Perfect Fifths by Megan McCafferty - Excerpt

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perfect fifths
a novel
MEGAN McCAFFERTY
Crown Publishers
New York
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Megan McCafferty
All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown
Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McCafferty, Megan.
Perfect fifths / Megan McCafferty.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Darling, Jessica (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Young women—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3613.C34P47 2009
813'.6—dc22 2008050525
ISBN 978-0-307-34652-0
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
To purchase a copy of
perfect fifths
visit one of these online retailers:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Borders
IndieBound
Powell’s Books
Random House
www.CrownPublishing.com
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For all the readers who have cared enough

to find out what happens next
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In our artificial civilization many young people at twenty-five are still

on the threshold of activity. As one looks back then, over eight or nine
years, one sees a panorama of seemingly formidable length. So many
crises, so many startling surprises, so many vivid joys and harrowing
humiliations and disappointments, that one feels startlingly old; one
wonders if one will ever feel so old again.
—Youth and Life, Randolph S. Bourne (1886–1918)
Even now, when I have come so far, I wonder where you are . . .
—“Even Now,” Barry Manilow (1943–)
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part one: before
one
W hen Jessica Darling blindly collides into Marcus Flutie on this
crisp, unclouded January morning, she can’t remember the last time she
had imagined where she would be—and who he would be—at the
moment of their inevitable collision.
For him, however, it’s a very different story.
two
R egrets. Jessica has so many regrets. She should have stopped pour-
ing after that first glass of wine last night. Shouldn’t have watched the
ceiling swirl for hours. Should have resorted to a narcotic sleep aid
sooner. Shouldn’t have hit the snooze button one, two, three times
before rocketing (“I’m late!”) out of bed this morning. Should have
skipped the shower, not breakfast. Shouldn’t have turned down her dad’s
offer to drive her to the airport instead of proving her mother right about
the unpunctual local car service. Should have chosen the security
screening line to the right, not the left, not the one that put her directly
behind the starving and savage middle-aged trafficker of more than three
ounces of the liquid weight-loss supplement with the funny name, a
name Jessica keeps repeating in her head in rhythm with her sneakered
feet sprinting across Concourse C.
Hoodia. Hoodia. Hoodia.
So many split decisions and judgment calls and incorrect esti-
mations have led to this. To being late. She’s late late late late for
Gate C-88. She likes the rhyme, especially when timed with the beat of
her feet, and chooses this staccato incantation over the silly-sounding
appetite suppressant.
I’m late late late late for Gate C-88.
3
Megan McCafferty
She recalls how she used to silently mouth spur-of-the-moment

mantras back in her competitive high school running days. Hand-
slapping rhymes from her youth: Miss Mary Mack Mack Mack . . . All
dressed in black, black, black. Boy-band lyrics she would never say out
loud: You might hate me but it ain’t no lie . . . Baby, bye, bye, bye. Even
her own name: Jessica Darling . . . Darling . . . Darling . . . Jessica Dar-
ling . . . Darling . . . Darling. These invocations lacked deep mean-
ing—even the song of herself—and were meant only to distract her
from how much she hated having to pretend she cared about the out-
come of the race.
Today she cares. And no matter how fast she sprints through this
airport, there are too many people standing still. Standing in her way. Or
stretched across the floor in carefree repose, smudgy fingertips plucking
chips and curls and twists out of the bags of overpriced snacks in their
laps. Seemingly in no hurry to get anywhere, which is funny if you think
about it (but Jessica doesn’t have time to think about it), because this is
the place where passengers pass time until they can be jet-propelled
across states and nations, oceans and continents, at six hundred miles
per hour. Why are they standing still, standing in the way of where she
needs to be? Surrounded on all sides by the drone of wheeled luggage
buzzing across the concourse, she speeds up, slows down, stutter-steps,
and shimmies her way through the hive. Onward, onward, onward. She
was wide-awake, wild-eyed with worry, for most of the night, and this
adrenalized marathon sprint is already taking its toll. She can feel fatigue
settling into her muscles, her bones, her brain, her spirit. But no. No!
She can’t slow down now. She can’t miss this flight. I can’t miss this flight.
The concourse splits down the middle, and she must quickly consider yet
another option. Should she hop on the human conveyor belt or just
keep running?
There is pure goodness awaiting her in the Virgin Islands. Her best
friends are all together to “celebrate the rarest love between two people,
the flawed yet fearless union that everyone hopes to find but almost
always turns out to be illusive if not elusive.” (Quotation marks needed
because it comes directly from the speech Jessica has prepared for the
occasion.) Jessica knows her friends will forgive her if she misses this
4
perfect fifths
flight—as they have forgiven so many of her unintentional slights and

