Second Helpings Page 8

  “Dunno,” said Sara.

  Like hell she doesn’t. I swear Google goes to Sara for information. Manda was just pissed that Sara had mentioned the mystery hottie in front of me. If Manda hadn’t been standing right there, I’m sure Sara would’ve spilled the gory story I’d already heard from Bridget about how Manda and Burke’s on-again, off-again sex fest had finally come to an end. Burke had dumped Manda two weeks ago, the day before he left for college, because he couldn’t “be tied down by a high-school girl.” Yet that hasn’t stopped him from trying to woo back Bridget via a series of corny, incredibly incriminating e-mails ever since.

  The point is, Manda is currently boyfriendless and on the rebound. She is out for hot-blooded American male companionship, but she’ll settle for frozen plasma if the search takes too long. This situation is extremely fortuitous for the new honors hottie, whom I will take the liberty of assuming will enjoy making the beast with two backs with a girl he barely knows. You know, like any other male between the ages of twelve and death.

  Seeing the Clueless Two for the first time since June reminded me of everything I hate about school. It’s amazing. Two minutes with them is all it took to suck whatever waning optimism I had right out of me. Why do I feel that sweet taste of Columbia will only make the toxic cocktail that will be my senior year harder to swallow?

  Hence, my decision to apply for early decision.

  I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. By applying for early decision, I get all my worries out of the way. My application is out there and I’m done with it. Once accepted, I am contractually obligated to go there, and nowhere else. Surely my parents would rather send me to Columbia than suffer the humiliation of having a daughter living at home and working on the boardwalk while the rest of their friends’ children are attending their freshman year of college. Whoo-hoo! It’s genius.

  Now that I’ve made this decision, there’s no point in putting it off. There’s no penalty against getting it in too quickly. The sooner I get it in, the sooner I have one less source of stress.

  September 1st

  Dear Hope,

  This year, I’m going in prepared. If I stay focused on these objectives, my final year of Pineville imprisonment might prove to be slightly less painful.

  Six Goals for My Senior Year That I Hope Will Make It Suck a Teensy Bit Less, Though I Wouldn’t Wager an Eyelash on It

  1. I will not be a college-unbound senior. I will send out my application to Columbia ASAP and not get caught up in the mass hysteria of the selection process. I will sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. Or full ride, as the case may be.

  2. I will try not to be such a buzzkill. If I succeed, I will write happy journal entries. When I get psyched about something this year, Lord knows I should document the rarity for posterity.

  3. I will be nicer to Bridget and any other misguided individual who— for reasons I can’t comprehend—pursues a friendship with me despite the inevitable incompatibility at its core.

  4. I will ignore the Clueless Two. This requires herculean effort, as Manda and Sara’s skanked-out adventures are too front-page tabloid to go unnoticed.

  5. I will refuse to read, watch, listen to, or take in through any other means of sensory absorption as of yet undiscovered by man, anything related to Miss Hyacinth Anastasia Wallace and her so-called Gen-Whatever masterwork, Bubblegum Bimbos and Assembly-Line Meatballers.

  6. I will accept that it is my primordial nature to focus all my hormones on one guy as opposed to taking the sluttier scattershot approach. I will learn from my mistakes and make a wiser choice for my OOOH (Obsessive Object Of Horniness) for the 2001–2002 academic year. Specifically, one who is not (a) a homosexual or (b) He Who Shall Remain Nameless.

  Dogmatically yours,

  J.

  september

  the fourth

  My first period class is gym. My second class of the day, which starts at 8:35 A.M., is lunch—or should I say, brunch. It takes place in the gymnasium, which is convenient because it’s followed by two more back-to-back gym classes. After that, I have freshman-level basic-skills English and another lunch. The last period of the day is blank. I interpreted that as a study hall.

  This slacker schedule is not a manifestation of early-stage senioritis. A wonky 404 hacked into the guidance department’s new scheduling program, and now not one of Pineville High’s students has a schedule that makes any sense. Approximately 25 percent of the student body was in my first gym class. We all squeezed into the bleachers in a flagrant firecode violation and sat there for the remainder of the day while the guidance department tried to sort out the glitch.

  “What up, my white soul sista?”

