Do not stop. The day this post went up my 13 year old son spent the entire day reading. It was the first time this had ever happened. Learning to read was difficult for him. I’ve worried that he would never learn to enjoy it, never experience getting lost in a book. Our house is full of books. I’ve offered them to him, tried to entice him into trying them, left the ones I thought he’d like lying on his bed or out on the coffee table. He never took the bait.
But wandering through the library he picked a book, the first in a series. He slogged his way through an hour of reading at a time. The day this post went up, he finished. Then he asked if he could start the second book in the series. He asked my permission to read! Once I generously granted him permission to read for longer than an hour, he got started. He read all day. The way I did as a kid, the way I still do if given the chance. He got lost in a book! I couldn’t stop smiling.

In the days since, I find him on the front step – reading. In the tree in the backyard – reading. Bothering his brother by having the light on at night so he can read.
He walked through the library and there were thousands of books he passed by, but he found the one he needed. I’m so grateful it was there.

I’ve written fiction for between 1 and 2 hours a day for 98% of my days over the last 3 years. The other 2%, I felt guilty. Last week I finished a draft of a new novel, and decided to take a few guilt-free days off.

Let me tell you something. Not writing is amazing.

I was awash in time. I remembered I had friends and a wife and a child. In the afternoon, I revisited the sun. Over the course of a year, two hours a day can produce an unpublishable novel. Over the course of a day, two hours can reconnect you with an old friend, pay your bills, make love to your wife, eat a killer Reuben sandwich, and put you outside in the sun with a beer. Multiply that by 365. That’s good times.

You may think there are higher callings in this world than making love, eating Reubens, and drinking beer in the sun. First off, you’re wrong. Second, writing is not that higher calling.

Fallacy 1: The world needs my story.

Really? Go stand in a bookstore and feel the silent pressure of thousands of untold stories. This is more effective when the bookstore is being gutted and turned into a Yogurt Extreme. Or stand in a library, in that stale part of the library, where a great author is being thoroughly unread by the people in your city. If you really care about connecting people to great stories, you should be a teacher. Or a librarian. Is your story any better than the unread millions? Is it more important because you happen to be alive? Perhaps you believe –

Fallacy 2: Writing will make me prominent, respected, and famous.

Are you still in the library? Take a stroll down the aisles and marvel at the number of sad-sack authors you’ve never heard of. Do you think your family and friends will respect you more once you’ve been published? Either they respect and understand you now, or they’ll never respect you or your stories because they still won’t understand them. Your stories come from the same bizarre, confounding backwaters you do.

Yes — people do respect money and publicity. But as Ursula K. Le Guin pointed out, “Trying to get rich writing is a damn-fool idea.” Let’s say the average book advance is $30,000. Here’s how much you can make at McDonald’s.

Fallacy 3: I will leave a mark on society.

Let me remind you of the hush in the library. Yogurt Extreme. And the publishing business. You probably won’t make it. Odds are the manuscript you’re toiling over will be read by about 4 people. You could volunteer for two hours at a food pantry and touch more lives. Or you could make your wife a Reuben. You could make me a Reuben . I’d rather eat a sandwich than read a novel 10 times out of 10. This includes my own drafts. Claiming society needs your specific book is like claiming society needs you to have a baby — because you will produce a superior product. The One.

New baby or new novel, you aren’t doing the world any favors. But more people will want to see the baby.

Conclusion:

If you don’t have an editor, you don’t need to write for anyone. So don’t. The world has not asked this of you. The world has probably, on occasion, asked you to stop.

But maybe you’re a peculiar kind of person. Maybe writing makes you a better thinker. It helps you feel more deeply, puts you in the mind of flow, ecstasy, the thrill of completion, the unlocking of emotional puzzles, the strange power of words to activate memories, to tell you stories you didn’t know you had. Maybe it feels, sometimes, like the best part of being alive.

Which is why that afternoon in the sun, after my beer and Reuben, I reached for a pen and a notebook and I wrote this post. Because it makes me happy. Because I love it. Because I can’t goddamn help myself.

My first breakup was miserable. Laden with torrid love triangles, back stabbing beauties, and scheming sexpots, it would have been right at home on the C.W.’s Thursday night lineup- the only thing missing was an evil twin. So for your entertainment I have turned my high school romance into a soap opera in the vein of Gossip Girl. Enjoy.

