Second Helpings

  “Oh,” I replied, vaguely remembering reading something about this in the brochure last year. At the time, when I was fed up with Marcus and malekind in general, and not in my right mind, the coordinate system had sounded like a good idea.

  “Gather round, ladies,” she said, “as I explain to you the benefits of the coordinate system, one of the most misunderstood components of the Piedmont University educational experience.”

  For the next half hour, she went on to explain that Piedmont was the only coed school in the nation that separates the sexes on campus. Much like at summer camp, guys and girls reside on opposite sides of a lake, the guys on the Piedmont College half and the girls on the Westlake College half. They have separate dormitories and student governments, but all classes are coed. According to Ms. Susan Petrone, the greatest advantage of the separate-but-equal living arrangement is that it allows women to live and work together without “the pressures of the patriarchy.”

  That is exactly the kind of backward, pseudo-feminist bullshit Manda slings. I’ve never understood the grrrls who believe that the only way to get ahead as women is to exclude men. Don’t get me wrong, the Y-chromosome set is teeming with total morons. But how can we expect to make our mark on the world if we alienate half its population? It’s like Paul Parlipiano said about PACO: The best way to change the system is to work within it. (He’d be so proud of me! Less than three weeks until the Snake March! Whee!)

  The oddest thing about Ms. Susan Patrone’s pro-separation-of-the-sexes spiel was that it drew so much attention to what made the coordinate system a fundamentally doomed concept. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the glossy, colorful Piedmont University brochure mentions the coordinate system almost as an afterthought. I think the publicity people know the truth: If a single-sex environment is your thing, fine. But why would any guy—or girl for that matter—go to a school where two thousand menstrual cycles get in sync? What a nightmare!

  It made me hate the Piedmont publicity people, for being so underhanded and sneaky about something that could have such a huge impact on happiness—especially since I almost bought into it. It just goes to show you how little we really know about the schools we pin our hopes on. I can’t believe I actually considered going here before Paul Parlipiano intervened. I don’t know if I know Columbia any better, but I do know this: It’s the diametric opposite of Piedmont, which is a step in the right direction. Thank you, Gay Man of My Dreams, for helping me narrowly avert certain collegiate catastrophe. (Just nineteen days! I’m so excited! I’m sooooo excited that I won’t even dwell on how absolutely pathetic it is that the highlight of my spring break social calendar is attending a social protest with a homosexual! When other girls are island hopping, I’ll be protest hopping!)

  And isn’t part of the point of going to college getting to know all different kinds of people, including—horrors!—guys? At Columbia (if I get in, please let me get in), I’ll be peeing next to the opposite sex on a daily basis because even the bathrooms are coed. I can’t see how Piedmont could possibly promote anything but unhealthy relationships between the sexes. Guys are lazy dogs. They are not going to leave the comfort of their own dorms, walk a mile—across a bridge, over a lake, and through the woods—just to hang out and watch television. No, the only reason they would walk a mile, across a bridge, over a lake, and through the woods, would be if they knew they were going to get their hobs nobbed while they watched television. In summation, the coordinate system rewards whoredom, which really would make it the perfect school for Manda, wouldn’t it?

  Speaking of heinous skankitude . . .

  “Look who I found!” my mom said brightly. “Isn’t this a coincidence?”

  Call Me Chantalle. And her mom.

  Holy shit.

  This was not a coincidence. This was a sign. Any second now, I expected Ashleigh, she of the broccoli schnozz and aggressively annoying personality, to show up, saucer in hand, nibbling on a dry, tasteless shortbread cookie.

  “Maybe we could be roommates again!” Call Me Chantalle gushed.

  I looked around the room. It was full of chattering, excited girls. This was insane. Why was I here, wearing an outfit I hated, putting on a happy face for my mom and the likes of Call Me Chantalle?

  “So it’s true,” I said.

  “What’s true?” asked Call Me Chantalle.

  “That psychosis is a symptom of advanced-stage syphilis,” I whispered so only she would hear.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Because you’ve got to have a sexually transmitted brain-eating virus to think I’d ever live with you again.”

