The Importance of Being Wilde at Heart
Page 1
Also by R. Zamora Linmark
Leche
Rolling the R’s
The Evolution of a Sigh
Drive-By Vigils
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2019 by R. Zamora Linmark
Cover art copyright © 2019 by Connie Gabbert
Cover photograph used under license from Shutterstock.com
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
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Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
Trade Paperback ISBN 9781101938218
Ebook ISBN 9781101938225
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
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Contents
Cover
Also by R. Zamora Linmark
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The Book of Random Splendor
How I Met Ran
The Difference Between North and South
Lightness
The Zissue
Case Closed
@ Wired
Twice Beautiful
Cazzandra, from Roman to Greek
You Are Here
The Emperors of Antarctica
The Downside to Focus
Spring Tease
It’s De-Ken-Zee, It’s De-Ran-Der-Ful
The First Certainty
Seven Steps to Eternity
Skyrocketing
The Am I or Am I Not? Checklist
The Secret to a Brighter Universe
The First Days of Forever List
The Book of False Starts
This
The One-Sided World
Spiffy
Uneventful
Ken Zapless
Gutter and Stars
Big Mouth Strikes Almost
The Ides of Yikes
The Song of Silence
Frienniversary
Rough Draft for Eternity
Hopelessly Writing
Oscar’s Wilde Tribe Presents “the Importance of Being Nameless”: Our Book Club
The Stupidest Thing
The Difficult List
Ode to Errors
Ditched
Acceptance/Rejection
Fragments
Nonresponsive
Heart-Stopping Things He Says
The Last of Us
Happily Never After
Erased
My Codependency Poem
The False-Start List
The Book of Abzs
The Pyramid of Stupidity
From Here to Hell
The I’m-So-Pathetic List
The Mask of the Heart
Utterly
Backfire
The Prison of Hope
The Hour of Sadness
The It’s-Not-Hard-to-Imagine List
Alternative Torture
Betrayal for Beginners
In Carcere Et Vinculis
Shim Sham
Lingering
Splat
The Memory of Paper
The Visitation
The Song of Broken Sleep
The Muse This Time
The Birth of a List
Banned for Now
Thursday-Morning Memento
Coda
The Problem with Good and Bye
Specifics
Epigraph
Chronology
Bibliography
Extremely Grateful Acknowledgments
About the Author
For my mother, Cecilia,
and my sister, Maria Angelina
There are two ways to begin this story.
a haiku
LITTLE MIRACLES
Inside a minute—
A blue-throated hummingbird’s
One thousand heartbeats.
OR
a prayer
Dear Oscar Wilde, Patron Saint of Rebels and Bookworms:
This is Ken Z. I’m seventeen years old, a senior at South Kristol High. I live on an island in the middle of Nowhere, Pacific Ocean. So tiny you need a magnifying glass to spot us on the map.
Oscar, I met someone. There. It’s out. Whew. Yes, I met someone earlier this week, and this morning, I woke up to my heart beating a thousand hummingbird heartbeats. It felt new and strange, and anything new and strange to me is worth exploring, like Antarctica. I don’t know where my heart is zooming to. So if you could, please guide me through this unfamiliar map.
Your forever devotee,
Ken Z
PS His name is Ran.
How I Met Ran
Saturday, 2 March
I met Ran at Buddha’s Joint, an organic restaurant for people who can afford to eat healthfully. It’s located inside Mirage, an uppity mall in the newly developed community in the easternmost part of South Kristol where corrupt politicians, celebrities, and foreign investors reside.
Worse, it took an eternity and a half to get there because there is only one bus in South Kristol that goes to Mirage—and it’s the number eight. I don’t even know why it’s numbered eight because there isn’t a one, two, three, four, five, six, or seven bus, unless they once operated a hundred years ago when South and North Kristol were still one nation. Sometimes we’ll see a second number eight bus circling the island. That only happens during election, and only if the current leader is seeking reelection. We’re very Turd World that way.
