Charmed Thirds Read online

  “That's, like, your motto for the summer,” she said, not without reason.

  “I know, I know,” I said. “But I'm going to make it up to you bigtime. How'd you two like to join me, Marcus, and my friend Jane from school at the Glam Slam Metal Jam tonight?”

  Pepe got on the line. “What's this about?” I explained how it was a hairbandapalooza, and how they'd have to show up in all their glam rock glory or not at all.

  “We're in,” Pepe said. “I'll drive.”

  “Cool,” I said.

  “Au revoir, Jess.”

  “Au revoir,” I replied with a pang of sadness, the way I always do whenever Pepe and I speak French now, which is rare and never goes beyond au revoir or bonjour or the occasional oui. Long gone are our private conversations in a language that no one else understood. Such intimacies are reserved for Bridget alone, as they should be. He got over his foolish, fervent crush on me and found someone so much better. And I'm happy for them. Really.

  “So Bridget goes to school in California, like you,” Jane said to Marcus. “And her boyfriend is going to school in New York, like you,” she said to me.

  “Yes,” Marcus and I said simultaneously.

  “Interesting,” Jane said cryptically, shifting her attention back to Marcus.

  “It's not interesting as much as it's inconvenient,” I said.

  “It is how it is,” Marcus said.

  “So!” Jane gushed, clasping Marcus's hand. “You must come shopping with us! Unless you've got some choice acid wash hiding in your closet.”

  “I'm gonna take a pass,” he said, looking first at Jane and then at me.

  I tried my best to mask my disappointment. I didn't want Jane to see that I thought our night would be ruined because of my boyfriend's absence.

  “Why?” I asked, calmly. “Won't it be fun to hang out with Bridget and Percy?”

  “I'm just not in the mood to play dress up.”

  And then we just kind of stood there for a few moments.

  “Well, we must go if we want to find the right outfits at the consignment shop.”

  If I hadn't memorized every millimeter of Marcus's face, I wouldn't have noticed the almost imperceptible wrinkling of his brow at the word must. He muttered his good-byes and I followed him out the door.

  “Hey,” I said, reaching for his fingertips before he stuffed them in his pockets. “What's going on?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I just don't feel like going, that's all.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But I get the sense that something else is going on here.”

  “You hate hair bands.”

  “So?”

  “This reminds me of one of your assignments for True,” he said. “Proving how game you are.”

  “This is different,” I said defensively. “Because Jane is my friend.”

  Marcus looked like he was about to say something, then stopped himself.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  Of course it wasn't nothing. If I were to guess, whatever he was about to say had something to do with Jane's use of pushy imperatives.

  Marcus thrust his hands inside his loose pockets. “Go have fun with your friend. I'll see you tomorrow.”

  It wasn't a fight. Not even close. But I felt conflicted because Marcus was obviously disappointed in me. But who was he to say why I was going?

  As I watched Marcus drive away, Jane came from behind and swung her arm through mine.

  “C'mon,” she said. “We must get skanked.”

  With a budget of $25, Jane and I set out for Good Stuff Cheap, a dumpy strip-mall consignment shop that would never be confused for a vintage shop in the Village.

  “This place is so crappy!” Jane exclaimed once we were inside, not caring who heard.

  “It is Pineville,” I said, covering my embarrassment with sarcasm.

  “It's perfect. Just look at these!” Jane quickly slipped on a pair of white spandex bike shorts. They were so tight that I could see her unborn children.

  “Perfect,” I said, finally sort of meaning it.

  I really started to cheer up when I unearthed peg-legged, acid-washed Sassoon jeans with bows at the ankles. The jeans were an ideal match for the screaming pink push-up bikini top, over which I wore a perforated half-shirt.

  “What do you think?” I asked, modeling my outfit for Jane.

  “Brett Michaels would definitely have sex with you,” she said appraisingly. “And he wouldn't even bother to learn your name.”

  At this point we were enjoying ourselves so much that I'd almost forgotten about what had happened with Marcus back at the house.

  Almost.