oversights—but she won’t forgive herself.
I can’t miss this flight, she silently says once more before choosing to
trust her own two feet over technology, the last in a series of synchronis-
tic decisions that contribute to everything that happens afterward.
three
T
“
his is a final boarding call for passenger Jessica Darling.”
After Marcus hears it the first time, he makes sure to listen extra
carefully the second time, just to confirm it is her name being called over
the public address system and not a phantom echo in his mind.
“This is a final boarding call for Clear Sky Flight 1884 with nonstop
service to St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. Final boarding call for pas-
senger Jessica Darling.”
Jessica Darling. It’s been years since he’s heard her full name spoken
out loud. Not that Jessica Darling hasn’t been analyzed, assailed, or
alluded to in conversations with family, friends, and near strangers from
their shared past. As a subject of discussion, Jessica Darling has been ele-
vated by—not reduced to—pronoun status. Have you seen her? What’s
she up to these days? Whenever anyone asks these questions, there’s
never any doubt as to whom the “her” or “she” refers. But those ques-
tions haven’t been asked lately, not since Marcus has—by all actions
and outward appearances—finally gotten over her.
Even after hearing her name once, now twice, Marcus still needs a
confirmation from somewhere outside his imagination. He seizes his
friend Natty by the lapels and asks.
“Dude, no,” Natty insists. “I didn’t hear her name. And neither did
you.” Natty’s sharp tone can’t burst the pop-eyed, expectant expression
on Marcus’s face. “And even if you did hear her name, there’s no way it’s
her. Now let go of me, because I gotta take a piss.”
Natty strands Marcus between the entrance to the men’s restroom
5
Megan McCafferty
and the fiberglass Betty Boop sculpture boop-boop-be-beckoning cus-

tomers into the faux-retro Garden State Diner for a greasy preflight
meal. Marcus feels overexposed, overstimulated, as if his whole body is
on extrasensory alert. Marcus’s nerves rattle and clang like the dirty sil-
verware carelessly thrown into plastic takeaway tubs by the too-busy
busboys. He tries to calm himself with a series of deep inhalations and
exhalations, but breathing cheeseburger smog only makes him more
queasy and ill at ease. The alarms going off in his nervous system evoke
the erratic animal behavior that precedes natural disasters: a mass exo-
dus of elephants seeking higher ground, dogs wailing under door frames,
rabbits clawing at cages, snakes shaken from hibernation slithering
through the snow. His instincts, too, urge him to flee. He half jogs away
from the diner and heads for the blue-screened monitors announcing
arrivals and departures.
As Marcus searches for Clear Sky Flight 1884 on the departures
board, he makes an effort to accept Natty’s logic. After all, didn’t his
Jessica Darling often joke about being confused with a porn star also
named Jessica Darling? Perhaps it’s the X-rated Jessica Darling being
called over the public address system, or maybe even a third unknown
Jessica Darling who shares nothing but a name with the other two.
A newborn Jessica Darling. A granny Jessica Darling. An African-
American, Asian, Hispanic, Pacific Islander, or Other Jessica Darling.
It must be one of these alternative Jessica Darlings flying out to St.
Thomas on Clear Sky Flight 1884, not his Jessica Darling, not the one
he proposed to over three years ago, not the one he hasn’t seen, spoken
to, or otherwise communicated with since he quietly accepted that her
answer was no.
He’s found it: Gate C-88. Clear Sky Flight 1884 to St. Thomas is
departing from Gate C-88.
What harm could there be in wandering over to Gate C-88 to see
for himself which incarnation of Jessica Darling is being called out loud?
None at all, save for the minor embarrassment of being suckered into a
one in six billion long shot. But what if it turns out that the familiar
name does belong to her familiar face? Marcus is incapable of calculating
the risks of such an improbable outcome. Still, he knows himself well
6
perfect fifths
enough to understand how the powers of his masochistic imagination

