Charmed Thirds (3 page)

No wonder our odds were a hundred to one.

Yet, despite the promise of a full payout, no one bet on us. I thought they were all suckers. I was certain we would stay together. Marcus and I had been through so much that our lasting union seemed like the only logical reason for it all.

I wasn’t tempted to stray. I mean, there were a few guys at Columbia who were the geek cute kind of guy I go for. But—oh!—those bright-eyed, death-cab cuties, I didn’t even get a chance to be dashbored by them all. Because they weren’t just
my
type, they were
many
girls’ types, which is why they were all married off before the end of orientation. But that was okay. I had the real thing. I had Marcus. And I tried not to worry about him and other girls, but it was kind of difficult to believe that someone with a carnal history as long and varied as his would be able to subsist on school-break sex fests alone. Especially when he told me about Butterfly, who just doesn’t understand us silly girls who still live in the “textile world.”

But all things considered, I didn’t blame people for not putting their money on us. And I couldn’t help but feel vindicated when Marcus and I were only one of two couples who made it through the academic year. That we split $375 with an Indian couple who is in an arranged marriage situation made the victory even sweeter.

I had just finished explaining this all to Bethany when my mother swooped in with Marin to “get in on the girl talk.”

“What money?” my mom asked, briskly wiping her hands of nonexistent dirt. An aspiring
GILF
, she was dressed similarly to Bethany in her silk halter top and denim skirt, though she had the sense to lower the hemline by about six inches.

“Well, I doubt you’ll be interested, because I was just telling Bethany how Marcus and I were one of only two couples on our floor to stay together all year.”

Disgust would have dented her forehead; that is, if my mother hadn’t recently Botoxed the spot between her brows. (I can’t even comment on this latest vanity, so disturbing is it to me.) My mother must have learned a sudden-change-of-subject approach to Handling Your Daughter’s Bad Boyfriend on a shrinky segment of
The View
or something, because the next thing she said was, “Jessie! Is Len back from Cornell? You should call him!”

My mother just can’t let go of Len, who dumped me senior year—on Valentine’s Day of all days—to be with Manda, the Official Revirginized Reformed Slut of Pineville. (Really. It’s in the brochures and everything. Okay, not really. But that’s only because Pineville sucks too much to have a brochure.) Len and Manda have been together for more than a year and still claim they haven’t had sex. They’re very proud of their chastity, which is why it’s common knowledge around here. Want to hear something people
don’t
know? Earth? It really
is
flat! And the Sun and planets revolve around it, not vice versa! I know this because a fleet of winged space monkeys just flew out of my butt and took me on an intergalactic tour of the cosmos!
Wheeeeeeeeee!!!

Needless to say, I think their celibacy is suspect.

“Scotty’s also back in Pineville,” my mom continued, her eyes straying toward the snack table on the opposite side of our swimming pool. She was clearly torn between her two favorite hobbies: playing Martha and torturing me. “He had a tough year, Jessie. He always liked you. You should call him! You could help him get through this difficult time.”

Everyone knows Scotty spent the whole basketball season on the bench and quit the team shortly thereafter. Unlike Len and Manda, Scotty didn’t go out of his way to broadcast this news. But his grotesque face puffery said everything anyone needed to know about his participation in the ritualistic alcohol abuse that inspires his fellow Lehigh University students to brag about their perennial top-five spot on Playboy’s ranking of biggest party schools. (This is an apocryphal honor because Hef has only published the list twice. In 1987, Lehigh wasn’t mentioned at all, and in last year’s rankings it was number twenty-three—far from the top five. I go out of my way to mention this because it makes their alcoholic pride all the more hilarious. Or sad. Depending on how you look at it.)

I doubt Scotty’s fall from grace or inflated face negatively affects the onslut of willing sex partners. Indeed, the Mother of All Gossipmongers still considers him “quite a catch.” She has a sycophantic devotion to Scotty, who just happened to be my first boyfriend, if you can call him that when our entire relationship lasted for eleven days in eighth grade. It ended when he mistook my mouth as a repository for his saliva; you know, to avoid a global crisis should there be a worldwide shortage of this valuable natural resource in the future.

I will never quite understand what Scotty ever saw in me.