The actual trip takes only forty minutes. But if you miss, best to have an alternate plan or be prepared to waste your youth waiting for the number eight. That’s why I always bring a book whenever I have to catch the bus, usually to go visit my friend CaZZ, who lives on the Pula reservation on the west side. Otherwise, I walk.
I always carry a book wherever I go anyway. It’s a habit I can’t—and will never—kick. My mother said I’ve been doing it from age four, when I learned how to read. Nothing kills time more effectively—and with more fun—
than reading.
This morning, my travel companion was The Importance of Being Earnest, a play by my favorite writer, Oscar Wilde, who is considered one of the best dramatists of the nineteenth century. It was he who inspired me to go bunburying. That means having a secret identity, an alter ego, like a superhero, except with bunburying the world is not in danger and there’s no lover or stranger to save.
Bunburying is all about escape. Escape from your world, work, family, friends, enemies. And most of all, from yourself, from who and what you’re supposed to be.
Everyone I know has boycotted the mall since it opened last November, right before Thanksgiving. They were turned away because they didn’t comply with the dress code that no one knew existed until they got there. NO BEACHWEAR, read the sign posted at the entrance. NO SHORTS, NO TANK TOPS, NO SLIPPERS. In other words: NO LOCALS.
This, ironically, made Mirage the ideal place for bunburying. It was the closest to a foreign country I could go to without leaving South Kristol, and no one from my world would recognize me there.
As a bunburyist, I could create a fictional version of me. Or a version to add to the growing list of ME. For a couple of hours I could be whoever and whatever I wanted to be. No mom. No Estelle and CaZZ. Just me, Ken Z:
Adventure seeker.
Lover of spontaneity.
A daredevil who, for the first time, is leaving his comfort zone.
So, this morning, I put on the same outfit that I wore for Career Day, minus the brown-and-orange-striped tie that would’ve been perfect if I were trying to pass for a son of a Jehovah’s Witness preacher. I even gelled my hair, slicked it back for the occasion, in case Mirage also had a strict hair code. I was all set, ready to hit the mall as an Aspiring Cultural Anthropologist disguised as an avid shopper on a tight budget.
At the main entrance, I breezed through the revolving door without a problem. The guards greeted me as if I shopped there regularly. At ten in the morning, the mall was already teeming with shoppers.
The mall’s interior was grand: marbled floors, glass elevators, and the longest and most terrifying-looking escalator I’d ever seen. From the basement, where the food court was, the escalator climbed all the way to the fifth floor, where the medical and dental facilities were. I couldn’t look at it without getting acrophobic.
Wherever I went, people eyed me up and down. Did I stand out too much? Was I that obvious? Did they know I was trying to pass for one of them?
I tried not to be too self-conscious. It was hard. I was not accustomed to getting so much attention. Best friends and mothers don’t count.
Two teenagers, a boy and a girl, smiled at me. The boy whispered something to the girl; then they covered their mouths, giggling. They wanted to let me know they were talking about me. Let them, I told myself, remembering one of the immortal sayings of Oscar Wilde: There is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
The salesclerks were friendly, not snooty as I expected. They greeted me warmly, complimented me on my hair, my clothes. They treated me as if I had been born with a silver spoon in my mouth, a politician’s or a banker’s son, one of South Kristol’s 1 percent.
Whether they were being superficial or genuine, I thanked them. After all, it was part of their job—to be nice, to make me feel good in exchange for sales commission.
In one of the shops specializing in men’s formal wear, a salesman old enough to be a grandfather talked me into trying on a charcoal-gray suit. I’d never worn a suit before.
Inside the dressing room with its three-way mirror, I came face to face with a stranger egging me on to smile. From every angle, the mirrors reflected possibilities of me. A ME who stood tall and confident like a tower. Another ME who turned heads whenever he walked into a room. And a ME with thick black hair and intense brown eyes who was not afraid to look at himself in the mirror and didn’t need to shy away whenever someone tossed him a compliment.
I smiled. If I must say, I looked good in the suit. But I could never afford it. Besides, it was all an act with an expiration time, like the midnight hour in a fairy tale.
