Are these the reasons I didn’t come right out and reject your proposal last week?
No. I think it was something else entirely, like the temporary amnesia brought on by your kisses. Sexual arousal releases oxytocin, a hormone that turns on the body and shuts off the brain.
Basically, you kissed me out of my right mind.
And I cannot let you do it again this afternoon.
seventy-seven
Here’s another story. One I started—but couldn’t finish—from the Care. Okay? party:
“…Eurocock,” said Cinthia.
“Who’s having Eurocock for supper?” boomed a voice from behind. And before I could turn around, I was attacked by a flock of wild purple ostriches.
“Dah-ling! It’s you!”
“Royalle G. Biv!” I spluttered, spitting his boa out of my mouth.
“Where’s the Buddhist?” the drag queen asked, readjusting his spangled cleavage. If the average anorexic starlet got a boost in her bra from those silicone chicken-cutlet inserts, Royalle G. Biv must use two Perdue Oven Stuffer Roasters.
“Not here,” I said. “And he’s not a Buddhist. He’s a Deist who practices Vipassana meditation.”
“Say no more!” he said, making an exaggerated lip-zipping gesture, which was funny because it was a perfectly appropriate gesture for describing your practice.
“Royalle G. Biv!” Dexy shrieked. “I love you! I’m your biggest fan!”
“Not possible,” he said. “I’m my biggest fan!” He waited for the laugh, then said, “Listen, doll, I’d love to tawk, but I’ve got to bring down the howse.”
And he pranced away as only a seven-foot drag queen can prance.
“This should be good,” Dexy said.
“Get ready to cry yer eyes out,” Royalle warned the crowd, pulling a chiffon scarf from his ballgown for effect.
And right before the background track started up, I thought about how phenomenal it would be if Royalle broke out into a Barry Manilow song. You were returning in less than forty-eight hours, and I wasn’t any closer to knowing what I’d say to you when I saw you again.
I needed a Sign. I was begging for a Sign. I was willing to shed twenty-two years of agnostic skepticism if God or a higher power came through with a Sign. This was His moment to wow me, win me over. I would spend the rest of my life as a missionary turning doubters into the devoted with my astonishing conversion story.
“And then when I had lost all faith, I got a Sign, and that’s when I knew I had to say yes….”
I pressed my palms together under the table, praying a seven-foot drag queen named Royalle G. Biv would act as the voice box of a higher power, spreading His message of hope and love by performing a number by none other than Barry Manilow. Perhaps the appropriately titled “Could It Be Magic”:
Baby, I love you, come, come, come into my arms
Let me know the wonder of all of you
Or “Daybreak”:
We’ve been runnin’ around, year after year
Blinded with pride, blinded with fear
Or even “Copacabana,” for Christ’s sake:
They were young and they had each other
Who could ask for more?
But, alas, Royalle opened his huge red mouth and began to sing a power ballad I didn’t recognize until it built up to the torrid chorus.
“I WAH-NT yoooooou, I NEED yoooooooou,” Royalle belted. “But there ain’t no way I’m EVAH GONNA LOVE you….”
Not Manilow, but another overwrought late-seventies balladeer. Meat Loaf.
And as much as I hate to admit it, Royalle’s diva delivery of this over-the-top song hit me where it hurts. It was a performance for the ages, and I was mesmerized. Granted, at that point I had worked up to a solid drunk, and I was certainly susceptible to the boo-hoo-hooze. But Royalle’s performance, though not a Sign of the divine, was a smashing success on another level. His melodramatic lament beamed a spotlight on my own version of this troublesome triangulation, which I will come right out and reveal right now. And it is this:
I love you.
And I want you, too.
But.
However.
Unfortunately…
seventy-eight
Of course, I got your message, too, which came after Len’s. It was so strange to hear your voice.
According to your message, the kiddies are calling you Rodney. That’s a pretty clever nickname, but if those Princeton Tigers really wanted to impress me, they would have called you Thornton, which is the senior-citizen college freshman character Rodney Dangerfield plays in the movie Back to School. But Rodney is a pretty solid nickname. Solid. A nickname like that could very well stick for the next four years. I knew I’d be right about the nickname. I just knew it, and see, you weren’t giving me enough credit for knowing such things. But I can hardly blame you. I wasn’t giving myself much credit, either….
