Charmed Thirds (16 page)

“That B-plus is really going to ruin your record,” my mom said mockingly.

“I don’t know if Bethany could find four As and a B-plus on all her report cards, ever,” my dad said.

My sister gasped in offense. “I made the Dean’s List my last semester in school!”

“Was that the semester you got an A in step aerobics?” Dad asked.

My sister huffed herself out of the room. As she’s gotten older, Bethany has grown less tolerant of her role as the Hot but Dumb One. Guess what that makes me?

I shouldn’t complain about my status. After all, I just completed my third semester at one of the most selective institutions of higher learning in the world (and I have used up almost all of my dead granny money for the privilege of doing so). I have read Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche. I have listened to Josquin des Prez, Monteverdi, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Verdi, Wagner, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. I’ve analyzed works by Raphael, Michelangelo, Brueghel, Bernini, Rembrandt, Goya, Monet, Picasso, Wright, Le Corbusier, Pollock, and Warhol.

La-di-da.

See, you’ll forgive me for all this name-dropping when I confess that I don’t remember a damn thing about them. Okay, that’s not entirely true. I remember Pollock paint splatters and discordant Stravinsky noise and Machiavelli’s primitive political methods, you know, the stuff of
Jeopardy!
daily doubles. But my knowledge really doesn’t go much beyond that. If I have a photographic memory, it’s a shitting Polaroid camera that self-destructs after producing a single, flawless picture that fades to nothing almost immediately after first viewing.

I was like this in high school, too—I was only as smart as my last exam—but I thought that maybe it was because my brain was in feast or famine mode. I’d stuff it with info for tests, but because it would be deprived of any sustenance on a day-to-day basis, it would get used up and forgotten. I was hoping it would get better at Columbia; that through Columbia’s “legacy of cross-disciplinary scholarship,” I’d be “compelled to analyze and ponder thinkers from the past” so that I could “better contemplate and influence the future.” (Uh, like it says in the brochure.) However, I can barely remember anything from Contemporary Civilizations, a class I aced less than two weeks ago, yet I can recite every line of dialogue from
The Breakfast Club.
Other Columbians have room for this kind of arcane knowledge
and
the stuff their parents are paying for.

One could argue that it isn’t any school’s role to make you smarter per se, but better educated, because intelligence is innate. If that’s the case—you’re smart or you aren’t—I know I
am.
But that old get-laid aphorism is totally true: Tell smart girls how hot they are, and hot girls how smart they are. I used to be okay with being well above average in intelligence, and just average in looks because I was still above average—a 3.0—for the total package. But after three semesters at Columbia, I now know there are plenty of girls out there who are A-pluses in looks
and
intelligence. (And they surely exist in California, too.) I already know Marcus loves me for my mind, so I think I’d get more out of him telling me that he loves me for my ass.

This is what I was thinking about when the doorbell rang.

My dad answered it, and there he was. Marcus Flutie. Marcus Flutie standing in the foyer underneath the mistletoe, as stretched out as his white T-shirt, as skinny as the thin wales of his corduroy pants. Standing as he had stood so many times before. Marcus Flutie, my boyfriend. More than that. My love.

And yet, he still seemed as ineffable to me as he did back when I’d see him with Hope’s brother, when I knew nothing about him other than that he was just another one of Heath’s dirty, dangerous, druggie friends. No matter how close I get to Marcus, I will never know exactly who he is. And the only reason that didn’t send me screaming back up the stairs is the certainty that he will never know me, either.

Marcus didn’t say anything when he saw me, only pointed upward to the beribboned sprig of greenery hanging above his head. I floated over to him. I opened my lips to say something.
Hey,
maybe.
Merry Christmas,
or
I missed you.

It should have been
I’m sorry.

But he pressed his mouth over mine and sent these and all words back where they came from. My apologies would wait.

the twenty-fifth

I get why people have kids, besides the whole propagation of the species thing. Kids give you license to do dorky things and have fun while doing them.

