Charmed Thirds (17 page)

“You get a lot of shit for dating someone black?”

“No!” Her blue eyes bulged. “Just the opposite!”

“Really?”

Then she went on to say that since Pepe started at
NYU
he’s been hassled by black girls for choosing a white girlfriend—a blond Barbie-doll-gorgeous white girlfriend, no less—over one of them.

“There’s a shortage of smart, black men who aren’t, like, in jail,” Bridget went on. “And so there’s a lot of competition among black women to get one. So for someone like me,” she yanked on her platinum ponytail for emphasis, “to be dating Percy is, like, in their opinion, an insult to all African Americans.”

“Wow,” I said, surprised by Bridget’s intensity. “How does Percy feel about all this?”

Bridget’s smile returned to her perfect face. “He says he’s never considered race a factor in his friendships and relationships, so why start now? And that if those girls were more open-minded, then maybe they would find someone who makes them as happy as he is with me.”

She sighed, squashed down into the beanbag, and closed her eyes. “And, like, the long-distance thing makes this even harder.”

“Uh-huh,” was all I could say.

“It’s so hard to find the line between, like, missing him enough and living your life, you know?”

My mouth soured with the metallic taste of blood. I hadn’t realized that I’d been gnawing on my upper lip that hard.

“Like,
logically,
I know it makes sense for Percy and me to just break up now and just live our separate lives and not have to worry about missing each other all the time. But when I think about that, I get sick. Physically sick. Like I seriously throw up. I need to be with him, even if I can’t, like, be
with
him.”

I shivered.

“Why am I telling you this?” she asked, her face flushed with the rush of emotion. “You know all about it! You miss Marcus as much as I miss Percy!”

I nodded convincingly, pressing a tissue to my lip.

“You know he never stopped talking about you, like, the entire three thousand miles to California . . .”

“I know,” I said, my eyes dropping. “You’ve told me.” Bridget went out of her way to remind me time and again, just so there was no doubt in my mind that nothing had happened between them.

“I mean, it was, like, really, really sweet but, like, really, really annoying, too,” she went on, half-joking. “There’s only so much gushing you can listen to. About how you were the most dynamic, the most interesting person he’d ever met. About how he loved your way with words, your ability to laugh at yourself. How you always managed to keep him guessing. How the sexiest thing about you is that you have no idea just how sexy you are. And on and on and on and on . . .”

I know this is all true. And yet, it bothered me now, as it bothered me then: Why did I have to hear these things through a third party? Why hadn’t Marcus ever said any of these things to me?

Is it because I never asked?

“It’s just so hard to be in love sometimes,” Bridget said. “Maybe we can find some inspiration in this next film,
Better Off Dead.
”

Bridget giggled, but I didn’t.

“That’s a joke,” she said, looking me over with concern. “Are you okay?”

No, I wasn’t okay. Now
I
was the one who felt sick. I looked at myself in the mirror and my skin was like chlorophyll.

“Yeah,” I said. “I just miss Marcus, like you said.”

She patted my head sympathetically, much like I had with Marin when she was upset by his absence. “He’ll be back tomorrow.”

Yes, tomorrow.

As Bridget popped in the
DVD
, I took off my ring and read its inscription:
My thoughts create my world.

What about my actions? What about those?

the thirty-first

Marcus returned today. And with him, a sky so bright and blue I had to squint.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he said, grabbing my hand and pulling me off my parents’ doorstep. “I still need to thaw out!”

He breathed in deep and hummed happily on the exhale. Then he started talking. Marcus had a lot to talk about. I did, too, but I let him go first. As if it made a difference.

Proving that they are their father’s sons, Hugo and Marcus bonded through adventure. In three days they managed to go skiing (cross-country and downhill), ice fishing, and dogsledding, and do several other activities with “snow” as the prefix, including, but not limited to, -boarding, -mobiling, and -shoeing. In the middle of an anecdote about almost running over a moose during one of these pursuits, he paused long enough for me to pose my question.

“Marcus, why didn’t you ask me to go with you?”

“I had no idea you’d be interested.”

