Second Helpings Read online

  Marcus looked around my room, taking it all in. Then he turned to me. And that’s when I began to levitate.

  “Look at you,” he said, taking his hands out of the front pockets of his threadbare jeans to point to the mosaic Hope had made for my sixteenth birthday. “Happy.”

  He was right. I was a portrait of rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed bliss. I was happy then, and it wasn’t a matter of choice. Happiness chose me. But I couldn’t respond because I was too preoccupied with trying to anchor myself to the bed.

  “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen you that happy,” he said.

  This was so Marcus to just come over here, on a totally random night, after barely speaking to me for nine months, and just pick up where he had left off, messing with my mind.

  My heart.

  I couldn’t say anything because I was using all my energy to stay grounded—one hand clutching the headboard, the other clasping the quilt.

  “I didn’t plan to come over here tonight. Pure impulse. I was on the way home from band practice and I saw your lights on. I stopped the car, got out and knocked on your door, talked politely to your parents. Then I walked up the stairs and opened the door and here I am.”

  He paused and examined my bookshelf, which, sadly, is filled with more DVDs than actual books. Then he read the fine print of the cast and credit lines on my Sixteen Candles poster. I held on for dear life, afraid to float up, up, up and get hacked into little pieces by my ceiling fan.

  He turned his attention back to me.

  “Can I sit down?”

  I nodded furiously, still holding on for dear life.

  As he pulled out my desk chair, I did a quick once-over in the mirror. My hair was stuffed under a Williams baseball cap, a souvenir from the campus visit. My gym shorts were safety pinned at the waist. Low-riders are the thing right now, but since I’ve lost my appetite, mine have a tendency to slip beyond plumber’s crack. Thank God I was sitting down, so Marcus couldn’t see the word BOOTYLICIOUS printed across my nonexistent ass—the butt billboard was a gag gift from Hope. Worst of all, I was wearing my favorite ribbed tank top, which was practically see-through from too many machine washings. I quickly grabbed a dictionary off the floor and held it to my also-nonexistent chest, hoping it would both cover me up and weigh me down.

  Marcus turned the chair around so he could straddle it instead of just sitting like a normal person. He looked at my murky, gray-over-pink painted walls—the result of Hope’s and my DIY project gone horribly wrong.

  “Did you know that the color of your walls changed the world?”

  I was too preoccupied by the fact that I was hovering an inch in the air above my quilt to respond.

  “Mauve,” he said.

  An inch and a half up. Did he notice?

  “The invention of that hue in 1856 inspired the creation of new dyes which, in turn, led to numerous scientific breakthroughs.”

  Two inches . . .

  “Funny how something so insignificant can have such a dramatic effect on history . . .”

  He let his comment hang—like me—in the air.

  “That was kind of a joke,” he said.

  “I got it,” I replied.

  “I was harkening back to when we first started talking to each other.”

  “I know.”

  “And I would throw out a question.”

  “I remember.”

  “As a conversational construct.”

  “Right.”

  “To facilitate a discussion.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He was going to make me ask the more pertinent question that needed asking.

  “Why are you here?”

  He clapped his hands together—smack!—and I came crashing back down on the bed.

  “I’m here because there are two things I need to tell you. I’ve decided to tell you these things because not telling you has led to the current state of our nonrelationship, which consists of me not telling you anything anymore and vice versa.” He paused, resting his chin so it hung over the back of the chair, which was now the front. “Is this making any sense?”

  “Uh . . . no?”

  He ran his fingers through his rooster tufts, making them stand up at insane angles all over his head.

  “I didn’t tell you that I knew a lot about you because I had eavesdropped on your conversations with Hope when I was hanging at her house with Heath. And when I told you last New Year’s Eve, it was too late in our relationship for such a confession, so you told me to fuck myself, which I did.” He raised an eyebrow. “Metaphorically speaking, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Literally speaking, that would be quite a feat.” And he paused, no doubt imagining himself in whatever contortionist pose would accomplish such an anatomical impossibility.