Before Marin, Christmas had kind of devolved into this depressing festival-forced holly jollity.
YOU
WILL
HAVE
A
VERY
MERRY
CHRISTMAS
,
GODDAMMIT
. There were all these holiday traditions that simply
had
to be followed, even though they had lost all their meaning. For example, in the Darling household we don’t put on any Christmas music until the day after Thanksgiving. And the annual inaugural record is Johnny Mathis’s first Christmas album, the one where he’s wearing the red jacket in the snow, not to be confused with his many follow-up Christmas albums, all of which have synthesized instruments and suck. And the first playing of Johnny Mathis has to be the original record, as in vinyl, not a CD, because it has certain scratches that make the record skip in predictable spots that would be missed by key members of the Darling household. And so, we have kept a turntable in the house for this once-a-year event, just so we can all hear Johnny stutter the last line in “White Christmas.”

“Annnd maaaay aaall yoour Christmases . . . ses . . . ses . . . ses . . . ses . . .”

Until my mother laughs and says, “Spit it out, Johnny!” and bumps the needle so he can finish the line.

“be white.”

This
has
to happen every year. Just like the tree always has to be draped in freshly strung cranberries even though it’s a long and tedious and finger-stinging process. Just like we always have to bake Gladdie’s butter cookies, even though they always come out tasting like oily tongue depressors.

But this year was different. There was a genuine excitement about waking up this morning because there was a wee one among us who sincerely believed that something magical had occurred while we slept. Think about the very concept of Santa for a second: A fat senior citizen in a tacky red suit flies around in a sleigh pulled by magic reindeer, delivering gifts for all the good little boys and girls in the world in just one night. It’s absurd. Yet kids totally buy it. Totally. And in small children, that pure, untainted faith is a beautiful thing. In grown adults, however, I find it disturbing. After all, how different is Santa from Jesus and Buddha and Allah and so on? But that’s an easy comparison for an atheist to make.

Anyway, I didn’t want to spoil Marin’s fun with my misanthropy. So I got all hopped up on candy canes and hot chocolate and threw myself into the Christmas cornballiness. And thus, I found myself wearing a jingle-bell reindeer-horn headband, entertaining my niece with very loud, very atonal versions of yuletide classics. Marcus accompanied me on guitar.

“YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!” cheered Marin with delight after I tore through “Good King Wenceslas.”

“Now, this next number contains a very important life lesson, Marin, about being true to yourself, even when everyone around you is putting you down.”

She blinked her huge blue eyes in bewilderment.

“It’s a little song about the culture of conformity, and how easily individuals can be victimized by groupthink and . . .”

“ING! ING! ING!” Marin’s word for “sing.”

And so I cut short the life lesson and positively shredded “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Despite my very punk rock performance, Marin lost interest before we even got to the middle eight and drifted over to her Pinky the Poodle Playhouse. I kept singing until my performance went down in “
HIS-TOR-Y
.”

Then Marcus said, “Rudolph Revisited: A Red-Nosed Nerd’s Revenge.”

When I heard him say the title of the high school editorial I wrote three years ago, an editorial that I’m sure has been forgotten by everyone else who read it, I was reminded of just how much
HIS-TOR-Y
we have together.

Marcus deserves to know the truth, but isn’t demanding it from me. He’s content to just be, which is very Zen of him. Besides, we were so full of sincere holiday cheer that I didn’t want to spoil the mood.

Tomorrow. I will tell him tomorrow.

We had made gifts for each other because we were sickened by our culture’s conspicuous consumption and
MORE
MORE
MORE
materialism. And also because we’re poor. Marcus is friends with a silversmith at school—yes, a silversmith—who taught him how to make a ring out of a quarter. He somehow soldered a message for me in teeny script:
My thoughts create my world.
It only fit the middle finger of my right hand.

“I love this,” I said, making the obscene hand gesture necessary to model it for him. “I’ll think of you every time I tell someone to fuck off.”

“Who’s the last person you told to fuck off?” Marcus asked.

“You.” A laugh struggled its way out of my throat. “New Year’s Eve 2000-2001.”

Before he could comment on this historical low point, I grabbed him by the red and green nubs of wool sticking out from around his neck. It was supposed to be a scarf. I tried knitting it last semester but didn’t get very far.