would make the coward’s alternative—never knowing, always wonder-
ing was it her? was it her? was it her?—a far greater punishment than any
awkward small talk.
He looks away from the monitors because the orange font/blue
screen makes his pupils vibrate. On the wall directly in front of him is
a changing digital screen advertisement for the Shops at Newark Liberty
International Airport. Before he even realizes he’s doing it, Marcus
impassively watches the images shift.
The picture: A gold-foil box of gourmet chocolates.
The words: MISSING HER.
The picture: A string of black South Sea pearls.
The words: MISSING HER LIKE CRAZY.
Marcus, wowed by the lack of subtlety, looks away and laughs at
himself.
No. He can’t give in to narcissistic folly and read this sign as a Sign.
It’s taken him three years to finally pull himself together, and he refuses
to come undone by commonplace coincidence. In fact, he’s just about
convinced himself that Natty is right, that there’s no way it was his Jes-
sica Darling being summoned over the Clear Sky PA system, that there’s
no need to head to Gate C-88 to verify this impossibility for himself
because it is not, it cannot be, her, not his Jessica Darling (why does his
skin still prickle with premonitory anticipation?), when his Jessica Dar-
ling slams right into him and bounces onto the floor.
four
A body in motion. A body at rest. Forces coming together—
CRASH!—in an instant. Energy spent, energy exchanged, and energy
conserved. Jutting elbows, bared teeth. Elastic arms, slack mouths. To
every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. This woman and
this man, a living demonstration of Newton’s Third Law.
7
Megan McCafferty
five
J essica curses herself as she scrambles across the marble tiles. Clad in
head-to-toe black, she resembles a desperate beetle stuck on its back, arms
and legs flailing for her flung-to-the-ground carry-on bag. She finds it,
scrapes herself off the floor, and decides that a curt give-and-take of apolo-
gies is the path of least resistance, the quickest way to get past this stranger,
this nuisance, this object of interference with feet stuffed into scuffed
Vans. There are already too many eyes on them, watching, wondering
what will happen next. A combative confrontation will only attract more
rubberneckers, and she doesn’t want anyone else slowing her down.
Marcus waits until she stands up before he takes a chance. “Jessica?”
It’s the voice that reaches her first, not the correct first name
uttered by the voice. Her head bolts up, and when her eyes corroborate
with her ears, her breath catches and her hands fly up to her face. She
breathes in and out through her palms, once, twice, before taking them
away. Miraculously, he’s still there. She is perfectly still for the first time
since vaulting out of bed this morning.
“Marcus!”
He nods to confirm what should be obvious but is still too unbe-
lievable.
“Marcus,” she repeats, softer.
He nods again.
“I . . .” she begins. “I’m . . .”
They are standing inches apart, not touching. Jessica clutches her
ergonomic teardrop-shaped carry-on bag to her chest, sensing that the
moment to embrace has passed. A spontaneous show of emotion now
would be too conspicuous, too much, too late.
“Late!” Jessica blurts. “I’m too late.”
Hundreds of passengers swirl around and away from them, like so
many snowflakes in a blizzard.
“Oh,” Marcus says. He’s contemplating whether he could get away
with playfully swatting her arm in what he hopes is a neutral zone,
between her shoulder and elbow. Behind her flashes the sign. The
8
perfect fifths
gold-foil box of gourmet chocolates. MISSING HER. The string of black

South Sea pearls. MISSING HER LIKE CRAZY. The sign. The Sign. He wants
to make contact when he makes his confession, that he’d heard her
name, and how he had hoped for the illogical, the impossible, to be true:
that it was really her. And today of all days. He’s about to touch her, then
deliver the befitting wishes, when she casts a nervous sidelong glance at
his turned-out palm, the part of him that dares to come too close. He
drops the offending hand and stuffs it deep into the front pocket of his
corduroys, knowing there’s no time for such intimacies.
He says nothing.
“We should—” Jessica starts. She’s rocking from side to side now,
an anxious, joyless dance. “You should—” The pronoun change doesn’t
go unnoticed by either of them. “E-mail. Or, I don’t know. Text. Some-
thing . . .”
“Something,” he says simply.
Marcus musters the courage to look Jessica right in the face. She
still wears her hair like an afterthought, pulled back with a few quick
twists of a rubber band. If she removed the elastic and shook it out, he
would breathe in the fruity scent of shampoo, certain that the chestnut
tresses resting against her neck are still damp from her morning shower.
He finds some comfort in this knowledge, as well as in the overall famil-
iarity of her features, which haven’t changed that much since he last saw
her. But he must admit to himself—only to himself, never to her, even if
she’d had the time or the temerity to ask—that her casual loveliness is
more than a little washed-out. Her eyes are tired, tinged pink, and
buffered by puffy purple undereye circles. Her lips are crackled dry, her
nostrils chapped and flaking around the corners, perhaps from too many
rubs with a paper towel, a wool coat sleeve, or some other rough tissue
substitute. He hopes that her careworn appearance is an aberration, that
her immune system is down but she’s not. He wants her to be sick or
tired, but not sick and tired, or just plain sad.
“I’d catch up if . . .” Her cheeks glow an embarrassed red, and her
pale complexion is better for it.
“If you had time,” Marcus finishes for her, trying to determine from
her voice whether she’s suffering from a cold or something worse.
9
Megan McCafferty
“If—” she starts again, but doesn’t finish.

She can’t look up at him. If she looks up at him, she will see him.
And if she sees him, she’ll be compelled to ask questions she doesn’t
have time for. Instead, she concentrates on her own familiar Converses,
but even that fails to bring her relief. That they both still wear their
same favorite brands of sneakers after all these years is only a minor rev-
elation, and yet even this tiny glimpse of his world going on without
her—and hers without him—is almost too much for Jessica to bear.
What else hasn’t changed? Does he still meditate for hours on the floor
of his closet? Jessica braces herself with a deep breath. Would he still
smell like smoldering leaves if she leaned in close enough? Does he still
compose elliptical, poetic songs on his acoustic guitar?
Derelict lyrics force themselves to the front of her consciousness, a
ballad softly sung when they were still teenagers, the only one Marcus
ever wrote or sang for her:
I confess, yes, our fall was all my fault

