Charmed Thirds

  “I decided to leave early,” he replied. “I learned all I needed to learn.”

  “So the whole silent meditation Buddhist thing, you're over that?”

  “Well, clearly,” he said. “I'm talking to you, aren't I?”

  “Are you?” I asked, with a little edge to my voice.

  “I am,” he said. I turned to the window to avoid his laserlike gaze. My parents were gawking from the front door. We were still idling in the street, and I resisted the urge to ask him to take me away.

  “And you're through with being a lonely cowboy?”

  You'll notice how I replaced “gay” with “lonely.” I wasn't out for blood. Yet.

  “I'm over it,” he replied. “It was a phase. One I needed to go through to get away from my other . . .” He placed his hands on top of his head, as if to reach in and pull out the answer. “Less healthy phases.”

  Should I be so surprised that Marcus needed to disappear for a while so he could get his head together? Haven't I also dropped out of my own life on occasion? And others' lives—like Hope's—when I didn't feel like I could live up to what I thought she deserved as a person? As a friend?

  And yet, I couldn't bring myself to be quite so forgiving.

  “A phase,” I said archly, wringing my cold hands together. “I never thought that Marcus Flutie would still need to go through a phase.”

  “Well, when you think of it, isn't everything a phase?” he asked.

  “How so?” I asked, unwilling to let on how I'd come to a similar conclusion in his absence.

  He pulled off his wool cap, then stuck his long, roughened fingers into the twisted, matted clumps coming out of his scalp. His hair was a dark, dirty red, and back to the dreadlocks he had when we first met. I guessed this had less to do with fashion than it did with a lack of hair-grooming products out in the desert.

  “Nothing lasts forever, so everything is a phase,” he said. “Some phases are just longer than others.”

  As casually as possible, I flicked the palm tree deodorizer still hanging from the rearview. “So what phase are you in right now?”

  “A friendship phase.”

  I let this sink in before responding.

  “You think we can be friends?” I asked. “We've never been friends.”

  After a slow start, I was gaining momentum. He's come back because he wants to be friends. Well, isn't that convenient for him? Coming and going whenever and however he pleases, defining our relationship on his own terms, leaving me fucked up and confused for years. . . .

  I suddenly had a lot to get out of my system.

  “A friend, dear Marcus, would have had the decency to officially break up with me. A friend wouldn't pull what you did with those postcards.” Between the heater and the intensity of my feelings, I was boiling. “What was that all about anyway? I mean, really. If you had something to say to me, why didn't you just say it? Or write a real letter or e-mail like a normal person would?” I had imagined giving this speech so many times that the words flew out fluidly. “Don't you think you're getting a little old for these antics? Like, it's not enough for you to take a break from our relationship, you have to go on a yearlong silent meditation. And it's not enough for you to give yourself some space, you have to go to goddamn Death Valley. Next thing you know, you'll decide it's not enough to take a vow of celibacy, you'll have to castrate yourself with a ceremonial sword carved out of strawberry Jell-O!”

  This made him laugh, even though I hadn't envisioned a humorous reaction.

  “I mean it, Marcus,” I snapped. “It was cute and mysterious in high school, but now, now it's just . . .”

  As I floundered for the right word, Marcus filled in with one of his own.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “It is sorry,” I said.

  “No, I'm sorry,” he corrected. “I am who I am and I did what I did. I hope we can be friends again, which is why I'm here now. That's all I can say.”

  Then he reached around and grabbed a roundish package wrapped in red tissue paper that was sitting on the floor in the backseat. He handed it over to me, and the gift sat heavy in my lap.

  “Open it,” he urged, a hopeful expression on his face.

  After a second or two of quiet contemplation, I dug my nails into the paper. And as I removed the wrapping, I couldn't quite believe what I held in my hands. Not even after I saw the blue jumpsuited image of the Showman of Our Time in all his decoupaged glory.