  Call Me Chantalle’s huge head turned red with anger and she looked exactly like a stop sign. I was pretty sure I could take all seventyfive pounds of her in a catfight, but I didn’t want to stick around to find out. My mother and Mrs. DePasquale were too busy bragging about the scholarships Piedmont was offering their daughters to notice the tension. I grabbed my mother by the arm and told her it was time to go.

  “But Jessie, honey,” she cooed. “We just got here.”

  “Which has already been long enough for me to realize that I will never, ever go to this school with these people,” I replied, without breaking my stride.

  When we got to the car, my mother attacked.

  “What has gotten into you? I’ve never seen you behave so poorly in my life!”

  “Mom, I have no intention of going to Piedmont,” I said. “I should have never agreed to go to this inane event.”

  “Then why did you even apply?”

  This was the third perfect opportunity to tell the truth. I applied to Piedmont because at the time, I was too scared to apply to the school I really wanted to attend, the one you won’t let me attend even if I get in. That’s what I should have said.

  But for the third time, I pussed out. And I pussed out because I suck. Suckity suck suck.

  the fifteenth

  Finally a Jessica-free edition of Pinevile Low I could enjoy.

  WHAT RICHIE-RICH THROW-DOWN THROWER RECENTLY EXPLODED OUT OF HER EARL JEANS BECAUSE SHE STILL THINKS SHE’S A SIZE 2?

  Sara, of course. Ha!

  With one less thing to worry about today, I decided to finally have a talk with Pepe about Bridget. He’s been hanging around her a lot lately, and I just can’t stand to see him crushed. I’m very sensitive to these types of heartbreaks for obvious reasons. When I accused him of having a crush on Bridget, Pepe issued denials faster than Whitney Houston’s publicists after a bout of “dehydration.”

  “Connerie! Bridget a eu un boyfriend célèbre!

  (“Bullshit! Bridget had a famous boyfriend!”)

  “Elle a eu une rendez-vous avec Geai de Kay. Et il n’est pas si célèbre.”

  (“She had one date with Kayjay. And he’s not that famous.”)

  “Pourquoi un POA chaude comme Bridget me choisirait? Je souhaite!”

  (“Why would a hot POA like Bridget choose me? I wish!”)

  “Bien, uh... Elle ne va pas. C’est pourquoi je t’ai dit de l’oublier.”

  (“Well, uh . . . She wouldn’t. Which is why I’ve been trying to tell you to forget her.”)

  “Ne t’inquiètes pas de moi. Je suis copacetic.

  (“Don’t worry about me. I’m copacetic.”)

  Later, I tried to urge Bridget to spend less time with him so she wouldn’t lead him on.

  “I would never carry on a secret relationship with anyone, especially someone I’ve worked with,” she said.

  “Are you sure? I think he might be hot for you.”

  “Jess, that’s so, like, unprofessional.”

  “But . . .”

  Bridget wasn’t about to explore this topic any further because she had revenge on her mind.

  “But nothing. We’ve got more important stuff to, like, think about!” she said, holding up a page torn out of the New York Times. “We are going to finally face off with Hy!”

  I looked at the clipping. Miss Hyacinth Anast
asia Wallace was doing a reading and signing at a bookstore on March 28—the same day I’m supposed to meet Paul Parlipiano in NYC.

  “I’ll take the bus with you, since I’m going in that day already,” I replied.

  “Oh,” she said. “Is that the day of the big Lizard Walk?”

  “Snake March,” I said, so aglow with the prospect of spending the day with my crush-to-end-all-crushes that I could easily ignore her nonchalant ignorance. “It’s PACO’s biggest nondiscriminatory demonstration against all forms of tyranny.”

  Bridget sighed. “He’s gay, Jess.”

  “I know. What does that have to do with anything?”

  “It’s just that since Len dumped you, you’ve kind of, like, gotten re-obsessed with Paul Parlipiano.”

  “Uh . . . I have not!”

  She stuck her ponytail in her mouth and mumbled a “Whatever.”