If you kissed my eyes, your lips would taste salt . . .
Her watery eyes stay fixed on the unraveled seams splitting his
mossy V-neck a quarter inch lower than the designer’s intentions. This
is an expensive-looking sweater—two-ply cashmere, she guesses—
and she doubts Marcus could afford to buy it for himself. She assumes it
was a gift from someone who is very familiar with his face, one who
knew how this gray-green shade would shake loose those evasive hues
from his multifaceted brown eyes. Definitely a gift. He doesn’t even have
the cash to care for this item properly with regular dry-cleaning. She
imagines him blithely tossing the sweater into one of his college’s com-
munal washing machines, along with his T-shirts, jeans, and underwear,
the tender cashmere threads coming more and more undone.
“Go,” he urges gently, pointing toward Gate C-88. “Don’t miss your
flight.”
She pulls a wad of scrunched-up paper towel out of the front pocket
of her hoodie, rubs her nose, and jerks her head in agreement. They offer
10
perfect fifths
hasty good-byes but no hugs, not even a handshake, before she takes off
for the gate.
“I’m sorry I ran you over,” Jessica calls out, barely casting a glance
back as she hurtles herself forward.
I should be, too, thinks Marcus. But I’m not.
And then she’s gone again.
six
J essica can’t catch her breath, but she won’t stop running. Panting, she
picks up the pace.
A new mantra: That didn’t happen. She runs faster than ever, even
with her palms burrowing into her eye sockets to push away tears, memo-
ries, perhaps both. That didn’t happen. Part of her wants to remove her
hands, look back, and contradict her desperate denials. That didn’t happen.
She wants to look behind her and take him in, Marcus Flutie, looking
every inch the rumpled grad student in his choice of clothing (the sweater,
the thin-wale corduroys), hairstyle (the finger-picked brush cut), and eye-
wear. (Glasses? She does a mental double take. He was wearing glasses,
wasn’t he? When did Marcus start wearing glasses?) Only he’s not in graduate
school, he’s still a superannuated undergraduate, a twenty-six-year-old
senior. (Is he graduating this semester? On time? Only four years late?)
Time. Late. There’s no time to contemplate any of these questions
because she is still late late late late for Gate C-88. (They weren’t annoy-
ing emo glasses, were they?) She steels herself against the temptation to
look back for any reason. An apology, maybe. Or a simple explanation.
(No, they were just regular wire-rimmed glasses, I think.) Her face burns
still hotter; she’s mortified by how she must have looked to him in both
appearance and in action. (Oh fuck.) What was he doing just standing
there like that in the middle of the airport? Meditating? Seeking inner
peace with no regard to his fellow travelers? Marcus Flutie standing still
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Megan McCafferty
amid the chaos on the concourse was an accident waiting to happen.

And it did. It finally did.
Jessica wonders who will be the first to find out about their momen-
tous collision, and when. Such a reunion has been a forgone conclusion
among Jessica’s best friends since the breakup. They would not only
expect a second-by-second reenactment but are exponentially invested
to demand one. And on any other day Jessica would have complied. She
would have told them everything, starting with how calmly Marcus
reacted to being run over by his ex-girlfriend in the middle of Newark
Liberty International Airport, as if he’d been expecting it, not in the
same “someday” way that Jessica and her friends had expected it to hap-
pen, but almost as if he had chosen to wait in that exact spot on the
straightaway under the arrivals and departures boards outside the men’s
restroom because he knew she was on her way.
But not today. No. Even before the crash, she’d already had her rea-
sons for not making today about her. And because it is definitely not
about Marcus Flutie, either, she forces him out of her mind. She keeps
moving. She must keep moving if there’s any hope of her making this
flight. (I can’t miss this flight.) Bridget and Percy didn’t question Jessica’s
need to make a pit stop in Pineville before traveling to the Virgin Islands,
which only makes her feel worse about having bailed on the bridal
shower and the bachelorette party. She has little hope of arriving in time
for tonight’s rehearsal dinner even if the flight (I won’t miss this flight)
hasn’t already taken off without her. But Jessica must be there for tomor-
row’s wedding, because she is the ministress of ceremonies, after all.
That didn’t happen.
Oh, yes, it did.
Her thoughts ineluctably return to Marcus and the last time they
were in the same room together: He was hunched over, bent at the waist
on the edge of his bed, slowly turning two unopened notebooks over and
over in his hands. Four sides. Turn, turn, turn, turning. Pages, pages,
pages, binding. He had just listened to Jessica explain that those two
black-and-white-speckled composition notebooks contained all the rea-
sons why she couldn’t be with him anymore. His callused palms shushed
across the pages, pages, pages, binding—the only sound.
12
perfect fifths
He read them and, a week later, returned them. “They belong to

you,” he said in a letter written on the second notebook’s final pages.
Marcus had vowed to honor Jessica’s request to let her go, and let her be,
and he had shocked her by actually making good on that promise. Some
might puzzle for years trying to remember the final word exchanged with
an ex-lover. But no such ruminations have been necessary for Jessica,
because the last word from Marcus was definitively written in ink as the
closing to that final communiqué:
WHATEVER
WHATEVER, as he explained in that letter, was the double-meaning