  We raced home and barely had enough time to tease our hair, not an easy feat with my current coif. (DAMN MY HAIR.) We smothered our eyes with black eyeliner, and slapped on red, airbrushed press-on talons. We were skankified.

  “Your friends better outdo themselves,” Jane warned.

  “Oh, don't worry. They've both got a flair for the theatrical.” I went on to explain that Bridget is an aspiring actress, and that Pepe once dressed up in an authentic rhinestone jumpsuit for his talent show– winning performance as The Black Elvis.

  I was right. They didn't disappoint. Bridget still managed to look gorgeous, even with roof-raising bangs, red-rinsed jean shorts, and an oversized shoulder-padded T-shirt. But Pepe outdid us all. He was shirtless under a pleather vest covered in decorative metal grommets, and he had squeezed into jeans so tight that one wine cooler too many and they would surely explode off his body with a force that would rival the onstage pyrotechnics. The final, perfect touch? A platinum, curly wig in the Dee Snider tradition.

  “It's an honor to meet you both!” Jane whooped.

  “Likewise,” Pepe said, admiring her outfit. “The Glam Slam Metal Jam is probably the only place on earth where white spandex bike shorts will be the norm.”

  Pepe, like the rest of us, assumed that the majority of concertgoers would also show up in heavy metal drag.

  Uh. Well. We were wrong.

  As we drove around the parking lot looking for a parking space, it soon became clear that of eight thousand fans, only four were in costume. And they were us.

  “We can't be the only people dressed like this!” Bridget said, horrified.

  “We are! We are!” shouted Jane, thoroughly thrilled.

  Most were dressed on the casually preppy side, like we would've looked had we not been wearing costumes. However, a minority were dressed in headbanger gear. But they, unlike us, clearly dressed like that all the time. Suddenly, an idea that started out as fun seemed anything but. We were scared to get out of the car, afraid that the authentic metalheads would be offended by our attire, interpreting our tongue-in-cheek tribute as a personal attack.

  “Come on,” Jane said, opening up the cooler of beer that Pepe and Bridget had packed before we left. “We must get drunk!”

  And this time, I took her imperative to heart. Which is why the rest of the night is fuzzy. Once emboldened by a few cups of Miller Genuine Draft, we left the safety of our car. And to our utter amazement, the fans—Mötley Crüe and J.Crew alike—loved us. They high-fived us. They whoooo-hooed us. They realized that we were out to have fun, not to poke fun. We were, in the words of the craptacular Poison song, out for “Nothin' but a Good Time.” We had risked embarrassment by throwing ourselves hair-first into the spirit of heavy-metal excess, and it had paid off. Fans laughed at us, and we laughed with them. I've been to better shows, but I've never had more fun at one. Ever.

  I wish that Marcus had joined us. He could have seen the difference between merely pretending to be game, as I had at True, and actually being game, as I was tonight. It's a distinction I couldn't explain before the fact, as I wasn't even too sure of it myself until now.

  And I also could have avoided this conversation on the way home.

  “So, Jess,” Bridget said as she yanked off her press-on nails in the passenger side of Pepe's
hand-me-down Subaru station wagon. (I assure you that all jokes about this car and Pepe and Bridget's nauseating domesticity have already been made.) “You never told us why Marcus didn't come.”

  “He said he didn't feel like dressing up,” I replied.

  “Isn't this the same person who came to school wearing a jacket and tie because he thought he needed to look like a goody-goody honor student?” Jane asked.

  “Well, yeah,” I replied.

  “And didn't he for a while wear teenybopper T-shirts, like Britney Spears, on purpose?”

  “He never wore Britney . . . ,” I began.

  “I remember his Backstreet Boys shirt,” Bridget piped in. “And Dawson's Creek. And he wore days of the week T-shirts, too. Except on Tuesdays he wore a black shirt, in tribute to 9/11. And then there was the GAME MASTER T-shirt. And the YOU, YES, YOU T-shirt . . .”

  “Christ, Bridget,” I snapped. “Who are you? Sara? Why have you paid so much attention to my boyfriend's wardrobe?”