  Okay, maybe I have gotten a little too excited about the Snake March, but I was just publicly humiliated by my ex-boyfriend and Skankier, whose hand-holding and pecks on the cheek are just too nauseatingly chaste to be for real. Is it so wrong for me to want to focus my energy on someone who seems to have only the best intentions for me? It’s merely coincidence that he just happens to be my former obsessive object of horniness, my crush-to-end-all-crushes.

  “I know he’s gay and that there’s no chance of anything happening,” I said. “It’s just that I think it’s cool that I’ve received an invitation from someone I thought would never, ever know I even existed.”

  “A gay someone,” she clarified unnecessarily.

  I just glared.

  “Well, if your nondiscriminatory protest with your gay date doesn’t, like, rock your world, you can always meet up with me at the bookstore to give Hy a piece of your mind.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Aren’t you, like, still pissed?” she asked, her aquamarine eyes blinking madly, beautifully. “Don’t you want to vent?”

  I shrugged.

  “Percy is helping me to write a script,” she said. “So my telling her off will be like a role I’m playing. That way I won’t, like, screw up or lose my nerve.”

  Bridget is the only other person who remembers that Hy’s book came out at all. It’s funny how little impact Bubblegum Bimbos ended up having on our school. The sad fact is, Pineville’s population doesn’t read. We’ve got six Wawas and eight liquor stores, but you have to drive twenty miles outside town limits to find a bookstore. PHS students just couldn’t take a time-out from their kegging to read it, opting to wait for the movie, which is due in theaters sometime in 2003. But who knows if they’ll even go see it? With the exception of Sara, who never forgets anything, Pineville High has a notoriously short attention span. If Hy really wanted to make maximum impact, she would’ve sold her rights to MTV and had Bubblegum Bimbos turned into a twenty-two-minute mini-movie wedged between Cribs and Becoming.

  I’m still sort of working through my whole Jenn Sweet identity crisis. It’s been pretty depressing to admit that I will never be one-bizillionth as cool as my alter ego. Jenn Sweet is not the kind of girl who gets publicly humiliated by her ex-boyfriend and the resident hobag. That’s because Jenn Sweet is not the kind of girl who would have gone out with Len in the first place if she knew deep down that he was not the right person for her. Or maybe she would have given him a chance, but she certainly wouldn’t have stuck it out with him as long as I did. I don’t know. I still find myself asking, “What Would Jenn Do?” even when I know that trying to be like her (like I did on New Year’s Eve) will only lead to certain disaster.

  But it’s not like being myself does me any better. Maybe I should ask Pepe to script my whole life, so I never screw up or lose my nerve.

  the seventeenth

  After the Piedmont fiasco, I thought my parents would refuse to go out in public with me ever again. Unfortunately, I was wrong. They joined me at Silver Meadows today for its annual St. Patrick’s Day celebration.

  I was happy to see that Gladdie’s outfit and walker were completely color-coordinated in shades of green. I had started to worry—that her mismatching was a sign that at ninety-one, she was finally slipping. But there were no signs of any new slippage today as she did a modified, walker-aided jig with Marcus to a tin-whistle ditty about sassy Irish lassies.

  Marcus was wearing a KISS ME I’M IRISH T-shirt.

  “Nice shirt,” I said.

  “It was a gift from your grandmother,” he said.

  “Pucker up, J.D.!” Gladdie bellowed.

  What my grandmother lacks in subtlety she makes up for in volume.

  “I’m not convinced that Marcus here is really Irish,” I said.

  “I’m one-quarter Celtic,” he said, tipping his green plastic hat. “And just take a look at this red hair.”

  “PUCKER UP!”

  “I’ll give you one-quarter’s worth of a kiss,” I said, kissing my palm and blowing it in his direction.

  “Oh, you disappoint me, J.D.,” Gladdie said, shaking her head.

  And Marcus, very uncharacteristically, didn’t say anything at all. That is, until my mother swooped in and asked the inevitable question.

  “Sooooooooooooo, Marcus,” she cooed, fluffing out her highlights. “Where are you going to college next year?”