irony that wrapped around his bicep in the form of a poorly executed
Chinese-character tattoo, one that Marcus had wanted to spell FOREVER
but that had gotten lost in translation. Since the return of those note-
books, since WHATEVER, Jessica hasn’t heard another word from him.
She has, however, heard the gossip.
He got into Princeton’s most prestigious secret society.
He failed out.
He won a Rhodes.
He lost his mind.
The most obstreperous rumors were inspired and spread by the usual
suspects, Pineville High alumni such as Sara D’Abruzzi-Glazer and
Scotty Glazer, whose social orbit barely extended beyond their home-
town since the birth of their third kid in as many years. And Manda
Powers, who (the last Jessica had heard) was couch-surfing around the
world all by herself and had an uncanny knack for bumping backpacks
with adventurous nomads who claimed to have met someone who met
someone who met someone from her suburban New Jersey hometown,
someone whose name is—What was it? Oh, right!—Marcus Flutie.
He’s fucking an eighteen-year-old freshgirl.
He’s fucking a forty-eight-year-old professor.
He’s not fucking anyone.
He’s engaged.
He’s gay.
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Megan McCafferty
The more legitimate updates were always provided by well-

intentioned friends and family members who mistakenly believed that
Jessica wanted to know what Marcus Flutie was up to. Like Paul Parlipi-
ano, who e-mailed to express his surprise to find himself hammering
alongside Marcus on a neighborhood rebuilding project in the Lower
Ninth Ward. Or Cinthia Wallace, who swore she saw him in the audi-
ence during the opening-night performance of the off-off-Broadway
musical satire of Bubblegum Bimbos and Assembly-Line Meatballers. Or
Jessica’s niece, Marin, who, apropos of nothing other than the fact that
she was a child and still begrudged the missed opportunity to be a flower
girl, occasionally asked, “Do you think Marcus has proposed to someone
else by now?” Or Marin’s mother, Jessica’s own sister, Bethany, who
didn’t have the naïveté of youth to account for answering “Oh, I hope
not,” followed by “But could you blame him if he has?”
He started drinking again.
He quit speaking again.
He started drugging again.
He quit cold turkey again.
Then there are those who indirectly court conjecture, like Bridget,
who sent links to Found.com asking, “Could this be a page from Marcus’s
journals that were stolen out of your car?” (To which Jessica always
answered no.) Or Percy, responding to the schlub whose NBA half-court
halftime marriage proposal was turned down on live TV, asked, “Jessica,
you tell me, how’s a man supposed to recover from a rejection like that?”
before being shoved into silence by Bridget. Or Len Levy, another one of
Jessica’s lovers (a number best described as threeish, or three and two
halves, the halves referring to two separate one-time-only nonpenetrative
lapses in judgment involving two separate men and therefore not equaling
a whole lover), who turned everything he thinks he knows about Jessica
and Marcus into a song titled “My Song Will Never Mean as Much (As
the One He Once Sang for You).” Despite college radio play and its cur-
rent status as the eighty-seventh-most-downloaded single on iTunes, this
other song turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because it is indeed
Marcus’s song (You, yes, you linger inside my heart / The same you who
stopped us before we could start . . .) that plays in Jessica’s head right now.
14
perfect fifths
He looks totally different.