  “So the two things I need to tell you are as follows.”

  He stopped speaking again, and in the silence in between one Yaz song and the next, I could hear the scratch of his chin stubble against the leather. I thought about his razor-sharp cheekbones, and how they could slice up that chair straight through to the stuffing. I held my breath. I had no idea what he was about to say. None.

  “Number one: I know your grandmother, Gladdie.”

  “What?”

  “The old fogues’ home, where I work—”

  “Is Silver Meadows?”

  “Yes.”

  Holy shit.

  “I didn’t know that she was your grandmother until the other day, when you visited her. I happened to see you walking down the hallway together. Suddenly, everything I’d been hearing about her granddaughter, ‘the smart cookie with great gams,’ made perfect sense. You were J.D.”

  Smart cookie with great gams. Marcus had effectively complimented me on both an intellectual and superficial level. Sort of. Right?

  “So you’ve been talking to my grandmother? And my grandmother has been talking to you? About me?”

  “Yes, yes, and yes,” he replied, his dark eyes daring me to look away. “I wanted you to know that so you couldn’t accuse me of doing it all on purpose and tell me to go fuck myself again.”

  “But why would it matter? We aren’t . . . or . . . uh . . . weren’t . . .” Which is it, Jess? “Aren’t” or “weren’t”? Present or past tense? Now or then?

  “We haven’t been talking to each other.”

  Past imperfect tense. How appropriate. Ha. In more ways than one.

  “No,” Marcus replied.

  “So you could’ve kept this to yourself. Or waited for me to find out on my own. Why tell me this at all?”

  He rose from the chair. “There’s too much tension in the world,” he replied solemnly. “What hope is there in the Middle East if you and I can’t make peace?”

  This whole scene was just so bizarro that I had no clue whether he was kidding or not. I had no idea what to say. Alison Moyet’s voice filled the silence.

  “Sometimes when I think of the move and it’s only a game / And I need you . . .”

  Christ. I was falling now. Falling, falling, falling.

  “And number two . . .”

  Oh, dear Lord. I’d forgotten there was a second thing he had to tell me.

  “Len likes you,” he said.

  Marcus was almost out the door, when he turned to say one more thing.

  “Be easier on him than you were on me.”

  And with that, he was gone. Poof!

  A millisecond later, my mom was knocking at my door, bubbling over the possibility that another “catch” was courting her younger daughter.

  “Jessie, that was the nice b— Why are you on the floor?”

  At some point during my conversation with Marcus, I’d sunk so low, so deep, that my molecular makeup was indistinguishable from that of the carpet.

  “I like it here.”

  My mother didn’t know where to even begin to interpret this, so she blithely pressed on. “Was that the nice boy from New Year’s Eve? Marcus?”


  “I believe so,” I replied. “Yes.”

  “What did he need to talk to you about?” Mom kept doing and undoing the top button on her cream-colored cardigan, a clear sign that she was getting impatient. “What did he say?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She rubbed her temples. “Honestly, Jessie. Why can’t you ever give me a straight answer? Why do you have to make things so difficult?”

  I wanted to ask Marcus those same questions. Even at his most candid, he’s confusing.

  Then Mom babbled about having just gotten off the phone with Bethany and how she and G-Money have decided to fly out to New Jersey for Thanksgiving and how marvelous it is that the whole family is getting together and how she can’t wait to see the golden couple because she simply could not imagine celebrating another holiday without them. . . .

  When I didn’t respond, she walked out the door in a huff.

  The song came to its end, with the last plinks and plunks of the synthesizer, with the final line.

  “And all I ever knew,” she sang. “Only you.”

  I stayed on the floor for a long, long time.

