Second Helpings

  Len’s Dumping Speech:

  “It’s not you. It’s me. And it’s also my mom. She really doesn’t like you very much, and it’s made it difficult to spend time with you, and I thought it was counterintuitive to continue a relationship with someone I can never see. Also, my future is very important to me and I can’t help but feel that since I’ve been with you, my priorities have shifted but not in a positive, productive way. Lately I have realized that we have opposing views on important subjects, including, but not limited to, sexual relations before marriage. I feel that I’ve gotten all I can from this life experience, and that the best thing for both of us is if we put an end to this now, so we can move on to a more fulfilling future.”

  When I didn’t respond, he shook my hand in a very businesslike way, then departed.

  LEN broke up with ME. ON VALENTINE’S DAY.

  I guess it’s better than his breaking up with me the day after Valentine’s Day, knowing all along that he wanted to break up with me on Valentine’s Day.

  NO IT’S NOT. IT STILL SUCKS.

  Len breaking up with me today was like a Daisy Cutter bomb. Both go by a seemingly harmless name. Both contain fifteen thousand pounds of explosive power. Both drop in plain sight. Both result in total obliteration.

  I was so traumatized that I was even willing to talk to my mother about it. I figured I would vent about Len, and she would go off on how any guy who doesn’t appreciate her perfect daughter is obviously undeserving of her company—you know, predictable parental bullshit that I really, really needed to hear.

  “He broke up with you? How dare he? Who does he think he is?”

  “I know,” I said, all sniffly and pathetic. “I know!”

  My mom, being so utterly conventional, followed her half of the dialogue to the letter—until the phone rang.

  “Bethie! How are you? How’s my future grandchild? Still kicking? You’re coming to visit? Oh! I couldn’t be happier!”

  Babies win out over everything, every time. Even breakups. They’re cute for that very purpose, you know. Otherwise no one would bother with them.

  She pulled her mouth away from the receiver to address me. “Bethany is flying out here and might stay for the remainder of her pregnancy! Isn’t that the best news? Doesn’t that cheer you right up?”

  “You betcha,” I said, flashing a double thumbs-up before retreating to my room.

  Hope keeps reminding me that I never really liked Len all that much. If that’s true, then why does this hurt so bad?

  the fifteenth

  It got worse. Worse than I could have ever imagined.

  WHAT VIRGINAL GUITAR GOD BROKE UP WITH HIS BRAINIAC GIRLFRIEND ON VALENTINE’S DAY SO HE COULD CARRY ON WITH THE VERY EXPERIENCED SUPER-FEMME HALF OF THE CLASS COUPLE?

  You read it right. Manda wasn’t after Marcus. She was after Len. And she got him. Just like she gets every guy she’s ever gone after. Ever. ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH. And I was too obsessed with the idea of her seducing Marcus to even notice.

  Serves me right. How did my life become tabloid fodder? Because I’m a moron. Take my brain for scientific research; I apparently don’t need it.

  You know what the worst thing is? Worse than realizing that tits always win? Worse than losing my faith in malekind? Worse than being betrayed by someone who seemed incapable of such a thing? Worse than knowing that Len beat me to what I wanted to do all along?

  The worst thing is this: that whoever is behind Pinevile Low knew the truth before I did.

  That’s what makes me want to crawl under the covers and never, ever come out again.

  the eighteenth

  Being pissed off expends a lot of energy. So after staying under the covers for who knows how long, I went downstairs this morning for some nourishment. In the kitchen, I discovered that someone had busted into the Chubby Hubby ice cream before I did.

  “Bethany, what are you doing here?”

  “I was here all weekend,” she said. “If you had left your room, you would know that.”

  It was true. I hadn’t left my room since Friday night. My bedroom and its adjoining bathroom was its own self-sufficient little ecosystem. I’d lost all track of time in the outside world.

  “Fine,” I said, in a tone that reflected how much I resented that she was here, honing in on my mope time. “But why are you here at all?”

  “Grant’s away on business and I don’t want to be alone,” she replied in between licks of the spoon.

  I want to be alone.