  “Well, J,” Jane said. “Marcus must have wanted to be noticed. Isn't that why he dressed that way? It's kind of like his . . .”

  “His what?” I asked.

  “His shtick.”

  Bridget knew how much this remark would bother me and came to Marcus's—and indirectly, my—defense. “But he was wearing a plain white T-shirt when I saw him the other day.”

  “When I saw him, too,” Pepe said.

  “That's what he was wearing when I met him,” Jane said. “It must be his new shtick.”

  “No, no, no,” I protested. “He just doesn't want to be bothered with choosing an outfit . . .”

  “Or maybe Marcus is sending a message by not sending a message at all.”

  It irritated me that Jane had declared herself an expert on my boyfriend and was passing judgment on his character after meeting him for all of two minutes. But it's hard to have a serious discussion when you're wearing acid wash and white leather, so I didn't say anything about it the rest of the way home.

  “You're mad,” Jane said later, as we stood side by side in my bathroom, rubbing off our makeup. The lipstick, the orange concealer, the red war-paint blush all came off easily with soap and water. The mascara was impenetrable and, evidently, permanent.

  “I'm not mad,” I said, scrubbing one eye roughly with a washcloth, as if it were the blackened bottom of a burnt pot. “I'm annoyed.”

  “At who?”

  “At who?” I asked, incredulous. “At you!”

  She dragged a brush through her crunchy hair, scattering Aqua Net shrapnel all over the countertop. “I was just making an observation about Marcus, one that you would totally make if he were anyone else's boyfriend.”

  Anyone's, I thought, but yours. Was I a bad friend because I couldn't be as candid with my “observations”? Then I rejected the question. There's a very good reason why I can't share her candor: Marcus might be shticky, but Jake (bleeech!) is . . . uh . . . dicky.

  “Hey,” she said, holding a cotton ball up to my eye. “I've got the right makeup remover for that. You must let me help you.” And before I could protest, she very gingerly dabbed at my lashes until every last bit of artifice had vanished. I felt Jane's warm, licorice-spiced breath on my face and imagined that my own smelled of the same flavor of Altoids. Then I thought about how Hope and I would never do this for each other. We were not touchy-feely friends. I can think of three times that we've hugged: (1) the day her brother died, (2) the day she moved away, and (3) the day she surprised me on the football field at my high school graduation, our first reunion since hug #2.

  Our friendship ran deeper than any demonstrative displays of affection.

  “See?” Jane asked, holding up the blackened lump of cotton. “What would you do without me?”

  “I don't know,” I said truthfully.

  And that's when I decided to forgive Jane for being a poor judge of boyfriend material. This doesn't make her a bad person. Just a very unfortunate one.

  the eleventh

  Jane made an important announcement on line for the bus back to Boston.

  “J,” she said. “I must tell you something.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You're my best friend in the world!”

  She spread her arms wide and crushed me with a hug.

  I categorize my friends, which is unnecessary because it's not like I've got so many that I need extensive record keeping to get a handle on them. But I've always referred to Hope as my best friend in the world. And when I've referred to other friends, I'd put a qualifier on it, like Marcus is my best friend who has sex with me. Or Bridget is my best friend from childhood.

  Jane is my best friend at Columbia.

  So I wasn't quite sure how to respond, until she pulled away from me and said, “Hey, J! Don't leave me hanging!”

  And that's when I told her that she was my best friend in the world, too.

  Afterward, Marcus came over to my house. I sat on the diving board and dipped my toes into the deep end of our pool as he voluntarily skimmed the leaves off the top.

  “Did you have fun with your friend?” he asked. As he extended his arms, muscles popped up like surprises underneath his (white) T-shirt.

  “We sort of got into a fight,” I said.

  “About what?” he asked, dumping the slimy brown clump into a garbage can.

  “About you.”

  “Really?” he asked, but he didn't look surprised at all.

  And then I told him everything she'd said about the shirts being his shtick and how it annoyed me because she made him sound so fake and calculating. I guess I was expecting Marcus to defend himself. I know I would have, if someone had said something like that about me. But he seemed unfazed by Jane's analysis and didn't stop skimming.