  I had been wondering the same thing. The last I had heard from Len, back when we shared these things, was that Marcus hadn’t even taken his SATs.

  “I’m not going to college,” he said.

  “What?!” my mom, dad, and I asked simultaneously.

  “I’m not going to college.”

  I played along. “Why aren’t you going to college?”

  “I don’t need a degree to get by in life.”

  “Well, that’s convenient,” I replied. “Now I can visit you and Bridget at McDonald’s next year.”

  “Just because you’re conflicted about your college plans doesn’t mean you should project those fears on me.”

  My parents jumped on that one.

  “She is conflicted, isn’t she?” my mom pried.

  “One minute it’s Piedmont, the next it’s Williams!” Dad said, turning purple with frustration.

  “Oh, it’s Williams now, is it?” Marcus asked.

  I shifted in my seat.

  His eyes darted toward my parents, then returned to me.

  “If I were going to college, however, I would definitely consider going to school in New York City.”

  WHAT WAS HE DOING??????? AND HOW DID HE EVEN KNOW TO DO WHAT HE WAS DOING????????

  “May I talk to you for a moment?” I asked, through clenched teeth.

  “It was nice seeing you again, Mr. and Mrs. Darling,” he said politely while shaking my dad’s hand.

  He pulled me over to a quiet corner.

  “Len,” he said, before I even asked. “I know about Columbia through Len.”

  Len had become such a nonentity in my life that I had forgotten there was ever a time I tried to confide in him simply because he was my boyfriend.

  “Why do you always have to step in where you’re not wanted?” I asked. “This whole Columbia thing is very complicated already and I don’t need you making it a bigger clusterfuck than it already is.”

  He opened his mouth to say something, then snapped it shut.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said, turning away from me. “Nothing at all.”

  Ha! If there’s one thing I’ve figured out, it’s that when it comes to Marcus and me, nothing is “nothing at all.”

  the twenty-first

  Scotty burst into the library after school today, all muscle and bluster.

  “Yo! Jess! How come you haven’t returned my phone calls?”

  “Scotty, I’m trying to help Taryn pass her geometry test,” I said.

  Scotty could hardly waste his precious time by so much as glancing in Taryn’s direction. She slunk lower into her seat and never took her Frisbee eyes off the parallelogram on the paper.
>
  “So are we going to the prom or what?” he asked, his chin dimple twitching.

  Ever since Sara informed me that Scotty was going to ask me to the prom, I had been artfully dodging him. I steered clear of the weight room and the cafeteria and hid in all the places I thought he didn’t know even existed, namely the computer lab and the library.

  “Oh, when you ask me like that, how can I resist?”

  “Fuck yeah!” he said, not getting that I was being sarcastic.

  “Fuck no,” I replied.

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry, but I won’t go to the prom with you.”

  As soon as I said it, I could feel mini-versions of my mother and my sister sitting on my shoulders, like in cartoons.

  “YOU SAID NO TO THE MOST POPULAR, BEST-LOOKING CLASS ATHLETE?” screamed my mom.

  “WHAT BETTER WAY TO GET OVER LEN?” screamed my sister, whose excess baby fat weighed heavy on my left shoulder.

  Then, in unison: “YOU DESERVE TO BE UNHAPPY!”

  Maybe I do. I just know that I would’ve been far unhappier if I had said yes.

  “What happened to you, Scotty?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, to you, what happened to the nice guy you used to be?”

  “Gimme a fucking break, Jess,” he said as he walked out.

  He didn’t even give me a chance to tell him that I would’ve gone to the prom with the old Scotty, the one who was sweet, a little goofy, and occasionally gross in a boogers-and-fart kind of way. The one who would have been Just Another Jock at our school, but who had kept his integrity in tact. But Scotty had made a choice two years ago. When he was crowned His Royal Guyness for the Class of 2002, all the testosterone necessary for that title left little room for sweetness or sincerity.

  I think this is very sad.

  But is it any worse than the roles any of us play to get through the day? I mean, I’ve been trying to be as vibrant and daring as Jenn Sweet for the past three months, which is just as loserish and pathetic as a pathetic loser can get.