He looks happy.
He looks tortured.
He looks exactly the same.
He looks as hot as he ever did.
Oh, no, he looks hotter than ever.
It is with a palpable measure of disquietude that Jessica acknowl-
edges that her dumbfounding full-body bender with Marcus has only
served to confirm the last and most superficial of these hypotheticals.
Was he coming or going? Jessica can’t stop herself from wondering. If
she had asked that single simple question, Marcus would have provided
an answer. And this information—any information—would have piqued
her curiosity and required her to ask more questions that she didn’t—
doesn’t—have time to ask.
Jessica rushes up to Gate C-88. A lone Clear Sky representative
named Sylvia is stationed alongside the velvet rope separating the termi-
nal tunnel from the plane on the tarmac.
“I made it!” Jessica exclaims.
Sylvia pinches a heavy-lip-lined smirk. The jetway door, as Jessica
can’t help but notice, is closed.
seven
T he baby-faced college senior bounds out of the bathroom less than
two minutes after he went in.
“Ready?” asks Natty.
Natty has been Marcus’s improbable best friend since they were ran-
domly assigned as roommates during their first year at Princeton Univer-
sity. Despite their difference in ages (five years), roots (Jersey Shore
suburbia versus Alabama antebellum), and modus operandi (get serious
versus get seriously laid) they have lived with—or near—each other ever
since. Natty knows Marcus in a way that is possible only when one is forced
15
Megan McCafferty
to share roughly 125 square feet of living space. Natty doesn’t like the
implications of his friend’s stricken expression, one that puts an unusual
strain on the peaceful facade for which Marcus has become known.
“Dude?” When his friend doesn’t answer, Natty sucker-punches him
in the sternum just hard enough to get his attention. “It wasn’t her being
called over the PA system, okay? It was someone else. So stop—”
“It was her,” Marcus interrupts, soothing circles into his chest with
his fingertips, still not taking his attention off Gate C-88.
Natty laughs too loudly, too eagerly, in the vain attempt to get Mar-
cus to see his own ridiculousness. “Do you seriously believe The Queen?”
The Queen. Marcus paid service to The Queen while in New
Orleans for what Natty likes to call a “humanitarian vacation”; it evokes
a certain Jolie-Pittesque selflessness that makes girls want to have sex
with him. And it isn’t untrue—Marcus persuaded Natty to spend the
useless reading period before final exams working to rebuild homes in
the still-devastated parts of the city. Even though they put in long days
of hammering, sawing, and standing around waiting for someone to tell
them what to do, Marcus and Natty still had more than enough free time
to devote their evenings and early mornings to living up to the city’s
unofficial motto—laissez les bon temps rouler.
After a few years of volunteering in the city made famous for its sor-
did decadence, Marcus is no longer content to sit elbow-to-elbow with
tourists in the French Quarter, the kind who consider it a hoot to order
an arm’s-length cocktail called the Hurricane Katrina (citrus vodka, blue
curaçao, spiced rum, Plymouth Gin, tequila, and apple vinegar, gar-
nished with lime) dreamed up by the more mercenary—or wickedly
funny, depending on your point of view—bartenders in town. And he
never matched Natty’s enthusiasm for slipping dollar bills to the titty-
tassel-twirling pros at the sex palace promising more “N’awlins Bounce
to the Ounce” (which, in turn, prompted their carnal rivals across the
street to promote “MORE N’awlins Booty Meat by the Pound”). Even the
novelty of the jazz clubs had worn off when Marcus noticed that he was
nodding along with the lazy behind-the-beat rhythms of the city’s take
on the blues, just like everyone else in the crowd. To him, it felt less like
collective pleasure than passive conformity.
16
perfect fifths
Marcus wanted to feel something real. He wanted to be taxi-driven