I can’t stop thinking about Driver, the MILF’s kid with “modulation issues.” I’m sure you escaped this diagnosis only because it hadn’t been invented yet. I can totally see this kid madly spinning around in circles as a way of trying to calm himself down because he can’t handle all the noise and hubbub of the classroom. And the wilder and faster he spins, the more out of control he feels. It’s a self-defeating coping mechanism. But he’s four. He doesn’t know any better.
Since I’ve known you, you’ve been spinning and spinning and spinning into all these various personas, and none of this self-exploration and experimentation has given you a sense of peace. I’ve known you for six years, intimately for four, and I still have no idea who I’m in love with. When we first met six years ago, you were Marcus Flutie, notorious burnout and sly defiler of underage women. After a mandatory stint in rehab, you became Marcus Flutie, sobered-up genius whose rebellious history made you all the more intoxicating to an unsullied goody-goody like me looking for a little corruption. After a few semesters at the un-accredited Buddhist college in California, and a few months at the experimental school in Death Valley, you became Marcus Flutie, non-sectarian practitioner of Vipassana meditation.
This minimalist philosopher is less or more the person who knelt on the floor and asked me to marry him last week. But I understand that being here in this new place will inspire you to shape-shift into somebody else, someone unknown to me right now: There will be a fourth coming of Marcus Flutie. Followed by the fifth. And the sixth. And so on. How can I possibly promise to love you FOREVER when I don’t even know who you’ll be by the time you get this notebook? Who is at the heart of Marcus Flutie? What is the essential part of you in every new incarnation?
Is that what you’re trying to find there, on the floor of your closet? You want to be still and quiet and look inward, and I fully encourage you in that quest. But I’m afraid that you’ve twisted so far inside yourself that I can’t help you find the way back out. And I’m not willing to go in there with you. Maybe there’s someone else out there who will. Someone who isn’t necessarily a better woman than I am, but better for you right now.
That’s one thing that hasn’t changed in a week: You, Marcus Flutie, are still an all-or-nothing proposition for me, and as much as I’d like to tread that middle path with you, I don’t know how. (You must have seen this yourself, or you wouldn’t have considered breaking up with me.)
I was just reading this study for work about how the happiest couples are those who sacrifice their own wishes so their partners can achieve their dreams. It makes perfect sense. And yet I know I’m too young, that we’re too young, for me to live my life only as it relates to you. If you had asked me to marry you the night you first told me about your acceptance, I would have embraced Princeton as part of a larger plan that involved me. I probably would have reacted differently.
I might have even said yes.
Alas, you didn’t ask me then. You made plans for your future without me in mind. And that’s okay. But how can you now ask me to arrange my life around you?
&nb
sp; seventy-nine
The train is pulling into the Princeton station.
And so I must bring this notebook to its abrupt end with a page or two left to spare.
I have to get up, get off, get going. I have to move, move, move before the doors shut, before this train reverses itself, before it returns me to the place I started from.
Oh, please forgive me, Marcus, for indulging in one last extended metaphor.
(I know you will.)
September 15, 2006
* * *
My dear Jessica,
Not only do I forgive you, I thank you.
I know that sounds odd under the circumstances, but I’m grateful for what you’ve given me. As difficult as your notebooks were to read at times, you were only sharing the truth as you saw it, and as I asked for it. As you noted, even your superficial confessions are significant if only because you were compelled to share them with me.
I’ve read them, and now I’m returning them. They belong to you.
I was tempted to leave annotations in the margins, but it’s too late for such revisions. I promised to honor your request, knowing how difficult it was for you to make. I respect you for being a stronger person than I am, and for doing what I was unable to do all those years: let you go.
Before I do, I hope you don’t mind if I use the remaining pages of this notebook to share a story of my own:
When I was thirteen, the same age as you and Hope when you played your innocent game of hypotheticals, I decided I needed a tattoo. Heath had Asian calligraphy crawling around his bicep and I decided to get something like his. I didn’t even know what language it was—Chinese? Japanese? Korean? It just looked cool.
I went to the same guy as Heath, who did all his work out of one of those weatherbeaten bungalows off the Seaside Heights strip. He didn’t hesitate to ink me up, though it was obvious that I was both underage and under the influence. I don’t remember the guy’s name, or even what he looked like beyond a basic, cartoonish “Asianness.” Was he Chinese? Japanese? Korean? Again, to my immature, uncultured mind, it didn’t matter.
