Perfect Fifths Read Online Free PDF Page A

deliberate. She looks long enough to confirm—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 buttons 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!"

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    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?"
    n ne
    Marcus is peeking out from behind a cylindrical floor-to-ceiling metal column roughly seventy-five yards away from Gate C-88.
    A hand yanks at his shirttail. "Let's go."
    Marcus shoves it away. "I'm just waiting to see what happens to her."
    'Ten more seconds, and you've crossed the line between bittersweet reunion and restraining order."
    Marcus watches Jessica's plane pull away.
    "And I'm crouched behind you because ... ?" Natty asks.
    "Because she might recognize you."
    "I doubt it," Natty snorts, standing up to his full height, which, in truth, isn't that high off the ground. "She only met me that one time. Remember? Right before she
    rejected you. Remember that? Remember when you thought you wanted to get married at twenty-fucking-three? Remember when you proposed and she said no?
    Remember how our room reeked like sweaty balls because you were too depressed to pick up a bar of goddamn soap and get in the shower... ?"
    "Yeah, Natty," Marcus says. "I remember."
    "Good times."
    Marcus watches as Jessica palm-heel massages her eye sockets, ignoring the Clear Sky Airlines rep drawing an air map with her fingers. When she's finished,
    Jessica takes a whole-body breath, one visible from seventy-five yards away, and sets out in their direction.
    "Duck!" Marcus whisper-yells.
    Natty instinctively dips behind Marcus and feels like a sycophantic jackass for doing so. Yet in deference to his friend, Natty waits until Jessica passes before commencing with the brotherly emasculation. "Have you lost your balls?"
    "Calm down, TaterTot," Marcus commands sotto voce.

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    Natty will not calm down. He is outraged by this turn of events. "What are you? Twenty-six going on twelve? Wanna write her a note asking her to check the box if she still likes you? I'll pass it to her during recess!" Natty is just getting started. "This is not acceptable.
    Not at all. Not from the same guy who rode his anthropology professor so hard she lost tenure."
    Marcus ignores this last comment especially, then waits until Jessica turns a corner before addressing his friend. "I liked you better before you got rid of your accent." Natty's parents had paid a vocal instructor two hundred dollars an hour to "deregionalize" their son's speech so he'd be taken more seriously in the realm of international business. "When you were all