Free Charmed Thirds by Megan McCafferty

point of view. And authenticity is what
True
is all about, albeit in a snarky, po-mo kind of way.
    “Listen up, my chickadee,” she said as she showed me to my cubicle. “I want your ideas. I want to hear from you what it means to be from the state that is the proverbial armpit of the nation. Brainstorm a bit and come back to my office after lunch.”
    So for the next two hours, I sat in my empty cube thinking about New Jersey.
    Like how in kindergarten I was proud that our state was number one in population density until I found out what population density meant. Or how Kevin Smith is a brilliant ideas man but absolutely sucks at execution because all his movies look like they were filmed on a PlaySkool View-Master. Or how we host the Miss America pageant every year but our state’s delegate hasn’t worn the crown since 1984, and only then because the real winner, Vanessa Williams, Miss New York, had creepy lesbo photos come out in
Penthouse
and was stripped of her title, so the first runner-up, Miss New Jersey, Suzette Charles (who was
also
black, which was weird because Miss America never had a black first runner-up before, let alone a black winner) was required to take over for the disgraced Miss America and (according to my mom, who is an amateur Miss America historian) had only two weeks to prep for her appearance in the pageant and had really let herself go because it’s not like she’d been making a lot of personal appearances as Miss New Jersey/First Runner-Up or anything so she had chunked up and looked not at all like a Miss America should when she crowned the winner for 1985 (who, incidentally, was a Mormon from Utah chosen by the judges to avoid another creepy lesbo photo scandal) and it was very embarrassing for her and now hardly anyone remembers Suzette Charles, but Vanessa Williams is probably the most famous Miss America ever, which, to me, seemed like an apt metaphor of our state’s inferior-to-New-York complex, but I hadn’t really worked out all the allegorical details when Tyra emerged from her office with a bullhorn.
    “Go home, chickadees!” she said, her voice painfully amplified, even for me, and I wasn’t hungover. “I’m too tuckered out to work. I declare the day after my birthday an official holiday from now on.”
    Cheers erupted from around the room.
    “Do you want my ideas?” I asked Tyra.
    “Save them for tomorrow,” she said as she skipped out the door.
    That was good news. It gave me all night to come up with pitches worthy of the magazine I loved. I was almost kind of relieved that Marcus was gone, because I could just hole myself up in the bedroom and work. Imagine my shock when I returned to the brownstone to find him sitting on the Oriental rug in the living room building a LEGO castle with Marin.
    “Marcus! What are you still doing here?”
    Marin crawled into Marcus’s lap. “Bethany asked me to stay.”
    “You hung out with my sister all day?” I don’t think
I’ve
ever hung out with my sister all day.
    “Well, Marin was here, too.”
    “PEE! POO!” Marin yelled with delight before burying her face in Marcus’s shoulder.
    Bethany entered the room with the phone to her ear, finishing up what was probably her tenth phone call of the day to G-Money. “Okay . . . okay . . . sure . . . ,” she said. “Okay . . . Will do! Sure . . . Okay . . . I love you!”
    All of her phone conversations with her husband sound like this, and there were a lot of them. Since he was the co-owner of the Papa D’s/Wally D’s franchise, I didn’t quite understand why he had to personally oversee the operations of each and every new location. Couldn’t he hire some underling to do it for him? I said as much to him in our first and only conversation we’ve had since I’ve been here.
    “Jessie,” he responded with stoic condescension, “this isn’t about opening up another store. It’s about my commitment to brand penetration.”
    Then his Town Car honked outside and he