Read Second Helpings Jessica Darling Online Free
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
july
the first
the second
the third
the fifth
the 6th
the tenth
the seventeenth
the 20-outset
the thirtieth
august
the 4th
the ninth
the eleventh
the fourteenth
the sixteenth
the twentieth
the twenty-eighth
september
the 4th
the 5th
the Seventh
the thirteenth
the 20-first
the twenty-9th
october
the 2d
the Seventh
the 12th
the fourteenth
the seventeenth
the twentieth
the thirtieth
november
the tertiary
the 6th
the tenth
the fifteenth
the seventeenth
the twentieth
the 20-outset
the twenty-2nd
the twenty-3rd
december
the 5th
the eleventh
the fifteenth
the eighteenth
the twenty-third
the thirtieth
january
the first
the second
the fifteenth
the nineteenth
the twenty-5th
the 20-7th
feb
the fourth
the fourteenth
the fifteenth
the eighteenth
the twentieth
the xx-Second
the twenty-fourth
march
the fourth
the ninth
the fifteenth
the seventeenth
the twenty-starting time
the 20-8th
april
the twelfth
the fifteenth
the seventeenth
the nineteenth
the twenty-third
the twenty-Seventh
the xx-eighth
may
the second
the third
the fourth
the 5th
the sixth
the fifteenth
the thirtieth
june
the second
the 5th
the eighth
the tenth
the fourteenth
the fifteenth
the twenty-outset
the xx-4th
the twenty-eighth
the thirtieth
Coming in Apr 2006 from Crown Publishers, Jessica Darling is finally back! - charmed thirds
freshman Summer, june 2003 - the first
Acknowledgments
Too BY MEGAN MCCAFFERTY
Copyright Page
For my parents
June 30th
Hope,
By the time you get this, I will already be attending the Summer Pre-College Enrichment Curriculum in Creative Learning. I recall it's hilarious for a gifted and talented program to have an acronym (SPECIAL) with the exact contrary educational connotation.
While I'm psyched to escape another summer of junk-food servitude on the boardwalk, I can't assistance but feel like a fraud. I'one thousand not all that interested in "experiencing the creative, intellectual, and social activities integral for a successful career in the arts," like it says in the brochure. My motivation is simple: I know that the only way to brace myself for the indignity of my senior yr at Pineville High is to avert everyone and everything associated with information technology for every bit long as I possibly can. Hence, why my summer vacation is a deportation.
You know I would've stuck around this strip-mall wasteland all summer if you had opted to visit me in Bailiwick of jersey instead of jetting around Europe. Tough choice. If y'all weren't my best friend, and I didn't dear you so much, I would hate y'all. Non for your decision, but for the privilege to make it in the first place.
I know our e-mail/IM daily, call weekly schedule volition exist out of whack until yous go back to Tennessee. But don't forget to write. More than than once a calendar month, if the mood strikes. And if it doesn't, well, less. Fifty-fifty though y'all're going all international on me, these are nonetheless the Totally Guilt-Free Guidelines for Keeping in Touch. With a special emphasis on the Guilt-Free part.
Enviously yours,
J.
july
the first
I tin't believe I used to do this nearly every mean solar day. Or night, rather. In the wee hours, when the sky was purple and the business firm sighed with sleep, I'd hover, wide awake, over my beat out-upwardly black-and-white-speckled composition notebook. I'd scribble, scratch, and scrawl until my hand, and sometimes my heart, ached.
I wrote and wrote and wrote. Then, one 24-hour interval, I stopped.
With the exception of messages to Hope and editorials for the school newspaper, I haven't written anything real in months. (Which is why it'southward such a crock that I'1000 attending SPECIAL.) I accept no choice but to start up over again considering I'chiliad required to keep a journal for SPECIAL'southward writing plan. But this journal will exist different. Information technology has to be dissimilar. Or I will be institutionalized.
My last journal was the only eyewitness to every mortifying and just manifestly moronic thought I had throughout my sophomore and junior years. And like the mob, I had the sole observer whacked. Specifically, I slipped page by page into my dad'due south paper shredder, leaving nothing but guilty confetti backside. I wanted to have a ritualistic burning in the fireplace, just my mom wouldn't let me because she was agape the ink from my pen would emit a toxic deject and kill us all. Even in my dementia I knew that would accept been an unnecessarily melodramatic touch.
I destroyed that journal considering information technology contained all the things I should've been telling my all-time friend. I trashed information technology on New year'south Day, the final time I saw Hope, which was the first fourth dimension I had seen her since she moved to Tennessee. My resolution: to stop pouring my soul out to an anonymous person on newspaper and starting time telling her everything again. And everything included everything that had happened between me and He Who Shall Remain Nameless.