“Of course I’m interested in meeting your brother,” I said. “I’m your girlfriend. I feel like I should know your flesh and blood as well as you know mine.”

He rubbed his hands through his bed-heady red knots. “I’m sorry, Jessica. I guess I’m not well versed in boyfriend-girlfriend protocol. I forget that you’re this person I’m supposed to introduce to my brother. I just see you as you.”

I was about to ask him what exactly he saw, so I could hear for myself all those things he had so willingly confessed to Bridget. But we were both stopped dead in our tracks by an unexpected sight.

“Our park!”

“They changed it!”

“They changed
everything!”

The Park That Time Forgot was no longer. Gone were the swings, slide, and sandbox of my youth. All were replaced by a plastic
FUNTASTIC
PLAY
CENTRE
.

This was a cosmic joke. The Park That Time Forgot was the Fifth Wonder of Pineville. Wonders one through four—the wine-bottle-shaped cement eyesore known as The Champagne of Propane, the VW bus on the roof of Augie’s Auto Parts, the purple dinosaur statue in front of the carpet store, and the hot-dog-shaped truck known as Der Wunder Weiner—have all been immortalized in the pages of the
Weird N.J.
coffee-table books. The Park That Time Forgot was the only wonder that had been kept our little secret, which was fitting as the most significant stop on the tour.

Three years ago this very night, it was the setting for the infamous “Fuck you!” New Year’s Eve. On The Park That Time Forgot’s rusty merry-go-round, Marcus confessed that he had eavesdropped on my angsty conversations with Hope while getting high with her brother. That he had used our mutual angst as a devirginization tactic, just to see if he could bed the school’s biggest goody-goody. That his dirty intentions were purified as he’d gotten to know me.

Until this revelation, I had been ready to sleep with him. But I wasn’t ready for the truth, so I told him to fuck himself. It was such a devastating blow—for him to hear it, for me to mean it—that it would take us another year and a half to overcome.

And come together.

Only to return here, to be torn apart.

“I hate this!” I yelled, kicking the purple kiddie climbing wall that had replaced the dinged-up merry-go-round.

“The old one wasn’t very safe,” he said, skimming his hand along the curves of a twisty slide. “I wouldn’t want Marin playing on any of that old equipment anyway.”

“You’re missing the point!” I screamed. “This was our park! And it’s gone! Gone!”

Marcus took a step back. “What’s going on with you? Are you all right?”

No, I wasn’t all right. I was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

And that’s when I ruined everything with a whisper.

“What?” he asked. Though from the stricken tone of his voice, I knew he had heard my words above the breeze.

“I cheated on you.”

And then, as quickly as I could, I told him everything I should have told him over the phone, months ago. How I thought I was pregnant and how it terrified me, not only because I wasn’t ready to be pregnant, but because I didn’t feel ready to be in the kind of relationship in which a pregnancy would be a significant mistake, a love that was already so deep that it wouldn’t be easy to just forget and get back to normal. And how this fear had something to do with why I fooled around with this other guy, but I wasn’t exactly sure how, but we didn’t have sex and it really, really didn’t mean anything . . .

Marcus held up his hands in capitulation. “Enough.”

“But you should know everything . . . ,” I said.

“I know everything I need to know.” His voice was flat.

“Oh god, I’m so sorry,” I said, searching his face for a sign, any sign as to what he was really thinking. “I should have told you sooner.”

“You told me when you were ready to tell me.”

He didn’t seem traumatized by my revelation. He seemed almost totally unaffected, as if I had confessed to breathing:
I did it, Marcus! I inhaled and I exhaled!

“Do you hate me?”

He took my hand. “I don’t hate you.”

“Really?”

“I could never hate you. There’s no good in hating you.”

He stroked the middle-finger ring gently before letting go and walking back toward my house, the park of our past receding into the background. I followed. And for about a minute, I reveled in my relief.
Marcus doesn’t hate me! I’m so lucky to have such an understanding boyfriend. He knows that everyone makes mistakes and that I’m no exception. He’s a better person than I am, because if he ever told me that he had kissed Butterfly, I would totally lose it because I can’t deal with the idea of him being attracted to anyone who isn’t me, even for one regrettable moment . . .

