Second Helpings

  “ ‘If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing,’ ” I replied, channeling Mac. “Kingsley Amis.”

  “Well, it seems that the administration thinks that in these troubled times, we need to be more sensitive and promote positive relationships among all social groups. Don’t you see how your editorial might have a devastating effect on your peers’ self-worth?”

  “I was trying to help!” I said, literally hopping up and down in frustration. “You’re the one who wanted me to broaden my point of view. I was trying to show how true heroism is overlooked in favor of treating jocks and cheerleaders and other members of the high-school hoi polloi like gods.”

  “I see,” said Haviland.

  “High-school hero worship screws everyone’s self-worth. So-called losers hate themselves for not being like the upper crust. And the upper crust gets caught up in their own hype and are devastated when their post-graduation lives don’t live up to their high-school glories.” I was gasping for breath, I was so worked up.

  “I know, I know,” she said, placing her hand on my shoulder and giving me a grandmotherly sympathetic head-shake. “But we’re dealing with a lot of close-minded Puritans who don’t see things the same way you and I do. I agree that we need to have agitating points of view—they are a necessary part of the conversation of humankind.”

  I think I started eye-rolling at this point, as Haviland was starting to get all hippie-dippy on me.

  “And,” she continued, “as students of the world, they should be privy to these divergent thoughts, to question them, analyze them, and critique them.”

  “Okay, then as my adviser, shouldn’t you have fought to keep it in?”

  She twitched her nose in annoyance, like I was a gnat that wouldn’t go away.

  “If I didn’t cut your editorial, I was told I’d lose funding for The Seagull’s Voice.”

  “So it’s better to have a paper that’s full of nicey-nicey, sanitized crap than not have one that actually stands for something?”

  This question didn’t make much sense, so I don’t blame Haviland for not answering. I’m much better making my arguments on paper. But not this paper.

  “When you first persuaded me to write for the newspaper, you told me that The Seagull’s Voice needed my voice. I guess you were wrong. I quit.”

  And for the second time in less than two weeks, I turned my back on the face of gaping-mouthed shock. My words and actions are finally getting in sync. Paul Parlipiano would be so proud!

  I’ve totally reversed my attitude about quitting, by the way. For me, quitting isn’t a sign of weakness. The weak thing to do would’ve been to keep on running, keep on writing. It takes a bigger set of balls to do the exact opposite of what everyone expects me to.

  Only one problem: What to do with all this free time?

  the seventeenth

  I think my mom is secretly psyched that I quit the team and the paper because now I’m not at practice or meetings all the time. It provides more opportunities for her to torture me with trivialities.

  “We got a letter from your sister today!” my mom sang before I had a chance to take my backpack off my shoulder.

  “How’s the cult?”

  My mother’s jaw and neck tightened. “I told you to stop saying that,” she said. Then her smile widened and her eyes brightened, a facial presto-chango as quick and authentic as Mr. Potato Head. “She wants us to come out to California for Thanksgiving.”

  “California? Are you insane?” I cried. “Even if I was willing to get on an airplane, which I’m not, there’s no way I’m going back to the dot commune with those freaks.”

  “Don’t make me reprimand you again. You know it upsets me when you call it that.”

  “It upsets you because it’s the truth,” I said.

  I went out to California during spring break last year to visit Stanford and Berkeley. However, one visit to the dot commune convinced me that I could never spend another four days, let along four years, in that state.

  Bethany and G-Money lost a bundle in the tech crash but still had more liquid in their account than my parents have earned in their entire lives. Instead of seeing themselves as members of the under-thirty leisure class that they are, B&G fancy themselves as forerunners of a spiritual/financial movement in which former Internet impresarios shun conspicuous materialism in favor of “the simple life.” Only their idea of simplicity is . . . expensive. Bethany’s letter was probably written with ink hand-squeezed out of imported Indian Ocean squid on thick linen paper cushiony enough to wipe even the most hyperallergenic ass.

