Charmed Thirds Read online

  Of being game?

  I half-heartedly gave the dildo a quickie one jerk, two jerks, three jerks, to show I was a team player, but I wouldn't degrade myself by participating 100 percent. As I uncomfortably watched my coworkers rubbing their rubber phalluses, I started to worry: What if they mistook my inept manhandling as the technique I used behind closed doors? The scenario wasn't that far-fetched. I could just imagine them gossiping about how I clearly had no clue how to please my man. . . .

  My man.

  My man, whom I hadn't seen all month because I was working here. But why? Why was I working here? Why was I doing this?

  I was doing this because it was funny. I was doing this because I could handle it. I was doing this because it was game.

  Right?

  Recently there was a newspaper article about New Jersey high school football players accused of sodomizing freshmen with Popsicles until they melted. Within jock circles at this school, it was a fairly well-known hazing ritual. To be chosen as a Popsicle Player was a bizarre honor. It meant the upperclassmen saw you as one of the most promising athletes, who therefore needed to be put in his place. As I read the story, I found it unbelievable that someone would subject himself to such humiliation just for the sake of belonging.

  But as I sat there, gripping my dildo, it didn't seem all that strange anymore. I had tried all month to be True. But it turns out that I don't have it in me. And never will.

  “And now,” Ms. Sheridan announced. “Oral techniques!”

  Before I got up, before I grabbed my backpack and walked out the door, before I headed to the train station to get on the bus that is bringing me back to the place that I should have never left to begin with, I said, “I'm not giving head to get ahead.”

  I think it's the first truth I've told all month long.

  Of course, no one responded. Their mouths were full.

  I can't wait to tell Marcus this story in person. He'll be proud.

  At least I hope he will be.

  * * *

  July 31st

  Dear Hope,

  Who knew that snarking could weigh so heavily on my psyche? And here I was, all this time, living with the grand illusion that you were the nice one.

  Thank you for trying to make me feel better about my short and undistinguished journalism career. I see your point about how all experiences are learning experiences, therefore nothing is a total waste of time, etc. But the thing is, I doubt the staff has even noticed my departure, if they were aware of my presence at all.

  I didn't do anything cool in the city because I was too poor. And I didn't bond with my sister and niece because I was too preoccupied by their fucked-up family dynamic. (Let's just say that after seeing the state of Bethany and G-Money's nonunion, it makes me wonder why gays are lobbying so hard for the right to marry.) So in spite of your wise assurances, I can't shake the feeling that this month could have been better spent.

  Yes, this has much to do with Marcus. If I'd come away with a byline, or a recommendation, or a paid internship in the fall, I'd feel better. But it upsets me to think I willingly chose to spend time away from him and now have nothing to show for it but a fake ID. It's strange how a three-week separation from Marcus was somehow harder than not seeing him at all last semester. Maybe it's easier when he's in California and there's no chance of us getting together. When he's in New Jersey, being with him is always within the realm of possibility, so it's like, Why aren't we?

  I miss you, too.

  Tragically, hiply yours,

  J.

  * * *

  the fifth

  I haven't written for one reason: Reunion sex rocks.

  Today was the first brilliantly sunny day since I've been home, so Marcus and I left his bedroom and took the ten-minute drive—past the sketchy motels and junky souvenir shops, the greasy fast-food drive-throughs and run-down bait and tackle shacks—to the beach. Tuesdays are generally good beach days because the weekend bennies are back in the boroughs and the cleanup crews have had a day to rid the sand of their cigarette butts, bottlecaps, and used condoms.

  It's been more than a week, but I'm still reeling from my True fiasco. For the first time in my life, I'm grateful that Pineville is so hicks-in-the-sticks. When the new issue of True comes out with Hy's-but-should-rightfully-be-my essay, I won't be confronted by my failure on the checkout line at the SuperFoodtown.

  “I really thought that True would be cool,” I said this afternoon. “I really thought I'd be happy there.”