  “Remember?” he asked.

  Yes, I remembered. How could I forget the Barry Manilow toilet seat from three summers ago? This was precisely the kind of theatrics I was just talking about! A bizillion questions bounced off my brain: Who the hell does he think he is? What gives him the right to pull this sort of stunt on me? When did he decide to do this? Where did he find it? Why did he want to give it to me now? How was I going to respond?

  Because I had no idea what to say next, I blurted out what is, quite possibly, the least appropriate thing I could say.

  “I slept with Len!”

  Despite his Zen leanings, I guess I expected Marcus to react with some measure of surprise. But I didn't get that satisfaction.

  “Good for both of you,” was all he said, but it wasn't with a trace of bitterness. He said it like he meant it, and his face meant it, too.

  I huffed beside him in my seat. “That's all you have to say?!”

  He sighed before gingerly cupping my chin with his chapped hands. “Isn't this what got us in trouble before?”

  He was right. Hadn't I learned anything in two years? Or, more to the point, was this a warning sign that Marcus and I were fated to repeat the same mistakes over and over and over again?

  I recoiled from his touch. I wasn't ready for this. Not at all.

  “It's exactly what got us in trouble before.”

  And without another word, I yanked on the door handle and left him and the toilet seat cover in the car.

  Marcus idled in the road for a few minutes before slowly pulling out and into the frigid darkness. I know this because I watched him from my unlit bedroom window. I guess I wasn't quite ready to take my eyes off him.

  the twenty-sixth

  Last night I was kept awake by questions:

  Why Marcus?

  Why did I get over Kieran so quickly? Why am I not mad for Len, who is as smart and sensitive as Kieran pretended to be? Why am I not still pining for Scotty, the first boy to kiss me? Or William, whose death promises that there will never be a cathartic resolution to what could have been? Or Bastian, who might have loved me like a real man—if only for one night? Or Cal, whom I'd all but forgotten until I saw him at the anniversary party? Why not any other man whose life has overlapped mine?

  Why Marcus?

  Why?

  The answer to all these questions was waiting for me in the mailbox this afternoon. A postcard from the National Organization of Women. On the back, one more word.

  Jessica—

  NOW

  —Marcus

  the twenty-seventh

  Not long after “right now,” Marcus and I shared the most sublime sex of our lives. It was utterly transcendent and confused the senses. I tasted his sighs. I was tickled by the salt in his sweat. I saw every microscopic cell in our one united body expanding and contracting in pleasure.

  “Are you happy?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I whispered. “Yes. Yes.”

  “I love hearing you say that.”

  “I love you.”

  I have only said these words to Marcus. And I almost got sad, trying to remember the last time I uttered them. But before I gave in to regret, I reached up and grabbed the leather string he was wearing around his neck. On it hung several totems—a piece of soapstone carved in the shape of a horse, a Native American arrowhead, a small silver ring. I inspected the last closely, and read aloud the words I knew were etched on the outside: My thoughts create my world.

  “How did you know that I'd take you back after al
l this time?” I asked, sticking my middle finger through the ring and caressing the delicate flesh at the base of his throat. “When I didn't know it myself until after I saw you?”

  “I had to take that chance,” he said, the words vibrating through his skin and buzzing my fingertip. “The only way our relationship would be worth having is if you knew what you were missing without it.”

  When he said that, I was reminded of that time I came home for Christmas break and my mom had put my most treasured possessions in storage. I remember her, then me, questioning their importance. If they were really that significant, I would have brought them with me to school, right? I remembered poring over these items—the “Fall” poem on its deeply creased piece of notebook paper, the mosaic portrait Hope gave me right before she moved—wondering why I had left them behind, and wondering if the relationships that these things represented would be in better shape if I hadn't. But I realize now that if I had brought those things with me, if I had surrounded myself with them every day, they would have gradually been downgraded to nothing special, until there was little difference between a once-cherished memory and the light switch. The only way to truly appreciate something's value is to distance yourself from it for a while.

