Anyways, the book is all about this girl who’s afraid of going crazy and killing herself. She’s afraid, this girl, that she’s trapped in a kind of box. That’s not how it starts; I mean, first, of course, you have to read all about her family situation and childhood she couldn’t stand and everything, but the thing is, it’s like her life is hard—at least she thinks it is—while actually it’s pretty posh in my opinion, because she goes to this nifty boarding school in Vermont and her parents are loaded, but despite all that, she feels she’s stuck in this box.
And the problem is, she can’t get the lid up.
I mean, she’s always sort of fantasizing that she’s stuck in this box, which of course is, like, the book’s big metaphor, you know, that life is like a box you can’t get out of—at least this girl can’t—and she’s so stuck that her only option is knocking herself off, which in the book she also fantasizes about and plans in, like, twenty-five different ways.
That’s what it’s all about.
I mean, that’s what my mom told me, and she also told me everything about how the girl who wrote it did herself in, like, literally only a month or something after the book was published. So even though I hadn’t actually read it, I knew enough to talk about it when Laura and I once took a walk through the neighborhood, just a sort of boring walk, but which turned out to be the one single time I ever heard her say anything about herself to try to tell me who she really was.
And I know that now, because I’ve, like, drawn so much attention to it, you’re probably thinking that what Laura said must have been, like, a really big deal—but maybe it wasn’t.
I mean, it isn’t like she read off to me her own personal version of, like, the Declaration of Independence or anything, but she said a few things that made a big impression on me, that’s all, and I started thinking about that, when I was standing there at the door to her room.
Anyways, we were walking, and I said to her, “Hey, by the way, can I have that book back? My mom said she wants it back. She wants to know if you liked it, though. She asked me.”
Laura sort of looked askance a second. It was near sunset, and we were both bored. Actually, she was bored, probably because I’d come up with nothing for us to do except take a walk. The day was warm, but kind of boringly warm, and the air smelled fresh, but really sort of boringly fresh. It was really boring, I have to admit it, because sometimes, in my neighborhood especially, it really feels like nothing is going on and nothing ever will go on, and it makes you feel sort of bummed out, just walking past all those staring houses and yards that never change, and I couldn’t help but think she might sort of judge me for not coming up with anything to do that was more, like, exciting.
“I lost it,” she said. She didn’t even turn her face to look at me.
Wow, I thought.
I almost stopped walking.
This was bad.
Because this particular copy of the book was my mom’s favorite copy. She’d had it since high school and treated it like her own personal testament.
“You lost it?”
I was really worried. My mom would be pissed.
“No, maybe not,” Laura said. “I just don’t know where I put it. I’ll look for it.” She still didn’t look at me.
I could tell something was going on with her, just from how she was walking a little faster and sort of deliberately wasn’t looking at me. I couldn’t really tell if she was fooling with me.
To tell you the truth, the feeling I had was that she wanted to keep the book, and not give it back to me.
I tell you, that book makes girls act like that.
Then—I think it was to almost sort of change the subject, even though we were still talking about basically the same thing—she asked, “Did you read it?”
She said it just like that: Did you read it? And I could sort of tell already, from this sort of dark attitude I felt coming from her, that she thought I was somebody who’d not bothered to read it, and was actually probably, like, the last person who would ever read it, given the chance.
“Me? No. I didn’t want to. My mom told me about it. She loved it. I don’t read that sort of stuff.”
“You should read it,” she said. She sounded stiff, like a teacher. And finally she looked at me.
“I like science fiction,” I said, trying to smile. “Ever read any of that? I like weird stories about different dimen—”
“That stuff’s for idiots,” she said. “You should read the book.”
I walked a bit.
I didn’t like the idiot thing.
I didn’t feel she’d called me an idiot—she hadn’t. I mean, she’d said that if I read the book—or at least she implied that if I read it—I’d probably get something out of it. I would only have been an idiot if she’d thought reading the book would do me no good at all. Actually it was more complicated than that, but the bottom line was that I could tell she thought that reading it might somehow improve my understanding of life, which I didn’t believe at all, and which actually kind of pissed me off.
“I don’t want to,” I said. “I think it might just make me bummed out.”
“Then you should get bummed out,” she said, and it sounded a bit sarcastic, because she