Instead of hating me for the weird any relationship He and I used to have, Hope proved once and for all that she is a ameliorate all-time friend than I am. She swore to me on that January day, and a bizillion times since, that I have the right to be friends and/or more with whomever I desire to exist friends and/or more with. She assured me of this, even though His debaucherous activities indirectly contributed to her own brother'due south overdose, and very straight led to her parents' moving her a thousand miles away from Pineville's supposedly evil influence. Because when it comes downwardly to information technology, as she told me that shivery afternoon, and again and once again, her brother, Heath's, death was no one'southward fault simply his ain. No one stuck that lethal needle in his arm; Heath did information technology himself. And if I feel a real connection with Him, she told me so, and keeps telling me, and telling me, and telling me, I shouldn't be so quick to cut it off.
I've told Hope a bizillion times right back that I'm not removing Him from my life out of respect for Heath'southward memory. I'one thousand doing it because it only doesn't exercise me any adept to keep Him there. Particularly when He hasn't said a word to me since I told Him to fuck himself final New year's Eve.
That'due south not totally true. He has spoken to me. And that's how I know that when it comes to He Who Shall Remain Nameless and me, there'southward something far worse than silence: minor talk. We used to talk most everything from stem cells to T
rading Spaces. At present the deepest He gets is: "Would you mind moving your caput, delight? I can't see the blackboard." (ii/9/01—Beginning menses. Globe History Ii.)
End!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I don't want to take to fire this journal before I even begin.
the second
Now, here'south a fun and totally not psychotic topic to write about!
Today I got the best donkey-kickingest going-away present: 780 Exact, 760 Math.
GOD Bless THE SCHOLASTIC Aptitude TEST!
That'south a combined score of 1540, for those of you who are mayhap not equally mathematically inclined as I am. YAHOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
I've done information technology. I've written my ticket out of Pineville, and I won't have to run in circles for it. I am the first person to acknowledge that if an athletic scholarship were my merely option, I'd be out running laps and pumping performance-enhancing drugs right now. But my brain, for once, has helped, not hindered. I AM So HAPPY I DID NOT SIGN UP FOR
Cross-Land Army camp.
As annoying equally all those stupid vocabulary drills and Princeton Review procedure-of-emptying exercise sessions were, I'm totally confronting the movement to get rid of the SAT. It is the only way to prove to admissions officers that I'm smart. A 4.4 GPA, glowing recommendations, and a number-one course rank mean absolutely zippo when you're up against applicants from schools that don't suck.
Of grade, with scores like these, my problem isn't whether I'll become accustomed to college, but deciding which of the 1600 schools in the Princeton Review guide to colleges I should attend in the first place. I've been cyberbanking on the idea that higher will exist the identify where I finally find people who understand me. My niche. I take no thought if Utopia University exists. But there is one consolation. Fifty-fifty if I pick the incorrect schoolhouse, and the odds are 1600 to 1 that I will, it tin't be worse than my iv years at Pineville High.
Incidentally, I didn't rock the SATs because I'm a genius. 1 campus tour of Harvard taught me the difference between freaky luminescence and the residue of usa. No, my scores didn't reflect my superior intellect as much equally they did my power to memorize all the niggling tricks for acing the examination. For me the SATs were a necessary annoyance, just not the big trauma that they are for nigh high-school students. Way more things were harder for me to bargain with in my sophomore and junior years than the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Since I destroyed all the evidence of my hardships, let's review:
Jessica Darling's Top Traumas:
2000–2001 Edition
Trauma #1: My best friend moved a thousand miles away. After her brother's overdose, Hope's parents stole her away to their tiny Southern hometown, where good one-time-fashioned morals prevail, apparently. I tin't blame the Weavers for trying to protect her innocence, as Hope is probably the concluding guileless person on the planet. Her absence hitting me right in the middle of the school year, nineteen days earlier my Biting Sixteenth birthday, before long before the plow of this century. Humankind survived Y2K, but my world came to an cease.
Hither'southward the kind of best friend Hope was (is) to me: She was the only person who understood why I couldn't stand the Clueless Crew (as Manda, Sara, and Bridget were collectively known before Manda slept with Bridget's swain, Burke). And when I started changing the lyrics to pop songs equally a creative mode of making fun of them, she showcased her numerous artistic talents past recording herself singing them (with her own piano accompaniment), compiling the cuts on a CD (Now, That'southward What I Phone call Agreeable!, Volume i), and designing a professional-quality cover complete with liner notes. ("Very special muchas gracias go out to Julio and Enrique Iglesias for all the love and inspiration you've given me over the years. Te amo y te amo. . . .") I'chiliad listening to her soaring rendition of "Cellulite" (aka Sara's song) right at present. (Sung to the tune of the Dave Matthews Band's "Satellite.")
Cellulite, on my thighs
Looks similar stucco, makes me cry
Barrel of blubber
Cellulite, no swimsuit volition do
I must find a muumuu
But I can't face those dressing-room mirrors
[Chorus]
Creams don't work, and squats, forget it!
My parents won't pay for lipo just yet
My puckered ass needs replacing
Look up, look down, information technology'due south all around
My cellulite.
If that isn't proof that Hope was the simply one who laughed at my jokes and sympathized with my tears, I don't know what is. We still talk on the phone and write letters, just it's never been enough. And unlike most people my age, I think the round-the-clock availability of electronic mail and interactive messaging is an inadequate substitute for face-to-face, heart-to-heart contact. This is one of the reasons I am a freak. Speaking of . . .