  “That was your first mistake,” Marcus replied as he drew circles around my belly button with his fingertip. I shivered with the recent memory of his tongue making the same round-and-round-and-round.

  “How so?” I asked.

  Then Marcus went into what he had learned in a seminar called “Miswanting: Unhappy with Having It All.” Most people have no idea what will make us happy. So we go after something we think will make us happy and might be temporarily elated when we get it. Ultimately, we end up disappointed because the thing—whether it's, say, getting into Columbia or snagging a cool job at True—doesn't have the enduring, euphoric emotional payoff that we thought it would. So we set our sights on something else that we think will make us happy, only to repeat the cycle indefinitely until we die. The upside to this is that the same holds true for negative experiences. Something we think will kill us—say, a best friend moving a thousand miles away or a boyfriend choosing a college across the country—won't have the long-term devastation on our psyches that we think it will.

  And by “we” I really mean “me,” since this sums up my whole life.

  “So how do we stop the cycle? How do we learn to accurately predict what will really make us happy?”

  “Well, if I could answer that,” Marcus said, “people would be praying to me.”

  He squinted because he faced the sun, but also because he was smiling. And right then, sitting cross-legged in the sand, with the sea and the sky serving as a backdrop, Marcus did look like a golden god. One this atheist would gladly bow down and worship. Which made me think.

  “So everything we believe about happiness is wrong,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Everything?” I asked, when what I meant was, Everything? Including you? Including me?

  And Marcus, being Marcus, knew what I really wanted to know, and answered my silent, more significant question. He held up his hand to shield the rays and looked me in the eyes.

  “Almost.”

  the eighth

  Jane is here for the weekend!

  She called me yesterday, said she was arriving by bus today, and now she's here. I can finally prove to my parents that, yes, I do have friends at Columbia.

  Despite (or perhaps because of) the diversity of our campus, students of the same race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and gender (and so on) tend to stick together, often through campus organizations designed to define us through similarities with one another and differences with everyone else. Jane and I didn't form an official club, but as White, Anglo-Saxon, lapsed-Catholic heterosexual females, we made a perfect pair.

  The similarities run even deeper. She, too, was a distance runner in high school who had no desire to run in college. She also came from a suburban wasteland close to (yet so far away from) a major city (Boston). She was an only child, and I felt like one because my sister was out of the house for most of my formative years. We had both been brutalized by the high school rumor mill, though her reputation (“Ride the Jane train!”) had been more damaged than my own.

  In fact, Jane and I are so tight that one of the F-Unit nerds who dabbled in music snobbery gave us the nickname 2 Skinny J's, inspired by an underground rap/rock group Jane and I had never heard of. Yet it was an appropriate nickname because of our similarly prepubescent builds. We often shared each other's jeans, cords, and T-shirts, and until I chopped off my hair, we both wore our brown hair in careless ponytails. No wonder we were constantly mistaken for each o
ther. Hope and I were tight, of course, but we never inspired nicknames.

  When I picked Jane up at the bus station, she clamped her hands above my ears and shook my head from side to side. “Your hair is growing wide before it grows long!”

  I swung my leg around and kicked her in the butt.

  “Hey! If I can't tell you the truth, who will?”

  It's so ironic that someone so ruthlessly honest spent her whole summer lying for a living as an “undercover spokeswoman” for ALPHApups, a guerilla marketing firm. She was paid $8 an hour to loudly extol the virtues of new liquors in trendy bars. (“This Yellow Jacket cosmopolitan makes me want to dance all night!!!”) Or she'd spritz on an experimental fragrance before flirting with weary but horny nine-to-fivers. (“This mesmerizing perfume makes me feel sooooo sexy.”) She has no qualms about being so manipulative and mercenary, which is one significant difference between the two of us.

  “Speaking of all things true, you must tell me about the internship!” she gushed as she stepped into the Volvo. “If you didn't have the best time ever, I will kill you.”

