Sloppy Firsts

by Megan Mccafferty

  "Marcus …" She tapped her finger to her forehead. "Marcus Flutie. How do I know that name?"

  She probably recognized it from the police blotter.

  "He’s really smart, possibly a genius," I said. "Maybe you know him from that."

  "Is he smarter than you?" she asked.

  Is he smarter than me? I wondered. "Maybe," I decided.

  "He’d better be if he’s going to have a shot," she said.

  Then the doorbell rang. The finger pushing that doorbell belonged to Marcus Flutie. Marcus Flutie was ringing my doorbell just as if he were any other boy. I thought for sure he’d honk and wait in the driveway. But he was actually going to meet and greet my parents. Jesus Christ. This really couldn’t be happening. I fumbled my hairbrush into the toilet.

  "I’ve never seen you this nervous before," my mom said, reaching under the sink to pull out a pair of rubber gloves so she could fish it out.

  I’d never decided to have sex before.

  I went to the top of the landing and saw Marcus shaking hands with my dad. I felt like I was wearing a cast again—on both legs this time. I couldn’t move. My mother nudged me from behind and I almost tumbled head-over-ass down the staircase. As I gripped the railing, and gingerly took each step, I prayed Marcus wouldn’t ask one of his bizarre questions before I got to the bottom: Mr. Darling, did you know that the Japanese have a word to describe the hysterical belief that one’s penis is shrinking?

  "Jessica!" my dad exclaimed, as though the last time he’d seen me had been on the back of a milk carton.

  Marcus looked me up and down.

  "Ain’t you jus’ darlin’?" he drawled, exactly like the first time in the principal’s office last year. So long ago.

  "She is, isn’t she?" my mom said, not getting the joke. "I told her she was!"

  I think I got out the th of thanks through my stifled giggles, but the other letters got stuck in my throat.

  Good-byes are a blur. The next thing I knew, Marcus and I were in the Caddie.

  "Your parents love me," he said. "They obviously don’t know who I am."

  "Obviously," I said.

  Marcus popped in an eight-track. It took a few seconds of snare drum and bass to figure out what it was.

  "This is Kind of Blue," I said.

  "Yes."

  "Hy said it was the essential jazz recording," I said.

  "Hy was right," Marcus said.

  "I hate that she was right," I said. "It would be so much easier to hate her if she were wrong about everything."

  I listened to the music, wondering how and where my devirginization would take place. Would we go back to his house? To mine? My parents were going to a party, but their return time was unpredictable. How about right here in his car? The Caddie had a big enough backseat.…

  "Aren’t you even curious about where we’re going tonight?" He didn’t wait for my answer. "Well, tonight, I’m going to take you on a tour. A tour of what I like to call The Five Wonders of Pineville, the strangest landmarks our town has to offer."

  I snorted. "There are five? I find that hard to believe."

  He turned the car into an abandoned parking lot. "Behold," he said, waving his arm with a flourish. "The Champagne of Propane."

  The Champagne of Propane is a twenty-five-foot high cement structure in the shape of a wine bottle. When we were kids, it advertised a liquor store. But when the liquor store became a gas station, the clever owners repainted the label, tweaking it to suit their needs.

  "You probably pass by the Champagne of Propane every day of your life," he said. "From the road, it’s kind of tacky. But have you ever looked at it up close before?"

  I admitted that I hadn’t.

  "It’s been painted over so many times that each color that chips or wears away reveals a whole new layer of color. Modern art."

  He pointed to a section where green popped through pink, speckled with aqua, flecked with red. He was right. Inch by inch, it was kind of pretty.

  "I know how much you hate Pineville," he said. "I thought tonight I’d show you what you miss when you don’t look hard enough."

