Sloppy Firsts: A Jessica Darling Novel by Megan Mccafferty

Author:Megan Mccafferty [Mccafferty, Megan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780676806649
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2002-03-05T05:00:00+00:00

the eighteenth

Last night was catastrophic.

Cataclysmically catastrophic.

In fact, the only reason I’m writing about last night at all is because I think it’s important from a purely historical perspective. I want my descendants to know what event cinched the last strap on my straightjacket.

About halfway through my shift, Manda came charging up to my stand as fast as her platform sandals would carry her.

“Can you get a ride home tonight?”

“No. Why?”

“Well there’s a huge blowout on Carteret Ave. tonight.”

“And?”

“Aaaaaaaand,” she exaggerated, as though my grasp of the English language were worse than Woody’s.

“We want to go.”

“We being …?”

“Me,” she said.

“And?”

“Sara.”

“And?”

“Burke.”

“Did you ever think that maybe I might want to go too?”

“Puh-leeze, Jess,” she said. “You never want to go anywhere.”

She was right. I never want to go anywhere. I had avoided going anywhere all summer and look how happy it had made me. I was more depressed than ever. Maybe some good old-fashioned mindless debauchery would do me some good. Liquid lubricant was just the thing to loosen up my torqued-uppedness. I was too uptight about everything. I needed to live a little.

“I want to go.”

Manda looked at me, expressionless.

“To the party,” I said. “I want to go to the party.”

Manda thought this was the funniest thing she had ever heard in her life. She literally bent over and slapped her knees as she laughed, affording Woody and his Hungarian homeboys a golden opportunity to look down her tank top.

“Are you spoken for?” Woody asked Manda.

Manda stopped cackling and started gagging. I ignored him.

“I’ll call my parents and tell them I’m sleeping over at Sara’s,” I said. “They’ll be thrilled that I’m out being social.”

“You’re serious about this?” she asked, as though I were signing away my life, which, as it turned out, wasn’t too far from the truth.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m ready to par-tay.”

After work (or nonwork in Sara’s case), Burke drove us over to the stretch of beach where the festivities were taking place. We got there around midnight. The fiesta was clearly in its early stages, as there was an even one-to-one ratio of people to beer cans scattered on the sand. Plus, the sexes had yet to mingle. Giggly girls clung in clumps, clutching plastic cups and beer cans kindly provided by members of the opposite sex who wanted to get in their pants. Packs of guys pounded each other in the arm, pointing out the girls whose pants they wanted to get into. We may be in high school, but until everyone is wasted these shindigs are as boy–girl segregated as a kindergarten birthday party. When the sexes interface, that’s when you know things are getting really messy.

The “beat of the beach,” FM 98.5, blasted a hot weather classic:

Summer summer summertime.

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