  November 1st

  Hope,

  “We are what we pretend to be.”—Kurt Vonnegut (via Mac)

  Halloween is a fascinating holiday. Costumes almost always reveal the wearers’ secret or not-so-secret desires. Who or what they choose to be on October 31 reflects who or what they want to be during the other 364 days of the year:

  Scotty was an FDNY firefighter, which I thought was appropriate considering my unpublished Hero Worship editorial and all. It turns out that Manda (done up as Like a Virgin–era Madonna) made him dress like that because it “turns her on.” Ack. Ack. And more ack. Sara was a generic, anorexic Miss America in a low-cut evening gown, stilettos, and a crown. Bridget was Gwyneth Paltrow at the 1998 Oscars. Len was John Lennon, but he had to tell people which of the Fab Four he was trying to be. Until the administration made him take it off, Pepe was a reservoir-tipped condom ribbed “for her pleasure,” one of the goddiggitydamnest sights ever seen.

  But there is no example better than Marcus, whose costume consisted of jeans and a new black T-shirt decorated with white iron-on letters. It barely deviated from his days-of-the-week uniform. Instead of WEDNESDAY, the shirt read, GAME MASTER.

  That’s right. You read that correctly. GAME MASTER.

  Not even self-proclaimed lifelong lovers of all things eighties (like Ashleigh) know about Midnight Madness. In fact, I daresay that there are only three people on earth who don’t need an explanation for the shirt, and that’s you and me and Michael J. Fox. We are the only three people on earth who would recognize the GAME MASTER T-shirt as the costume worn by the Leon character in Michael J. Fox’s film debut, the obscure 1980 college comedy Midnight Madness, which you and I enjoyed during a particularly memorable Friday Night Flick and Food Fest. And since you and Michael J. Fox were unlikely to grace the hallways of Pineville High, I can guarantee with 100 percent certainty that Marcus wore the costume for my benefit alone.

  At least this time I can explain for his actions, it’s not a case of inexplicable intuition. I know he must have seen the DVD on my bookcase when he came to my bedroom the other night. He didn’t even have to know anything about the character or the movie itself. All that mattered was that I knew what it meant. This brings me to the more significant point, which is how this costume perfectly sums up Marcus’s life ambition: messing with my mind. So I responded to the Game Master’s maneuver by not responding at all.

  So, there!

  What did I wear for Halloween? Well, it just so happens that I didn’t wear a costume. I went to school as myself. If you buy into my whole theory, it was indeed the perfect costume, wasn’t it?

  Inauthentically yours,

  J.

  november

  the third

  I decided not to make a move, even though it was my turn. I swore that I wouldn’t give in to the Game Master.

  This lasted three days, thirty-six hours longer than I thought it would, which is pretty damn good.

  This morning, however, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I just had to tell Bridget all about the Game Master costume and getting grambushed in my bedroom and the news that Len liked me. I was already agitated, and since Bridget is the only other person who ever saw the fall poem, I figured I might as well vent just how much it bothered me that their band’s name is Chaos Called Creation. What’s with that, anyway? There’s no way that of all the lines, in all the poems he’s ever written, Marcus just happened to choose a line from the poem he wrote with the sole intention of seducing me. You know, the one Marcus wrote to “thank” me for peeing into the yogurt cup. The one that began, “We / are Adam and Eve / born out of chaos called / creation.” And ended, “I know we will be / together again someday / Naked / without shame / in paradise / My thanks to you / for being in on my / sin.” That one. It’s been ten months since the New Year’s Eve cockblock, but he’s still thinking about it.

  This is more or less a synopsis of the rant I greeted Bridget with when I arrived at her house this morning. Her response? She thwacked me on the head with a copy of the fall fashion issue of Vogue—which is nine hundred pages thick with advertisements, mind you.

  “Get over it. He’s a dreg.”

  “But he doesn’t use anymore,” I argued.

  “Once a dreg, always a dreg,” she said.

  Bridget was just expressing the opinion shared by the Pineville High majority. Once you’re put into one of PHS’s neat little categories— be it Upper Cruster, Jock, Groupie, I.Q., 404, Wigga, Hoochie, Hick, or Dreg—it’s difficult, if not impossible, to get reassigned.

  “And Len?” I asked.