  For the next hour, we visited the other "Wonders" of the town in which we were both born and raised: the fiberglass purple dinosaur inexplicably erected outside Magic Carpets and Remnants that predates Barney by about twenty years and has been beheaded by out-of-control automobiles no less than six times; Der Wunder Wiener, the tiny hot-dog-shaped shop-on-wheels that has been parked across the street from the abandoned Woolworth’s for as long as we remember, yet never seems to have any customers. After the fourth Wonder—the white Volkswagen Beetle perched on top of the roof of Augie’s Auto Parts—I got a bit anxious about, well, getting the action going. Especially when Marcus made a right at the light at the entrance to my development.

  "Are you taking me home?"

  "Not quite."

  He drove past my house (no lights on) and slowed down when we got to the kiddie park. The one I used to run to in the middle of the night.

  "And this," he said, "is the park that time forgot. It’s the only one in town that hasn’t been Disneyfied or Pokémonized. It’s exactly the same as it was when we were in elementary school. The tire swings, the monkey bars, the merry-go-round. It’s all exactly the same."

  The park is one of my favorite places. I loved that he brought me here. It made me want to tell him things.

  "I used to run here in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep."

  "Really?"

  I pointed up at the leafless tree. "I’d hop on a swing and try to hit the branches with my feet," I said, feeling bold enough to look Marcus right in the eye. "It was just a game I used to play."

  "A game."

  "Yes." I tried, and failed, to suppress a smile. "Now I talk to you instead."

  Marcus stuffed his hands into his front pockets. He suddenly looked incredibly uncomfortable, as though he wished he could climb inside his pants and hide.

  Then, without saying anything, he ran toward the merry-go-round. I followed and sat down inside the big red circle in the middle. Bull’s-eye. Marcus hopped on and sat Indian style, facing me. The wind inched the merry-go-round in circles, but I felt like I was spinning out of control.

  "I made my first New Year’s resolution," he said.

  "Really? I would think that you’d already given up all your vices."

  "Almost," he said.

  "So?" I said, sitting up on my heels. I was eager to hear what vice he was giving up. God help me if he chose now to go celibate.

  "Well, it has to do with you."

  I tried to say, With me? but no sound came out.

  "I promised myself that I’d stop jerking you around."

  "What … ?!"

  He put his finger to my lips to shut me up. Did I ever want to put it in my mouth and suck on it until it got pruny. Then I’d move on to the next one …

  "You never should have read that poem," Marcus said. "’Fall.’"

  Our knees were touching.

  "Why?" I asked. "I like your poems."

  "But it gives you the wrong idea about what I want from you."

  He was going to apologize for wanting to have sex with me. I just knew it. I learned from watching addicts on The Real World that saying I’m sorry is number nine on AA’s twelve-step program. But Marcus didn’t have to take this step with me.

  "You don’t have to apologize," I said, leaning in closer. Close enough for him to kiss my forehead, my cheek, my mouth …

  "Yes, I do," he said, arching back and away from me. He tapped his fingers against the merry-go-round metal, ping-ping-ping. "I wrote that before I really knew you. I only thought I knew you. Or maybe I did know you then, and you’ve changed."

  Now I was confused. "Changed? How?"

  He looked away, his foot tapping a bizillion beats per minute.

  "Well," he said. "When I used to listen to you and Hope talk …"

  I jolted to attention, as though a puppeteer had jerked
my marionette strings. "You listened to me and Hope?!"

  His words came rushing out, almost too fast to hear.

  We’d be in Heath’s room too stoned to move and I could hear you through the wall complaining about how much you hated your friends and this town and your goody-goody label and I thought hey here’s someone who has something to offer the world if only she had someone to help her bust out and why couldn’t I be that person I admit it was sort of an experiment to amuse myself to see how far I could push you but when I asked you to fake my test I never thought you’d actually do it so when you took that bait I wrote the poem to see if I could tempt you with sex too just to see if I could but that was before I really knew you …

  Holy shit!

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. None of it was real. From our mutual mistrust of technology, to Barry Manilow, to Xmas, the things that made us click weren’t signs of kismet or synchronicity or even mere coincidence. It was all about calculation, orchestration, manipulation. He knew what to say to me because he’d heard me say it before, to Hope.