Meet P- your typical attractive, intelligent, and likeable teenage outsider. P never quite fit in with the rest of the crowd at Crescent Valley High School because he knew Steinbeck had written something besides The Grapes of Wrath and owned a record player. All his days were spent in isolation walking down old country roads kicking bottles as empty as his soul- until he met K.

K was the closest thing Corvallis, Oregon had to an it girl. She took senior level classes as a sophomore; she made the varsity volleyball team as a freshman. She was beautiful, sweet, and deceptively funny.  Boys flocked to her like moths to an open flame, but she wanted more. And P was the only one who could give that to her.

But relationships never get off to a smooth start- not on the C.W. It took a year’s worth of false starts, chance run ins, and an awkward love triangle between P, K, and P’s best friend C to finally bring them together. Fan girls around the world rejoiced.

The next 15 months were a disturbingly adorable time, filled with all of the usual clichés. Theywould stay up all night talking on the phone, both refusing to hang up first. Entire days were spent cuddling on couches, watching T.V. and making funny faces at her camera. There was also a lot of making out. (Which was awesome)

This all came to a screeching halt however, with the introduction of V- A skinny artist with a liberated libido and piercing blue eyes. V had a harem of male followers. Half of the school seemed to be wrapped around her finger (both boys and girls).And her sights were set on P.

It was readily apparent to everyone but P that V wanted the D. This justifiably created some tension between K and P, and only served to drive a wedge between them- a wedge that V would soon take advantage of.

One week before the homecoming dance, V made her move on P- kissing him during free period. P, in an ill-advised decision told K, who promptly dumped his ass. Soon thereafter a twitter war erupted between the entire student body. The campus was unevenly divided between the three members of the love triangle, and P soon found himself on a path to social ostracism. Things were further complicated when it was revealed that V had actually been dating two other members of her harem, which transfigured the love triangle to a love pentagon (or as Brooke from One Tree Hill would call it a love square plus one). Things got even more convoluted when K began dating one of V’s two scorned lovers.

In a futile attempt to blow off some steam P went to his first party with alcoholic beverages, where his friends convinced him there was absolutely no chance he could reconcile with K and he should ask V to the Homecoming- in a stripper cake.

So he asked in front of all his friends, and she said no. As it turns out she was now dating someone else. Hello Love Hexagon.

P wound up going to home coming with his friend S, who berated him all night because he wore the wrong color vest. He also had the flu and spent the majority of the dance puking.

And thus concluded the 3rd week of P’s senior year.

Welcome T. Michael Martin and his newfangled “vlogging” to Boys Don’t Read!

T. Michael (“Mike”) Martin is a novelist, screenwriter, and YouTuber who holds a B.F.A. in Filmmaking from University of North Carolina School of the Arts. He was inspired to write his debut novel, The End Games, by his own younger brother, Patrick, and their shared love of zombie movies. Mike and his wife, Sarah, currently live in West Virginia.

Links:
http://www.youtube.com/tmikemartin
http://tmichaelmartin.tumblr.com
http://www.twitter.com/tmikemartin
http://www.amazon.com/The-End-Games-Michael-Martin/dp/0062201808/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1351025555&sr=8-1&keywords=the+end+games+t.+michael+martin
http://www.goodreads.com/book/sho

The days girls started to matter – I mean, really matter – the day they went from a passing curiosity, to a fiery, all-consuming fascination… was the first day of middle school.  Sixth grade.  You might already see where I’m going with this, but before I get into specifics, let me say this about women:

Women are awesome, graceful, dazzling creatures.  Beings of intelligence, humor, creativity, expression, and insight.  Layered enigmas of both nurturing and chaos.  Lovely to behold, infinite in their complexity, fearsome in their wrath.  And I swear to God – that’s just the tip of the beginning.

So what went down that first day of sixth grade?  What epiphany rocked me to my twelve year old core?  What glories of heaven opened up and rained their shining light down upon me?

A bunch of girls grew boobies.

A thousand apologies to the female readers of Boy’s Don’t Read.  You do realize those things have some crazy, cosmic power of us, don’t you?  It’s like heroine on crack.  And our life-long addiction begins the very first time we look around and see them popping out like Spring-time buds.

Girls have boobies.

Girls I used to ride bikes with have boobies.

Girls I used to chase on the playground have boobies.

Girls I used to pass notes to, who sometimes actually circled the ‘yes’…

…they have boobies.