He spat all his words. “What you want?”
I hadn’t given much thought to the design because I couldn’t sit still long enough to give much thought to anything. I was more excited about getting the tattoo than having it.
“Dunno.”
“You dunno what want on arm forever?”
My mind was so malleable that if he had said, “You dunno what want on arm, dumbass?” I might have requested the translation for “dumbass.”
“For. Ever,” I answered. I exaggerated the pronunciation, thinking it would eliminate any chance of miscommunication. “For. Ever. For. Ever.”
“You want repeat around arm?”
“Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”
“What. Ever?”
“Yeah, Tat Man,” I said. “What. Ever…”
A painful hour or two later, it was done. I had my FOREVER tat. I was stoked for about a week. Then I got bored with it, like everything else, and it was just something that was there, on my arm, easily forgotten unless it behooved me to show it off to a dizzy, fizzy girl. (Not you. Never you.)
I’m sure you’re aware that the main street in Pineville was recently renamed the Avenue of Americanism. Our hometown is not known for being a welcome host to anything foreign. It wasn’t until I went away to school in California that I made friends from other countries and cultures. And with my interest in Buddhism, a great many of them were of Chinese descent. Not too long after I moved in with my cottagemate, Topher, he pointed to my bicep.
“What’s that supposed to say, anyway?” he asked.
“What?”
“The tattoo?”
As I said, I often forgot it was there.
“I got it when I was young and dumb,” I said. “It says FOREVER.”
Topher laughed. “No it doesn’t.”
He picked up a pen and illustrated the difference between what I thought I had and what I actually did:
= FOREVER
= WHATEVER
I got what I deserved.
My proposal to you could not have been more sincere. But it seems that my life is imitating badly executed skin art, turning my intentions for FOREVER into something else altogether. And so I’ll let you go, and let it be.
* * *
Whatever, Marcus
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to:
Joanna Pulcini, for dispensing the wisest advice when I needed it most.
Kristin Kiser, for giving me the freedom to go in the strange, surprising directions of my dreams. Steve Ross, Stuart Applebaum, Min Lee, Philip Patrick, and Tina Constable for having my back. (You are the closest I’ve ever come to having a posse.) Lindsey Moore and Lindsay Orman for not getting annoyed when I got confused and sent the right e-mail to the wrong person. (Or vice versa.) Christine Aronson, Donna Passannante, Sarah Breivogel, and Shawn Nicholls for your brilliant ideas and committed follow-through. Lynn Goldberg and Megan U. Beatie of Goldberg McDuffie Communications, for respecting my point of view and helping me put it out there. And Elizabeth Carter for providing another pair of eyes.
The countless readers and writers—most of whom I’ve never met—who offered candid words of encouragement. Meg Cabot and Sophie Kinsella, whose e-mails made me laugh when nothing seemed funny. Rachel Cohn, Sarah Dessen, Julia DeVillers, Piet Hut, Erika Rasmusson Janes, Jeannie Kim, Carolyn Mackler, and Monica Ryan deserve special thank-yous for wisdom and general “awesomeness.”
Dr. Helen Fischer, anthropologist and author of several books, including the fascinating Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, for developing the real science behind the fictional iLoveULab. I’ve never met you, but I would love to have lunch with you someday.
Justin Timberlake, who brought the sexy back during the intense revisions phase. I’ve never met you either, but…
My mom and dad, who prove that parenting doesn’t suddenly end when your kid turns eighteen.
The Fitzmorris and McCafferty families, who always come through for me.
CJM and CJM, for everything, forever.
About the Author
Megan McCafferty is the author of the hit Jessica Darling novels Sloppy Firsts, Second Helpings, and the New York Times bestseller Charmed Thirds.
ALSO BY MEGAN MCCAFFERTY
Sloppy Firsts
Second Helpings
Charmed Thirds
Sixteen (edited)
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.
Copyright © 2007 by Megan McCafferty
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McCafferty, Megan.
Fourth comings…ovel / Megan McCafferty.—1st ed.
1. Darling, Jessica (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Young women—Fiction. 3. Periodicals—Publishing—Fiction. 4. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. 5. Chick lit. I. Title.
PS3613.C34F68 2007
813'.6—dc22
2007010818
eISBN: 978-0-307-40563-0
v3.0
Megan Mccafferty, Fourth Comings
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