The Mall - Megan McCafferty Page 0,1

spleen had swollen to the size of “a small spaghetti squash,” which was an oddly specific gourd to choose from all of the more common vegetables he could have selected. After I was hooked up to various IVs and my temperature finally went down and I wasn’t in immediate danger of dying, Dr. Baumann said mine was the most severe case of mononucleosis he’d ever seen in forty years of practicing medicine.

“Overachiever,” I’d rasped. “Even when it comes to viral infections.”

Each word was more excruciating than the last, as if Dr. Baumann had removed my vocal chords with rusty garden shears, scrubbed them with bleach, and reattached them to the back of my throat with six blindfolded sharpshooter blasts of a staple gun.

“That’s not funny,” Troy had replied.

I disagreed. It was a little funny. If anyone knew anything about overachieving, it was us. We were the couple with the plan. The boy and girl Most Likely to Succeed, as voted by our Pineville High School classmates and forever immortalized in the yearbook superlatives. Troy and I studied hard—together—to get into our dream schools—together. I was set to attend Barnard College in the fall where I’d major in biological and biomedical sciences en route to med school. Troy would be right across the street at 116th and Broadway, an econ major at Columbia with both eyes on business school. We thought it very mature of us to attend different schools within the same university system. Our parents would cover tuition, but Troy and I were responsible for earning money for books and any nonacademic purchases very loosely described as “incidentals” that to me were anything but. It was all part of the plan.

We passed the One-Hour Fotomat where I would’ve gotten all my pictures from prom and graduation developed if I hadn’t been too sick to attend either of those events. Mono wasn’t fun any time, but it particularly sucked in June of my senior year. Troy made me feel better about missing prom by reminding me how anticlimactic it was, as these things predictably were.

“Prom only matters for those who don’t have anything better to look forward to,” Troy had said. “If you can’t go, I won’t go either.”

Of course, Troy was the type of boyfriend who would offer to stay home on prom night in solidarity. But I wouldn’t hear of it. He’d already bought the tickets, rented a tux, and put a nonrefundable deposit on a limo shared with a small group of friends. Plus, we both assumed it was only a matter of time before his own symptoms developed. So I stoically urged him to live his life before he was struck down.

I wasn’t disappointed about prom. Graduation was another story. If I hadn’t gotten sick, would I have been the senior class speaker instead of Troy? I was happy for him, of course, but while my classmates were celebrating in top-down, cherry-red convertibles and skinny-dipping in pristine swimming pools, I was building igloos out of blankets and waiting for my internal organs to shrink back to normal size.

Troy and I slowed down in front of a pyramid of Billboard Hot 100 CDs displayed in the window of Sam Goody. Among all the usual, commercially successful but terrible suspects—Color Me Badd, Poison, Wilson Phillips—I was pleased and quite surprised to see a poster promoting Morrissey’s newest release. The shot was taken from below, the photographer on his knees, the Moz all in black, rising up against the backdrop of a cloud, arms outstretched in a way that, for me—and I wasn’t religious at all—evoked a priest performing a benediction.

“I’ll drown myself in the Wishing Well if we don’t get tickets,” I said solemnly, referring to the chlorinated fountain where shoppers literally threw their money away. Pennies, mostly. But still.

Troy picked up the pace, easily overtaking a pack of power walkers. My wobbly legs struggled to keep up.

“It would be fun for us to see his show in New York City,” I said. “Not, like, fun fun, because, you know, Morrissey, but, like, depressing fun.”

Troy stopped so abruptly, his curls quivered. He looked to the Piercing Pagoda’s lone employee for reinforcement, but she was too preoccupied with a paperback Danielle Steel novel to take any interest in the teen relationship drama playing out right in front of her.

At last, his innocent blue eyes met mine.

“Let’s just get through the summer.”

Those were the final words I heard before taking a violent blast of cucumber-melon body spray

right

to

the

friggin’

face.

2

BAD HUMORS

In the immediate