Getting Over Jack Wagner by Elise Juska Page A

Girl”—then bust out of town with me on the back of his “broken wings.”
    Â 
    In retrospect, that Thursday night had a quality of doom about it. Maybe it was the fact that Halloween was in two weeks and I didn’t have even a costume idea. Maybe it was the fact that Hannah had officially kissed Eric Sommes (who she described only as “kind of mushy”) and I officially had not. Maybe it was the fact that the student council election was the next day and Ivan was in our kitchen fumbling through his campaign speech while Camilla yelled things like “Enunciate!” and “Where’s the eye contact?” and “Convince me, Ivan! Convince me!”
    Whatever the reason, that night Mom agreed to let me watch Entertainment Tonight. It wasn’t her first choice—she would have preferred Wheel of Fortune, with bubbly Vanna and good-natured Pat and ceramic wildlife for three hundred dollars—but tell me, what was not to love? ET had mansions. Fashions. Tropical vacations. California stars with California cars. It was a different world from the one we lived in, and that was why I liked it. Maybe it was something like the world my dad lived in, which I pictured revolving around a new chair, a better chair, maybe a bright chaise longue complete with a) umbrellas, b) tequilas, c) mystery women with d) mystery cats, or e) all of the above.
    EXCLUSIVE BEHIND THE SCENES PHOTOS! the headline flashed. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his face appear, then disappear, next to a smiling, pretty blond woman. My heart started pumping wildly. A NEW BEAUTY IN PORT CHARLES! NEXT…ON ET!
    Cut to a coffee commercial. My stomach dipped and spun as coffee plinked happily from an automatic drip. Had it been him? Definitely not. It couldn’t have been. It was another headline, a different headline, an exclusive-behind-the-scenes-something-else. I didn’t breathe until ET was back on screen.
    â€œOn TV’s hit daytime soap General Hospital, some guys can have any woman they want,” said the female voice-over, smooth as whipped cream. “And hunky Frisco Jones—played by real -life hunk Jack Wagner—is no exception. But when a blond beauty joins the gang in Port Charles this season, Frisco will see that one special lady is all he needs…”
    It was the kiss of death: the lyrical reference.
    The next sixty seconds of my life felt like someone banging my head against a wall. A painful, mocking burst of a photo montage: blond hair, sparkling blue eyes, big white smiles, a quick pan of the GH set. And then—poof!—it all disappeared.
    It happened so fast I wasn’t sure it had happened at all.
    But it had, of course. Jack Wagner had a new woman in his life. She was blond and pretty and perfect, of course. She would one day become his wife, of course. Of course, of course. It was a moment of raw, bare truth, the first in a lifetime of raw, bare truths about rock stars I’d wish I had never known. And for every one of them, from that moment on, there would be that same “of course” at the end of the sentence: a mixture of shock and expectation, disappointment and inevitability.
    Within minutes, I was sobbing so hard I couldn’t catch my breath. I felt Camilla hold a glass of juice to my lips, but I was crying too hard to drink it. Ivan kept repeating, “Is there anything I can do? Is there anything I can do?” When I felt my mother touch my shoulder, I shook her hand away. I ran upstairs, locked my door, ripped the posters from my walls, threw myself facedown on my bed and cried because I’d lost him.

3
best friends
    SIDE A
    â€œRunning to Stand Still”—U2
    â€œDreams”—Fleetwood Mac
    â€œDriving Sideways”—Aimee Mann
    â€œGirlfriend in a Coma”—The Smiths
    â€œEveryday I Write the Book”—Elvis Costello
    A fter deserting Karl and his lasagna, I feel too bad about what