  “So why do you wear the white T-shirts?” I asked. “Is it because anyone with ten bucks can buy a fake vintage ALABAMA: SO MANY RECIPES, SO FEW SQUIRRELS T-shirt from a sidewalk street vendor? Because what once might have been an authentically quirky find in a secondhand store has become manufactured for the masses, which makes it anything but funny? Because to combat this crass commercialization, a small but growing segment of the population has, like you, started making their own one-of-a-kind T-shirts? And the T-shirt makers have a lot of pressure on them to put a grand statement on their chests, or at least a really clever one, which is tough to do, so rather than get caught up in this walking billboard competition, you've decided to opt out and—”

  “Jessica!” He rapped the skimmer against the patio to get my attention. Tiny droplets caught the sun, making miniature, split-second rainbows. “Sometimes a T-shirt is just a T-shirt.”

  Everything Marcus did was deep with meaning. There had to be more to it than that.

  “Okay, Freud, but why the white ones? Why?”

  He sighed. “My mom bought them for me.”

  I didn't say anything after that. Marcus kept dragging the net along the surface and didn't stop until the pool was clean and pure. Then, without any ceremony, he stripped off his controversial T-shirt and jumped in. The water splashed up and hit me in the face. I watched him swim underwater, his image ripply and distorted beneath the surface.

  His head popped up. “Want to join me?”

  “Nah,” I said with a shiver. “It's too cold.”

  the sixteenth

  It didn't hit me right away. Not even when I saw my mom slumped at the breakfast bar in her pink bathrobe, her blond hair flat and matted, her face reluctantly showing its age.

  “Hey, Mom,” I ventured. “Are you feeling okay?” My mother never came downstairs in the morning until she was fully dressed, blown out, and made up.

  She made a murmuring sound that was neither affirmative nor negative. It was a thoroughly indistinct sound, made by someone who didn't give a shit about the question that had been asked. She wasn't sipping her morning tea while simultaneously perusing the Fall Preview Pottery Barn catalog and talking to my sister on the phone as was customary at
this hour. She was just sitting there, staring at the splotchy granite countertop, an unreadable expression on her naked face.

  “Mom?” I asked, with more urgency.

  A few seconds passed before she swiveled her head and looked through me with dead-eyed, drug-induced zombification.

  And then I remembered: Today would have been my brother's twenty-third birthday.

  Matthew Michael Darling succumbed to SIDS at two weeks old. I'd say that he would have been three and a half years older than I am, but if he were still alive there would be no me. The Darlings wouldn't have wanted a third kid to mess up their picture-perfect family, a blond girl who looks like Mom and a brown-haired boy who looks like Dad. Not that I'm even sure he had brown hair, or any hair at all, because no one ever talks about him. I only know as much as I do from Bethany, who was seven years old at the time of his birth and death. Old enough to remember that he briefly existed, but too young to know the details. And I can't bring myself to ask anyone else.

  For the next two weeks, my mom and dad will mourn their way through the length of their son's brief life. My mom will pop emotion-numbing pills. My dad will get on his bike and ride and ride and ride in what I can only assume is a vain attempt to outrace Matthew's memory.

  “Oh, Mom . . .” I wanted to say something that would let her know that I understood. But the truth is, I didn't understand. Matthew is such a nontopic of conversation that I don't have the vocabulary for speaking the language of senseless loss. So I said nothing else before grabbing a Coke and escaping upstairs.

  Now I'm really dreading these last weeks at home. I can't wait to get back to school. When I saw him later that afternoon, Marcus picked up on my restlessness, though I didn't explain the deeper reasons for it.

  “I know just what you need.”

  “What?”

  “A road trip!” His eyes didn't merely dance. The greens of his irises do-si-doed with the browns, swirling, dipping, twirling in excitement.

  “Road trip?”

  “You know how you wanted us to hang out more with Percy and Bridget . . .”

  He told me how spending so much time with his dad this summer, and hearing his tales about the open road, had given him a serious case of wanderlust.