Sloppy Firsts (Jessica Darling, #1)

by Megan McCafferty

“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.