  I turned around and was so happy to be face-to-face with someone I actually wanted to see.

  “Why, if it isn’t my token black friend!”

  Pepe and I bumped fists.

  “I thought this scheduling mistake was the administration’s way of keeping the brothas down,” he said. “But I see that you crackas are getting harassed by the Man, too.”

  This ongoing joke about his “blackness” and my “whiteness” never gets old. I don’t find it annoying or offensive when Pepe acts ghetto, because (unlike Miss Hyacinth Anastasia Wallace and countless Wiggaz at Pineville High) he’s doing it to be funny, not to keep it real. (Also, unlike Hy and the PHS Wiggaz, Pepe benefits from actually being black.) There is much fun to be had upsetting too-uptight, politically correct people.

  Last spring, Pepe and I also bonded over the stupidity of everyone else in our French class. He’s a big fan of my editorials in The Seagull’s Voice, too, which I totally appreciate. We even got over our first totally awkward moment, crucial to the well-being of any friendship. I was sure that his Pepe Le Pew-on-E crush would fizzle as soon as he got to know me better as a person. I mean, it’s a lot easier to have a crush on me when you don’t know what a total psycho I am. So I was shocked when after eight months of daily conversations, he asked me if I’d like to go to see a French flick that was showing at the local library’s International Film Festival. I was even more floored when he decided we could still be friends after I turned him down, which I did because (say it with me now) I will not get obsessed with anyone who is anything less than perfect for me. This mandate pretty much guarantees that my hymen will continue to stay so intact, so airtight that it could be used as a flotation device in case of an emergency.

  “Hey, Jess!”

  Bridget was also in the ridiculous gym class. She was flapping her arms in the air to get my attention.

  “Over here!”

  Bridget was sitting alone in the gym bleachers. Sort of. She was surrounded on all sides by a ring of fawning freshmen who kept a very safe distance. The very fact that they were gawking at Bridget with awestruck admiration clearly ID’ed them as freshmen. (All sophomore, junior, and senior girls have already moved on to bitterly envying Bridget’s entry into quasi-celebritydom, as evidenced by all the fingernail-pointing and Who does she think she is?-ing coming at her from all directions beyond the ring of fans.) Furthermore, in the attempt to put their middle-school days behind them, these Hoochie Babies were dressed in the most revealing items in their whoredrobes. Lucky for them that the administration was too preoccupied with the scheduling snafu to enforce the dress code.

  If Bridget noticed the freshmen, she didn’t let on. I climbed up the bleachers to sit next to her.

  “You coming with?” I asked Pepe.

  He shook his head. “Nah, you go ahead. She’s A-list. I’m still fighting for walk-ons. You tell her I said s’up.”

  “Will do.”

  And with a complicated, palm-slide-slap-behind-the-back-fingersnap-chest thump-soul-brother-number-one maneuver, Pepe was gone.

  “Hey, Bridget, you’re being gawked at again,” I said, motioning to the girls, who were trying—and failing—to keep their cool.

  “Am I?” Bridget looked around, uninterested. “Whatever. How come Percy didn’t
come over here to, like, say hi or something.”

  “Oh, he’s too intimidated by your celebrity,” I said.

  “That’s so, like, duh,” she said, watching him retreat. “I don’t know why everyone acts like the video is such a big deal.”

  Me neither. Personally, I’d be more than a little mortified to be the subject of false rumors involving a member of a bargain-bin boy band. But you know, that’s just me.

  “So have you seen Sara and Manda yet?” I asked.

  “Skank and Skankier?” Bridget replied, grimacing. “No. Have you?”

  “Not today,” I said. “But I bumped into them at the mall last week.”

  “Oh. I’m surprised Skankier wasn’t, like, too busy snaking someone else’s man to go shopping.”

  I really wasn’t in the mood to rehash the details of how Manda slept with Burke while Bridget was with her dad in L.A. Christ, it happened two summers ago. Even though Bridget is obviously over Burke, she relishes any opportunity to remind everyone how slutty Manda is. But I was tired of talking about it, and seized this perfect opportunity for a segue.

  “Sara seriously downsized over the summer.”