There might be a chance I could someday look at the boobies.

I know it’s pathetic, and I’m truly sorry, but that’s how we think.  Even at twelve years old.  Hell, especially at twelve years old.  Those poor little dudes have no idea the hurdles and formalities and sheer effort it’s going to take to finally lay eyes on a pair in all their naked glory.  Despite the piggishness of the thing, you’ve got to admit – it’s kind of cute, right?  In an innocent sort of way?  Right?  No?  (Please recall the part where I mentioned my current appreciation for the complexity and elegance of the female soul.)

Moving on.

Knowing what I know now – all the myriad ways a strong woman and a sound romantic relationship can enrich a guy’s life – I think it’s almost unfair that God slapped something so painfully, mind-numbingly enticing on the front of each and every woman.  It induces a kind of insanity.  It makes us stupid.  It makes us not look where we’re supposed to be looking at the wrong times.  I think of all the women I admire, and have the utmost respect for, and would never treat with anything less than absolute dignity and honor – and then I feel ashamed because I’ve checked out their boobies.  And yeah… I’ve been doing it since the first day of sixth grade.

There’s really no point behind what I’m telling you, other than, first, stressing the inexplicable fixation the human male has with the human female’s breasts, and second, pleading for some measure of understanding, and perhaps a slight, begrudging forgiveness.  Because we really can’t help it.  Our formative years are filled with visions of breasts, the pursuit of visions of breasts.  Starting as young as twelve, we see breasts on the inside of our eyelids every time we blink.  We see breasts in the clouds, breasts in the snow, breasts in our oatmeal and ice cream (flavor, color and scoop size are entirely irrelevant, believe me).  And when we sleep… no, I won’t go there.  Let’s just say that we dream about breasts and leave it at that.

Ultimately, it might be pathetic, but it’s also one of the great truths of the history of our race, and it’s inescapable.

So in closing, you writers of fiction take heed: if your twelve to nineteen year old male characters aren’t at least on some level infatuated with breasts – they are inauthentic.  Want to make it better?  Throw in some boobies.  Everything’s better with boobies.

Ray Veen works two jobs, parents four kids, and writes lots of YA books that aren’t published.  He blogs and plays banjo here.

“Tobias Wolff. His prose, baby,” I said, head in my hands at the Bier Stein. “It’s so clean.”

“I know, Jeff.”

“So fucking clean.”

“Right.”

We were having this conversation (again) because I have a blood alcohol trigger of .04% which sets off: 1) irrelevant stories about ex-girlfriends, 2) the endless rehashing of arguments I didn’t — but very nearly — had that day, and 3) teary approbation of Truman Capote and Tobias Wolff.

My reptile brain has been conditioned toward item 3, which can be discussed at some length without forfeiting either additional beers or bed privileges. So on it went. At the Bier Stein. The Jackalope. The entire way home. Directed eventually to our nanny, frozen in the doorway, trying to leave.

“Bullet to the Brain,’ sure! Who hasn’t! But how about ‘Hunters in the Snow?’ How about ‘Nightingale?’ Read that little beauty, and when you’re done bawling your eyes out, give me a call.”

Our nanny did not convincingly commit to reading “Nightingale” before she left. I was lamenting this aloud, sitting in my easy chair with a half-finished pint when it struck me.

“Hey,” I said, popping into the bathroom. My wife was brushing her teeth. “Tobias Wolff is alive. He’s breathing. Not even far from here. I could drive down to Stanford in less than a day.”

“You have your crazy eyes on, baby,” she said, spitting in the sink.

I went into my bedroom and Googled the drive time from Eugene to Stanford. Just nine hours. Then I checked out Stanford’s faculty bio pages. Tobias Wolff had a page. His very own, publicly-viewable page. With office hours.

“Holy shit,” I said, rubbing my hands together. “Oh, holy shit.”

“What?”

“Tobias Wolff has office hours!”

“So?”

“So, look. There’s a phone number. And a certain time he’ll be there. By the phone.”

“That’s his job.”

“But – holy shit, you know?”

She fixed me with a look I’ve come to associate with the end of the conversation.

“I should call him now,” I said.

“Yeah?” she said. “Go ahead.”

“Really?”

“You should do it.” With the threat of a prank call, I had awoken in my wife a slumber-partying 7^th grader. She advanced. “Call him. Do it. Call Tobias Wolff.”