  I thought I could stay in my room forever—until my stash of miniature Baby Ruths and Cap’n Crunch ran out. And it was practically encouraged by my mom, who would have let me stay home from school today even if it wasn’t Presidents’ Day. Funny how my mom wouldn’t tolerate my post-Hope-move moping yet was totally tolerant of this highly melodramatic self-banishment simply because it was about a boy. Funny how I couldn’t muster one-bizillionth of the emotion I’m feeling now while me and said boy were together.

  “But you’re not due for another three months,” I said finally. Truth is, Bethany’s bulging belly looked ready to pop at any second. Make no mistake, my sister was still beautiful in that rosy-cheeked, radiant way that pregnant women are supposed to be. And she’d scored the only other benefit I can see to getting knocked up: mammoth mammaries.

  “I feel better when I’m around people,” she said, putting her hands on her basketball belly.

  I feel better when I am not around people. When I am alone, alone, alone.

  Bethany turned the question of the moment on me. “What are you doing here?”

  “I live here.”

  “Don’t be cute,” she said.

  “Oh, don’t worry, I’m not cute,” I said. “That has been made abundantly clear lately.”

  “You do look terrible,” she said, emphasizing the word in a way that someone who has never suffered a bad-hair day can.

  I looked at my reflection in the spick-and-span kitchen window. Greasy pigtails, shadows under the eyes, an archipelago of acne dotting my forehead. I hadn’t showered or changed out of my tank top and PHS XC sweatpants in four days. I looked like I smelled. Terrible.

  I shrugged, grabbed a spoon, and dug into the pint.

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” she said. “It’s just that you shouldn’t let yourself go like this.”

  I crammed as much ice cream on the spoon as I possibly could, then shoveled the whole thing into my mouth.

  “I know this is about the boy who dumped you. On Valentine’s Day.” She involuntarily shuddered at the thought.

  My tongue was cold, but I didn’t taste the salty and sweet, chocolate-vanilla-peanut-buttery goodness.

  “I’m sorry, Jessie,” she said, settting down her spoon. “Len seemed so nice, too. So not the type to do something like that.”

  “He also didn’t seem like the type to start banging the class slut, and he’s doing that, too.”

  “Really?!” she gasped, clutching her midsection.

  “Um-hm.” The ice cream simply didn’t taste as good as I needed it to. Maybe I should have brushed my teeth first to get rid of three days’ buildup of mouth muck.

  Bethany watched me for a few seconds before shaking her head slowly with pity.

  “I know how you feel,” Bethany said in a soothing, big-sisterly voice.

  “YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL?”

  “I do.”

  “How? Nothing like this ever happened to you!”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because you loved high school! You were the type of person who makes high school hell for people like me.”

  “That’s not fair, Jess. I had problems. Life was not always a bowl of cherries for me.”

  “Whatever.”

  I knew better. Bethany was the Manda of the Class of 1991: Most Popular, Best Looking, and one-half of a Class Couple who broke up immediately after graduation. Sick. Sick. Sick.

  “Do you still have Trapper Keepers?” she asked. br />
  “What?”

  “Trapper Keepers. Do they still make them?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. But only the TMR kids use them.”

  “TMR?”

  “Trainable Mentally Retarded.”

  “Oh,” she said, shifting her girth. “Well, when I was in school everyone had Trapper Keepers. And the thing to do was to cut open the plastic and replace the boring Trapper Keeper background with a collage of all the labels from the brand-name clothing you wore. If you didn’t have enough ESPRIT, Benetton, or Guess? labels, forget it. You were over socially.”

  She mistook my silence for understanding.

  “I was desperate to keep up. No matter how many labels I had, it wasn’t enough. Especially since we didn’t have as much money back then and Mom always insisted we buy things on sale. Or at Marshalls, which was just not cool. Not cool at all. So I’d go through the mall, secretly ripping the labels off clothes and slipping them into my purse. I was shoplifting labels for my Trapper Keeper!”

  I let this sink in.

  “Bethany,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “That is the most moronic thing I have ever heard.”

