3) From Jennifer I learned to avoid any boy with an ex-girlfriend who hates him with every fiber of her being…because chances are there’s a reason she hates him so much, and you may find out the hard way.
4) From Melanie I learned that, while it’s true that guys have one thing on their mind, most are greatly relieved and easier to deal with if you make it emphatically clear right up front that they’re not going to get that one thing in the foreseeable future. Or at least not from you. Once that becomes clear, either they go after some girl who never learned the warning signs, or they stick around.
I tried out point number four on a boy last year, and it worked. His name was Max—my first and only boyfriend before Brew—and we got a whole series of necessary milestones out of the way. First date, first kiss, first conniption fit from my parents for breaking curfew. He got the first suspicious look from my father, and I got the first suspicious look from his mother. With all those firsts out of the way, we were free to live normal lives.
We eventually broke up, of course, because all training-wheel relationships must die if we ever intend to graduate from the sidewalk into the bike lane. We’ve remained friends, though, which has been very good for him socially (see point #3).
As for me, popularity was never something I worried much about. I’ve always been as popular as I needed to be with the people I cared about, and fairly well liked, too—if you don’t count a handful of evil, insecure Barbies who call me Man-Shoulders because I’ve got a slightly developed upper body from swim team. I take comfort in knowing that while I often come home with gold around my neck, all the Barbies can ever hope for are rocks on their fingers.
So then, with all that taken into account, I felt I was entirely conscious of the risks, and fully prepared to date Brewster Rawlins.
I was spectacularly wrong.
14) IBEX
As much as I hate to admit it, my brother, Tennyson, was right about what first attracted me to Brewster. It was the stray dog thing.
I’ve always had a dangerously unguarded place in my heart for strays. There was the time when I was ten and brought home a seriously psychotic shih tzu, which proceeded to attack everyone’s ankles, drawing more blood than so little a dog should be capable of doing. We named him Piranha and gave him to an animal rescue center that has a no-kill policy, although later I heard that Piranha almost caused them to change their policy.
Regardless, I’ve discovered that nine out of ten strays have issues that are not life threatening, so I have no desire to change my ways, thank you very much.
When it came to Brewster Rawlins, he might have had a home, but he was a stray in every other sense of the word.
It all began the day he showed up in the library.
I was a library aide at the time, which involved a lot of hanging around while the librarian tried to come up with busywork for me to do. I didn’t mind, because it gave me time to read, and be among the books. Do you know that if you take the books in an average school library and stretched out all those words into a single line, the line would go all the way around the world? Actually, I made that up, but doesn’t it sound like it should be true?
Part of my job was to help other kids find books, because not everyone has a keenly organized mind. Some kids could wander the library for hours and still have no idea how to find anything. For them, the Dewey Decimal System might as well be advanced calculus.
I figured that here was one of those kids, because I found him lurking in the poetry section looking like a deer caught in the headlights. A really big deer— maybe a caribou or an ibex.
“Can I help you find something?” I asked as politely as I could, since I’ve been known to scare off the more timid wildlife.
“Where’s the Allen Ginsberg?” he asked.
It took me by surprise. No one came into our school library looking for Allen Ginsberg. I began to scan the poetry shelf alphabetically. “Is it for an assignment?” I was genuinely curious as to which teacher might assign radical beatnik poetry. Probably Mr. Bellini, who we all secretly believed had his brain fried long ago by various and sundry psychedelic chemicals.
“No assignment,” he said. “I just felt like reading Ginsberg again.”
That stopped me in midscan. In my experience, there are three reasons why a boy will want to take out a book on poetry:
1) to impress a girl 2) for a class assignment 3) to impress a girl.
So, thinking myself oh-so-smart, I smugly said, “What’s her name?”
He looked at me, blinking with those ibex eyes. A nice shade of green, I might add.
“Whose name?” he asked.
At this point I felt embarrassed about having to explain my assumption, so I didn’t. “Never mind,” I said, then quickly found the book and handed it to him. “Here you go.”
“Yeah, this is the one. Thanks.”
Still, I found it hard to believe. I mean, Allen Ginsberg is not exactly mainstream. His stuff is out there, even by poetry standards. “So…you just want to read it for…pleasure?”
“Something wrong with that?”
“No, no, it’s just…” I knew it was time to give up entirely, as I was truly making a fool of myself. “Forget I said anything. Enjoy the book.”
Then he looked down at the book. “I can’t really explain it,” he said. “It makes me feel something, but I don’t have to feel it about someone, so I get off easy.”
It was an odd thing to say—so odd that it made me laugh. Of course, he didn’t appreciate that and turned to leave.
Something inside me didn’t want our encounter- among-the-stacks to end like this, so before he reached the end of the aisle, I said, “Did you know Allen Ginsberg tried to levitate the Pentagon?”
He turned back to me. “He did?”
“Yes. He and a whole bunch of Vietnam war protesters encircled the Pentagon, then sat in the lotus position and started meditating on levitating the Pentagon at the same time.”
“Did it work?” I nodded. “They measured a height change of one point seven millimeters.”
“Really?”
“No, I made that part up. But wouldn’t it be wild if it were true?”
He laughed at that, and now seemed like a reasonable time to hold out my hand invitingly and introduce myself. “Hi, I’m Brontë,” I said.
“Yeah, I know.” He shook my hand, which almost disappeared into his. “Probably named after the writers Charlotte and Emily Brontë. I’ve never read them, but I know the names.”
Truth be told, I was actually glad he’d never read the Brontës. That would have made him a little too odd. “My parents are professors of literature at the university. My brother, Tennyson, is named after a famous poet.”
“He must hate that,” he said, “being a meathead and all.”
“You know him?”
“By reputation.”
Which made sense. My brother’s obnoxious reputation precedes him like, oh, say, hail before a tornado. “Actually, he loves his name. It keeps people confused. He likes keeping people confused.”
He still hadn’t introduced himself. Since he knew my name, I wanted him to think I knew his name, too.
“I’ll need your ID card to check out the book,” I told him.
He handed it to me, and I glanced at the name quickly as we made our way to the circulation desk. “Well, Brewster, if you want my advice on other poets, let me know.”
“I just like the angry ones,” he said. “Know any more?”
“Plenty.” Which was not entirely true, but I knew angry poetry was highly Googleable.
As he left, I tried to size him up in full view. He was large, but not fat, sloppy—not grungy. His clothes seemed worn, but not stylishly so; they were actually worn, and the legs were short enough to prove they’d been around for at least two inches of growth. And although most boys look pretentious in a distressed leather bomber jacket, it seemed natural on him.