  Nothing that had happened between Marcus and me was real.

  I sprinted away—but not far or fast enough. Christ, I wish I hadn’t taken the fall that wrecked my leg.

  "Jessica, listen to me for a second!" he yelled, grabbing my arm.

  "Why should I?" I screamed, trying to pull away. "This whole thing was fixed from start to finish! You’re no better than Hy!"

  "Come on, Darlene!"

  "Don’t call me that! I’m tired of being a joke. I’m tired of being played."

  "I know!" he said, gripping my arm tighter. "That’s what I was trying to tell you. I don’t want my relationship with you to be a game."

  I was all ice and silence.

  "Jessica, don’t you see?" He cupped my chin in his hand.

  "See what?" I said, thawing with the warmth of his touch.

  "You are the one who changed my life."

  NONONONONONONONONNOONOONOONNONO!

  Why did Marcus have to say that? Why? WHY? None of the girls he’s messed with wanted to be just another donut. They—we—all wanted to be the one who changed his life. The one who made him forget all the other girls who came before. He was telling me exactly what I wanted to hear, not because he meant it, but because he knew I wanted to hear it. What had made all our conversations so wonderful was their weirdness. Saying this, the "perfect" thing, ruined everything. Everything.

  "Did you hear what I said?" he said again, now softly brushing my hair behind my ears with the very tips of his fingers.

  "Fuck you."

  "What?" he asked, eyes blinking madly.

  I had never said Fuck you straight to someone’s face before. All forms of the word fuck are way overused—kids said Fuck you like it was What’s up? I always thought that if I ever were to say it, I would have to hate that person with a genocidal fury.

  And that’s how much I hated Marcus at that moment.

  "You heard me, Krispy. Fuck you."

  He pulled his hands away from my hair, like he’d been electrocuted. I took off, and he didn’t try to catch me.

  I ran all the way home, until my barely mended bones screamed in pain. I bolted up to my bedroom, unplugged the phone, and sobbed until I was sore, until I felt as though I’d twisted my body tight like a wet towel and wrung myself dry of tears.

  Marcus and I didn’t have a connection.

  One big mind game. Like Hy.

  Like Cal, but way worse because I was about to peel off my panties.

  How could I be such a moron?

  How could I have jeopardized my friendship with Hope for THIS?

  I played my conversations with Marcus over and over in my head. After hours of mental rewinding and fast-forwarding, one question kept repeating itself—first as a whisper, then louder—until I clamped my hands over my ears, vainly trying to shut it up:

  Doesn’t his confession prove that he cares more about me than the others?

  Others chimed in, no matter how hard I tried to drown them out:

  Wasn’t it true that we didn’t really know each other then?

  Didn’t we talk about things I’d never discussed with Hope?

  Hadn’t I eavesdropped on him and Len Levy?

  Maybe it’s not too late for us …

  I was still floundering in a maelstrom of love, lust, and loathing when I felt an ache in my abdomen. I went to the bathroom, pulled down my tights, and saw the blood in my underpants.

  Blood.

  BLOOD!

  Blood where there hadn’t been blood in over a year. My period made its comeback on the very night I’d planned to have sex. With Marcus.

  Jesus Christ.

  I’ve been laughing ever since this discovery—hard, loud, and crazy—because this is way too bizarre to be just a coincidence.

  Is it a message from the higher power that controls synchronicity? Is it another one of my body’s built-in emergency anti-sex mechanisms? Is it a sign of the Y2K+1 apocalypse? Like the one doomsdayers predicted for last New Year’s Eve? Maybe my world is coming to an end a year later than I expected.

  Or maybe, just maybe it means something else entirely. No matter what his initial motivations were, Marcus’s words rocked me to sleep. His strange lullabies soothed my anxieties, which made it possible for my period to return.

  Without Marcus, would my body ever have caught up with my brain?