  “Uh, it was a job, J. Like any other job . . . ,” I said, keeping my eyes on the rearview mirror to avoid her scrutiny.

  “Oh sure, just like any other job at the coolest, funniest magazine in the universe! Like any other job that a bizillion girls are dying to put on their résumé!”

  When she put it like that, it almost made me jealous for the person lucky enough to snag that job, until I remembered that the person was me and that the job sucked.

  “Well, it really wasn't that fun.”

  And then I explained how I was ignored all summer, and the only way to get attention from anyone was to be catty and snarky and, of course, game for anything and everything that Tyra deemed cool, which was a complicated classification, one that included giving a blow job to a suction-cupped dildo in front of a dozen people in the middle of the afternoon.

  “You what? That's hilarious!” Jane cackled.

  I tried explaining that it wasn't funny at all, that it was degrading and weird and uncomfortable and gave me an icky uh-oh feeling like you get warned about in antimolestation videos in elementary school.

  “You walked out on them?” Jane slapped both hands on the dashboard in shock. “But you love that magazine! How can you suddenly decide that it's not you! It's funny! Ha-ha! Funny! Jokes! Remember jokes? Remember laughter?”

  “Har-dee-har-har,” I replied.

  She popped in a CD mix that she had made for me. An Eminem/ Depeche Mode mash-up burst from the speakers: It'd be so empty without me . . . I just can't get enough . . . I just can't get enough . . .

  “So! When do I get to meet the famous Marcus Flutie?”

  “Tomorrow.” I smiled at the thought of it. “He's giving us ‘girl time' tonight.”

  I've been looking forward to introducing Marcus to Jane, for educational purposes. Jane is a very together chick, and there is only one thing about her that I do not get at all: her boyfriend. First of all, he's got a chin-warmer; you know, all bushy below the mouth but completely naked above it, a peculiar facial-hair fashion that has never worked on anyone in any period of history. And he'll wear the same thrift-shop corduroy blazer every single day until the elbows rub down to a greasy sheen. He's undertall and underweight and would need to gain about fifty pounds before he'd look healthy enough to achieve heroin chic. Finally, his face always has that flared-nostril, openmouthed look of a person about to yawn.

  But I'd forgive his physical flaws if his personality wasn't so beyond redemption. He's so godawful that I hate saying his name because it provokes a visceral puke-in-my-mouth repugnance, which is sad because it's the same as a certain cinematic hottie who has provided me with many a sexual daydream. Which means Jake (bleeech!) has all but ruined Sixteen Candles for me.

  Need proof? There's the time he heaved a heavy sigh and hesitated for a few moments before joining us in the cab taking us to Roseland to see the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs, because “New York City hasn't made a significant contribution to the music scene since The Ramones.” At the club, he slouched in the corner, arms crossed and unsmiling, until Jane took him out of his (our) misery midway through the set.

  Or the time a bunch of us went for Italian at Carmine's and Jake (bleeech!) got so bored with our conversation about all the antiwar protests on campus that he literally rested his head on the table like he was taking a nap. He only snapped to attention when Jane turned the conversation toward a topic he likes: himself.

  Or the time I introduced myself.

  I said, “Hey Jake! [Bleeech!] I'm so happy to finally meet you.”

  And he said, “Uh-huh.” Then he turned his back on me, walked into Jane's room, and slammed the door in my stunned face.

  As a self-appointed “Poli-Poetics” major at Brown, he wasn't around to foul us with his presence too often. But on these three occasions that I had the misfortune of sharing air with him, I couldn't understand why Jane would bother being friends with someone like him, let alone have sex with him. Jane is the reason for the existence of self-help books like Why Smart Chicks Pick Total Dicks. How she can be so observant when it comes to other people, yet totally blind to her own errors is beyond me. She's always making excuses for his obvious flaws—He's really shy! He's not comfortable around new people! He's different when it's just the two of us!—all of which sound exactly like the types of things people say about puppies and babies when they misbehave. If Jake (bleeech!) made a steamer on the rug right in front of me, Jane would sheepishly shrug her shoulders and say, “He isn't potty trained yet!”