  I WISH OUR LOVE WAS RIGHT NOW.

  It is. It is.

  I kissed him until I heard the tiny hairs prickling on his belly.

  “You must be a long phase for me, Marcus Flutie.”

  “The longest, Jessica Darling,” he replied.

  Yes. Love has the longest arms.

  the thirty-first

  Hope and I are about to embark on the most haphazard cross-country trip in history.

  “Can you believe it's been six years since I moved?” Hope asks as she inspects our bag of backseat snacks. Fun-sized Baby Ruths. KC Masterpiece Baked Lay's. Sour Patch Kids.

  “Yes and no,” I say, rummaging through my duffel for my sunglasses. I can't start this road trip–cum–senior thesis without them. Who cares if it's December and the sun can barely be detected in the dull sky? I've always imagined embarking on a cross-country trip with sunglasses. “Sometimes, when I think about six years ago, it feels more vivid, more real than all the stuff in between.”

  “I totally know what you mean,” she says, throwing the last of the bags into the trunk.

  This trip started as a joke, as most things between us do. In one of our last phone calls before she left for France and we lost touch, Hope reminded me how she's always been fascinated by a particular road sign en route to her cousins' house.

  “Can you believe there's a place called Toad Suck, Arkansas, and people actually live there?”

  A paper-dodging, time-wasting Google search quickly revealed that Toad Suck was in bad company. Monkey's Eyebrow, Kentucky. Nipple, Utah. Satan's Kingdom, Rhode Island. There were just too many ridiculously named towns out there. Pennsylvania alone was host to Muff, Blue Ball, and Dick.

  “I wouldn't mind telling people I'm from Hell, Missouri,” I said.

  “I'm feeling very Uncertain, Texas, myself,” Hope replied. “But I'd like to be Yeehaw Junction, Florida.”

  Thus, her senior project, “Mental States: A Cross-Country Tour of My Emotions,” was born. For the next month, Hope will take self-portraits next to appropriately expressive town names and use the photos in some sort of multimedia installation that she had yet to devise. She not only convinced her department head to give her class credit for the trip, but somehow got the school to subsidize most of it in some work-study agreement that only Hope could wrangle. When she asked me to ride shotgun a few weeks ago, I didn't hesitate.

  “Thank you, Rhode Island School of Design!” she says now, lifting her Coke can to the sky before popping its top.

  “Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Darling, for refusing to pay my tuition and making this trip possible!” I reply in kind, actually meaning every word.

  “To Virginville, Pennsylvania!” Hope whoops.

  “To Virginville!”

  And then a voice says, “I'm not sure you two will make it past the Virginville border patrol.”

  I turn to see Marcus standing in front of me, holding a red box.

  “I thought you didn't want to say good-bye,” I say.

  “I still don't,” Marcus says. “I'm not here to say good-bye. I have a going-away gift.”

  “You already gave me a going-away gift,” I reply, gesturing toward the Barry Manilow toilet seat that we've propped on top of our bags in the backseat. Hope has deemed it our good luck traveling totem.

  “That was a coming-home gift,” he explains. “This is a going-away gift.” And then he hands me a raw silk box meant for holding photos. It's heavier than I had expected. I don't realize that I'm just standing there staring until he says, “Open it.”

  I do what I'm told. Inside are at least a dozen black-and-white-speckled composition notebooks exactly like the one I'm writing in right now.

  At first, I think, How did you get my journals? But then I notice that the spaces reserved for Name, School, and Grade, have been left blank, where on my notebooks they have all been inscribed with the start and end dates of the contents within.

  I open one. These aren't my journals. . . . They're his.

  This realization makes me sink to the curb with the box between my knees.

  He sits down next to me and says, “I was wrong the other night in the car, when I told you that I had said all I could say.”

