Holly and Her Naughty eReader (2 page)

Chapter 2

Here’s a summary of my high school experience by year.

Freshman year
:
Arrived in the fall of 1999 bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Literally. My eyes
are bright green and my hair is a frizzy explosion that I had tied back in a
bushy tail on the first day of high school. I found my niche in the band
(French Horn, the bookish girls always play French Horn), and on the basketball
team (I’ve always had a decent jump shot) and in speech and debate (go ahead,
try and argue with me) and in drama (is it apparent that I can be dramatic?)

Despite all those activities, my true love was the
library. Any library. The school library, the public library, or the burgeoning
library of paperbacks in my room. Christmas of freshman year is when I
discovered Harry Potter. It’s also when my parents began their outrageously
bitter divorce. My dad kind of dropped out of my life that year, and Dumbledore
took his place.

Sophomore year
:
I started dating Steve Wachowski at band camp. I broke up with him two months
later while trick-or-treating after Becca’s Halloween party. Steve was dressed
as Neo from
The Matrix
and wanted me
to dress up as Trinity. When I came as Dorothy from
The Wizard of Oz
instead we both knew it was over.

Junior year
:
Max Brody showed up to band camp with a sexy new swagger to match his new title
as lead trumpet, and I decided I had a crush on him. I also decided that,
rather than tell Max I liked him, I would tell no one at all about any of my feelings
and instead I would brood about in dark makeup with intense paperbacks under my
arm like
Catcher in the Rye, Dune,
and
the complete works of Anne Rice.

Senior year
:
Michelle Flores, the strong forward on the basketball team, became my best
friend. I went to prom with Chris Tooley and he got sore with me when I refused
to give it up that night. I read and re-read and re-read again Harry Potter 1,
2, 3, and 4. At a nighttime astronomy lab, Max Brody and I made a connection,
and at Clarissa’s graduation party, I danced with Max to
Faithfully
by Journey. The next day he stood me up on our date.

Now, here’s a summary of my 10-year high school reunion
by hour.

Hour 1:
Lots
of hugs, lots of “you look good’s” exchanged, a gin and tonic downed.

Hour 2:
Sat at
a table with Michelle, some other band geeks, and their spouses. While my
friends told stories about their little children, I drank two glasses of wine.
By the time Michelle finally made an effort to get me involved in the
conversation, I was in that stage of drunkenness when you know everything you
say is hysterical. I told the story about finding my fiancée in bed with a
nineteen-year-old girl.

“And so I took off the
engagement ring,” I said, “I threw it across the room, and I shouted..”

--at this point I should note
that I’m pretty sure I didn’t just say the words, but actually gave my friends
a full volume demonstration of my scorned woman shouting voice--

 
“…and I shouted, ‘You stupid lying fuckface!’”

My story was met with utter
silence, not only at the table, but, it seemed, throughout the entire ballroom.
Michelle’s mouth hung open, and I remembered from high school that she had a
bunch of silver fillings, and then I wondered if my generation was the very
last to ever get silver fillings because I know they use tooth-colored fillings
now, and then I wondered what else my generation was last at, and then I said,
“You guys remember where you were on 9/11?” and Michelle smiled and said,
“Someone’s had one too many, I think,” and they all laughed.

Hour 3:
Danced
in the large group for the fast songs. Went to the bar for a vodka sour every
time there was a slow song.

Hour 4:
My
blood alcohol level somewhere between blitzed and wasted, I plopped down by myself
at an empty table and started an internal debate about what was making me feel
the most sad. I couldn’t decide it if was:

a)
     
The fact that Michelle was clearly best friends
with Kayla now. Their children were in preschool together and they spoke in a constant
stream of snappy inside jokes of the sort Michelle used to use with me.

b)
     
That Max Brody didn’t show at the reunion so
there wasn’t even a chance at some sort of closure with him over that time he
stood me up and never called me back. I hadn’t come into the night looking for
a confrontation, but now that I was good and drunk I was ready to have one.

c)
      
That no one was hitting on me. Maybe I’ve read
too many books about high school reunions, but a part of me was just certain
that I would show up and reconnect with someone I hadn’t thought about in years
and we’d have this great chemistry and then who knew what would happen.

d)
     
That my Kindle was busted.