  The stationery is just the tip of the iceberg, one made, no doubt, by purified well water pumped in via an elaborate irrigation system that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to install. B&G’s definition of a simpler life also means selling their condo and moving into a brand-new 10,000-square-foot ranch in the Marin County countryside with two other dot-bomb couples. That’s 3333.33 square feet per couple. I don’t need my real-estate maven mother to tell me that’s still a grotesque amount of footage. They have this notion that it is somehow more noble and less wasteful to buy necessities of life like salmon roe and Veuve Clicquot in bulk for six, instead of for two. Their whole oxymoronic existence makes me want to hurl. If you want to be rich, just be lousy, filthy, stinking rich!

  Even worse than their ostentatious minimalism was all the B.S. I was forced to listen to every night at dinner. They’ve been brainwashed by Francis T. Upbin, Ph.D., cult leader and a self-described Economical Downturn Doctor they met at a seminar called “Invest in Yourself.” Dr. Frank is helping them cope with Loss of Sudden Wealth syndrome.

  “As Dr. Frank says, your portfolio isn’t the only thing that takes a beating when you tank ten million dollars in an afternoon,” said G-Money, taking a bite of organic guinea fowl. “I’m grieving the loss of my lifestyle, my identity, my self-worth.”

  Bethany and the other dot-bombers looked on, hypnotically.

  “But that money was all on paper,” I pointed out. “You guys are still pretty loaded.”

  “Dr. Frank says I need to diversify my psychological portfolio,” G-Money continued, without so much as a nod in my direction. When I first met him, I thought he didn’t talk to anyone because he was painfully shy. But I’ve since learned that self-absorption is his defining characteristic, and he simply can’t be bothered by anyone else’s existence.

  “You also need to recontextualize your belief system,” Bethany chimed in.

  It was an unusually multisyllabic comment for my sister, so I couldn’t help but quiz her.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  G-Money answered for her.

  “It means,” he said, “that I’m going to invest in the life assets to which Dr. Frank and I have assigned the highest Nasdaq-proof valuations.”

  “Which means?”

  G-Money sighed. “It means,” he said, looking around at his fellow cultists for sympathy, “I’m going on more ski trips this year.”

  Well, there you have it. How can you argue with spiritual transcendence through self-indulgence? Bethany and G-Money represent everything foreigners hate about our country. While no amount of vitriol justifies mass murder, I can’t blame them for feeling it because sometimes I feel it, too.

  Normally, I could use cross-country practice or the newspaper as the excuse to get me out of the trip, but now that I’ve quit both, I can’t use them as a catch-all excuses for avoiding activities that I want no part of. Tutoring sucks up Monday through Friday after school. But the weekends are still still problematic. I still need to work on that.

  Incidentally, dabbling in ancient Eastern disciplines has taught me one important lesson already: I suck at yoga. Good thing it isn’t a competitive sport, which I now realize is why Hope recommended it in the first place. When I lie down on my stomach and attempt to arch my torso into the cobra asana—which is practically the easiest pose that has come out of six thousand years of practic
e—each and every muscle fiber holding my anatomy together screams in protest: WHAT IN GOD’S NAME DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING?????

  I know it’s not supposed to hurt like that, but I kind of like the pain, in that masochistic hurts-so-good kind of way. I can definitely forget about achieving the enraptured state of mind-body-spirit for a very long time. I’ve got about a bizillion poses to get through before I can reach my toes, let alone enlightenment. I tell myself to breathe, Jessica, breathe, and curse all those years of running for winding my leg muscles tighter than my hymen.

  The book says there is definitely a correlation between my inflexible physicality and unbendable personality. I think the book is right.

  the twentieth

  I was amazed at our generation’s ability to just bounce back after the recent tragedies. Since we’ve never experienced any real hardship, I think we assume that whatever is wrong with the world will just work itself out. It’s our inalienable right to live worry-free lives. (It’s my opposing take on life that makes me more of a Gen-X kind of girl, hence my love for all things eighties. But I digress.)

  Until global chaos hit locally.