“Oh! And did I mention that Mrs. Milhokovich said Bridget will be back in a few days?”

I’m actually looking forward to seeing Bridget for the first time since winter break. But I’m worried, too. She said she couldn’t visit me at school during spring break because she was still recovering from the removal of what she calls “ugly marks,” aka benign moles. She had been talking a lot about how cosmetic surgery is a fact of life in LA, and no more out of the ordinary than, say, brushing one’s teeth. So I’m troubled by the possibility that the moles were just a front, and she now has the artificially pneumatic look favored by starving starlets and the horny casting directors who bang them.

“Oh! Grant said that Wally and his daughter are supposed to stop by later. Sara graduated with you, right, honey?”

Of course my mother knows that Sara graduated with me. It’s just one of the asinine questions she asks as a means to launch into the meaningless conversations she holds so dear. But my mother may not know that Sara was caught trying to cheat on her Introduction to Fundamentals of Conceptual Finite Mathematics (aka Numbers for Dummies) by copying the formulas she had written on the inside label of her water bottle. She should have failed the class and been put on academic probation, but Sara’s dad—the legendary Wally D’Abruzzi himself—promised to open a drive-through combo Papa D’s Donuts/Wally D’s Sweet Treat Shoppe on the Harrington campus and all was forgiven. I find it hilarious that Harrington prioritizes fast-food funding over an endowment for like, oh, I don’t know, a
library
or something. And knowing Sara’s love/hate relationship with hydrogenated fats, it’s even funnier. Because G-Money and Sara’s dad have made it their joint mission in life to take Papa D’s Donuts and Wally D’s Sweet Treat Shoppe national, I will bear unwilling witness to Sara’s foibles for a very, very long time.

Thankfully, Sara was the last of my mother’s name-dropping material. When she trotted out of earshot, Bethany leaned in conspiratorially.

“If you and Marcus are still together, why isn’t he here?”

And that’s when I decided I needed a break from the festivities and went to hide in my room.

Marcus is still in California, away from me for two more weeks so he can attend an elective “Learning Cluster” on The Creative Coexistence of Nature and Humanity.

You know what would be
really
creative? The coexistence of Marcus and his girlfriend. Me.

It’s not entirely his fault. I’m the one who’s leaving in July, not him. It’s the promise of my internship at
True,
of doing something cool with one-third of my summer, that has made this very uncool Marcus-free part of my summer bearable at all. Of course, the irony is that the internship itself will actually extend the Marcus-free part of my summer. Get it? It’s an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, wrapped in a clusterfuck.

I can hear footsteps. It’s probably my mom on her way upstairs to demand that I stick my hands back in my paws, put on my poodle head, and get out there to perform another tap—

MARCUS!

MARCUS
IS HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

the eighth

I have imagined my reunion with Marcus in many ways.

In the PG-13 version, I’m wearing something casually sexy, like the ME,
YES
, ME T-shirt Marcus gave me for graduation and a pair of shorts. In this daydream, I do not have a mental-patient haircut; it’s still long enough for a swingy ponytail. I’m lounging on my bed, writing in my journal about how much I miss him, when he sneaks up behind me. He grabs my journal and chucks it across the room. We kiss.

In the R-rated version, the setup is the same, except I’m wearing a tank top and a pair of bikini-cut skivvies. He says something like, “I need you right now,” which doesn’t sound all that sexy, but it’s all in the sultry drawl of his delivery. My journal, chucked. My clothing, shucked. My body, (insert verb here).

In the X-rated version, there is no wardrobe or intelligible dialogue. The plot is best left to your (okay,
my)
prurient imagination.

As you can see, I like my daydreams to have an element of reality to them. (I even do my own nude scenes.) It makes them that much more interesting, like,
Oooooh, this could actually happen.
Which in this case it
almost
did. Except I never pictured a G-rated version, in which I was—from the neck down—dressed as a stuffed animal. (Although, for plushy-loving pervs, it could have been confused with the X-rated version.)

As always, Marcus had the perfect entrance line. He gently stroked my pink pelt (any plushy pervs who weren’t already turned on are definitely wanking it now) and said, “My, how you’ve changed, Jessica.” His surprise arrival proved that he hadn’t changed at all. On the inside at least.