I think I was more sad about the
Kindle than anything. Don’t laugh. To you, a broken Kindle might not be
comparable to the disillusionment of coming to your 10-year-reunion and
realizing you don’t belong anymore, but to me, they were one in the same,
especially in my drunken haze.

At times like these, I looked to
my Kindle to provide me comfort. How I would have loved to bail on this
reunion, go back to my hotel, and read a quick ditty about a smoking hot
werewolf from an abusive family who just needs a nice girl to understand his
pain and love him for who he is.

And then tomorrow, when I dealt
with the hangover that was sure to come, I could spend the day in my pajamas,
reading samples until I found the perfect one to buy.

Ahhh….samples. One of the great
joys the eReader revolution hath wrought. Sure, we all got to sample in the
bookstore too, but it wasn’t the same. In the bookstore you had to be careful
with the $30 paper prize you didn’t own. You had to turn the pages with the
lightest of touches, always wary of getting a fingerprint on someone else’s
volume, always mindful of the fact that, until you went to the register and
made the purchase, you were loitering on someone else’s property.

And under no circumstances could
you
bring any materials
into the bathroom
!

But samples on the Kindle changed
all of that. Long, free, try-before-you-buy, you own it and can take it to the
bathroom if you want, samples. What an utterly brilliant invention. Not only do
you get to read all your heart desires, but you get the joy of pushing a button
and giving yourself a treat from Amazon whenever you want!

What a joyous, wonderful thing
is the Kindle!

And mine was broken.

“You look sad.”

The words came from a girl whose
voice I recognized right away, but whose body was wildly different from the one
I remembered.

“Moongirl?” I said.

She laughed. “I go by my real
name now,” she said.

I looked at her for a second, my
alcohol-soaked brain slow to process all the many thoughts it had to deal with.

“Of course you go by your real
name,” I said. “How are you Vivian?”

Vivian Halloway, a girl who was
on the edge of my circle of friends, but not quite inside it.

“I’m great, Holly,” Vivian said.
“How about you?”

“I’m….fine,” I said. “How come
this is the first time I’ve seen you tonight?”

“I just got here,” Vivian said.
“I have no patience for the beginnings of parties. I only do the ends.”

I couldn’t help but laugh.
Spoken just like Moongirl.

Vivian “Moongirl” Halloway was
the most gothy of the goths in high school. Declaring herself a Wiccan at the
beginning of sophomore year, and always coming back to class stoned after
lunch, she bore only a passing resemblance to the beautiful woman who was
talking to me now. In high school, Moongirl wore dark makeup and big boots, had
a messy brillo pad of a hairdo, and always had a cigarette in her lips.

But this woman in front of me
wore a short, tightly-fitted black dress that showed off a fit and toned body,
her hair was short and tame, and her makeup was light and cheery.

“I like the way you think,” I
said. “Maybe next time I’ll only show up for the end as well.”

“So why are you sad, Holly?”

“I’m not sad. It’s nothing,” I
said.

“See, but right there you’ve
said two different things. First you said you’re not sad. Then you said it’s
nothing. Which is it?”

“It’s nothing,” I said.

“Which means it’s something,”
said Vivian. “Something has made you sad and you’re pretending it’s nothing.
What is it?”

“I feel like I’ve wasted the
past ten years of my life,” I said.

Vivian nodded, slowly. “I
understand,” she said. “I think reunions can do that. People put on a show when
they get here. They all want us to believe their lives are just awesome. Nobody
has the courage to tell the truth and say they wished some things had turned
out differently. And because everyone is playing this game, it escalates.
People start trying to one-up each other with their awesomeness and you get a
feedback loop.”