  I thanked her for her company, grabbed a new box of Cap’n Crunch and a bottle of Diet Coke for sustenance, and shuffled back upstairs. There I stayed for the rest of the day.

  I know that Bethany was trying to bond with me over the Tyranny of the Trapper Keepers and all, but it so paled in comparison to what I was going through.

  the twentieth

  Six Fun Activities for When You’re Playing Hooky and Feeling Very, Very Sorry for Yourself

  Count the bleeps on Jerry Springer.

  Arrange your tresses into a Mohawk. Then—using a stopwatch from your running days—time how long it stands up, unaided by any hair products other than your all-natural scalp grease.

  E-mail your gay mentors to find out if they are aware of any hypnosis that cures people of heterosexuality.

  Play toe-lint football.

  Lie on your back on the floor for hours. This is known as savasana, the corpse pose. It’s the only yoga asana you have truly mastered so far, which is okay because it so aptly describes how you feel.

  Write in your journal about your virgin ex-boyfriend who dumped you on the most lovey-dovey of holidays so he could bang the class slut. Write about how you never saw this coming, and how you never thought it would hurt this much even if you did. Then tear out all the pages you’ve just written and torch them with a Zippo. If you don’t have a Zippo because it’s downstairs, and you can’t go downstairs because that’s where people are, tear the pages into tinier and tinier and infinitesimal pieces until not even a single letter of a single word is discernable, not a trace of this thing that has made you into the mess you are for no good reason at all.

  the twenty-Second

  In my entire academic career, I have never, ever stayed home from school for more than one day in a row. I rarely get sick. My white blood cells kick ass, which is one thing I’ve got going for me, I guess. Playing hooky was out of the question in elementary school because I loved school so much and couldn’t stand the thought of my classmates learning without me. As I got older, I realized I’d be smarter if I stayed home, because doing so would spare the obliteration of countless brain cells. But then my participation in cross-country and track and other after-school activities dictated that I attend, whether I wanted to or not.

  Unlike those mystery students who are on absentee lists with stunning frequency and anonymity, it was very conspicuous for Darling, Jessica to miss an entire week of school. Yet even after a week’s worth of ignored phone calls, IMs, and e-mails, I was still surprised when Bridget and Pepe showed up in my bedroom tonight.

  “P.U.!” Bridget said, pinching her nose.

  “It smells like ass in here,” Pepe added.

  Bridget stepped over the depressing detritus—the Diet Coke cans, candy bar wrappers, Cap’n Crunch crumbs, and shredded pages from this here notebook—to open the window. The cold, fresh air hit me before I could complain. It felt better than expected. Clean.

  “What are you guys doing here?”

  “We’re your friends,” said Bridget.

  “And we’re worried about you,” said Pepe.

  “I’m fine.” Then I meant to laugh a silly, carefree kind of a laugh, but it came out more maniacal than intended. “HAH-hee-hee-hee-hee-hah-hah-hah-HAH!”

  Bridget and Pepe exchanged terrified looks.

  “Look, Jess,” Bridget said. “What Len did was—”

  “Len? You think this is about Len?”

  “Well . . .”

  “This isn’t about Len,” I said, while expertly doing the corpse pose on my unmade bed. “I never really liked Len, so how could this be about Len? Oh, no. This isn’t about Len. It’s about me. I’m just taking some me time. A vacation for the soul. A Jessication! Yes! Time out from the stress of school to get back to me. It’s all about me, me, ME!”

  Another lunatic laugh followed.

  “Well, it’s not working,” Bridget said, pulling me up from the mattress and pushing me in front of my mirror. “Look at you!”

  Gasp!

  I hadn’t looked at myself since when I was in the kitchen the other night, and I actually gasped when I saw the greasy, zitty, stinky carcass I had become.

  And that’s when I started to cry. I was crying not because of what I looked like—because a shower and some clean clothes could change that—but because of the fact that I had let myself sink so abysmally low. I was a zeta-female. And over Len. LEN!

  Len, whom I dated for all the reasons I said I wouldn’t go with Scotty last year:

  So I’d have something to do on Saturday nights now that Hope is gone.

