And here we have CHAPTER ONE! Yay! I'm going to try and update every Friday if I can. I know this chapter is a little bit slow, but I promise that it picks up. I hope y'all like this. It would be awesome if you could leave a comment, telling me what you think. Thanks xx. 

one

My eyes roamed over the endless spines of aged books mixed with ones that had yet to ever be discovered. One of my favorite parts about this bookstore—“The Bookstore,” as it was creatively titled—was that it mixed the old and the new. People brought in countless books that they had read hundreds of times, allowing others to discover the magic within the weathered pages. The Bookstore also ordered an assortment of modern entities and was pretty good at keeping up to date with whatever literary trend the world was experiencing. One could easily find a classic Jane Austen and then turn around to another shelf and find the latest theory of futuristic life forms. I was more of an Austen girl myself, but I had perused a few sci-fi novels in my time, just for the heck of it.

Currently, I was in search of something to read. I didn’t know what I was in the mood for, but I knew that only a book could cure my desire. In English we were going through a poetry unit right now, which was just dreadful, because poetry happened to be rather dreadful. I had never really understood the appeal of crafting pretty fragments rather than complete entireties. Novels made more sense to me than poems did. I respected poets enormously, for they were merely expressing themselves, but that didn’t mean that I had to read or love their works. I preferred basic prose.

As I continued to scan over the many titles printed across the backbones of books, I came across a black one. I had always been drawn to black books. Though the notorious idiom stated that you weren’t supposed to judge a book by its cover, I still did, in a way. I judged books by their colors. Black was a severe color, leading me to the conclusion that if a book possessed a black jacket or coating, chances were that it was serious. That wasn’t always the case as I had learned from my reading of black books, but more often than not, my assumption was correct. So because I happened to be in a bit of staid mood, I pulled out this particular black book and read the back.

It was about a doctor from the early 1900s. Every patient he had died. It wasn’t his fault, though, because they were all in critical condition, and in the twentieth century, some medicines had yet to been invented.

“That’s a terrible book,” someone said from behind me.

Clutching the black paperback in my hand tightly, I spun around to face a boy. “Why?”

“Well,” he glanced down at the ground, avoiding eye contact, “do you mind if I ruin the ending for you?”

“I’d rather you not,” I admitted softly. I liked coming to my own conclusions about books—even if unfamiliar boys with curly hair and wide-brimmed glasses disliked them.

“Okay, but I’m just letting you know now, you’re not going to like it,” he said, continuing to gaze at the scuffed up hardwood floor.

“How do you know?” Most of the time I wasn’t one for oppositions or chats with strangers, but this kid looked harmless, so I was okay breaking one of my personal norms.

He shrugged and momentarily allowed his eyes to dart up and look at me. “It’s just a terrible book.”

“What makes it so terrible?”

“The writing is bad—it’s just a ton of useless sentences—and the plot just gets increasingly depressing as it progresses. It’s terrible.” He stood by his first claim, and I respected that. Personally, I possessed many strong opinions about the books that I read—if this random guy thought that this book was terrible, then maybe it was. Though, I would still have to read it for myself to verify his negative review.

“So then if you think this book is terrible, what would you recommend instead?”

Upon my question, his head twisted over to a wall of shelving units, containing a seemingly infinite amount of written work. His hand brushed over a few of the titles, and then he extracted a red book and said, “Read this one,” as he handed it over to me.

I skimmed the summary and shook my head. “Pirates?”

“I promise, they’re not of the Caribbean variety,” he laughed, the edge of his mouth tilting upwards.

“That’s a shame,” I sighed, “I’ve always been a sucker for Johnny Depp.”

“These pirates are better than Depp.”

I let out a mocking gasp.

He laughed again and said, “I know it’s hard to fathom, but just read it. Their morals are what really got me.”

“So a book about a doctor and death and one about pirates. It’s not quite what I was expecting when I came in here.” I looked down at the books in my hand, guesstimating that by this time next week, I’d be finished with both (I was a fast reader).

“That seems to be a common theme with all of the patrons here—finding something that they didn’t initially intend to.”

“Oh, do you work here?” I wondered because of the way he talked about the customers.