She was making a circle in the
air with her finger now.

“It starts with a douche like
Felipe Valdez exaggerating about how good his job is,” Vivian said, nodding in
the direction of Felipe, who was dancing with his wife. “Then Darian hears
Felipe bragging and thinks he needs to show off how cool he is, so he brings
over the hot girl he started dating last month specifically so he could take
her to the reunion. He’s gonna dump her tomorrow.”

Looking at Darian, I heard the
truth of Vivian’s words. Of course that babe who came with Darian was a ringer.
In high school, Darian dated the valedictorian and the Korean exchange student.
He wasn’t the type to get caught up with a bimbo.

“Then Janelle feels threatened
by how good Darian’s date looks, and she starts yammering incessantly about her
children,” Vivian said.

Now I was giggling. Janelle had
indeed been showing off pictures of her kids all night long.

“The one-upsmanship gets passed
around like a virus,” Vivian said. “And here you are, thinking you were coming
back to catch up with old friends only to find yourself contaminated with a
severe infection of my-life-is-better-than-yours.”

“Wow Vivian,” I said. “That’s…exactly
right.”

“You wanna get out of here?”
Vivian said.

“And go where?” I said.

“I can think of a hundred places
more fun than this one.”

Chapter 3

And thus it came to be that I
left my 10-year-reunion in the passenger seat of Vivian Halloway’s Passat.
Didn’t see that one coming.

In high school, Vivian and her
crew sat under the big oak tree at lunch and talked about how God was a great
lie and our parents were all suckers for believing in him. As a band geek, I
had my own group of friends who were mostly removed from Vivian’s crowd.
However, Vivian and I did have a history, albeit a minor one. In the middle of
junior year, Vivian had an ugly breakup with her long-time boyfriend Miles
Murphy, and she underwent a dramatic and temporary transformation. Whereas some
girls might choose to go goth
after
the breakup, Vivian did just the opposite. Miles was as ingrained in the
leather boot and trench coat crowd as Vivian, and after their breakup, one of
them needed to step away. Vivian decided it would be her.

For two weeks, she came to
school wearing sneakers, jeans, T-shirts, and no makeup, and during this time,
for reasons I still don’t understand, I became her best pal. She took me to
lunch every day and spilled her guts about Miles and the tragedy of their
breakup. She even slept over at my house one night. We watched
Say Anything
, we painted each other’s
nails, and we stayed up until four in the morning.

The next week Vivian and Miles
got back together and my brief spate as Vivian’s bestie came to an end.For the
rest of my high school career, Vivian and I said hey when we passed in the
halls, but nothing more.

So it was kind of weird that she
and I bailed on the reunion together, but here I was, cruising down Montgomery
Boulevard at midnight on a Saturday with the windows down. I was looking out
the moon roof of Moongirl’s car.

“Do you remember freshman year,
when Krissann and Marvin put on a one-act play they wrote?” I asked.

“You mean the one where Krissann
played a confused lesbian?”

“Yes, that’s the one,” I said.
Vivian was remembering the silliest part of the play, when Krissann, the
prissiest girl in school, stood center stage and screamed, “
I’m a god-damned filthy dyke
!”

“What about it?” said Vivian.

I was looking at her. All that
remained of Vivian the goth were two silver pentagrams that sat flat against
her earlobes. Otherwise, she looked like the sort of power broker who worked
downtown and had important meetings over lunch.

“You sat next to me in the
audience,” I said.

“And I offered you a hit of
acid,” Vivian said with a laugh. “Now I remember. Oh shit. I was such a pusher.
I’m sorry about that.”

“It’s alright,” I said. “You
know, I sort of regretted saying no to you. It was the only time anyone ever
offered me something like that.”

“Are you asking me to go get us
a score tonight?” Vivian said with a giggle.

“No, no, of course not,” I said.