“What if he answers?”

“It’s eleven thirty at night.”

“But what if?”

“Then you’ll have to talk to him.”

I nodded solemnly, playing the part of a man who would accept the consequences of his actions. This, all the while knowing I would let Tobias Wolff talk a few precious moments then hang up, power down my phone, and throw it in the creek. I would also, in the long run, consider this worth it.

I dialed nine numbers then hung up.

“Seriously?” she said.

I dialed his full number. Tobias Wolff’s number. She huddled by the receiver for five unnerving rings. Then, the click of an answering machine.

The canned voice began: Hello, you have reached – and then,  – “TOBIAS WOLFF” – please record blah blah blah.

I hung up. I’d heard the man. “Tobias Wolff.” He had spoken his name with authority. Military background, evident.  That voice. This was not a man to trifle with. For a moment, I considered all the guns in his stories. Probably one gun per 5 pages, now that I thought about it.

“So that’s it?” my wife asked.

I set down my phone. My hand was actually shaking. I wasn’t ready for this. Imagine if he had answered. Hell, imagine if he had recorded the entire message. I closed the faculty page. I cleared my cache, then closed my browser. As I was leaving my office, I heard my wife down the hall.

“Tobias, it’s okay. I love you, Tobias. I love you so much.”

I froze – a prickling on the back of my neck.

Then she started into a lullaby. I sighed. She was in the next room with Tobias, our two-year-old son.

Thank God. For a second there, things had almost gotten weird.

I’d seen exactly one movie in a theater by the age of four, but I’d seen it exactly three times. The Muppet Movie, to me at least, represented the pinnacle of the art form. Puppetry, pageantry, singing, dancing, Charles Durning—in other words, everything a preschooler demands from entertainment. For my fourth screening, I decided I’d share the gospel of Kermit and I invited a young lady named Charlotte to see it. Our fathers were colleagues, so it’s possible that they actually arranged the whole thing, but for the purposes of this story I’d like to believe that I approached her, one hand on my heart, one hand outstretched, and I said, “Would you do me the honor of accompanying me to the cinema? There’s a lovely picture about a frog and a pig and a bear and a dog and an indeterminate creature who cavorts with chickens. I guarantee. You will adore it.”

Let the record show that I was an infamous exaggerator with a wild mop of hair and my favorite Muppet was Animal, a character inspired by the legendary drummers Keith Moon, Ginger Baker and John Bonham. Any father worth his salt knows that a boy enamored with drummers is one step closer to becoming a drummer himself, or at least a fan of Rush, and you don’t want either showing up at your door with some Russell Stovers under his arm. So Charlotte’s dad nominated himself as the chaperone of my first date and when the agreed-upon afternoon arrived, he ferried Charlotte and me to the movies in what I’m guessing was a wood-paneled station wagon.

Remember, I was four and my memory is admittedly hazy, but I’m pretty sure that the seating arrangement at the theater went like this: Charlotte’s dad sat next to her, and she sat next to me, and I sat next to the aisle. I’m also pretty sure that I was enjoying my fourth screening as much as my first three and I was relishing my role as the seasoned cineaste, constantly leaning over and whispering spoilers into Charlotte’s ear.

“Oh you’ll like this song. It’s about road trips.”

“Don’t worry. They don’t eat his legs.”

“It’s Lou Zealand, not New Zealand. Common rookie mistake.”

Although I was playing it super cool, there must have been some tension building inside of me, because during the climatic scene of the movie, which involves a showdown in a ghost town, I began to lose my emotional bearings. I knew what was going to happen next. My beloved Animal was going to take one of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew’s patented insta-grow pills, then expand into a giant, break through the roof of an old saloon, and scare off the villains. And yet this knowledge did nothing to steer my emotions straight. As the scene played out, in the same way it had the first three times I’d watched it, I found myself so worked up, so terrified by the image of a gigantic Animal, that I screamed, jumped up from my seat and ran—arms flailing one would assume—out of the theater.

My first date ended with my date’s father consoling me in the lobby, rubbing my back and wiping the tears from my cheeks with his handkerchief, as my date stood there sipping her soda, shaking her head and thinking, “Well he ain’t exactly drummer material, is he?”

This story haunted me for years. Charlotte’s dad used to crack it out at every office picnic, and everyone would laugh and hot-faced I’d shrug and say things like, “Well, dating is scary.” And it is for this reason, and this reason alone I assure you, that I didn’t go on another date for twelve years.