  I'm Jane's closest friend at Columbia, but I know that if it came down to choosing him or me, I'd come out the loser. Which is why all I can do is smile as tightly as I possibly can to keep the words from screaming out of my mouth: WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH THIS ASSHOLE!!!

  So I'm excited to introduce Jane to Marcus.

  “I can't wait,” Jane said.

  Neither could I.

  the tenth

  With Jane here for only three days, I wanted to make them memorable. She'd already been to Sleazeside during the MTV Beach House summer, so the boardwalk didn't hold the cheesy allure that it usually does for out-of-town guests. I wasn't sure how we'd pass the time, until Jane ripped a page out of our newspaper at breakfast.

  “We must do this!” she said. “Won't it be a riot?”

  I read the torn piece of paper.

  “The Glam Slam Metal Jam?” I asked, not really knowing if she was serious or not.

  “Poison! Warrant! Quiet Riot! Six hours of glam rock glory!”

  For the record, I'm into the eighties, but I've never been a fan of the hair bands. But I didn't want to be a buzzkill.

  “We've only got eight hours to get our outfits together!” she said.

  “Outfits?”

  “The only way to get in the glamming, slamming, metal jamming spirit is to dress the part, right?”

  “Sure!” I replied, trying to match Jane's enthusiasm

  For inspiration, we consulted Bethany's high school yearbooks, as she very conveniently started high school in 1987. We marveled at the foot-high bangs and plastic earrings and saw that we had our work cut out for us. Because my sister's look back then was more Debbie Gibson than Lita Ford, we couldn't piece together an entire outfit from oldies-but-goodies from my parents' attic. However, there was one notable, notorious exception, one that my mother was all too thrilled to mention.

  “You can finally wear The Jacket!” Mom exclaimed, pulling out a plastic dry-cleaning bag.

  The Jacket, which cost $150 in 1987, was the most expensive piece of clothing my mother had ever bought Bethany. Made out of white leather, The Jacket had huge padded shoulders and long fringe running across the chest and back. When Bethany begged for it in ninth grade, she was inspired by Sloane Peterson, Ferris Bueller's very cool girlfriend, who wore a similar jacket in the movie. But not two months after she got The Jacket, NJ's own JBJ (that's Jon Bon Jovi t
o those of you in the other forty-nine states) wore a black leather version in his seminal “Livin' on a Prayer” video. Instantly, her beloved jacket was sought after by Pineville High School's headbangingest students, and she just couldn't wear it anymore. My mother has kept it in the closet ever since, as a reminder of what a spoiled brat Bethany was back then.

  “The Jacket that was going to make your sister happy for the rest of her life!” my mother said, still annoyed sixteen years later.

  “Well, everything we know about happiness is wrong,” I said.

  “You can't really believe that,” Jane said. “It's too depressing.”

  “It's true,” Marcus said, entering the room and the conversation.

  “Marcus!” shouted Jane as she charged toward him. “I feel like I know you already!”

  “His reputation precedes him,” my mother muttered, twisting her lips into more of a sneer than a smile as she retreated from my bedroom.

  “So Marcus,” Jane said, grabbing two fistfuls of white cotton T-shirt above each of his shoulders. “Guess where you're going tonight!”

  “I'm going somewhere?” Marcus asked, sliding out of Jane's grip.

  “The Glam Slam Metal Jam,” I said, showing him the newspaper clipping.

  “Really?” Marcus asked, smoothing over the rumpled fabric at his neck. “You hate hair bands. And you hate nostalgia for hair bands even more.”

  And before I could answer, the phone rang. My mother yelled from downstairs.

  “Jessie! It's Bridget!”

  “And you say you aren't popular,” Jane teased. “Tell Bridget she must come with us!”

  “Hey, Bridget; I was going to call you,” I said instead.