How can he be so okay with this?

I started to get mad that he wasn’t mad.

“Uh, Marcus?”

“Yes?”

“You don’t hate me?”

“No.”

Pause.

“You’re
really
not mad?”

He sighed. “I didn’t say that.”

“Okay. Then what are you?”

He didn’t say anything. Instead, he stopped and sat down on a curb only a few blocks away from my house. He was hunched over, hugging his legs, and he seemed so much smaller than I know he is. I sat down next to him and hesitantly took him in. He smelled like the dying embers of a bonfire. I waited for him to say something.

He didn’t.

And he didn’t.

And he still didn’t.

Finally, after what seemed like a silence as endless as the universe itself, I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Marcus? Why aren’t you saying anything?”

He shifted in my direction, and I heard every inch of his body rubbing against the concrete.

“I was trying to find the right words. And I can’t. So I’d rather say nothing right now.”

“Nothing? I do what I did and you have nothing to say? You don’t care enough about our relationship to say anything at all?”

He got up and walked to the Caddie parked in the driveway. All without a word.

“I can’t believe you have nothing to say,” I mumbled as he put the key in the door and slid into the driver’s seat. He fastened his seat belt, put the key into the ignition, turned it on.

The door was still open.

“You’re not listening,” he said, finally.

I looked into his eyes and saw that they were shiny with tears.

“Most people talk when they have nothing to say,” he said. “I’m not talking because I have too much to say. None of which I’d want you to hear.”

Then he shut the door, backed the car out, and drove far away from me.

December 31st

Dear Hope,

Four years ago on this date, you moved to Tennessee.

Three years ago on this date, Marcus confessed that he only befriended me so he could have sex with me, and I told him to go fuck himself.

Two years ago on this date, I did ecstasy with Scotty, almost lost my virginity to Len, and wished out loud that Marcus was the one I was (almost) having sex with.

One year ago on this date, Marcus visited me in New York for the sole purpose of leaving a party early so we could have sex in my skinny college bed.

I can’t help but wonder if any of this would have happened if you had stayed. I used to tell myself not to think about it, and just accept my past as it was because there was nothing I could do to change it now. I told myself, and others, that I was happy with how I’d ended up and that’s all that mattered. But that was just naïveté talking. It’s really easy to convince yourself that you’re just so goddamn
evolved
when you don’t have a clue. Because the truth is, I’m not all that happy with who I’ve been these past few months, and I’m not quite sure where I went wrong, or whether there’s a resolution strict enough to fix me.

Commemoratively yours,
 J.

the fifth

I was flattened on the floor in shame.

“You cheated.”

Bridget was sprawled out on my bland beige bedspread, staring at the ceiling, still reeling from my news. She’d come by to tell me that the release date for
Bubblegum Bimbos
had been pushed back yet again, which meant that its suck-ass, straight-to-video future was practically guaranteed. Compared with my cover story, her gossip was like the teeny sidebar hidden in the back of a magazine next to the horoscopes.

“Jess, you
cheated.”

“I know.”

“I don’t like cheaters,” she said gravely. “I was so hurt when I found out that Burke had cheated with Manda.”

“I know.”

“And you were so upset when Len cheated with Manda . . .”

“I
know.”

“What’s wrong with everyone?” she asked. “Why does everyone cheat?”

“Everyone
doesn’t cheat . . .”

“I just don’t get it,” she continued, ignoring me.

“What don’t you get?”

She puffed up her cheeks, then blew all the air out in agitation. “Let’s say a girl is attracted to someone who has a girlfriend. And then the guy with the girlfriend decides, like,
What the hell? We’re not married, we’re just hanging out. I can hook up with this other girl if I want to.
It seems obvious to me that any self-respecting girl would realize that the guy’s decision to cheat on his girlfriend would make him an undesirable person to hook up with, right?” She paused for a moment to give this profound inquiry its due gravitas. “And the guy who wants to cheat should be turned off by any girl who is so willing to hook up with someone else’s boyfriend. Being so, like,
morally bankrupt
should cancel out all the attractive qualities that tempt you to cheat.”