We all have dry spells, my friends. The trick is finding a good story to justify them.

Aaron Starmer is the author of DWEEB and The Only Ones. His latest novel, The Riverman, will be released next year. He lives in Hoboken, NJ with his wife, who is charmed by his knowledge of Muppets. Visit him at www.aaronstarmer.com.

That by itself was enough to qualify her as the coolest girl I’d ever met. But as we got to know each other in that (now ancient-seeming) class and then in ninth and tenth grade, I grew to understand the depth of her coolness. She not only liked weird, goofy humor like I did and wore a beat-up, teal bookbag with mysterious, possibly music-related buttons on it, she was also blunt, outspoken, and seemed genuinely not to care what people with whom she wasn’t friends thought about her.

And she was very cute. I had thought so since we’d sat next to each other in computer class, but it wasn’t until the two of us, along with about a dozen other students and two teacher chaperones, took a month-long trip to Germany that I realized I had an actual crush on Kara. She had seemed so much cooler than me, and I had for so long suppressed any romantic intentions toward anyone simply out of fear, that I hadn’t seriously considered making a move at all, let alone on her.

I, of course, continued to suppress my romantic intentions and never once, in a month of close quarters and drunken discotheque dancing, made anything resembling an actual move. (This is true of my dancing to this day.) Kara and I came back from Germany, remained friends, and she got serious with another guy, who was also cool. So it was pretty damn heartbreaking to hear from her, several months later at a party, that, while we were in Germany, she had had a crush on me.

She. Had had a crush.

On me.

Never before had I experienced such unrequited like, and I reveled in the emotional aftermath. Kara became “the one who got away”—never mind that neither she nor anyone else had been got in the first place.

But months passed (years in adult time) and my anguish faded, despite my ongoing lack of a likelife. In fact, by the time April of junior year came around, I was so over it all that when Kara suggested that she and I go to prom as friends, I was sincerely, platonically excited. We would go together with our mutual friends, make fun of stuff, have a good time, and unearth no demons whatsoever.

I did not anticipate that I would win the title of prom prince that evening. I considered myself awkward and quiet, and though I had gained a reputation as something of a funny weirdo, I definitely wasn’t popular in the traditional sense. But at the end of the dance, my name was called and I rushed to the stage, overwhelmed and ecstatic and shy next to the cheerleader princess, having been carried to victory by a surprisingly large coalition of fellow nerds and misfits.

It felt like the greatest thing that had ever happened to me—and then it all quickly went to shit. On the drive home, I got us lost in downtown Atlanta, and Kara and I started to fight. Then, at the afterparty in my friend’s basement, Kara’s new boyfriend, whom she’d started to date in the interim between our agreement to go to prom and prom itself, came over. And so I, the newly crowned prom prince, sat alone drinking discount-vodka screwdrivers as all of my friends, including my prom date and former crush, sat with their significant others, coupled up and romantically successful.

It was the greatest despair I’d ever felt. So, of course, I wrote a poem about it.

Months later, in my first-semester English class, Ms. Collins had us write personal poems based structurally and tonally on other, published poems. Using an anthologized poem (that I’ve since forgotten and can’t seem to find online) as my guide, I crafted the following piece:

Picture of that night in our seventeenth year

 

Fall. Tired, restless, my mind’s eye turns

To a picture of that night in that crowded, musty basement.

I, in the corner; you, daintily cross-legged,

with a mile-wide smile on the floor with him.

He’s got a smile, too, more satisfied and less energetic.

 

In plain, dirtied clothes, he pulls the hairpins

from your styled, sweat-encrusted hair, just like

all the other smiling guys do with their girlfriends.

I smile too, and laugh, and try to joke

around like everyone else.

 

Clearly, now, the smile is dead, the laugh is

half-hearted, and the joke is morose like the

night. How can I blame you,

though the night was decimating, when I

could have been him and known it?

 

This poem isn’t as bad as I remembered it being after years of not looking at it at all. It is melodramatic and VERY presumptuous at the end there, but it is my most sincere expression of one of the most momentous occasions in my life, and as a high school poem it’s alright. Still, I have to say that “sweat-encrusted” was not a great choice.

