Sloppy Firsts (Jessica Darling, #1)

by Megan McCafferty

foreword

Hi. Megan McCafferty here, author of SLOPPY FIRSTS. I hate to derail your attention from Re-becca Serle’s gorgeous foreword to this new edition, but this seemed like perfect place to in-troduce myself. Perhaps you’re going back for a nostalgic reread of an adolescent favorite. Or maybe you’re meeting Jessica Darling, Marcus Flutie and the world of Pineville High School for the first time. Either way, I’m thrilled you’ve decided to pick up a book originally published 20 years ago! Keep going! I’ll be chiming in with all sorts of Pop-Up Video-style factoids. (And yes, that VH1 reference was specifically chosen to get you in a turn-of-the-new-millennium state of mind.)

Tonight I’ve been thinking about the mosaic Hope gave me the night she U-hauled ass out of Pineville.

Before SLOPPY FIRSTS, I’d never written anything longer than a 25-page college term paper. I had a bunch of semi-autobiographical short stories I’d written over the years for various work-shops and was repeatedly encouraged by classmates and teachers to turn them into a novel—something I had absolutely no idea how to do. These stories followed a lot of funny characters making wry observations about the daily indignities of teendom on the Jersey Shore, but lacked an overall plot. More important, there was no emotional core. Why would anyone care about these characters? In thinking back on my own adolescent life, I could pinpoint THE defining event that changed everything for me: When my best friend moved away mid-way through freshman year. She moved less than 100—not 1,000—miles away. Still far enough to qualify as a long-distance phone call though. And when you’re fifteen years old and don’t have a drivers license 100 miles is a universe apart. My best friend’s departure left me feeling utterly (ahem) hope-less and alone. Over the next three and half years, I made choices—both good and bad—I def-initely wouldn’t have made if she had stayed. “Write what you know” right? So that’s why we meet Jessica Darling at the post-Hope crossroads of her high school life.

When you say too much about anything important, it always ends up sounding more trivial than it is. Words trash it.

Quite an ironic observation by a character who spills hundreds of thousands of words over five books. It’s so much easier for Jessica to go on and on about meaningless stuff, so she spends most of her time obsessing about meaningless stuff. Without much practice, she’s ill-equipped to express herself with snark-free sincerity. Marcus’s “conversational constructs” successfully disarm Jessica because they are so silly. Together, Jessica and Marcus find depth through triviality.

After all, you can only be in a bad mood for so long before you have to face up to the fact that it isn’t a bad mood at all. It’s just your sucky personality.

So I’m asked all the time if Jessica Darling is me, how much of the story happened to me in high school and IS MARCUS FLUTIE REAL??? I always answer the same way: Everything in the SLOPPY FIRSTS was rooted in truth…until I started lying my butt off. Making stuff up is the beauty of writing fiction. I could never write a memoir because my actual teenage years would not nearly be as entertaining to the reader because I spent an inordinate about of time listening to The Smiths, waiting for my bangs to grow out and making collages out of the cut-out pages of SASSY magazines. Not the stuff of riveting fiction. That said, this line comes directly from one of my journal entries. I can’t verify for sure what one because I filled dozens of notebooks between the ages of 10 and 25 but this sounds like my cranky 11th grade self.

All subjects are the same. I memorize notes for a test, spew it, ace it, then forget it. What makes this scary for the future of our country is that I’m in the tip-top percentile on every standardized test. I’m a model student with a very crappy attitude about learning.