  So I’d have a boyfriend like all normal heterosexual high-school girls are supposed to.

  So I’d have a living, breathing outlet for the sexual tension that has built up all these years.

  How did I let myself get into a relationship I never really wanted in the first place?

  “How did I let this happen?” I asked out loud, in between sniffles.

  “Getting dissed is a bitch,” Pepe said, handing me a tissue, misinterpreting the question.

  As I honked out the snot, I realized that this was the first time Pepe had ever been over my house. He was more than my little freaky French buddy. He was a friend. A friend who had asked me out and—

  “Oh, God!” I said. “I am so sorry I rejected you!”

  Pepe shot Bridget a glance. “It’s all gravy, ma belle. I bounced back.”

  “And that’s what you have to do,” Bridget said.

  Then they went on to explain that Monday was the perfect day to make the transition from hermit to high schooler because Len, Manda, and Scotty wouldn’t be there. Apparently, Scotty opened up a can of whup-ass on Len when he found out about him and Manda. Hence, Scotty’s two-week suspension. After round one had been broken up and Scotty was being led to the principal’s office, Len hauled off and gave him a buck fifty to the face. Hence, Len’s two-week suspension. When Scotty went nuclear after Len, Manda tripped him, then kicked him in the teabags. Hence, her two-week suspension.

  “It would serve Len right if he got negged from Cornell because of this,” Bridget said.

  “Ha!” barked Pepe.

  “Hmm.” I was thinking about something else entirely. “I was kind of hoping Len didn’t want to have sex with me because he was gay.”

  Pepe and Bridget glanced at each other nervously, unsure of how to react.

  “You know I have a thing for homosexuals.”

  Now they were actually smiling. I was showing signs of life.

  “Come back,” urged Pepe. “We miss your face.”

  “You couldn’t possibly miss this face,” I said.

  “Well, not this face, but, like, the nontoxic version of it,” said Bridget.

  “You can’t hide forever,” Pepe said.

  I was touched by this.
I really was. Pepe and Bridget cared in a way that I thought only Hope could, or would.

  “Okay,” I promised pathetically.

  But there’s something I have to do first. Well, second. After I take a shower.

  the twenty-fourth

  The millisecond I stepped foot inside Silver Meadows, I knew that word of the infamous Valentine’s Day dumping had already spread among the over-sixty-five set. I was met with hushed tones too soft for hearing aids, pruny, pointed fingers, and embarrassed, toothless smiles.

  I found Gladdie in the rec room, as usual. The only difference was that everyone except Gladdie and Moe hurriedly hobbled off when I arrived, as if they would catch breakup cooties from me.

  “Buck up, bee-yoo-ti-ful,” Gladdie said.

  “Do you want me to teach him a lesson?” Moe asked, raising his hand, which, due to arthritis, he couldn’t close into an official fist.

  “No,” I said. “There has already been too much violence over this.” And I went on to explain all the brawls, balls-kicking, and suspensions.

  “Look on the bright side, J.D.,” Gladdie said. “There are plenty of fish in the sea. And your first fish ain’t your last.”

  Gladdie gently patted Moe’s hand, and he smiled at her like she was the most bee-yoo-ti-ful woman in the world, even though she had ninety years of wrinkles and her eyebrows were drawn on crookedly and her lipstick had melted past her mouth line and her beret was red and her pantsuit was blue and her walker was still resplendent in purple. Maybe she mismatched on purpose. Red and blue make purple. I was about to ask her when his voice snuck up on me from behind.

  “Hey.”

  “Tutti Flutie! Fancy seein’ you here.”

  “Hey,” he repeated. “Hey, Jessica.”

  “Hey,” I said, without facing him.

  “Can we talk?”

  I nodded. When I turned around, I looked down at his feet. Same old Vans with the hole in the toe. I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the face in this state. I followed him down to the empty library. The fire was out and the room was cold and dark and smelled like musty, wet pages. I slumped into the leather armchair and he sat on the hearth facing me wearing his COMINGHOME T-shirt. The fake-velvet letters had faded and flattened out. I’d missed my chance to feel their softness with my fingertips.