  I read the first page of the journal on top. There's no date. But the first line is addressed in a very specific way: My dear Jessica . . .

  And then pages and pages and pages of words, words, words . . . everything Marcus couldn't say to me over the past two years, but wants me to know.

  “You're always going to pull stuff like this, aren't you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even though it drives me insane.”

  He shrugs. “It's who I am, Jessica. It's part of my charm. You wouldn't want me any other way.”

  And I know he's right.

  I almost can't believe I'm going to make myself vulnerable to him again. But what is love but the most extreme and exquisite form of risk perception? I know that relationships don't last. And yet, with Marcus, the risk of not being with him is much worse than any other hurt I can imagine.

  Marcus's gaze is fixed on the grass. His face is partially obscured, but I can see his dented brow. And he's tapping his feet in a twitchy, arrhythmic way. And I think, I'm making Marcus Flutie nervous.

  “Will you still be here when I get back?” I ask.

  He looks up. The frown fades and a smile arrives in its place, one that starts at his mouth but really comes out through this eyes. It's a sincere, unsullied smile.

  “I want to be.”

  And that's when I stand up, lean in, and kiss him. I kiss him because I know exactly what he means, as much as such knowledge is even possible between two people. Marcus wants to be here when I get back, but he's not promising that he will. All promises are true only until they aren't, and I appreciate his honesty.

  “You've changed,” I seethed right before he left me that winter, nearly two years ago. And yes, Marcus had changed, but that was my problem, not his. A relationship ends because you've outgrown it. It can begin again because you, as two, can fill the new shape.

  I thought Marcus was going to be in my life forever. Then I thought I was wrong. Now he's back. But this time I know what's certain: Marcus will be gone again, and back again and again and again because nothing is permanent. Especially people. Strangers become friends. Friends become lovers. Lovers become strangers. Strangers become friends once more, and over and over. Tomorrow, next week, fifty years from now, I know I'll get another one-word postcard from Marcus, because this one doesn't have a period signifying the end of the sentence.

  Or the end of anything at all.

  Marcus,

  AND

  Love, Jessica

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks go out t
o:

  Joanna Pulcini, for telling me that the best was yet to come.

  Kristin Kiser, who has always gotten it. Lindsey Moore, for her sharp eye and even sharper sense of humor. Jennifer O'Connor, whose beautiful covers continue to catch buyers' eyes years after publication. And everyone else at Crown for their innovative ideas and exhaustive efforts.

  Columbia University, for withstanding my creative liberties.

  Colleen Myers, who confirmed that things haven't changed all that much at my alma mater in the last decade. (When it comes to male-female relations, I'm sorry to hear that.) Jay Saxon, for his informative tour of Princeton University, but mostly for letting me lurk on facebook.com. (Vote for him when he runs for president in 2024.) Amber-Lyn Kuhl at the College of St. Elizabeth, for moderating the livejournal community devoted to passionate discussions about my books (livejournal.com/community/sloppyfirsts/). And all the other college students who stopped working (hard) and playing (harder) long enough to answer my questions, including Annie Berke, Sarah Downs, and Sara Fuentes.

  The creators and contributors to collegehumor.com for making me laugh my ass off while I was conducting “research.”

  The ladies—especially Jeannie Kim, Erika Rasmusson Janes, and Monica Ryan—for helping me retain and maintain my mojo.

  Alan and Ellen McCafferty, for being the most supportive in-laws ever.

  My parents, Tom and Laurie Fitzmorris, who, for the record, differ from the Darlings in countless ways, not the least of which being that I have never walked in on them having sex. (Thank God.)

  And finally, Collin and Christopher, just for being my boys.

  ALSO BY MEGAN McCAFFERTY

  Sloppy Firsts

  Second Helpings

  EDITED BY MEGAN MCCAFFERTY

  Sixteen: Stories About That Sweet and Bitter Birthday

  Copyright © 2006 by Megan McCafferty

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.