  “He’s cute. He’s smart. And he’s a virgin,” she said. “You’re, like, a match made in heaven.”

  “How do you know he’s a virgin?”

  “Everyone knows Len is a virgin,” she said, as matter-of-fact as ABC and 1-2-3. “Just like everyone knows you’re a virgin.”

  I was outraged. “And how does everyone know I’m a virgin? Maybe I shared very specific intimate moments with the Lucky Seven this summer! Is that so unfathomable?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  She laughed. “If you were getting laid, you wouldn’t be so, like, tense,” she said. “And neither would Len.”

  This is coming from my closest friend at Pineville High. In all of New Jersey, actually. Make that the Northeastern Seaboard. Very sad.

  Then again, maybe she has a point.

  “So you still haven’t, like, talked to your grandmother yet?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you should. You never know what that freak might talk to her about.”

  “Or vice versa!”

  Gladdie has never been discreet. Throw two strokes into the mix and there was no telling what she would say. Or what she had already said. Once I realized this, I couldn’t drive over to Silver Meadows fast enough. Literally. By the time I got there, I was already too late.

  “This is the dollface I’ve been telling you about, Tutti Flutie,” Gladdie bellowed. “My granddaughter J.D.!”

  Marcus, Gladdie, Moe, and a very sour-looking woman wearing a Richard Simmons Sweatin’ to the Oldies sweatshirt were in the middle of a card game. Cards are a spectator sport at Silver Meadows, as is anything that involves my grandmother.

  “You’re here on purpose,” I said.

  “Well, yes,” he replied.

  “Aha!” I blurted, thrusting an accusatory finger in his face. “So you admit it!”

  “Of course I’m here on purpose,” he replied. “I work here.”

  Duh.

  “You two know each other?” Moe asked.

  “Yeah,” I replied, glaring at Marcus. “We know each other.”

  “Well, that’s just swell because now you can replace Irene here, and we can get down to playing a real game of hearts.”

  “Would you, Jessica Darling, care to j
oin me in a game of hearts?” Marcus asked, wearing an expression that was as aggressively innocent as those posters of babies dressed up like bumblebees and sunflowers.

  Game of hearts. Har-dee-har-har.

  “Well,” I replied, “you are the Game Master, aren’t you?”

  “What? You don’t like hearts?” Moe asked, oblivious to the stare-down. “Then let’s play poker.”

  “You with your poker,” chastised Gladdie. “You just don’t like it when I shoot the moon.”

  Marcus sat there, coyly batting his eyelashes at me.

  “You liked my costume, huh?”

  “Yeah, I liked it as much as I like your days-of-the-week T-shirts,” I said. “What’s with that, anyway?”

  “Well, I’ve always admired days-of-the-week underwear,” he replied.

  I’ll bet he has. I’ll bet he’s admired many pairs of days-of-the-week underwear. Three dozen girls’ worth.

  “But, you see, I don’t wear underwear.”

  Gladdie and Moe rocked with ribald merriment.

  “Whoo-wee!”

  “Yowza!”

  “I’m just joshin’,” Marcus said when the din died down. “See?” He then lowered the waistband of his jeans so we could all get a totally gratuitous look at his boxers. More whoops, cackles, and wolf whistles, but only from Gladdie this time.

  “So are ya in or are ya out?” Moe asked, holding up the cards. He was clearly put out by Gladdie’s fondness for the youthful patch of flesh above the boxers and below the navel. And so was I, quite frankly. So was I.

  “Thank you, Moe, but I’m not in the mood for cards. Gladdie, do you mind if we escape to your room for some good old-fashioned girl talk?”

  “But it’s so pleasant out here with the boys!” Gladdie said, flirtatiously placing one hand on Marcus’s hand, and the other on Moe’s. “Don’tcha want to stay awhile with Moe and Tutti Flutie?”

  Oh, Christ. I really was too late. Tutti Flutie had already charmed the hell out of my grandmother. And my grandmother, being who she is, wouldn’t want to give up a single second of attention from a male more than seven decades her junior.