I take it as a huge compliment that Jessica feels so real to readers they assume she’s me. Even my own mom was guilty. “MEGAN BETH! I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU URINATED IN A YO-GURT CUP!” (For the record: I did not urinate in a yogurt cup.) Jessica Darling and I certainly have a lot in common. We both grew up in suburban New Jersey, suffered when our best friends moved away, ran track, wrote in journals, worked on the Boardwalk—just to name a few similarities. Academically, I also had a near perfect GPA and racked up the end of year awards. There is one distinct difference between me and my fictional counterpart: I suuuuuucked at standardized tests. My SAT score actually went DOWN 30 points when I took it a second time. How is that even possible? So unlike Jessica, I never considered applying to the Ivy League as a high school senior because I didn’t have the stats to get in. (I transferred to Columbia University two years later but I’ll get more into that when I annotate SECOND HELP-INGS and CHARMED THIRDS.)

This is my new hobby. I watch my life depart minute by minute. I anticipate the end of everything and anything—a conversation, a class, track practice, darkness—only to be left with more clock-watching to take its place. I’m continually waiting for something better that never comes. Maybe it would help if I knew what I wanted.

Oof. Of all the passages in SLOPPY FIRSTS, this is probably the one that most accurately sum-marizes my attitude about high school. I was deeply unhappy. I desperately tried to distract myself from what I can now recognize as undiagnosed depression by staying as busy as possi-ble: year round varsity athlete, drama club, choir, newspaper, Mock Trial, Key Club etc. etc. etc. At best, these activities inspired a genuine sense of accomplishment. But these proud moments were fleeting. More often than not, everything I did felt like a placeholder until my “real life” began in college. It took me a while to figure out that the joy should be in the work itself, not in the promise that any endeavor will ultimately lead to something better. Whatev-er “better” even means. No wonder my favorite part of my life of a writer is the actual writ-ing—even when it’s hard.

The way I see it, there’s only one racing strategy that matters. It’s the one I run by: Get in the lead and don’t let anyone pass you.

Though Jessica is speaking literally here about winning races, it’s also a metaphor for how she approaches all areas of her life at Pineville High. Her insistence of staying “ahead” of every-one is why she’s so thrown when Marcus Flutie matches her stride for stride.

Girls will get together just to get together. Guys need an activity as an excuse. Otherwise it’s too emo for them to handle.

This is a perfect example of a line we changed from the original text because it’s not 2001 an-ymore. Nothing is lost in the edit. The joke still works. Hopefully all of the revisions in these new editions are similarly effective.

Right now I feel guilty to be alive. Why? Because I’m wasting it. I’ve been given this life, and all I do is mope it away. What’s worse is, I am totally aware of how ridiculous I am. It would be a lot easier if I believed I was the center of the universe, because then I wouldn’t know any better not to make a big deal out of everything. I know how small my problems are, yet that doesn’t stop me from obsessing about them. I have to stop doing this.

SLOPPY FIRSTS is presented as Jessica Darling’s private journal. She’s unloading all the snarky observations and cringe-worthy confessions she’s unable to share with anyone else—even Hope. There is nothing objective about what we’re reading. It is entirely from Jessica’s myopic 16-year-old point of view and her favorite topic is herself. She is far from perfect and says and does things that were downright painful for me as her creator to put her through. Readers have told me her flaws make her relatable. I agree. But it’s Jessica’s self-awareness—most acutely reflected in this passage—that makes her relentless self-absorption tolerable.

How do other people get happy? I look at people laughing and smiling and enjoying themselves and try to get inside their heads. How do Bridget, Manda, and Sara do it? Or Pepé? Or everyone but me? Why does everything I see bother me? Why can’t I just get over these daily wrongdoings? Why can’t I just move on and make the best of what I’ve got? I wish I knew.

In 2018 I adapted SLOPPY FIRSTS into a stage play that made its debut by the Teen Perfor-mance Company at Round House Theater in Bethesda, Maryland. This is one of the longer pas-sages that I took almost word for word from the book. Most of the play is pretty snappy, so this monologue provides one of the most powerful hear-a-pin drop moments. As a former teenage drama person, I’d love to see more performances of the show. If you are in any way involved with youth/school theater and are interested in staging a production, contact me at megan@meganmccafferty.com with SLOPPY FIRSTS ON STAGE as the subject.

