B is for Books...

B is for Books

Books! God I love books. Love, love, love! The first book that I remember was the Very Hungry Caterpillar. I loved that thing! I had the kind with the really thick pressed pages so I could read it again and again and it never wore out. I’ve always been a good (and fast) reader. I started reading the classics in middle school, along with teen horror king Christopher Pike. Pike wrote about sex, which was water-to-a-dying-man for a thirteen year old. I actually think it was that aspect in his books that ultimately led me to love the romance genre. But gosh, I have so many memories about books; I wouldn’t even know what story to tell!

My Top 4 most memorable books (like the kind that I can still remember the covers in my head!

Th The Hungry Caterpillar
Final Friends by Christopher Pike
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Perfect by Judith McNaught

You know what you have to do...Okay, so I’m going to tell the embarrassing 8^th grade yearbook story. Whenever this memory pops up in my head I take a second to go back to 1994 and then I cringe in utter embarrassment. Even now, all these years later, I am so.fucking.embarrassed! I did the absolute stupidest shit in school. How I made it through, I’ll never know.

In 8^th grade I was head over heels in love with Russ. We had dated off and on since 6^th grade. We were even one of the first couples to *gasp* French-kiss in 7^th grade (quite the big deal back then). Then, in 8^th grade, Russ decides he likes Heather better and drops me harder than a 400 pound man out of an airplane. I was crushed. Devastated. Heart-broken. Life could not…would not go on. But I was thirteen and as most young, hormone raging adolescents do, I quickly recovered. Tony liked me! Tony, who was tall, dark, and han…no ladies and gentleman, Tony was not handsome. He was tall and dark, but his head was too big for his neck, his nose was too big for his face and he looked like a pepperoni pizza on steroids. Oh, what was I thinking?!? Tony’s mother was also a teacher so we began spending our afternoons together, he asked me out, we held hands at lunch, and life was grand. At the end of the year Tony asked me to go to the 8^th grade dance with him *sigh* and I said yes. I had the biggest poufy hair at the dance, I wore a purple dress and he had a tie to match and we slow danced the night away. Pure bliss.

The next Monday at school we finally got our long awaited yearbooks. I can still remember it like it was yesterday. Tony sat in front of me in Mrs. Jacob’s home ec class. During second period he turned around and handed me his yearbook. Since I was Tony’s girl, I got to sign his yearbook first (insert little girl squeal here). I was at the height of my Christopher Pike obsession at this point and had just finished reading Final Friends 3: The Graduation. In this book, the main characters are graduating from high school and the first two chapters are small inscriptions that they are making in each other’s yearbooks. One character, Bubba, is the rudest and crudest of them all (and duh, my favorite!). Well, as you can imagine, Bubba writes a particularly ‘racy’ message in Sara’s yearbook. When I read it a week earlier I just knew that was what I had to write in Tony’s yearbook when he gave it to me! He would see that I was a woman who was sexy and smart and knew what she wanted. What the hell was I thinking??? And why, why oh why, did it not dawn on me in the ensuing seven days that this would be an utter mistake? But alas, I was thirteen, the hormones were raging, and I, apparently, had no brain.

My inscription in Tony’s yearbook (verbatim from the book):

My Dearest Tony,

My heart patters at the thought of us making love tonight above the deep ocean swells, our bodies locked in passion, the salty sweat on the burning flesh of our entangled limbs mingling like oil and wine, ready to burst into flaming ecstasy. My head swoons. Tonight, Tony, I promise you, will be our night. The gods will envy our joy.

But we mustn’t be foolish. We mustn’t forget, in our carnal hunger for each other, certain responsibilities. You would rather float on love-intoxicated perfumed clouds, I realize, ignoring the practical demands the world places upon us, only fantasizing about the pleasure I will send throbbing through your body. Yet we have to be careful. We can have our cake and eat it, too, but only if we don’t let the ice cream melt. We have to get some condoms.

As you have probably guessed, anything that will heighten our delight is fine with me. I prefer the natural to the artificial, the tight to the loose, blue to red. Keep this in mind when you visit the pharmacy, Tony, and you will be thanked a thousand times over when the time comes.

Love You Always,

In So Many Different Positions,

Fiona

I imagine at this point your mouth is hanging open in shock, you aren’t reading this because you are rolling on the ground laughing, or you can totally feel my absolute mortification. I told you it was bad. There was a reason I haven’t ever rewritten this passage.

Remember when I said Tony gave me his yearbook in 2^nd period? Yes, that means that everyone who signed it the rest of the day read what I had written. It never crossed my mind that other people would read it or that Tony would be completely embarrassed by the passage also. By lunch everyone knew about it and Tony had to hide his yearbook in his locker while we both prayed the story didn’t get to our mothers.

I don’t know how Scarlett the guidance counselor, who knew everything I did in school, never found out. Or maybe she did but couldn’t muster the nerve to face me about it. That night I came up with a solution: we would glue a page over the top of it (I had written it on the back cover). The next day I came to school armed with a piece of construction paper and super glue. Between the permanent marker and all the glue I used, I am confident those words were never read again. My relationship with Tony ended shortly after that. Apparently, I was too much woman for him to handle.

Life Lesson: “Don’t put it in writing unless you’d be willing to have the world read it.”

Fiona