nine

I held my breath as he strode into the room, his confidence following him like a superhero’s cape. I AM CONFIDENCEMAN! MY GOAL IS TO MAKE INSECURE PEOPLE FEEL EVEN MORE INSECURE WITH MY SUPER CONFIDENCE AND MY SUPER CHARM AND MY SUPER ACCEPTANCE OF MYSELF! The first thing he looked at was the window, parallel to the door. Below it were two desks crowded with organized clutter. It was easy to tell which was Thalia’s and which was mine, because Thalia’s was a blur of pink, and mine possessed no hint of favoritism to a certain hue of the rainbow. His gaze then averted over to our closed wardrobes and then to the beds (I told Thalia that I’d start sleeping with a nightlight again if she didn’t make her bed today), and finally to the right wall where Thalia had hung posters of her favorite actors and singers and I had simply put a few quotes up, torn from magazines and interviews with my favorite authors.

“It’s, umm…” he struggled for how to pose the adjective politely.

“Small? Yeah, I know,” I filled in. “What did you expect?”

He moved over to my bed (the non-pink one) and just stared at it for a moment. “Honestly, I expected it to be bigger. This is Barnes Academy. I don’t know. I’ve just always been under the impression that everything at Barnes is big and expensive and elite.”

“Does this ruin it for you?”

Thinking for a moment, he nodded and then said, “Yeah, kind of. I mean, I know that your education is probably a billion times better than mine—”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” I mumbled, for people often forgot that though Barnes was an established institution, that wasn’t to say that it was the best institution out there. The education I was receiving was the top of its class, but there were still faults in it. Personally, I thought that certain things and teachers could’ve been updated. Everything about Barnes revolved around tradition, and just because something was old didn’t mean that it was the ideal. But at Barnes, old trumped good five out of five times.

“Believe me, Emily Albert, it is,” he assured me, “but as I was saying, seeing an actual dorm kind of eliminates this illusion of perfection that I’ve always had about the place. Now, it’s less of a concept than it is an actual, physical place. Being here makes Barnes more real.”

“I guess that makes sense. Does it feel like all the hype is deflated?” His eyes flicked down to underneath my bed, and a small smile graced my face, so I moved over to where he was in order to heave the trunk out. Mutely, I opened it up and my grin widened as his eyes grew, too, in wonder.

“It’s like a pin punctured my metaphysical balloon,” he said, crouching down in order to see my stash of books. “Wow.”

“You showed me yours, so I figured that it was only fair for me to show you mine, Mr. Dobson,” I told him, admiring the works that I hid under my bed during the year.

He glided a hand over the spines and asked, “Do you only bring your favorites?”

“Those, and the ones that I accumulate over the course of the year.”

Nodding, he selected a book and then sat down on my bed to admire it. A piece of my stomach flipped at the sight of Oliver Dobson actually, physically sitting on my bed, because though there wasn’t really any other place to sit in the room, my bed was, well, my bed. It was about as intimate as objects came, and it was where I was most vulnerable. (Early on, Thalia and I came upon an agreement to not mess with each when we slept, because though it was tempting—mainly for Thalia—it was also a line we understood well). And now, Oliver was sitting on my bed, looking at one of my books.

“This was great,” he said, his eyes perusing the back with a flick of familiarity, “but I hated the ending.”

“Why?”

“Well, because you think it’s over, but it’s not. There are three more books after it. I literally spent a week doing nothing but reading the series. I needed an ending.”

“But as a stand-alone novel,” I said, “it’s still pretty spectacular.”

“Yeah, but the ending sucks. It’s so ambiguous and I had so many unanswered questions.”

“Which was why you read the other three books.”

“I guess. But…shouldn’t a book be able to have closure even if it is part of a series?”

“I thought it had closure.”

I was pretty sure that Oliver was going to continue to discuss the closure or lack thereof relating to the book in his hands, but then he surprised me. Which wasn’t exactly a surprise, for he happened to do that quite a bit. Instead of furthering our debate, he cut it short: “Emily, can we talk about something else besides books?” His tone was serious—not light and joking and witty like it was just a few moments prior. If my life were a movie, then the lighting would darken and the musical score would turn ominous and somber.

“Uh, what is it, Oliver?” I wondered, hoping that he wasn’t about to make some monumental pronouncement about having cancer or being gay or having been hired by someone to befriend me.

But my life was about as far away from the silver screen as lives came, so Oliver just said, “I want to talk about us,” which wasn’t life-threatening, but it sure worried me.

“Oh. Okay.” I had a hunch that he was about to make a confession of some sort, so I sat down on my bed, about a foot away from him, our toes inches from touching on the ground.

“I’m going to make this plain simple, Emily Albert: I like you—more than a friend. I have since the first time I saw you in that bookstore. I know that you have issues with my gender, and I’m terribly sorry about that, but I’m not one to be grouped with the majority. I don’t intend on breaking your heart, nor do I plan on being the one to initiate a breakup, presuming that you have feelings similar to mine. A few months back, I went through some messy stuff with a girl, but that’s not important. What is important, Emily Albert, is my motive, and I’ll tell you that right now: I want to fall in love with you. I’ve read enough to know how these sappy speeches go, and you may think I’m being cliché, but I’m not. I like you Emily Albert, and that’s all there is to it.

