Dear Diary,
I never paid much attention to the age difference between heroines and their love interests until the twins became teenagers, at which point I realized how creepy it would be if a middle-aged guy wanted to marry one of them.
Now that I’m almost sixteen, I can’t believe anyone my age would ever want to be married at all, much less to a person old enough to be someone’s dad. With or without the madwoman in the attic.
M.P.M.
a biology textbook into my locker when I sensed a presence behind me.
“Hey—” I started to say as I turned, expecting to see Lydia or Terry, because Arden would have been bouncier. The rest of the sentence evaporated as though I’d shoved a paper towel in my mouth.
Alex Ritter stood behind me, head cocked at a questioning angle. My heart galloped, up and then down again. “You were saying?” he prompted.
I shook my head.
He eased backwards until he was propped against the wall. Today’s shirt was Wedgwood blue, which brought out the dark ring around the paler hue of his irises. Surely he planned these things for effect.
“What?” He looked down at himself. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I’m trying to decide if you’re a fop.”
“Excuse me?”
“Dandy, popinjay, coxcomb. Fancy man.” I broke off, realizing my mouth had sprinted ahead of my brain. His whole attitude was so familiar, as if we were intimately acquainted, that I’d fallen into the trap of talking to him the same way. You did measure his hips, I reminded myself.
“I’m guessing you’ll ace the vocab section of the SAT.”
I braced myself against a rush of warmth; there was bound to be an ulterior motive behind the flattery. “Did you want something?”
He nodded. “You’ve read Jane Eyre.”
It was a statement, not a question. I blinked at him, nonplussed. He wanted to talk about the Brontës?
“Phoebe says everyone in your family is like a walking library,” he continued, filling the space where a normal person would have joined the conversation instead of gawping at him like a rube.
“Of course,” I finally managed to say. Honestly, did I look like a philistine?
A girl in tasseled ankle boots grabbed his hand as she passed. “See you tonight, Alex?”
His answering smile sent her off with a spring in her step. “What did you think about what happened at the end?” he asked me, without missing a beat.
“You mean when the ghostly voice is calling ‘Jane, Jane’ across the moors? As in, do I think it was a paranormal event or some kind of Freudian delusion?”
He scratched his chin with a thumbnail. “What about what happens after that?”
“When she goes back to Thornfield and it’s a burned-out husk?”
“Hmm. It’s not what you’d call a happy ending, is it?”
“What? No, it’s beautiful. How she finds him again and sort of hints he’s not totally blind—”
“Who’s blind?”
It shouldn’t have surprised me that Alex Ritter was not a close reader. “Rochester. From the fire,” I reminded him. “When he tried to save his first wife from the burning building, but she leaped to her death instead? Which is tragic, but also handy for Jane because, goodbye, bigamy!”
He was staring as though I’d spoken a foreign language. With painful slowness, my brain pieced together the puzzle.
“You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
“Didn’t quite make it that far,” he admitted without the faintest trace of shame. “To recap, house burns down, he goes blind, she comes to find him, and then?”
“They get married.” I reported this with the robotic inflection of someone who has been shocked into a catatonic state.
A slow grin spread across his face. “That’s exactly what I needed to know.”
I swallowed, unsure where to direct my gaze. The force of his attention was like standing in a spotlight. “It is?”
“Essay test next period.”
“How could you not finish Jane Eyre? It’s so . . . juicy.” I had been on the point of saying romantic, but pulled back in time.
“Busy week,” he replied, with the insouciant air of someone accustomed to charming his way out of trouble. “I got to the part where that creepy family takes her in. Seemed obvious she was going to marry the boring preacher guy and settle in with the sister-wives for a life of tea and embroidery.”
“That is so incredibly wrong.”
“I know.” He leaned closer, lowering his voice to a confidential murmur. “Thanks to you.”
Heat simmered beneath my skin, a red tide of outraged sensibilities. His laissez-faire attitude—in literature and love—offended me almost as much as the fact that I’d been unwittingly embroiled in his cheating.
“Wait,” I said, as he turned to go. “Don’t you want to know about the very end?”
He raised his brows in question.
“There’s an epilogue. It turns out Bertha—the homicidal first wife—isn’t really dead.”
“After jumping off the roof?”
“She’s pretty messed up,” I improvised. “Extremely bedraggled. And she’s kind of . . . singed. And limping.”
“Sounds twisted.”
“It is. Especially when she breaks into their house at night—Rochester and Jane’s. And then there’s a big fight, but since Rochester is still mostly blind it’s up to Jane to save the day.”
“And does she?”
I nodded. “Nobody messes with Jane. She stabs Bertha. With a kind of . . . dagger.” Though I was tempted to embellish the description, it seemed wiser not to push my luck.
“Wow.” He looked back at me with an expression I couldn’t decipher. Hopefully it wasn’t suspicion. “I guess I should have kept reading.”
“Mm-hm,” I agreed, smiling sweetly.
“Finally!” Arden exclaimed when I made it to lunch. Before I could explain the nature of the delay, she nudged her phone across the table, watching me with barely contained glee. “Check it out.”
A patchwork of pictures filled the screen, but my eye went to the words unfurling in ornate script across the top. “Bad Guys from Books?” I read aloud.
“It’s a working title. I’m open to suggestions.” Arden flashed me a tentative smile. “What do you think?”
I studied the images more closely. They were black-and-white, or nearly so, with hazy effects near the edges, but all featured the same, vaguely familiar subject: a young man in formal dress with an intense expression.
“It’s him,” Arden informed me. “From the movie. Scroll down.”
