and went to hide in my room.

  Marcus is still in California, away from me for two more weeks so he can attend an elective “Learning Cluster” on The Creative Coexistence of Nature and Humanity.

  You know what would be really creative? The coexistence of Marcus and his girlfriend. Me.

  It's not entirely his fault. I'm the one who's leaving in July, not him. It's the promise of my internship at True, of doing something cool with one-third of my summer, that has made this very uncool Marcus-free part of my summer bearable at all. Of course, the irony is that the internship itself will actually extend the Marcus-free part of my summer. Get it? It's an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, wrapped in a clusterfuck.

  I can hear footsteps. It's probably my mom on her way upstairs to demand that I stick my hands back in my paws, put on my poodle head, and get out there to perform another tap—

  MARCUS!

  MARCUS IS HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  the eighth

  I have imagined my reunion with Marcus in many ways.

  In the PG-13 version, I'm wearing something casually sexy, like the ME, YES, ME T-shirt Marcus gave me for graduation and a pair of shorts. In this daydream, I do not have a mental-patient haircut; it's still long enough for a swingy ponytail. I'm lounging on my bed, writing in my journal about how much I miss him, when he sneaks up behind me. He grabs my journal and chucks it across the room. We kiss.

  In the R-rated version, the setup is the same, except I'm wearing a tank top and a pair of bikini-cut skivvies. He says something like, “I need you right now,” which doesn't sound all that sexy, but it's all in the sultry drawl of his delivery. My journal, chucked. My clothing, shucked. My body, (insert verb here).

  In the X-rated version, there is no wardrobe or intelligible dialogue. The plot is best left to your (okay, my) prurient imagination.

  As you can see, I like my daydreams to have an element of reality to them. (I even do my own nude scenes.) It makes them that much more interesting, like, Oooooh, this could actually happen. Which in this case it almost did. Except I never pictured a G-rated version, in which I was—from the neck down—dressed as a stuffed animal. (Although, for plushy-loving pervs, it could have been confused with the X-rated version.)