He definitely
looked
different since I’d last seen him. He gets so immersed in his studies that he forgets to eat, making him even leaner than he was before he left for school. He doesn’t look gaunt and stricken; quite the opposite. The overall effect makes all that is Marcus even more so. His angular nose isn’t merely dignified, but aristocratic. His eyes, more feral than feline. His cheekbones could slice through diamonds. He hasn’t trimmed his hair since our good-bye, and it reminds me of fallen leaves, all burnt red and curling at the edges. His dusty jeans dipped down below his hips, and I could see the V-cut of his pelvis, pointing the way to happy territories below.

And he was wearing the summer version of the same outfit he was sporting the last time I saw him; that is, he’d removed the thermal from underneath his old
COMINGHOME
T-shirt. The iron-on letters I once wanted so desperately to stroke with my fingertips are faded beyond legibility and nearly translucent from so many sudsy tumbles through the washing machine. I once ached to touch those letters on his chest, to touch him. It was at the infamous high school Anti-Homecoming party at Sara’s house, infamous not only because everyone who had ever attended Pineville High showed up for the beery lechery, but because it served as the backdrop for my first kiss with Len, not my first kiss with Marcus as it should have. (We wouldn’t kiss until months later.) I compensated for that night’s longing by wearing the
COMINGHOME
shirt after we made love for the first time, the second time, the third time. On those June nights, it smelled pungent yet sweet, like autumn decay. It still does.

Toward the end of last semester, I was dangerously close to running out of dining dollars, but I didn’t want to replenish from my bank account because I was trying to save myself from financial ruin. So I went almost totally freegan: I limited my food budget to five dining dollars a day, and supplemented the rest of my meals with whatever I could get gratis at the various events thrown by any one of the bizillion campus organizations at Columbia. Bagels with Six Milks improv comedy group. Pizza with the Philolexian Society. Spicy chicken wings with Acción Boricua. No affiliation was too inappropriate for my hunger. (Actually, I did draw the line at the Columbia College Conservatives Club
BBQ
.) Sometimes the spread would already have been vultured by my fellow starving students by the time I got there, but most nights I’d be in for a feast. And no matter what was being served, it was always the most finger-licking deeeeeelicious meal I’d ever had in my life . . . not only because I needed it so badly, but because my nourishment was never guaranteed.

Seeing Marcus was like that. I wanted to devour him. Figuratively. Okay, more than a little bit literally, too.

So my initial response was: “MARCUS!”

Followed by: “I hate my hair! It’s okay if
you
hate my hair!”

And: “Get me out of this poodle suit!”

However, stripping off the Pinky the Poodle costume was not something that could be done spontaneously or (let’s face it) erotically. So I just went with my canine instincts. I leapt off the bed with surprising agility for someone weighed down by fifty pounds of fur and pounced on top of Marcus. I howled as we tussled on the floor.

“AHWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

“Happy to see me?”

“
BOW-WOW-WOW
YIPPIE
YO
YIPPIE
YAY!”

“I’m happy to see you, too. Happy anniversary!”

Our anniversary. He remembered that he had deflowered me one year ago. It’s nice to know that mine stands out among all the many petals that had fallen before me.

I licked his laughing face.

“Down, girl, down!” he said, rolling out from under me.

“I’m just! So! So! So!”

Words failed me. I barked.

“Happy?” he offered.

“WOOF-WOOF! ARF-ARF!”

No surprise that all this commotion attracted the attention of my mother, even amid the deafening chaos of a one-year-old’s birthday party.

“Jessie,” I heard her shrill voice coming up the stairs, “what are you d—?” She stopped in my doorway midinquiry, stunned by the sight of her daughter dry-humping Marcus’s leg.

“Oh,” she grumbled, tugging at the bow at the back of her halter top as if it were a silken noose. “It’s you.”

She would have been happier if I’d been rutting bin Laden.

Marcus hopped to his feet. “Hi, Mrs. Darling. It’s nice to see you again.”

Mom ignored him. “Jessie, we need you back downstairs. We want Pinky to bring out the birthday cake for Marin.” She turned on her high heels and went out the door.