Nevertheless, Ms. Collins returned the poem with a sticker on it. This, as I recalled, meant that she considered the piece worthy of consideration for “awards and competitions” and would submit it for such, with the author’s permission. Having at last gained something from my (still ongoing) romantic failure and my moment of ultimate despair, I hastily gave my consent—and then just as quickly forgot about the whole thing. It was senior year.

So it was quite a surprise when, the following May, I opened my copy of the school’s annual literary magazine, distributed to the entire 3,000-student school at once in homeroom, to find my name in the table of contents. I flipped to the poem immediately, read it again for the first time in months, and had several simultaneous realizations: 1. That anyone who knew me would understand immediately what the poem was about; 2. That I had never told anyone that I’d written the poem or even had this emotional experience; 3. That Kara is reading this right now; 4. That, holy shit, the entire school is reading this right now.

That last one was an exaggeration borne of panic. Most people, I’m sure, didn’t read it and didn’t care. But I was incapable of understanding that at the time, especially since I had a class with Kara immediately following homeroom—and a full day of deepest humiliation ahead of me.

It sucked. Kara was kind of weirded out, as were a few of my friends, and I was incapable of properly explaining myself. I walked from class to class in a haze of shame. But by the time I called Kara that night to try to fix things between us, she was already over it. As it turned out, she was still really cool.

I should have been more grateful for that—and for my group of friends and my nerdy, misfit allies and just the simple fact of being published—rather than wallowing in my supposed loserdom. And I think I kind of got that, even then. But it would be a long while before I understood that my fear of romantic failure and my shame about it were not unique, nor were they disgraceful secrets. They were obvious. And normal. And useful material.

Lucas Klauss is the author of Everything You Need to Survive the Apocalypse. He also writes humor (McSweeney’s, College Humor) and is one-third of NYC sketch comedy group The Bilderbergers.

I was a sophomore in high school when I found out I wasn’t smoking right.

My friend Erica pointed it out.  We’d go to her house after school because her mom worked and we’d sit in her window and smoke, flicking ashes onto a shrub that smelled like cat pee.  “You need to blow the smoke out,” she said.  “Not just let it waft out, all lazy.”

I didn’t love that she micromanaged the tarring of my lungs.  But she was occasionally funny and mostly cool and, well, we could sit in her window and smoke after school.  And she had an older brother named Billy. Who had a friend.  Jareth.

They hung out at Erica’s after school, too.  Not so much to sit in windows and smoke cigarettes as to look through gun magazines and cut soda cans into weird shapes for no apparent reason, but whatever.  Jareth wore flannels and had brown hair that hung in his eyes.  His front teeth were wonderfully crooked and he liked death metal that sounded like someone dry heaving through a megaphone.  A few years before this, John Hughes had ruined my life with The Breakfast Club and all that devastating Judd Nelson-ness, and then, poof, there he was.  My very own John Bender.

Plus, his name was Jareth.  It was like a whisper, even if you shouted it.  Jareth.

I was fifteen.  And there’s something you need to understand about my fifteen year-old self.  I was one gigantic wad of romantic sappy fluff.  I wish I could say my sappiness was influenced by Jane Austin books or Shakespeare, but no.  Soap operas.  Thanks to my mother and my grandmother, soap operas were my only gauge on any and all matters of the heart.  On General Hospital, when Luke finally found Laura at that mansion when he thought she was dead?  IT CHANGED ME.

So, Erica and I would hang out in the kitchen with them sometimes and I’d sit next to Jareth and stare at his wonderfully crooked teeth while he talked and sometimes he’d talk to me.  He’d ask me things about New York (where I lived during middle school) or tell me about how he liked to put his cousin’s Barbies in the microwave to watch them melt and in my head we were already walking around school in our matching flannels holding hands.  Once, we were sitting on the couch while Billy and Erica played Super Mario Bros. and their cat climbed up and fell asleep in between Jareth and I.  We both pet her at the same time, our hands moving in circles, in little figure eights, our fingers touching. Touch, graze, linger, graze, touch.  He leaned his head back on the couch and stared at me, like he was finding it all mildly interesting.  It wasn’t the erupting passion in Luke’s eyes when he and Laura finally married, but it was close.  Sorta.