  I have no clue what to think about Marcus anymore. But I am certain of one thing: I have to do what I should’ve done ages ago.

  January 1st

  Hope,

  Your plane touched down in Newark about an hour and a half ago. Any minute now, your parents’ rental car will drop you off in my driveway. I can’t wait until you’re here and I can hand-deliver this letter. Until then, I’m writing. Waiting.

  By the time you read this, I will have already told you everything. Everything.

  God, I hope you’re reading this. I mean, I hope you don’t hate me so much that you rip it up without looking at it first.

  I can’t see you doing that.

  I wanted to tell you all that stuff about Marcus sooner. But I just wasn’t ready. I was afraid that my "whatever" relationship with him would ruin the real relationship I had with you. And though I didn’t feel right hiding it from you, it wasn’t something I wanted to tell you on paper, over the phone, or via the information superhighway. It was face-to-face stuff. Heart-to-heart stuff.

  Stuff I’m dying to tell you right now.

  I’m just wasting time until you arrive.

  Instead of making New Year’s resolutions, I’m starting to think about The Real World. And how weird it must be for cast members to see themselves in reruns. I mean, they’ve moved on with their lives. But whenever there’s a Real World marathon they have to relive moments that they probably would’ve forgotten about had they not been immortalized on video and broadcast to millions of TV viewers.

  I wonder how I’d feel if I saw this year of my life on TV. Even with good editing, it would be tough to take. So many crazy-good and crazy-bad things have happened since you left. I thought I knew people so well. Marcus. Hy. Scotty. Bridget. Paul Parlipiano. Pepe. Even my mom. But they all blindsided me. And the thing is, I know people will continue to shock me next year, and the year after that. Forever.

  I just realized that if I had been on The Real World this year, you never would’ve made an appearance on the show with me. That seems so strange, considering the huge influence you have on my life, every single day. Obviously our friendship will never be the way it was before you moved. And if we try to force it to be that way, we’ll fail. But for the first time I can remember, I’m optimistic about both our friendship and the future in general.

  Maybe it’s because I hear your car in the driveway. You’re here. Finally here.

  Love, J.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks go out to:

  My agent, Joanna Pulcini, whose very first words to
me ("You’re Megan? I love your book!") I will always appreciate, and never forget.

  John Searles, whose incredibly generous introduction made it possible for me to hear those words at all.

  My editor, Kristin Kiser, whose appreciation of the title told me everything I neeed to know about her understanding of Jessica Darling’s world. Her assistant, Claudia Gabel, who also gave me precisely the feedback I needed to write the book that I’d always wanted to read. And everyone at Crown—especially Steve Ross and Andy Martin—whose enthusiasm confirmed that this book would appeal to readers of both sexes who were way beyond high school.

  Liza Nelligan and Kate Burns, whose early suggestions helped me figure out why I was telling this story, and the best way to do it.

  The ill-fated writers group—particularly Nancy Miller—who had no clue that a positive review of a ten-page short story would encourage me to quit my job and write a novel.

  Alan, Ellen, and Sean McCafferty, whose W.T. tales were an invaluable source of humorous inspiration.

  Ryan Fitzmorris, for being a master storyteller in his own right. And Renée Darling, who was gracious enough to let me steal her last name.

  Sean, Donna, and Caitlyn Fitzmorris, for making Tuesday my favorite day of the week.

  My parents, Tom and Laurie Fitzmorris, whose unique combination of nature and nurture got me here.

  And finally, Christopher, my husband and best friend, for making me laugh every single day.

  About the Author

  MEGAN McCAFFERTY is a former editor for Cosmopolitan, YM, and Fitness magazines. Her work has appeared in Glamour, CosmoGIRL!, Maxim, Details, and other national publications. McCafferty created "You Think Your Life is Crazy," a fiction serial for teens featured on Twistmag.com. She lives with her husband in New Jersey, where she is curently writing her second novel about Jessica Darling.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2001 by Megan McCafferty