This is the fifth of six character profiles to introduce you to the group of friends in Beautiful & Terrible Things, about which reader Erica D. says:
“This book reminded me of [the TV show] Friends, but with a more diverse set of characters that dealt with major issues…I absolutely fell in love with the six friends.”
Character Profile: Jess
Meet Jessica Delgado: Jess is an ambitious, often tactless 30-year-old straight woman of Columbian descent, who works as a corporate accountant and has been friends with Xander and Sunny since college.
What She Represents: Our ambition
Personality in Brief: The Executive
Personality in More Detail: Jess does better with numbers than with words and interpersonal communications. While caring, she is often so blunt that she’s tactless. And she’s so into efficiency that she refers to her friends by their first initials, i.e. Xander is “X” and Charley is “C”.
She is a second-generation Colombian-American, her parents having emigrated to the U.S. as adults before Jess was born. But she pushes away her heritage thinking that passing as white will help her career at the city’s biggest real estate development company.
Her Challenges, Hopes & Dreams: Jess’s focus is one-hundred-percent on her career and someday becoming a Chief Financial Officer for a major company.
What Others Say
How the Friends Describe Jess:
Charley: An attractive woman with short, asymmetrical brown hair and a huge smile descended the steps to the driveway. She wore a sleeveless red blouse and black Capri pants.
Terrance: Jessica had intense brown eyes and subtly highlighted short hair that reached to the bottom of her earlobe on the left and to her chin on the right. Olive skin, strong eyebrows, a perfect nose, rosy lips, and a cleft in her chin combined for a striking visage.
Xander: Being a raving capitalist and having a big heart are not mutually exclusive.
What Jess Says
Quotable Quotes:
Other than Xander and Sunny, all her friends were married, getting married, pregnant, getting pregnant, or recently pregnant. Jess did want a husband and kids someday. Just not yet.
“I’m not denying my heritage. It’s just not relevant to everyday life.”
“I don’t waste time hanging out with people I don’t like.”
“Why do I always have to be the only practical one here?”
Excerpt: Jessica
Jessica Delgado had a choice to make: which of her three standard breakup reasons to give Thomas—a sought-after investment banker, one of the city’s most eligible bachelors, and her Caribbean holiday companion for the last ten days.
Just as they touched down on American soil, Thomas casually announced he wanted to make their thirteen-week-old relationship exclusive. Jess had busied herself with her carry-on items, as if suddenly her pocketbook and computer bag had unorganized themselves. Now, options revolved in her head like the baggage carousel she and Thomas stood before. She calculated having twenty minutes at most to make her decision. Not ideal for someone used to digesting numbers and facts ad nauseum before recommending a course of action.
Telling the truth—that her focus remained solidly on her career for two more years minimum—had proved frustratingly ineffective with the last few men, who acted as if they knew her better than she knew herself. Right. Telling the man she simply wasn’t ready to commit was futile. He would say he’d hang on until she was ready. But she refused to continue a relationship in which the parties’ objectives weren’t aligned.
That left option number three, the strategy with the highest success rate of late.
“I’ve met someone else,” she blurted as her brown-and-black patterned suitcase plowed through the heavy plastic fringe separating outside from in. Thomas turned to her, mouth open, eyes hurt, luggage forgotten. She jutted out her lower lip and blew a puff of air up to shift her long side-swept bangs out of her eyes. “What I mean is, I ran into an old boyfriend right before we left. I can’t stop thinking about him. I’m so sorry, I didn’t plan this. You’re an amazing person who will make someone else very happy. Very soon.”
She stepped away to retrieve her suitcase from the carousel.
“Can we talk about it?” Thomas asked.
“I’m sorry. There’s nothing to talk about. Thank you for coming. This was a great vacation.” She rolled her luggage outside while Thomas tactfully ducked into the men’s room to avoid an awkward wait together at the taxi stand.
Fifty-two minutes later, she arrived home to the apartment she shared with two roommates. Rifling through her pile of mail, she was accosted by two wedding invitations from high school friends and a baby shower invitation from a colleague.
Why, she wondered, did people insist on spending three percent of their wedding budgets printing and mailing invitations when an evite would suffice, freeing up cash to be funneled into other aspects of their events while doing something good for the planet? Unlike the brides-to-be, whom she’d grown up with in one of the city’s more affluent suburbs, Jess prided herself on demonstrating more economy. She bought her fine-quality clothes at discount stores and websites. Rather than rent a posh high-rise apartment closer to downtown, she lived here, in this cheaper but less convenient neighborhood that allowed her to bank two-thousand dollars a month toward a down payment on the city center condo she planned to buy in the near future.
At least the reason for the hard-copy shower invitation was clear, if annoying. When Jess opened the card, a flurry of pastel pink and blue confetti in the shape of baby booties and rattles spilled all over the floor.
“Fred, no!” she cried at Xander’s dog, who licked up a few pieces of confetti before Jess towed him away. She tossed the invitation onto the table and collapsed on the couch. Other than Xander and Sunny, all her friends were married, getting married, pregnant, getting pregnant, or recently pregnant. Jess flicked a tenacious baby blue bootie from her leg. She did want a husband and kids someday. Just not yet.
Where to Buy
Beautiful and Terrible Things is available in paperback, ebook and audiobook, on all major sites. Click here to get to most of them; it’s also available on Walmart and Target.