By noon, bunburying had exhausted me. I was ready to bid adieu to my adventure, mess up my hair, and go back to my neighborhood with its horizon of clotheslines and cable TV antennae and crowing roosters and nauseating stench of diesel fumes and heaps of trash burning in backyards. And hang my bunburying clothes back in the closet.
Aside from false and genuine compliments, bunburying made me hungry and inspired me to write a haiku:
A pack of ramen—
Everyday diet for an
Anthropologist.
Famished, I went hunting for a restaurant within my budget. I ended up in Buddha’s Joint. It turned out to be an overrated, overpriced, organic junkie of a joint.
I ordered the chicken wrap and kale shake. Two yakuza thumbs down.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a picky eater; my tummy digests anything it can afford. But insecticide-free greens and grass-fed animals are too expensive for my taste. Chewing them is difficult. I also feel guilty eating a chicken that, while alive, was almost free as a bird. The kale shake sucks too.
Anyway, I was so engrossed reading the first act of Oscar Wilde’s play about a pair of professional bunburyists that I didn’t realize someone had been standing in front of me until he finally exhaled an “ahem.” I looked up and saw a guy my age smiling and pointing to the sign taped on the Formica table. SHARE THE SEAT OF COMPASSION AND WIN A FRIEND.
I nearly fell off my chair. I thought my mind was playing midday tricks on me. He looked like the spitting image of Dorian Gray, the fallen hero in Oscar Wilde’s novel who traded his soul for eternal youth and beauty. To the girls—and even guys—in my senior literature class, he was the hottest fictional character to ever get away with murder. He made evil so sexy that he made Prince Hamlet look like a wimp in tights.
I tried not to stare at Dorian Gray’s look-alike. It was hard not to. His steel-gray eyes—slanted and piercing—would not let my gaze wander. The resemblance was too uncanny. He had Dorian’s face—oval, angelic. His mouth was small and pouty; his lips were red and full. His hair, which was parted on the right, then combed back, was blond with dark roots. Judging by his preppy taste in clothes alone, he was definitely from the upper class.
He seemed so relaxed, carefree, the type who could strike up a conversation with a complete stranger but wouldn’t be disappointed if he was snubbed.
“Mind if I join you?” he asked.
“Huh?” was the best word I could come up with from my Dictionary of Speechless Moments.
He pointed to the empty chair across the table from mine.
I looked around the restaurant. The place was practically empty. As in Current Occupancy: 2. Him and me.
Yet he chose to sit with me.
I consented. He pulled the chair out and sat himself down.
I went back to Oscar’s play and read the same line over and over—“I suppose so, if you want to”—hoping the repetition would strengthen my concentration. It didn’t.
The second I took my eyes off the book, I caught him staring at me. It was as if he’d been waiting for this moment to happen. “This sandwich is terrible,” he said, making a yuck face.
I stifled a laugh.
He tossed the rest of his sandwich on his tray. He’d barely eaten any. “Even this kale shake is awful.”
“I know,” I wanted to say. But his stare kept getting in the way of my words.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” he said. “If I am, just tell me and I’ll disappear.”
I shook my head. “It’s fine,” I said, even though his attentiveness was making me nervous. Truth is I never had anyone pay me that much attention before.
“You won’t believe me when I say this, but that’s my favorite pl
ay you’re reading.” He pointed to the picture of Oscar Wilde on the cover. It’s the famous portrait of him wearing knee breeches, silk stockings, low shoes, and a velvet coat.
My ears perked up. “Favorite?”
“All-time,” he said.
“You read it?”
“Twice,” he replied. “It’s so witty.”
I yupped with a smile.
“The whole bit about bunburying is pure brilliance.”
With Oscar as our common ground, I started to feel more relaxed.
“I wonder how many people in the world right now are bunburying,” he said.
“If only you knew,” I wanted to tell him.
“Imagine if the whole world were ruled by bunburyists,” he continued.
I thought about it for a moment. “Everyone would be deceiving each other, right?”
“True,” he said. “But I don’t think bunburying is meant to hurt anyone. It’s more about having fun, right?”
I nodded. He had a point.