  “Bruiser finally lost the fat?” Bridget was so stunned that she temporarily forgot to refer to her as Skank and had regressed to using Sara’s slightly less damning nickname. “Ten pounds? Twenty pounds? Fifty pounds? Like, how much?”

  I’ve never been on a diet in my life. I have no idea how much weight would transform Sara from a stout trapezoid into a slender, rectangular shape. And I think my geometric explanation would be lost on Bridget. Math is not her strong suit.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “A lot, I guess.”

  “You never help when it comes to, like, the important stuff.”

  According to her definition of important, I couldn’t agree more.

  Bridget stood up, using her pale white hand to shield her eyes from the sun streaming through the window. She scanned the crowd, looking for the newly-skinny Skank. I remained seated and did the same. I found Sara within thirty seconds, but before I got around to pointing her out to Bridget, I discovered something far more disturbing.

  “Holy shit! Is that Manda wearing Scotty’s varsity jacket?”

  Bridget squinted her eyes in their direction. “Skankier!”

  I couldn’t read the name embroidered on the jacket, but from the way Scotty and Manda started plowing their tongues down each other’s throats, I think it was a safe bet that it was indeed Scotty’s wool-and-leather varsity jacket Manda was wearing on this ninety-degree, 10 tanning-index day. Somehow between last week and today, Manda had used her feminine wiles (aka her penile mastery) to nab His Royal Guyness, the Grand Poo-bah of the Upper Crust. Revolting.

  “I seriously think I’m going to blow chunks,” I said.

  “I thought you didn’t, like, like Scotty anymore,” Bridget said.

  “I don’t,” I replied. “I never did like him as a boyfriend. But it’s just so sick that someone who once liked me, and wanted me to be his girlfriend, is now engaging in fluid exchange with Manda.”

  I still can’t believe that he was my first and only ex-boyfriend. Of course, this was back in eighth grade, years before he became junior prom king, All-Shore point guard, and All-Around Cool Guy that he is today. I never really wanted to date him. Still don’t. But when I saw him and Manda, I almost belly-flopped right out of the bleachers. Manda. I wonder if she’ll change her name to Mandy, to match up with the rest of his bimbocious girlfriends: Kelsey, Becky, Corey, Lindsey, and Tory. Ack. I didn’t really know any of those girls, and that made their girlfriend status easier for me to take. Nevertheless, Scotty with Manda was too incestuous. I knew them both too well.

  “Ack.”

  I continued to freak out in this manner for the next half hour, until Bridget found a better source of distraction.

  “New hottie alert!” she exclaimed, pointing to an intriguing guy on the opposite side of the gym. His hair is a deep, deep brown, a color I can’t help but hope is a reflection of his deep, deep intellect. It’s cut short on the back and sides, kept long on top, so it flops onto the wire-rims of his brainy specs. He possesses a subtle musculature, the kind you get from hiking alone for hours in the woods, not from pumping iron with a bunch of goons in the weight room, and a nervous smile he takes back as soon as he gives it away. Pale, perfect skin, not unlike that of the naked Nevermind baby swimming across his T-shirt, reaching for the dollar bill, taking the bait.

  OOOH. My kind of cute. Geek cute, with an emphasis on the cute part. Yes, siree.

  Oh, please let him be the new Honors Hottie Sara told me about. PHS has about a thousand students but seems much smaller. By the time you’re a senior, you either know all nonfreshmen personally or know something about them that may or may not be true. Clearly, he wasn’t freshman meat. No, Nirvana was fresh man meat. A transfer student from another district. Or maybe he’s a confused foreign-exchange student who needs a native Jerseyan like myself to give him a glorious guided tour of the Garden State.

  Mere milliseconds later, I didn’t give one goddiggitydamn about reaching Nirvana anymore. Because next to this Honors Hottie, I saw . . .

  The person I had hoped to see in homeroom, but didn’t, because our messed-up schedule had replaced some of the Ds-through-Fs with kids from all over the alphabet, reassigning some of the Ds-through-Fs (and one F in particular) to homerooms unknown.

  I saw . . .

  The Boy Who Shall . . .

  Oh . . .

  Screw it.

  SCREW IT. I GIVE UP.

  My mind games aren’t working. Removing his name from my vocabulary has not removed him from my memory. This cognitive behavior therapy crap I read about in my Psych book is officially over. Done. And to prove it, I will say and write his name.