Farther down the page, in a smaller font, another line of text appeared: Is Your Guy a Vronsky?
“You made this?” I asked.
Arden nodded, biting her lip.
“It looks very professional.”
She waved off the praise, though I could tell she was pleased. “I had some time last night, and I thought it might be a good idea to share what we’ve learned. Like a public service.”
“We could call it the Loser List.” Lydia took a meditative bite of carrot stick. “Or the D-bag Dictionary. Encyclopedia of Creepers?”
“Dangerous Dudes?” offered Terry.
Arden’s lips pursed in thought. “If you had to summarize why a certain party, who wanted to date Terry even though he already had a girlfriend, was bad news, what’s a word for that?”
“Irresponsible?” I was thinking of his reading habits, among other things. “Feckless? Or maybe libertine? Rogue? Scoundrel?”
“Ooh, scoundrel. I like that.” Arden’s thumbs danced across her phone. “Let’s call it ‘The Scoundrel Survival Guide.’ Okay.” She looked up at us. “What’s rule number one?”
Terry raised her hand. “Always check for a criminal record?”
“I was thinking more specific to the type,” Arden said diplomatically. “But that’s a great general principle.”
“Never trust a guy who has better hair than you?” Lydia suggested.
Arden looked entreatingly at me.
What was the crux of the issue? You couldn’t really say too attractive, because the way Alex Ritter looked wasn’t entirely his fault. “Watch out for guys who are too charming? And flirt with everything that moves? And fall in love at the drop of a hat?”
“Yes,” Arden said as she transcribed.
I peered at the screen of her phone. “Is this going to be online? For anyone to see?”
“It’s totally anonymous,” Arden assured me. “Like a blind item in a gossip column.”
“We’re okay in terms of libel laws,” Lydia added. “Technically we’re not even talking about anyone real.”
“Exactly. It’s about guys in books who happen to suck in ways we can all relate to.” Setting her phone to one side, Arden picked up her bag of chips. “Who are some others, Mary?”
“Scoundrels?”
She nodded. “The really famous ones. Super skeevy.”
I took a bite of leftover spring roll, chewing as I reflected. Where to start? “There was a man who claimed to love this woman because she was such a free spirit, passionate and intelligent and not afraid to speak her mind, but when push came to shove, he was like, ‘Sorry, I’m going to marry your passive-aggressive cousin instead because she’s better at faking it to fit in.’”
Arden smacked Lydia in the arm. “Remember Jimmy, Morrison’s friend? He used to date this girl Maggie, who was completely wild, in a totally adorable way. So funny, you never knew what was going to come out of her mouth. But then he dumped her senior year for this girl who basically never laughed. Ever. I don’t even know if she had teeth. Seriously, wouldn’t you rather be embarrassed a couple of times than bored out of your mind every single day?”
I nodded sadly. It was rare to find someone who truly valued the unique or original. Most people wanted to have what everyone else wanted, as if forming their own opinions was too mentally taxing. “There’s a famous one where a guy is mad at this other guy for calling him on his bad behavior, so the first guy dates the second one’s way younger sister and tries to get her to elope.”
“Revenge dating,” Lydia said at once. “I’ve heard of that.”
“What about murderers?” Terry asked.
“Well,” I began, thinking fast. “There’s the person who was obsessed with his adopted sister, and they basically ran wild together until one day he overheard her saying something unflattering about him and he had a hissy fit and ran away. When he finally came back, he was so furious that she’d married their namby-pamby neighbor, he went and married the wussy guy’s sister. And then he was so horrible to everyone they basically died of sheer misery.”
Arden stared at me wide-eyed.
“I know. And there are people who think Wuthering Heights is a classic romance, even though the so-called hero has the emotional maturity of a two-year-old.”
“But somebody takes him down in the end, right?” Lydia asked.
“His childhood love comes back to haunt him after she bites it.” I gave a grudging shrug. “That part is actually pretty cool. But I don’t know if it relates to anyone here.”
Arden patted my hand. “Don’t worry. We’re going to get out there and meet more people very soon. In fact, I thought we might tackle another item on my list this afternoon. Add a little more seasoning to your life. If you get what I’m saying.”
Lydia placed the cover on her lunchbox, snapping the corners into place. “What are we in for this time? I need to mentally prepare myself.”
“It’s a totally fundamental experience. Fanciness, luxury, and excitement, all under one roof!”
“For the record,” Lydia announced, “I am not getting my eyebrows waxed. Or anything else.”
“It’s nothing like that.” Arden self-consciously smoothed her own slender brows.
“The DMV,” Lydia guessed.
“No, we’re not taking Lady Mary to wait in a really long line.” A smidgen of testiness had crept into Arden’s voice. “It’s way better than that.”
Lydia turned to Terry. “Help me out here. What am I missing?”
“Black-market organ smuggling?”
Not even Arden had a response to that one.
“I saw it on an episode of Underground Forensics. This girl went to a party at a warehouse, and she thought the drinks tasted a little funny. When she woke up the next day she felt rough stitches in her lower back.” Terry pressed a hand to one side of her spine. “It turned out they’d stolen one of her kidneys.”
Lydia nodded as if this were a possibility that merited consideration.
“They say people pay more for young organs.” Terry’s already soft voice trailed off when she saw the look on Arden’s face.
“The mall,” Arden said through gritted teeth. “It was supposed to be a surprise, but I’ll just tell you. No one’s getting cut open. We’re going to the freaking mall!”
“That’s cool,” said Lydia. “I need a new sports bra.”