So I was contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Though I doubted this was the first time he’d played darts rather than reading. “Do you want any recommendations? I’m a Literature major, so I’ve pretty much read it all.” I retrieved my darts and wrote down my pathetic score.
“Sure.” Darren took his place at the line and I wandered over to the bookshelves. “Not now, though.”
“Why?”
He gestured with the dart. “I wouldn’t want to hit you.”
Right. I backed away and watched Darren hit two more doubles and one in the outer ring of the bull’s-eye. This was going to be a massacre.
“Are you going on the snorkeling trip today?” I asked him as he retrieved his darts and made marks on the scoreboard.
“There’s a snorkeling trip?” he asked.
Well, that answered that. God, this kid had to be going stir-crazy. He wandered over to the bookshelves and I took it as a cue to delay my turn at the board, since if he was worried about hitting me, he had to be terrified, given my wild aim.
“So what do you suggest?”
Go with the obvious. “Catcher in the Rye?”
He snorted. “Everyone says that. I read it, like, three years ago.”
Oh, a challenge. I smiled. “Did you like it?”
“It was okay. I’m reading Nietzsche right now.”
Like good disaffected fourteen-year-old boys everywhere. “Which one?”
“Genealogy of Morals.”
“How are you liking that?”
“Easier going than Kant.”
I laughed, and, as he’d moved away from the board, risked making a toss with the dart. It landed right outside the outer bull’s-eye ring.
“Good throw!” Darren said.
My next shot hit right above the “4” in fourteen. “I had a German Lit prof who said it was easier to learn German, then read Kant, than it was to read him in English.”
“Well, I’m not going to learn German on this island.”
Especially if he didn’t make it into the tomb here. “I specialize in fiction anyway. I mostly only read philosophy for background material. My Aristotle is less morals and more poetics.”
“I hate Aristotle. I find his tone to be remarkably jejune.” He looked at me as if I was supposed to contradict him. To act shocked. Yeah, this was the kid of an Eli student. A Digger, too. I don’t think I’d even seen that word since I took the SATs.
I threw my last shot (wide) and went to collect my darts. “Let’s see, what should you read?” I wandered over to the shelves. Who stocked these things? The bulk of the titles were your usual paperback thrillers of the Clancy and Grisham variety. Stephen King. Heinlein. Krakauer. Beach reads for boys on vacation. No romance, but I didn’t expect it, what with the usual demographics of the island’s visitors. Farther along were a few hardcovers of the classics. Tristram Shandy, of course. I’d have to show it to Harun. A dusty copy of Pilgrim’s Progress. Gag. War and Peace, my old nemesis. Several Dickenses, Tom Jones, Robinson Crusoe (natch!)—
I caught sight of a dart whizzing past from the corner of my eye. “Hey!” I cried, turning around.
He lifted his shoulders. “Oops. Sorry. I forgot.”
I looked back at the board. He’d hit the bull’s-eye. “Good shot.” I held up a thick paperback. “What about Catch-22?
He looked down at the darts in his hand. “Do you think—?”
The door opened. “Amy!” Demetria called. “There you are.” Half my club trooped in, looking famished and beachy. Everyone wore bathing suits and the appropriate cover-ups (except for Clarissa, whose itsy-bitsy pink bikini and white mesh cover-up were hardly G-rated), sunglasses, and hats, and smelled strongly of suntan lotion. Ben even had zinc smeared on his nose.
I suddenly felt way overdressed in my shorts, sports bra, tank top, and sneakers.
“Clarissa figured you were hiding so we wouldn’t force you on the boat,” Jenny said. “Do you know when breakfast is?”
Darren checked his watch. “About fifteen minutes.” He walked over to me and looked at the book in my hands. “I read Heller last year. Try again.”
This was trickier than I’d thought. Darts forgotten, we traveled down the length of Cavador Key’s collection, which I noticed was pretty much devoid of women writers (with the exception of Ayn Rand, who was present in an almost unhealthy abundance). No Austen, no Alcott, no Ahrendt. And that was just the As. No Brontë, no Behn. Somebody needed to shake up these shelves. Mary Shelley was there, thank goodness, along with a slim volume of Emily Dickinson. But all in all, a pathetic turnout for femalekind.
Figured.
Darren vetoed Animal Farm and 1984 (“I mean, it obviously didn’t happen, right? So what’s the point?”), looked skeptical about Kafka (and who could blame him?), made a face at Flaubert (“So, she’s a madam? Like a hooker?”), and seemed only moderately intrigued by Crime and Punishment (which I thought, but didn’t say, was too old for him).
“You’ll love it in about five years,” I said, placing Dostoyevsky back on the shelf. Nearby was a volume of the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe, which only made me think of the one Digger who hadn’t yet come by for breakfast.
It’s fine, Amy. It’s not a date.
“Okay, last suggestion, and then I’m out.” I pulled down a hefty volume. “The Count of Monte Cristo.”
“What’s it about?”
Had he not seen any of the movies? “It’s about a guy who is betrayed by his friends and winds up in this island prison for ages, until he escapes, finds a buried treasure, and gets revenge on everyone.”
“Hmmm…”
“Lots of swordfights. Swordfights and opium and lesbians.”
“I’m in.”
“Good lad.” I handed him the book and patted him on the shoulder. Yep, the old lesbian ace in the hole. Better than Nietzsche for the teenaged boy. Demetria would not approve.
Soon after, breakfast was served, but still Poe failed to appear. I tried to concentrate on my pancakes, which should have been easy, given how delicious they were, but my eyes kept sliding to the door of the dining room, waiting for my date to arrive.
No. Not my date. My, uh, appointment. My eleven o’clock appointment.
Breakfast ended and the others started to gather their things together for the walk to the yacht.
“Are you sure, Amy?” Clarissa asked.
I patted my bag. “Absolutely.” Where was Poe? “I have all kinds of reading to catch up on.” I wasn’t about to tell Clarissa I’d made a non-date with everyone’s second-least-favorite patriarch on the island.
She peeked into the mesh sack. “Longinus? Hell no. If you spend your Spring Break reading literary criticism, I’m going to have to kill you.”
“If you make me get on that boat, you won’t have to. I’ll die of fright all by myself. Really, Clarissa. I’m much happier this way.”
“Okay,” she said warily. “But if I don’t see a tan on you this afternoon, we’re revisiting this topic.”
“Absolutely.”
Everyone filtered out the door, including Malcolm, who gave me little more than a friendly wave, and I settled into my rocker with my On the Sublime and wondered what the author would have thought of a Florida island in springtime. The earlier mist had completely burned away by this time, leaving nothing but warm, lemony sunshine, blue skies, soft, salt-scented breezes, and the sound of singing insects. All I needed was a hammock.
It was so peaceful that I’d almost forgotten I was in waiting mode by the time a shadow fell across the pages.
“Hey.”
I looked up and there was Poe, in a dark bathing suit and a smoky blue T-shirt that made his eyes look almost silver. He wore a faded pair of running shoes and smelled of sunscreen.