Everything probably would have been fine if I’d just left it at that.  Left whatever spark we had back in the tufts of cat hair and just let it evolve naturally.  But, no.  I couldn’t.  My only outlet for romance had been daytime TV and they drag that shit out for months until that one fateful day the writers decide to put everyone out of their misery and let love blossom and if you didn’t have the timer on your VCR programmed that particular day, you were SCREWED.  All that pining and aching for nothing.  I couldn’t.  I just didn’t have it in me.  I was an emotional time bomb.  I had to do something.

I did something.  I bought Jareth a Valentine’s Day card.  One of those pop up cards that explodes with big, puffy hearts when you open it.  And it had a bear.  In a top hat.

Inside, I wrote words.  Words I agonized over.  I wanted to write I LOVE YOU THIS IS FATE WE MUST BE TOGETHER but I think it came out more like I think you’re super cool, we should hang out more, because, given the exploding hearts, I felt that smooth and breezy were my best approach.  But I was too embarrassed to give the exploding hearts to Jareth myself.  So, I gave it to Erica to give to Billy to give to Jareth.

The next day I saw Erica on the quad before first period.  Her mouth was rigid and it took me a minute to realize she was fighting a smile.  A smile that was holding back laughter.  Sputtering laughter, which came out in bursts as she reached into her backpack and produced the envelope with the card in it.  It was wrinkled a little.  And bent.  When I opened the card, instead of exploding, the hearts just kind of dangled.  Sad.  Lifeless.

Then I saw them.  Words.  Not my words.  My words were still there, but just barely.  His words had taken over.  They were horrible words.  Scratched, angry, at harsh angles.  Words I’m pretty sure Luke would never say to Laura – even if she turned all his socks pink in the wash, even if she crashed his Ferrari, even if she ran off and married that one Stefan dude.

Words that made the name Jareth not sound like a whisper anymore.

I learned three very important things that day.  1) Never trust anyone who criticizes the way in which you introduce toxins into your body.  They probably don’t really have your best interests in mind.  2) Exploding hearts cards are romantic kryptonite and should be reserved for young children or the elderly.  And 3) There is a reason why people watch soap operas.  The storylines are excruciating, drawn out and overly dramatic, but you can rely on them.  You know that when sparks fly between two people, eventually something good, at some point, will happen.

Real life not so much.

***

Vivi Bickell writes books for young adults and not so young adults.  She’s also a doting mother, hopeless geek and an insufferable coffee snob. Occasionally, she’ll have dance-offs with zombies on otherwise quiet Sunday afternoons. But, mostly she just writes. And eats Oreos.

I was all, “Hey lady…” and when she didn’t laugh, when she didn’t say I sounded like Barry White–or Barry Sanders, who I had just used to rack up 400 rushing yards against the Bears–I said, “This is Bryan. Don’t hang up.”

I hated the creakiness in my voice, especially because it was the outward and visible sign of my inward anxiety. This girl–my first real girlfriend–had quickly become vital. These late night phone calls, the notes passed between classes, had turned me sideways. And I loved it.

“Are you there?” I asked.

Nothing. I could hear her breathing on the line so, thinking this was a joke, I said her name playfully. Singsong-y. It’s best that we not dwell on this part for too long, because very quickly this turned from a John Huges guy-gets-the-girl love story to Wes Craven horrific. I expected a girlish laugh. Oh Bryan, you so crazy… Instead, the voice of hell itself.

“I’m gonna kill you.”

And then the line went dead.

Now, I wasn’t exactly tough. Had somebody said this to me face-to-face, I probably would have responded with something like, “Please don’t.” And despite that I had lived most of my life near Chicago, I was nothing like the Lords of Hell or any of the other hardasses that stalked the city nights.

So this unnerved me, and I did what you’d expect in this situation. I sought the reasoned and trustworthy advice of people who cared for me and would never think of steering me down the wrong path. I brought it to the lunch table.

“You should probably learn karate,” one friend said.

“Or hide,” another offered. “Like, forever.”

This is pretty much the way it went for the rest of the day until I finally saw my girlfriend and told her about the late night call. She looked appropriately freaked out–we lived in a small town and these sort of things weren’t supposed to happen to us, the good kids. I looked her in the eye and promised we’d be safe.

As the day moved on, I began to rationalize the situation. I had never done something to warrant such a threat, I reasoned, so it must have been a wrong number. By the time track practice rolled around, I was feeling pretty confident that I wasn’t being stalked by some lunatic. So I spent my practice as I normally did: trying to impress my girlfriend by running as fast as I could. All while pretending not to see her.