away from the city’s most famous streets, through the swampy morass of
the outlining parishes, to the temple of a voodoo priestess known only
as The Queen. As Marcus had been told by those who know, The
Queen was blessed (or cursed) with unrivaled gifts in the necromantic
arts, as well as widely considered to be the best of all such practitioners
of black magic in a city that boasted more licensed shamans than
schoolteachers. He was told that The Queen wasn’t much of a show-
woman, having dispensed with the ornamental masks, orgiastic dances,
and other tropes of the trade that were attractive to tourists. She didn’t
even advertise her talents, relying solely on word-of-mouth recommen-
dation. Her demeanor was brisk and no-nonsense, so much so that she
never let customers inside her home, and she always made it very clear
that she wanted nothing other than to get them off her porch as soon as
possible. A true artist, The Queen refused to take money from just any-
one, only from those who were approved by the Loa, or spirits who
watch over earth. Her services—divination, mostly, with some faith
healing and spell-casting on the side when the spirits moved her—could
not be validated by any on- or offline guidebook. But if the Loa vouched
for Marcus, The Queen would give him the most profound spiritual
reading he would ever receive . . . just by holding his hands.
It was this last bit that really sucked Marcus in. It was preposterous.
He was in on her shtick, and he knew that this out-of-the-way place was
as much of a tourist trap as any jazz bar or strip club in the French Quar-
ter, just one that required slightly more effort than a less adventurous
visitor would give. In fact, for that reason alone, his feeble quest for
authenticity was a cliché far worse than the French Quarter frat boys,
because at least the brothers of Sigma Chi weren’t puking in the alleys
under the pretense of keepin’ it real. And yet for someone who had spent
countless hours seeking enlightenment through silent meditation, even
a false promise of instantaneous truth was too much for Marcus to resist.
It should be noted that he had been drinking the night of his visit
to The Queen. After years of post-teen-in-rehab teetotaling, he had
reacquainted himself with alcohol in his freshman year of college at the
age of twenty-three. He didn’t indulge very often, and he never set out
17
Megan McCafferty
to get drunk, but his years of abstinence had affected his body’s ability to
metabolize booze, making him a lightweight, a cheap date. The disori-
enting buzz Marcus felt after one or two beers was similar to that which
would be expected from someone a foot shorter, fifty pounds lighter, and
female.
So it was in such a delicately soused state that Marcus paid audience
to The Queen. Even in retrospect, he couldn’t decide whether a response
to the alcohol or a genuine spiritual crisis had brought him to this neigh-
borhood of off-the-map shotgun shacks, some of which appeared to have
been semi-condemned since the first bitch—Hurricane Betsy—hit in
1965. But once he found himself in front of The Queen’s one-story
home, painted a magisterial purple worthy of her reputation, he was glad
he had listened to the NOLA local who had tipped him off earlier that
afternoon over the spray of dust exploding from the circular saw. Natty
was not impressed, however, and chose to stay inside the idling cab so
the driver wouldn’t take off without them.
“We ah gone dah hee-yah,” Natty twanged. His accent always came
back whenever he drank too much or spent time below the Mason-
Dixon Line. On this evening, both qualifications had been met.
“We are not going to die here,” Marcus assured him as he gingerly
made his way up the battered stairs leading to a lopsided doorstep. He
was about to ring the bell when he heard the metal-on-metal slide of
multiple locks. The inside door swung open, first releasing the sweet
pungency of dried sassafras and cigar smoke, then revealing a Creole
woman in a faded polka-dot housecoat who didn’t look a day over 150
years old.
“Doggone it,” The Queen grumbled. “ ’Nother one.”
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Marcus said, barely overcoming his urge
to bow at her feet.
“Fa sho,” she replied. “’S’what y’all say.”
She contemplated Marcus through the sliced-up screen door, appar-
ently waiting for word from the Loa as to whether he passed muster. He
stood in silence, watching hummingbirdlike moths hurling themselves
into the irresistible lamplight, flinching whenever one met its end with a
metallic ding!
18
perfect fifths
“Yeah, you right,” agreed The Queen, though it wasn’t clear if she
was speaking to Marcus or the all-knowing undead. She pointed to a
long slit in the screen and said, “Give it here, dawlin’.”
Dutifully, Marcus pushed through five twenties, as he had been
instructed before he came.
She counted the bills, then slipped them into the front pocket of
her housecoat. The fabric was so faded that Marcus could still see the
face of wild-haired Andrew Jackson on the outermost bill. Then The
Queen gestured for Marcus to slip his hands through the same open
space in the torn screen. She closed her eyes as she took his hands in
hers, hands that felt not unlike Jessica’s grandmother’s hands, or those
of any of the other elderly patients he used to take care of when he did
community service at Silver Meadows Assisted Living Facility—fragile,
like decaying paper or the wings of those suicidal moths. And it struck
him as odd at the time that he should think of Gladdie, someone he
hadn’t thought of in years. He remembered the last time he had visited
Jessica’s grandmother before she died—she had beaten him at hearts,
her favorite card game, by shooting the moon—and then, of course, he
thought of Gladdie’s wake, when he had boldly followed a grieving Jes-
sica into the bathroom, locked the door behind them, and kissed her—
hungrily, sloppily—for the very first time—
The Queen suddenly let go. No more than ten seconds had passed.
“Y’all gone get run ovah,” she said.
“Run over?” asked Marcus, making sure he had heard her correctly.
“By a car?”
“Noooooo.” She cackled. “Mo’ trouble den dat.”
“A bus?”
“Her,” she said with emphasis, the power of the pronoun in full
effect.
Marcus’s mouth dropped open. The Queen’s front door slammed
shut.
“Git off mah poach,” she shouted from inside. “I’m fixin’ to watch
’Merican Ah-dol.”
Natty taunted Marcus for the rest of the trip. “A hundred dollars
wasted! That’s ten Hurricane Katrinas! Or one hay-yell of a lap dance!”
19
Megan McCafferty
Now, back in the airport, Natty still spits with laughter. “Dude, seri-
ously. You believe The Queen?”
“I didn’t,” Marcus says, angling his head to the side and down so he
can look Natty in the eye. “Not until Jessica Darling ran over me while
you were in there taking a piss.”
Natty still assumes this must be the setup for a practical joke,
though he’s hard-pressed to come up with a reason why Marcus would
joke about this, about her, of all subjects. “Oh, come on. You expect me
to believe that? Try harder . . .”
“She was standing right there, where you are right now,” says Mar-
cus, first pointing at the floor under Natty’s flip-flops before lifting his
finger to gesture across the concourse. “She’s over there, in black.”
Natty looks to Gate C-88. There is a female who, from behind, at a
distance of about a hundred yards, vaguely fits the physical description of
the girl he met once over three years ago. “Are you sure it’s her?”
“I talked to her, Natty,” Marcus replies. “We talked.”
Just then the girl in question twitches a glance over her shoulder,
and Natty must concede: Yes, it’s definitely her.
“Oh, fuck,” Natty groans.
“Indeed.”
“So,” Natty says. “What did she have to say for herself?”
An apprehensive smile brings relief to his afflicted face. Marcus
removes his thin wire-rimmed glasses, cautiously rubs the lenses with an
untucked shirttail, then puts them back on again. He surrenders a sad
laugh. Then, finally, answers.
“Not enough.”
eight
I
“
made it!” Jessica repeats triumphantly, thrusting her boarding pass at
Sylvia. “The plane is still here!”
20
perfect fifths
Sylvia barely glances at the document. “Yes, ma’am,” she says. “But
we have completed the final boarding of this aircraft. The jetway door is
closed.”
Jessica doesn’t know what’s more troubling: that the jetway door is
closed? Or that she looks old enough to qualify for “ma’am” status?
Either way, she has to stay on Sylvia’s good side if she has any hope of
getting on the plane and staying out of the airport detention center for
problem passengers.
“But the plane is right there,” Jessica says, desperation creeping into
her voice despite her best efforts to keep calm. “And I’ve got my board-
ing pass.”
Sylvia is no-nonsense. When she shakes her head, her sprayed
blond flip moves as a single unit; not one of the hundreds of thou-
sands of individual hairs has the audacity to stray. “We have com-
pleted the final boarding of this aircraft. The jetway door is closed.”
Her tone is like an automated recording, unchanged from the first time
she said it.
“But I’m just one person—”
In that moment of weakness and doubt, Jessica half swivels her
head. It’s an almost unconscious impulse, too quick to register anything
or anyone behind her.
“Once the jetway door is closed, it stays closed.” Sylvia claps her
hands together to illustrate her point. Her nails sparkle with the same
opalescence as her lips, both painted an infantilizing pink that coordi-
nates with her powder-blue Clear Sky uniform only in the sense that
they are hues best left to gender-specific bibs and diaper bags. “It would
be against TSA regulations to allow any passenger to board this aircraft,”
she briskly insists, her smile tightening with every word. “We always
advise our passengers to provide adequate time to—”
“I did provide adequate time! I was held up at security by a stark-
raving madwoman trying to smuggle . . .”
Sylvia’s smile is frozen and synthetic, like a plastic-flavored Popsi-
cle; she is clearly bracing herself for the tirade of passenger complaints
against the incompetent Transportation Security Administration, the
21
Megan McCafferty
inconvenient Newark Liberty International Airport, the inhospitality of