“That’s why I love this car,” he said. “It’s festooned with all the trappings of the elderly.”

This is a verbatim quote from real life. My boyfriend said these exact words to me when he was 17 and I was 19 and I have never forgotten how hard I laughed. We’ve been married for 20+ years and he still makes me laugh. That’s my idea of romance. My husband is not Marcus Flutie.

“Did you know the average American spends six months of their life waiting for red lights to turn green?” “What?” “Six months wasted, waiting for permission to move on,” he said. “Uh-huh.” “Think of all the other stuff you could do with that time.” I was totally confused. “In the car?” “In your life,” he said. “Oh.”

So here’s the deal with Marcus Flutie. There is no real life Marcus Flutie. I’m sorry to disap-point you. However, as with all characters in all my work, Marcus Flutie was inspired by real life. He’s an amalgam of several intoxicating/infuriating young men from my high school and college years combined with a generous dose of my imagination. However, this passage, and Marcus Flutie’s tendency to share random bits of trivia as a “conversational construct” did come directly from one of those real life guys. In my junior and senior years he’d call me up and throw out an odd, out-of-nowhere question just to see how I’d react to his randomness. He wouldn’t even say hello. Days, weeks, sometimes months would go by in between these late night calls. He had a girlfriend and I had a boyfriend and the unpredictability and illicit tension of it all really made those last two years of high school worth showing up for.

FALL We are Adam and Eve born out of chaos called creation

Like many melodramatic, depressed teenage writer-types, I went through a Sylvia Plath phase in my junior and senior years of high school. I wrote a lot of “deep” and “dark” poetry with tor-tured metaphors. (More on this topic when Jessica arrives at summer arts camp in SECOND HELPINGS.) When I realized it would be so Marcus to communicate with Jessica through poet-ry, I had plenty of my own terribly overwrought material for inspiration. I borrowed the “chaos called creation” line from a bit of juvenilia then really leaned in on the Adam and Eve theme. Marcus’s intent with this poem is to tempt Jessica into possibly having sex with him and I had fun channelling that horny energy. I guess FALL succeeds on that level because readers seem to be…um…really, really into it?

“Well, tonight, I’m going to take you on a tour. A tour of what I like to call the Five Wonders of Pineville, the strangest landmarks our town has to offer.”

The Five Wonders of Pineville were inspired by real landmarks in and near my hometown. In-trepid readers have made pilgrimages to see these monuments. As of this writing, the Cham-pagne of Propane, Car on the Roof, and Oft-Beheaded Dinosaur are all still there. Unfortunate-ly, The Park That Time Forgot was remembered and renovated. Most tragic of all, an SUV veered off route 9, jumped the curb and crashed into Der Wunder Weiner. Thankfully there were no fatalities, but the legendary parking lot hot dog stand was totally destroyed.

“Fuck you.” “What?” he asked, eyes blinking madly. I had never said Fuck you straight to someone’s face before.

This is a powerful moment for Jessica. She’s never said these words out loud, straight to someone’s face before. The intensity of her hatred for Marcus in this moment is as powerful as the lust she was feeling for him in the moments leading up to his confession about Hope. Many readers were annoyed with me for not providing Jessica and Marcus with a ro-mantic climax. (Um…no pun intended?) But real life is messy, especially in adolescence. And a perfect ending would’ve undermined the whole point of the book—a book very deliberately titled SLOPPY FIRSTS.

A Note from the Author

Self-reflection is always a positive—if sometimes uncomfortable—process. Language and so-cial mores have changed dramatically in the twenty years since SLOPPY FIRSTS was published. Recent newcomers to the series have rightfully criticized some of what I (via Jessica) wrote as outdated or outright offensive. Though the heart of the story endures, it was clear to me that this objectionable material should not. I cannot stress enough how extraordinarily grateful I am for the opportunity to evolve as writer—and a person—in these pages. I think Jessica Dar-ling would approve.