“It’s
almost
long enough to be an ascot,” I apologized.

“I love it,” he said. “I love you.”

We kissed with sticky peppermint mouths.

Then Marin ran back over, showing us how she had taken the Virgin Mary out of the Nativity set and given her a makeover.

“PEE! POO!” Marin can say “Pinky the Poodle” but prefers the scatological shorthand because it makes her very immature aunt Jessie laugh. And I laughed even harder when I saw that Jesus’ mama had red Magic Marker “makeup” smeared across her face, and Pinky’s bikini and feather boa over her robes. Mary looked like a hooker after a bad trick.

“Nothing is sacred,” Marcus said.

And I silently agreed.

the thirtieth

Marcus isn’t here. He’ll be back tomorrow to ring in the New Year with me.

Marcus is in Maine visiting his brother, Hugo, whom I have never met. All I know about him is that he’s twenty-two, never went to college, works in construction, and lives in a log cabin on a lake in a salt-of-the-earth Ashton and Demi arrangement with a woman named Charlotte who is twenty years older than he is and has two teenage sons from a previous marriage and ekes out a living making pottery that she sells in a tent pitched on the side of the road. Marcus has never offered to take me with him to meet them. I’ve been his girlfriend for almost a year and a half now, so I considered it beneath me to ask to be brought along. Or maybe I felt like I didn’t deserve to ask. At any rate, I didn’t. Which is why he’s in Bangor and I’m here.

Pepe is also away until tomorrow. He’s visiting assorted aunts, uncles, and cousins in Chicago. Bridget felt too guilty to leave her mom alone during the holidays and declined when he asked her to go. (She now regrets that decision since her mom is always working overtime at the Oceanfront Tavern because she gets paid double to cover for servers or hostesses or bartenders who—ahem!—take time off to spend with family.) So Bridget and I have been hanging out with each other because we hate everyone else in town.

The weather sucks. It’s not cold enough to snow, but still soggy and gray—like hugging wet construction paper. Bridget and I have stayed indoors, mostly at my house because she fully appreciates all of my mom’s manufactured holiday cheer. A single, working mom, Mrs. Milhokovich doesn’t have any time for it. When we were ten, my mother was shocked—SHOCKED!—to discover that since the divorce, Mrs. M. didn’t even bother trimming the tree anymore; she just stored it in the basement fully decorated, and dragged it back out as-is every third weekend in December. Since then my mom has encouraged Bridget to spend as much time with our family over the holidays as she wants.

“You know that
Bubblegum Bimbos
is supposed to come out in a few weeks, right?” she asked on the day of her boyfriend’s departure.

“How can I forget when you forwarded me a bizillion articles from
Ain’t It Cool News
?”

I’m not looking forward to seeing the film version of Hy’s book. Bridget needs to see it because she auditioned for a role and was justifiably miffed when she wasn’t considered “seasoned” enough to play the “Gidget Popovich” role inspired by . . . herself.

“To give a totally honest review, I need to be schooled in the art of the teen movie. You know, for, like, a base of comparison.”

And so, for the past five days, Bridget and I have seen every eighties teen movie in my
DVD
collection. The Best of the Genre
,
The T&A Romps
,
The Stupid Supernatural Comedies
,
The Brat Pack Dramadies
,
The Dark Social Commentaries
,
and—of course—The Against All Odds Romances
.

“You know what’s, like, totally annoying about these movies?”

I shrugged, picked up the remote, and shut off the
DVD
player.

“All these couples are, like, supposedly so into each other but all they do the whole movie is talk about how they’re such opposites and how it’s so cruel that their friends and family just can’t accept their love and how tough it is for their romance to survive and
wah-wah-wah-wah.”

“Hm.”

“Percy and I have had a lot of tough stuff to deal with and you don’t hear us
wah-wah-wahing
about it all the time.”

Tough stuff. I was interested in hearing about this.

“Like what?”

She plopped herself down in my old beanbag chair that I had rescued from the basement.

“Well, even though his parents accept me, and my parents accept him, like, the whole world isn’t so ready to deal with, like, interracial relationships.”