Clear Sky airlines, the indignities of air travel in general, none of which
she can solve herself. But Jessica stops midsentence, distracted by a
blurry movement in her peripheral vision. It’s the plane, of course, taxi-
ing away from the gate and toward the runway. It’s her flight, Clear Sky
Flight 1884 with nonstop service to St. Thomas, the one she can’t miss.
And it’s leaving without her.
Was Marcus coming or going? she wonders again. And this time,
when she turns her head, it’s deliberate. She looks long enough to con-
firm—he’s gone—that she’s missed her opportunity to get the answer.
Jessica’s cell phone comes to life inside her bag, and she jumps—
jumps!—as if she just discovered a venomous snake rattling around in
there. She gets ahold of the vibrating device, then fumbles with the but-
tons for a few surprised moments before confirming that it isn’t a phone
call from Pineville but a short video from the Virgin Islands.
“Woo-hoo!” shouts Bridget, hair whipping up and airborne like
patriotic yellow ribbons as she leaps in front of an impossibly blue sea.
“Woo-hoo! We’re getting married tomorrow!”
The tiny screen goes blurry as Percy turns the lens on himself. “I’m
marrying a freak,” he says. “A beautiful freak.” His grin takes up the
whole screen.
The action returns to Bridget, now turning floppy cartwheels across
the sand. “This is paradise! Just wait until you get here! You won’t
believe it!”
Percy swivels to catch Hope photographing Bridget with a very
large and expensive-looking camera. Hope realizes she’s being filmed,
goes cartoonishly cross-eyed, then shouts something that can’t be heard
over the rumbling wind and the waves. Then, without an official sign-
off, the screen goes blank.
Jessica covers her face with her hands, breathes in and out. Sylvia,
who has been waiting professionally if not patiently all this time, clears
her throat.
“So,” Jessica says, revealing what she hopes resembles the face of
composure. “What do I do now?”
22
MEGAN McCAFFERTY is the author of the hit novels Sloppy

Firsts, Second Helpings, and the New York Times bestsellers Charmed
Thirds and Fourth Comings. She lives in New Jersey with her
husband and son. To find out more about Megan and the Jessica
Darling series, visit www.MeganMcCafferty.com.
To purchase a copy of
perfect fifths
visit one of these online retailers:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Borders
IndieBound
Powell’s Books
Random House

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Copyright © 2009 by Megan McCafferty

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Printed in the United States of America

For all the readers who have cared enough

In our artificial civilization many young people at twenty-five are still

part one: before

She recalls how she used to silently mouth spur-of-the-moment

flight—as they have forgiven so many of her unintentional slights and

and the fiberglass Betty Boop sculpture boop-boop-be-beckoning cus-

enough to understand how the powers of his masochistic imagination

gold-foil box of gourmet chocolates. MISSING HER. The string of black

“If—” she starts again, but doesn’t finish.

I confess, yes, our fall was all my fault

amid the chaos on the concourse was an accident waiting to happen.

He read them and, a week later, returned them. “They belong to

WHATEVER, as he explained in that letter, was the double-meaning

The more legitimate updates were always provided by well-

He looks totally different.

Marcus wanted to feel something real. He wanted to be taxi-driven

inconvenient Newark Liberty International Airport, the inhospitality of

MEGAN McCAFFERTY is the author of the hit novels Sloppy

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