“No,” he shook his head simply, “but I’m in here enough that I might as well.”

I laughed and then said, “I don’t work here, either, but I probably know the shelves better than the girl behind the register.”

“Probably,” he mumbled. Then the boy turned back to the shelf, and without giving it much thought (or so it appeared), he picked out a thick orange hardcover. I knew the book well.

“That is a good book,” I told him.

He turned it over and scanned the back. “Would you mind ruining the ending for me?”

“Uh, why?” My eyebrows rose up at his odd request, for I had never been one to encourage spoilers.

“I hate surprises and suspense,” he told me. “If you don’t tell me the ending, then I’ll just Google it or head straight to the last chapter.”

“Now that is an idiosyncrasy if I’ve ever heard one,” I laughed, rolling my eyes a bit at the human spectacle before me.

“What happens at the end?” he pleaded—almost begged—for the answer.

Reluctantly, I sighed and submitted, though it felt wholly wrong: “The girl and the boy spontaneously get on an airplane, but they’re not sure where it’s headed.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Well, thank you for saving me a week of nonstop reading, only to result in disappointment.” He put the book back on the shelf where he found it.

“It’s a good book,” I assured him, “and I like that it ends with this unknown sense of exploration.”

“It sounds unsatisfying to me,” he shrugged.

“How do you figure that?” It was a great book. Long, but every single page was worth it.

Again, he turned back to the books and continued to look. “There’s no closure—I like closure. In fact, you could almost say that I need it.”

“Why?”

“Because I like feeling complete and not left wondering. Waking up in the middle of the night, contemplating how books end because an author didn’t bother to write a satisfactory conclusion isn’t my idea of fun.” This time, he chose a thin white book. Just like the orange one, I knew how it started and how it ended. He held the cover of the book out to me and asked, “Have you read this one?”

I nodded. “I have.”

“Care to share the ending?”

“They live happily ever after,” I mimicked a high-pitched tone that could’ve belonged to a narrator of a Disney movie.

“Really?”

I laughed. “No.”

“So then what happens?”

“He commits suicide. She marries his best friend.”

“Well, I can’t say that that strictly abides by the Bro Code,” he said, “but it’s definitely a resolution. Did you like it?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t like the best friend,” I admitted, thinking back to the book and mentally getting lost once again in the story. I had finished it in two days—during the week. There was something so captivatingly tragic about the writing and the plot that I couldn’t seem to put it down. By the end, though, I had some pretty strong words that I wanted to say to the best friend of the guy who had killed himself.

“Enlighten me,” humored the boy.

“He married the girl that his dead best friend loved more than anything else in the world. Even when his best friend was depressed and having suicidal thoughts, he still loved the girl. But then the world got too much for him, and he killed himself. So his best friend went off and married his grieving girlfriend. And I think that sucks.”

The corner of his mouth tipped up once more as he inquired, “Why?”

“Because even though the guy was dead, you just don’t do that. The best friend knew how madly in love the suicidal guy was, and then the minute he was out of the picture—because he committed suicide—the best friend took the opportunity to make a move on the girl, whose mind was temporarily clouded, because her boyfriend killed himself.” I was very passionate about fictional characters, whether I liked them or wanted to stab them with a machete. This particular character I wanted to shoot with a machine gun, because he was just so inconsiderate to the girl who lost her boyfriend to such a serious mental illness as depression. If the guy were real, I would go right up to him and punch him in the face. Okay, so maybe I wouldn’t because I was a pacifist, but I would probably send him a strongly worded email about how awful I thought he was. Actually, scratch all that. I was too nice to even hate on him from behind a computer screen. But in my head, I would totally think that he was a jerk.

“He sounds like a dick,” murmured the boy with the book in his hand.

“Well, at least he’s being consistent with the rest of his gender.” I couldn’t resist—it just came out of my mouth before I could process to whom I was speaking. But then again, it was probably for the best that he was a complete stranger, because if I had knowingly insulted all men to a man (or boy) that I knew, that would’ve been much worse.

The boy looked up at me and a full grin broke out onto his face. “So you’re one of those girls.”

“I’m not a full-fledged feminist—or a lesbian, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I quickly sputtered out, not being able to count the times that I had automatically been put into that category just because of my strong views.