  Marcus Flutie.

  That’s when I saw Marcus Flutie.

  There, I wrote it. I said it.

  MARCUS FLUTIE! MARCUS FLUTIE! MARCUS FLUTIE!

  Christ, that feels good. But not as good as if felt to lay eyes on him. I gasped when I saw him, sucking enough air into my lungs to suffocate everyone else in the stadium.

  “Oh, Jess,” Bridget said. “No.”

  Oh, Jess. Yes.

  “No,” she said, quietly but firmly.

  Yes.

  “Not Marcus Flutie again,” Bridget said.

  Yes. Marcus Flutie. Again. Andagainandagainandagainandagainandagain.

  His shirt-and-tie uniform had been replaced by a plain white shortsleeved T-shirt, with something too distant, too blurry for me to read printed across his chest. The summer sun had brightened his russet hair to a new-penny shade of copper, and he’d grown out his buzz cut, so tufts rise off his scalp like a rooster. OOOH. Cock-a-doodle . . .

  “Don’t.”

  Cock-a-doodle-don’t.

  “What is it about him that makes you, like, totally lose your shit?”

  I wish I knew. It’s more than the late-night conversations we used to have about everything and nothing, the only thing besides running that helped calm me down and get a decent night’s sleep. It’s more than the way he seems to make things so complicated, yet helps me see things so clearly, like through new eyes. It’s more than the fact that he is the only guy I have ever almost had sex with.

  It’s probably because I know there is no way we will ever be together.

  “I’m supposed to remind you that you, like, hate him.”

  I like/hate him. I love/hate him. I love him. I hate him.

  “I hate him.”

  Bridget sighed. “Yes.”

  Bridget is the only one at school who knows that I came thisclose to letting Marcus Flutie devirginize me last New Year’s Eve. She’s the only one here who knows that I didn’t because he had the nerve to come clean about how his desire to sleep with me started out as a game, just to see if the infamous male slut of Pineville could bed the class Brainiac, then evolved into a genuine longing. She’s the only one who kno
ws how I tortured myself every day afterward, wondering how I could have even considered sleeping with Marcus when he had been drug buddies with Hope’s brother, and seemingly unapologetic about Heath’s overdose. She’s the only one here who knows about the destroyed journal from the sick, obsessive second half of my junior year, the one that covered these Marcus-related issues (and many, many more) in psychotic detail. She’s the only one here who knows how, despite my guilt, and how tired I am of being toyed with, I can’t stop thinking about him.

  I’ve made her promise not to tell anyone about any of these truths, and I know she’ll make good on it. What Bridget lacks in depth she more than makes up for in honesty. Bridget does not lie. That quality alone makes Bridget my closest PHS ally, which really isn’t saying much because my options are quite limited.

  “How about this?” Bridget said all of a sudden, with renewed vigor. “Say everyone in the world had to be put in, like, one of two bins, a fat bin or a thin bin. Which bin would Sara be in?”

  This is going to be a very long year, indeed.

  Marcus Flutie.

  Ahhhhhhhhhh. I said it again.

  Cock-a-dooodle-dooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

  the fifth

  Thanks to my “new and improved” messed-up schedule—which now has one less gym, but one more study hall—the only period that comes close to resembling a real class is English with Havisham. (Damn. I mean Miss Haviland. Since I am well on my way to dying a virgin, I vow to make an effort not to make fun of her spinsterhood anymore.) A core of the normal honors group was still intact, but we were joined by at least a dozen other PHS students who had no business being there. Actually, we were the ones who had no business intruding on them , because according to the schedule, it was listed as a freshman basic-skills class and not senior AP. Whatever.

  Haviland relished the opportunity to reach a wider and more varied audience than usual. I’d barely had a chance to sit down before she climbed on her soapbox to deliver one of her famous orations. Specifically, her speech was about how whoever hacked into the school’s computer system was obviously bright, yet our generation tends to use its brainpower for mischief, not good. Don’t we see that our spoiled generation takes education for granted? That wisdom is your ticket around the world? That knowledge is power, and these lost days will have a devastating, long-lasting effect on our fragile teenage minds?!