  “Omigod! Did your SATs quote get the ’thrax unquote?” Sara asked.

  “What SATs? What ’thrax?”

  “Did the SATs you took last month get stuck in an anthrax-contaminated post office?”

  “I didn’t have to take them this month,” I said. “I rocked them the first time around.” That second part was unnecessary, but there are few opportunities to brag about my brain. Bonus: I knew it would piss Sara off.

  “Omigod! I hate your guts! If I have to take them one more time, I’m going to kill myself.”

  I doubt she’d be so kind. The fact that she brought up the SATs at all suggests that she is very unstable right now. The SATs are one topic Sara usually avoids like a vegan shuns a Whopper. The D’Abruzzis have already shelled out the cost of a college tuition by hiring a one-on-one “Test Prep Professional” to help boost Sara’s scores. She’s more than 200 points shy of the 1200 she needs to get into Rutgers, where she and Manda (1210) have already promised to be roommates and pledge the same sorority and date smokin’ fraternity boys and be maids of honor in each other’s weddings to said smokin’ fraternity boys and buy luxury homes next door to each other in a gated community and be each other’s very, very bestest buds 4-eva.

  Sara isn’t the only one in honors who is so devastated by the lost scores.

  “Um! I’m never going to get! Um! Into Cornell!” yelped Len at my locker in between classes.

  Len did well when he took the SATs last March, but 1480 just wasn’t high enough for him. So he took them again last May but was so convinced that he did worse than the first time that he walked right out of the classroom and called the testing service to cancel his scores. Being the academic head-case that he is, he took them again this month.

  “Now I’m going to have to take them again! I have to get at least! Um! Fifteen hundred to guarantee that I’ll get! Um—”

  “Len, you’ll get in with fourteen-eighty,” I said, cutting him off.

  “Easy for you to say. Um. Miss Fifteen-forty.” He gulped.

  “Okay. It is easy for me to say now, but I was just as freaked out as you were last spring. Everyone was freaked out because our school had done zippo in helping us prepare for them.”

  “I wasn’t, like, freaked out,” said Bridget, who had come up behind us.

  “That’s because you didn’t care what your scores were because you had this insane idea you weren’t going to college, anyway,” I replied.

  “I’m, like, still not going to college,” she said.

  “YOU’RE NOT GOING TO COLLEGE?” Len simply didn’t have enough bandwidth to process this information.

  “She’s going to college,” I said. “She’s just being dramatic.”

  “I’m, like, so not going to college. I want to be an actress,” she said.

  “And if there’s anything I learned at SPECIAL this summer, it’s that no one can teach you, like, how to be an actress. So why pay all that money?”

  Len was practically flopping on the floor and frothing at the mouth at the very notion of an honors student not going to college. He cleared his throat. Ahem!

  “Pineville High’s college matriculation rate is already the worst in the county. Only eighteen percent of the senior class, comprised almost entirely of our honors group, will go on to a four-year institution of higher learning. Another ten percent will attend two-year junior colleges, in most cases, Ocean County College. If honors students cut short their education, Pineville High’s academic standing will sink even lower than it already is, making it even more difficult for serious students like myself, or my younger brother Donald, who currently has the highest grade-point average in eighth grade, to get into top-notch schools like Cornell. What will happen to future generations of Pineville scholars?”

  And then, at the point in Len’s one-sided sermons when he usually keeps on going until someone mercifully interrupts him, he stopped himself. I couldn’t help but stare. That was the first time I had ever heard Len complete one sentence, not to mention an impassioned oration, without stumbling over his words, or babbling on forever. It was as if he had swallowed Paul Parlipiano. Or Haviland, the traitor.

  “She’s going to college, Len. She already applied.”

  He turned back to me and said, in classic Len style, “Um. Huh? She. What?”

  Bridget didn’t miss a beat. “I applied to UCLA to get my dad off my case. But I’m, like, totally not going.”