“Now, on the off chance that you don’t want to pursue anything with me, then I understand. And I’m not going to be selfish and stop being friends with you out of spite or resentment. But if that does happen, I’d just like you to know that every time I see you, all I’ll able to think about is holding your hand and wrapping an arm over your shoulder and kissing you until you’re weak to the knees. I’m not Prince Charming, nor am I infallible. I’m just Oliver, but I can get at least two people—maybe three—to vouch that that’s good enough. I won’t play mind games with you, and I won’t screw around in any way—I just want you, Emily. I want you to be my girlfriend.

“And while being my girlfriend may sound like a daunting task, I promise that I’ll try to make it as painless as possible. Not to pressure you or anything, but I’d like you to know that I’d always text you first, and though you don’t care about social media, if you did, I’d put your picture everywhere, just so that everyone knew that you were my girlfriend. Oh, and I don’t use the term ‘girlfriend’ lightly. Today, our generation seems to be more concerned with hooking up and having sex than they do with finding someone special and sharing an emotional connection, along with all the other stuff. I don’t want just another hook up buddy. I’ve had those in the past, and Emily, it’s not for me.

“Girls think that all guys want is a face to suck and a body to f*ck. But I’m not all guys, Emily. I think that relationships shouldn’t solely be about the physical, and yeah, nine out of ten guys would call me a loser, but I don’t care. If having the mentality that girls aren’t just supposed to be used for their bodies makes me a loser, then so be it. I am loser. I’ve come to accept my fate long ago, and I’m comfortable with it. And I’m not trying to be noble or gallant or any of that. But if you think that’s what I am, I won’t deny it, because humility isn’t my strong suit. I’m not a feminist, but I’m not against feminism. Whatever. Emily, I like you, and I want you to be my girlfriend. Will you? I know it’s a loaded question and you don’t have to say anything now, but it would be awesome if you did.”

As his monologue came to a close I wasn’t sure whether to cry or run away, though this was my dorm room, and it was supposed to be the one place on the planet I felt comfortable running to. My emotions were like one big, knotted ball of yarn, unable to sort themselves out. Instead of going easy on me and throwing me a bone, Oliver had essentially thrown me a bone, a doghouse, and a dog to go with it. And I was expected to figure out whether or not I wanted to keep this allegorical dog, or put it out on the street, forcing it to fend for itself. Oliver’s feelings were the dog. And I wasn’t sure whether to welcome them or not. It was all very confusing, because I wasn’t sure how I felt.

I liked Oliver—as a person—quite a bit. He was funny and charming and smart and we both possessed a deep-seeded appreciation for literature. Oliver also happened to have a great name. And he was easy on the eyes. A girl like me dating a boy like Oliver Dobson made sense. But just because it made sense did not necessarily mean that it was the right thing to do. I knew that I liked Oliver, but after all my history with boys, did I really want to risk it once more?

But then again, Oliver was different. He wasn’t from Barnes. And while he may have lived a similar life to those with whom I attended school, he was still different. Oliver didn’t have the same types of pressure and stress that the kids at Barnes did. He had similar stresses and pressures, but there weren’t as amplified, because he wasn’t in an environment like Barnes. Barnes induced a sense of grasping from its attendees. Everything they did was never good enough. There was always room to improve. One could never achieve greatness, even if they received awards and national honors and medals. The culture was full of striving, and it wasn’t healthy. I was roped into this schema, but long ago I learned how to cope with it. But the other boys that I had interacted weren’t as savvy, despite their false senses of confidence.

With Oliver, his confidence was real. There was no one and no thing that would knock him down and tell him that what he was doing wasn’t good enough. He had a support structure like no other and real friends who genuinely supported him. Nothing about his life was fake. Barnes was fake. It wasn’t real life. It was a prep school that was supposed to better our chances at a bright and monetarily sound future. But everything about it was fake. The teachers. The message. The building. The kids. Everyone was putting on some big show to try and prove that they were really as prestigious as Barnes Academy was meant to be, and in the process, everything produced was fake. Oliver, though, was real, and that was probably the thing that scared me most.

I knew how to deal with fake people. Fake friends. Fake roommates. Fake teachers. Fake boys. Fake institutions. (Holden Caulfield would call all these various groups “phony,” but this was the twenty-first century, so I preferred the term “fake”). But I wasn’t accustomed to dealing with someone as real as Oliver. He may have been pretentious, but everything about him was real. How he talked, how he walked, how he was. Oliver didn’t try to act a certain way just to maintain a façade that correlated with the façades of others around him. He just acted like Oliver Dobson, and that scared me.