After practice we held hands–it’s just how I did–and talked about the coming weekend. We were dating, but I was still scared to ask if she wanted to come to my house or to do anything one might expect from a high school relationship. So when she invited me over to her house that night, when she said we could watch a movie, I knew all that sprinting and disregarding had worked its magic.

When I arrived at her house, I said hello to her mother and was quickly shepherded to the windowless basement. We watched Wayne’s World on VHS and it was perfect. And as the credits rolled–as the room grew darker and darker–I knew this was my moment. I kissed her. And then I went home, victorious.

That night, as I waited for her phone call, I sat in the living room, the phone on my lap. I was lost, reliving every moment of the night when I heard something outside. We lived on a busy road, so this wasn’t abnormal. And in my post-victory stupor, I dismissed it as exactly that. But then there was laughter. I heard my name. And then the doorbell rang. I opened the door to find a piece of paper. A note.

Dead meat! 

Typing that now, it seems comical. Who writes something like that? But in the moment, standing on my porch in the cool Illinois night, I was freaked the hell out. I didn’t realize I was still holding the phone, so I jumped when it rang.

I answered with a yell.

“Bryan?”

Her voice, like a balm to everything. I told her about the note and she was sufficiently worried. She asked me to bring it to school the next day and I said I would, trying not to cry.

I showed her the note the next morning and her face cloud over. This is the moment where I should’ve been the strong one, where I should’ve taken the note from her hands and said, “Nobody’s messing with me. With us.” Instead, when she asked to keep the note–when she folded it into her pocket–I was happy to be rid of it.

And that night, when the phone rang, I prepared myself for the coming threat.

“Hey,” she said. “Are you okay? You sound angry. We can talk tomorrow.”

I swallowed back the testosterone, the relief I felt upon hearing her voice. I went singsong-y, but didn’t care. We were approaching three weeks, just footsteps towards forever, and she needed to know the real me.

“I thought you were the killer,” I joked. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t say much, actually, and I was worried that I’d somehow made her mad. But when I asked if anything was wrong, she perked up and said, “No, no. Of course not!”

We talked late into the night, until we both were delusional from the early morning. And maybe that’s what did it. Maybe she had meant to do it earlier, when she first called, but it took four hours of mindless chatting to finally pull it from her lips.

“I need to tell you something,” she said, her voice like church.

“If you want to tell me I’m awesome,” I said. “I already know.”

(And looking back–knowing what I know now–I wouldn’t have dropped such a great line. I would’ve held back. I would’ve waited.)

She paused. I assumed she smiled. Then she said, “I know who’s been calling you.”

His name was Dylan and he was her boyfriend too. I was indignant until I realized they’d been dating for more than a year, and that I was the actual interloper.

“Say something,” she said.

But I couldn’t. All I could envision was Dylan sitting outside my house right now, watching me with night vision goggles. It made sense he would have such technology, because everything else about him was just as fantastic.

Her boyfriend. For a year.

The next day, at the lunch table, my friends proffered advice.

“Oh shit, man. You know that dude. He’s the guy with the Iron Maiden t-shirt collection. He might actually kill you.”

We went to a large school, so I didn’t, in fact, know this guy. But after looking him up in the yearbook–seeing the way he scowled at the camera–I did fear for my life. I mean, the guy was wearing an Iron Maiden t-shirt in his school picture, which meant he had little supervision at home, which meant he probably owned nunchucks or brass knuckles, which meant he could, quite easily, follow through on his threats. So I did what anyone would do in that situation: I went to the nurse and pretended to be sick.

I spent the next three days at home nursing my broken heart. Despite the fact that I was the other man, it stung to be cut loose so quickly and with such little regard. My girlfriend never spoke to me again–seriously. I ended up moving to North Carolina a year later and the last thing she ever said to me was: “Yeah, well, I kind of have another boyfriend.”

I don’t know how to end this except to say that I looked them up as I was writing this post and it turns out they got married. Married. I won’t lie: it eased the sting. I was going up against fate and True Love. I didn’t stand a chance. And maybe that’s the moral of the story: the person that dumps you will probably end up married to a guy that wears metal t-shirts for his school picture. A guy who calls people in the middle of the night, threatening them with the voice of a chain smoker. And, in some little way, that has to make you feel better. And if it doesn’t, rest easy in the fact that phone numbers are pretty easy to track down these days.

You know, I’m just saying.