Michael
Michael knew, as he watched Lane disappear, that he’d gone too far. He’d treated her like one of his students. Worse, he’d come dangerously close to insulting her taste in literature. He hadn’t meant it to come out the way it did, but sometimes he forgot that not everyone spent their days hiding in the pages of old books. When he was a child books had been his sanctuary, a refuge from the bullies and the memories he couldn’t outrun. Later, his friends were others like him, academic types more comfortable with dead writers than live people, who preferred words on a page to real life.
It hardly made for satisfying relationships, as Becca, his on-again, off-again girlfriend, had icily pointed out while packing up her DVDs and exercise mats three months ago. Truth be told, he was relieved when it ended. Keeping up with a twenty-seven-year-old yoga instructor had been both exhausting and mind-numbing, a manic whirl of health lectures and vegan cooking classes, all ironically lubricated with far too much chardonnay. He should have known better. In fact, he had. But she’d been someone—something—to fill the void, to distract him from the growing realization that the life he was living belonged to someone else, someone who wasn’t even real.
Drifting back to the shelves, he slid the weathered volume of Great Expectations free and ran his palm over the front cover, cool and vaguely waxy. It had been beautiful once, moss green leather, embossed lettering, richly marbled endpapers. Now the lettering was gone, the leather badly scarred after God only knew how many readings. Not surprising, though. Boys didn’t take care of their own things, let alone books that belonged to someone else.
He opened the volume tentatively, savoring the musty scent of old book: dust and ink and slowly decaying paper. After coffee, it was his favorite scent in the world. Flipping to chapter twenty-seven, he scanned the pages until he found the passage he sought. It was one he knew by heart.
In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.
Yes, he’d been abrupt with his hostess, and less than truthful about the reason he disliked Great Expectations, but what was he supposed to do? Spill his guts to a virtual stranger? Explain that as a boy the story had torn him apart, giving him nightmares that left him drenched and weeping in his narrow bed? That even now thoughts of the tragic Miss Havisham filled him with revulsion? Lane would never understand. How could she? His hostess saw Great Expectations as a literary classic. He would always see it as something else.