So now, he had laid everything out on the table. He liked me. More than a friend. And I didn’t know how I felt about him, and I felt bad about it, because Oliver deserved someone who knew what she wanted. Oliver deserved an amazing girl—I wasn’t that amazing. I was just an introverted, ordinary girl who had somehow unconsciously tricked Oliver Dobson into liking her. Yes, that was a bit on the self-deprecating side, but it was accurate. I knew everything that Oliver said was the truth, but something in me prevented me from feeling an overwhelming sense of joy. It was like a blockage. I couldn’t be happy that a guy as great as Oliver Dobson liked me because he was a guy, and my history was guys wasn’t the best.

“I just…” was all that came out of my mouth after a long, long pause of silence. “Every time I give boys another chance, they let me down, Oliver. I know you don’t intend on doing something so cruel, but how can I be sure that the outcome won’t be the same as it always is?”

“You can’t,” he answered without a second thought. “Besides, you only met me a few weeks ago. For all you know, I could be lying about everything. My name. My association with literature. My feelings about you. And maybe I am lying about the outcome I see in the future. But what if, Emily Albert, I’m not lying at all? What if you miss the opportunity to discover something amazing just because of a couple of bad experiences?”

“It’s more than a couple. I don’t really have much faith left in your gender. The boys in my past really did a doozy on me.”

“But that’s the thing, Emily,” he said, rubbing his thumb over the cover of the book that was still in his hands, “you’ve been dealing with boys. And I know this might sound absolutely idiotic, but I’m not a boy, Emily Albert—I’m a man. Real men don’t wear pink or wear Old Spice, unless they feel the sudden urge to. Real men, Emily, treat girls right and have just motives in mind when pursuing them. I’m a real man, and I want to fall for you, Emily Albert.”

And I wanted to believe him. I really did. Because Oliver was probably one of the good ones. He was clever and confident and cute, but all that couldn’t outweigh the skepticism etched into my mind forever, dating all the way back to someone as inconsequential as Tommy Miller.

Tommy Miller was no more than a shady opportunist, as most boys were. Will Brooks was one, and so was Becket. Tommy saw me on the quad one day, figured that he’d grease me up with a smile and an introduction, and then when the time was right, he pounced on a naïve, unassuming freshman girl with nothing to lose. I was an emotional wreck because people gossiped about our little osculation and Tommy never talked to me again. But what did I expect? He was a cool sophomore, and I was a lame freshman. In my mind, I didn’t honestly think that we would magically ride off in the sunset and live happily ever after, but I also didn’t think that Tommy would completely snub me. He was just doing what he did, oblivious of the emotional casualties left in his wake.

That wasn’t to say that what he did was okay or that he was blameless, but maybe my expectations were too high. I expected Tommy to at least wave to me every once in a while. Maybe I should’ve set my standards lower and accepted the awkward eye contact. Because the truth of the matter was, boys sucked. It was just inherent in their nature. Like their hair color or eye color or bone structure. There was some dominant trait in their genetic makeup that caused them to suck, and they couldn’t help it. But something told me that that trait was recessive in Oliver Dobson’s DNA, despite all the evidence I had encountered with different boys to prove otherwise. He didn’t suck. Because of his gender, he had the capacity to suck, but somehow he had beaten the odds. Oliver Dobson was something else.

I found myself shaking my head. “I don’t know, Oliver…”

At that, Oliver stood up from the bed, so that he was directly facing me. Our eyes connected, and though I desperately wanted to look away, I couldn’t. “Emily, you like books, correct?” To remind me what a book was, he held the one in his hand over his head, just like Rafiki in The Lion King.

“Uh, yeah,” I said, not having the faintest clue as to where he was headed.

“But you don’t like boys—at least, entering into relationships with them because they’re unreliable and possess mass amounts of suckage, correct?”

I nodded my head slowly, keeping my eyes trained on his. “Correct.”

“Well, let me tell you a little something about books and boys, Emily Albert: conceptually, they’re the same. Some will leave you mystified and angry and sad that they came to an end too soon. Others, you’ll be glad to be rid of. Sometimes you’ll wonder why you wasted so much time on one, and other times you’ll be pondering why didn’t jump into things sooner. Some will break your heart and leave you wanting more and wondering what you did to deserve such a cruel fate. And others you’ll keep forever and go back to over and over again. Because, Emily Albert, the truth about books and boys is that no one is the same. And in order to judge one, you have to give them a chance, first. So, in the wise words of Abba, take a chance on me?”

I bit my bottom lip, pretty sure that I was about ready to implode or explode or just plode right about now. There were so many random thoughts colliding about in my mind, telling me to disregard everything that Oliver said. He was a boy; he would just end up letting me down. But the small sliver of optimism in me wanted to give him that chance. Because he was right—not all boys were the same, and maybe—just maybe—he would be different. But I had had that mentality before, so was it really worth the risk? Apparently, my mouth worked faster than my brain, and before I could even come to a full conclusion, I was already saying, “Okay,” and allowing myself to enter the dangerous realms that were far more frightening than those I read about in books. I was entering into boy territory, and I was downright terrified.