  I know Bridget is going to college, so I don’t even bother getting all riled up. I have to admit, though, that the more she says it, the more it starts to concern me. Bridget does not lie, which means she really has herself convinced that she isn’t going. I figure the best way to make her change her mind is to just agree with her and get the conversation moving. I needed to calm Len down. He’s the only EMT I know, which wouldn’t be much help in the event of his own apoplectic seizure.

  “Okay. Besides Bridget, who doesn’t count because she isn’t going to college”—I said those last five words with just enough singsongy sarcasm to make my point—“everyone else, myself included, was freaking out about the SATs last spring. So don’t think I can’t relate.”

  “Like, Scotty wasn’t freaked out,” Bridget quietly pointed out.

  Thankfully, Len didn’t hear her. Her comment was unnecessary but true.

  Scotty was the only person I envied last spring because he was totally chillaxed about the SATs. He had already been wooed to play b-ball for the Patriot League, the only Division I conference a reasonably skilled, five-foot-eleven Caucasian from the ’burbs could hope for. All he had to do was fill in his name correctly and he had the score he needed in order to accept the scholarship Lehigh was dangling in front of him. Sure enough, he got 1170. He’s as hooked-up as a King should be.

  After struggling through 5:50 1600s and 2:35 800s all spring, I knew no such athletic ride was in the cards for me. Yet I kept the dream alive for my dad and Kiley, promising to train hard all summer to get back into my formidable form. I sort of meant it, too.

  That is, until I got my scores.

  Nevertheless, my success has brought on a new problem. As Len pointed out, I am one of a handful of students in the history of our school whose scores might provide PHS bragging rights via a scholarship to a particularly prestigious university. Therefore, I am asked the Question approximately a bizillion times a day. Teachers I’ve never had. Custodians. Lunch ladies. You can’t not give an answer to the Question when you’re Jessica Darling, which is why I’m back to saying:

  “Amherst, Piedmont, Swarthmore, and Williams.”

  I decided to listen to my mom and have started putting together applications to the original final four, the ones Paul Parlipiano disapproved of. Surely he would understand my reasons for wanting to stay safe and sound and away from New York City. I even dared to bring it up with Taryn
over geometry proofs yesterday.

  “So Taryn, did your stepbrother ever mention meeting me over the summer?”

  She didn’t lift her huge eyes off the paper.

  “Well, we did. He told me that I should go to Columbia, which I had considered until, you know, everything that’s happening in the world.”

  I could tell she wanted to pull her wool cap down over her eyes.

  “Has Paul ever mentioned wanting to leave the city now, you know, because he’s afraid of what will happen?”

  She peered out through her thick curtain of hair. She didn’t answer. I guess she wants to keep our relationship on a professional level.

  I still can’t help but feel like none of these schools are quite right. I’m trying to convince myself that it’s safer for me to stay within what Mac called my “perfect suburban world.” Why would anyone bother bombing a snow globe?

  the thirtieth

  He was wearing the black shirt. It was the only exception to the days-of-the-week uniform. He’d stopped wearing that particular day-of-the-week shirt as a memorial to that unforgettable Tuesday, almost a month ago.

  So it was still Tuesday when it happened.

  One second, I’m lying on my bed, listening to Upstairs at Eric’s , thinking about how much less stressed I should feel because I finally sent out applications to the final four, yet not feeling the least bit relieved at all. Life, as ordinary as it can be.

  The next second, magic! Enchantment!

  “Hey, Jessica.”

  Poof! MARCUS WAS STANDING IN MY BEDROOM.

  Actually, he was leaning against my wall, six feet of long-limbed, tattooed, slouching insouciance.

  My body got all tingly.

  “Are you quiet because you’re surprised or because you’re repulsed?”

  “Uh . . .” MARCUS FLUTIE WAS STANDING IN MY BEDROOM. “Not repulsed.”

  Yet not quite surprised, either. Just . . . otherwordly. My arms and legs didn’t feel like flesh anymore. They felt like they were filled with helium, lighter than air, going up, up, up. My head wasn’t too solid anymore, either.