Trauma #ii: I had suck-donkey excuses for friends. My parents thought that I had plenty of people to fill the void left by Hope, especially Bridget. She is Gwyneth blond with a bodacious booty and Hollywood ambitions. I am none of these things. We share nix in common other than the street we've lived on since birth.
My parents also had a difficult fourth dimension buying my loneliness because it was well known that Scotty, His Purple Guyness and Grand Poo-bah of the Upper Crust, had a crush on me. This was—and still is—inexplicable since he never seems to understand a single affair that comes out of my mouth. I found the prospect of having to translate every utterance exhausting and exasperating. I didn't desire to engagement Scotty just to kill time. He has since proven me correct by banging bimbo subsequently bimbo, all of whose first names invariably terminate in y.
My "friendship" with the Clueless Two, Manda and Sara, certainly didn't make my life whatsoever sunnier, particularly later Manda couldn't resist her natural urge to bang Bridget's young man, and Sara couldn't resist her inborn instinct to blab to the earth nigh it.
And finally, to make matters worse, Miss Hyacinth Anastasia Wallace, the one girl I idea had friend potential, turned out to be a Manhattan celebutante hoping to gain credibility by slumming at Pineville High for a marker menstruation or two, so writing a book nigh information technology, which was optioned by Miramax before she completed the spell check on the last typhoon, and volition be available in stores nationwide simply in time for Christmas.
Trauma #three: My parents didn't—and still don't—get it. As I've already mentioned, my parents told me that I was overreacting to the loss of my best friend. My mother thought I should channel all my angsty energy into becoming a boy magnet. My male parent wanted me to harness it toward becoming a long-distance-running legend. My parents had little feel in dealing with my unique brand of suburban-high-school misanthropy because my older sibling, Bethany, was everything I was not: uncomplicated, popular, and teen-magazine pretty.
Trauma #4: I was unable to sleep. I developed chronic insomnia later Hope moved. (I currently get near four hours of REM every night—a huge improvement.) Bored past tossing and turning, I started to sneak out of the house and become running around my neighborhood. These jaunts had a soothing, cathartic effect. It was the only time my head would clear out the clutter.
On one of those early-morning time runs, I tripped over an exposed root and broke my leg. I was never as swift again. My dad was devastated, simply secretly I was relieved. I never liked having to win, and was grateful for an excuse to suck.
Trauma #v: My menstrual wheel went MIA. My ovaries close down in response to the stress, lack of sleep, and overtraining. I was as sexually mature as your average kindergartener.
Trauma #6: I developed a sick obsession with He Who Shall Remain Nameless. He wasn't my fellow, only He was more than just a friend. I was able to tell Him things that I couldn't share with Hope. When I couldn't run anymore, His vocalism soothed me, and I was actually able to fall asleep once again. My catamenia even returned, welcoming me back to the world of pubescence.
His motives weren't every bit pure as I thought they were. Whatsoever relationship nosotros had was conceived under simulated pretenses. I was an experiment. To see what would happen when the male slut/junkie of Pineville High—who but happened to exist my best frie
nd'southward dead brother's drug buddy—came on to the virgin Brainiac. He thought that confessing His sinful intentions on that fateful New Year'south Eve would lead to forgiveness, merely it just made things worse. I was profoundly disappointed in Him—and myself—for always thinking that He could've replaced Hope.
No one can. Or should. Or will.
the third
When I was in showtime grade, my instructor wanted to bump me upward two years in schoolhouse. I was already reading, writing, and not wetting my overalls, which apparently put me years ahead of my peers. Miss Moore told my parents that I would exist more than intellectually stimulated if I was with third graders. I retrieve she just wanted me out of her sight. I was bored out of my heed in Miss Moore's class and had no problem letting her know it.
"Miss Moore the Bore! Miss Moore the Diameter!" I'd sing, over and over once more.
My parents negged the skip idea, of course, arguing that speeding up my academic growth would have a negative issue on my social development. They were afraid that if I was ii years younger than all the other kids, I would be on the receiving end of countless wedgies. So, with the exception of the two hours I spent with accelerated 3rd-grade reading and math groups, I spent the rest of the schoolday with children my own age, learning how to play nice.
I soon found a mode to combat boredom in the middle of B is for Boy and Baby and Bear lessons. I'd clutch my mesomorphic blue pencil like a microphone and walk effectually the classroom conducting imaginary Television interviews, but not with the classmates I was supposed to be bonding with. No, I'd pose in-depth questions to the chalkboard, the fern, or any inanimate object had a lot to say that day. Does it tickle when nosotros write on you? Would y'all like to be iced-tead instead of watered? Thus, despite my parents' best efforts, I even so ended upward being a freak.
So I wish that my parents had skipped me, if just to provide an acceptable excuse for my inability to relate to anyone. Information technology would have been all my parents' fault! As it is now, I have no one to arraign but myself. More than important, if my parents had skipped me two grades, I would already have my freshman twelvemonth of college behind me, and not but be prepping for a half-dozen-week-long collegelike feel at SPECIAL.
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