“That’s not what I was thinking,” he said.

“Oh? So then what were you thinking?”

“You,” he paused for the theatrics, “are a man-hater.”

I couldn’t entirely disagree with him, so I only did so partially: “Actually, I am a teenage-boy-hater. Men are fine, it’s the boys that I have a vendetta against.”

“May I guess why?”

“Go right ahead,” I invited him right into the core fueling of my mania.

“You were hurt by one too many guys, and now you think that they’re all the same—heartbreakers and liars and cheaters and dicks,” he expertly speculated, the glimmers of a smug smile shining through because he knew that he was right.

“And I suppose you’re about to tell me that I’m wrong?” I scoffed.

“Indeed I am,” he nodded, reaching up to push his slipping eyewear back onto the bridge of his nose. “Boys are a lot like books—”

I couldn’t listen to whatever inane theory he was about to spew, so I involuntarily let out a sigh.

“Just hear me out,” he went on. “Like books, some boys are terrible—I’ll attest to that—but some guys are good. There are terrible books with nice covers on the outside, and there are good books with terrible covers. Some guys suck but have nice covers, and other guys don’t suck but also don’t have nice covers.” In this analogy, I had to presume that the “covers” he was talking about were outer appearances. “Not every book is the same, and the same goes for boys.”

“That’s a lovely belief,” I said, “but it’s too bad that it’s false.”

Suddenly, he dropped the subject of my teenage-boy-hating and asked, “What’s your name?”

“Emily Albert,” I said, despite the oddity of only now introducing myself. Typically, introductions were how conversations started—not ended.

“Emily Albert,” he repeated, trying it out for himself, “that’s a nice name. I’m Oliver—Oliver Dobson.”

Oliver Dobson. It fit him. It wasn’t over-the-top pretentious, nor was it too dorky or geeky. It was the type of name I could see on or in a book one day. Oliver Dobson was a good author’s name, but it was a better character name. I could fall in love with a fictitious character named Oliver Dobson. That would never happen with the one standing in front of me in the flesh, but if he had a doppelgänger in literature, I could potentially see myself and my heart growing overly attached to him, to the point that I cried or mourned when his story was over. And this was all because Oliver Dobson happened to be a fantastically solid character name.

In Tuck Everlasting, one of the main characters happened to be named Jesse Tuck. I read the book in probably sixth or seventh grade, though that name had stayed with me. It was just such a good name for a character. The book was good, but what I fell for was the name. It was probably because I was a logophile, always opening dictionaries up to random pages, just to discover new and interesting words, but there was just something so simple yet beautiful that I loved about Jesse Tuck. And right now, I was talking to Oliver Dobson, who also possessed a name that belonged in a narrative masterpiece.

“That is a marvelous character name,” I informed the boy before me. Because I knew he was a reader, I also knew that he would understand exactly what I meant.

“Well, my parents always were firm believers that I would somehow obtain immortality one day, so there’s still time for someone to write an epic about my mundane life.”

“You’re a reader—as long as you have that, your life could never be mundane.” Books possessed worlds for readers to enter and experience vicariously. When readers read, they weren’t merely staring at a page for hours—they were living and breathing new realms of discovery that could take them on journeys and add to their wealth of knowledge. While most readers looked unassumingly mundane, as Oliver had suggested, I believed that they couldn’t be farther from it. Readers were the real explorers.

“I guess you’re right, Emily Albert,” he determined. “Unfortunately, you’re still wrong about all boys being the same.”

“Am I?”

“Yes.” He was wrong—I wasn’t.

“Well, I guess we’re have to agree to disagree.”

“I guess so.”

“It was nice meeting you, Oliver—even if you are wrong,” I bid, taking a few steps away from the forest of books.

“Likewise, Emily,” he returned. “Oh, and just for the record, that book that you’re about to buy—the black one—it’s still terrible, and you’re still going to dislike it.”

“We’ll have to see, won’t we?”

“That we will.”

I shot a small smile at the boy who was no longer entirely a stranger, and then went over to another part of The Bookstore, where the uninformed cashier was. There, I paid for my two books and left the store, eager to read and discover.