Charmed Thirds (13 page)

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.

“Why can’t the four of us drive from New Jersey to California? Let’s explore this great nation of ours.
From the mountains to the prairies! From the land where my fathers died to the land of the pilgrims’ pride! From sea to shining sea!”
He sang the last parts, his hand patriotically thumping his chest.

I did not share his excitement. I was getting tired of everyone thinking they knew what was best for me all the time.

“How are Pepe and I supposed to get back home?”

“Fly,” he said, as if it were merely a matter of flapping my wings.

“Marcus, I didn’t work all summer, remember? I’ve got no money. I’m barely keeping myself afloat . . .”

He dropped his hand to his side, sensing defeat. “I’m sure you can get a cheap flight on the Internet. You don’t start school for a few more weeks; you can be flexible.”

Flexible was not how I felt. This is how I felt: My middle-school science teacher once did a demonstration to illustrate how physical properties are transformed by outside forces. He stretched a large rubber band into a cat’s cradle between his hands. Then he released the rubber band and dipped it into a beaker of liquid hydrogen. After a few seconds, he removed the rubber band and banged it against the lab table, and it shattered into a bizillion pieces.

“No, I can’t,” I said.

“Nothing is absolute,” he said, his voice calm. His voice was always calm lately, the result of hours and hours of solitary reflection, he tells me. “Everything can change . . .”

Everything can change, I thought. Everything already had. Instead I said, “Why don’t you just stay here and fly out when you had planned? Are you afraid to spend time with me?”