Holly and Her Naughty eReader
By
Julianne Spencer
Copyright 2012
Chapter 1
I’ve decided to blame Max Brody for what happened to my Kindle. I was supposed to go on a date with him the day after we graduated from high school. He was going to meet me at the ice skating rink.
He never showed.
Therefore, ten years later, when my Kindle Fire fell out of my purse and clattered around on the hard brick floor of the Albuquerque Airport, jarring something loose inside so it wouldn’t turn on, it was Max’s fault.
Bear with me now. I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense to say that because Max stood me up ten years ago it’s his fault the Kindle fell out of my purse, but that’s how these things work. The Butterfly Effect or something. When Max stood me up he set in motion a sequence of events that resulted in a broken Kindle Fire ten years later. It’s simple. Case closed. Max is guilty.
What? You’re not convinced? Perhaps you need more details.
You see, I don’t know how to ice skate, and I told Max as much when he asked me out. Well, not told so much as texted—that’s how this particular communique happened—here, see for yourself.
Max: You wanna hang tomorrow?
That was his first text. You wanna hang? But what is hang? Does hang mean a date, or does it just mean…hang? Ugh. Boys.
Holly: That would be awesome. What do you wanna do?
I should note that it took me five minutes and approximately three-thousand-seventy drafts to compose that response.
Max: Ice Skating.
Holly: I don’t know how.
Max: I’ll teach you. Meet me tomorrow at the Outpost on Tramway.
Holly: What time?
Max: Meet me on the ice at 2:00.
Meet me on the ice. Good Lord. Not only did we not meet on the ice, but we didn’t meet in the lobby, or the parking lot, or ever again. He didn’t show, he didn’t answer his phone when I called, he didn’t respond to my texts, and I spent a lonely afternoon at the Outpost, sitting outside the rink, skates on my feet, phone in my hand.
That night, feeling angry and confused, I locked myself in my room and watched Somewhere in Time, which was playing on USA Network.
Have you ever seen this movie? It stars Christopher Reeve (an exceptionally beautiful, 1980 Christopher Reeve), as a playwright who becomes obsessed with an old picture in a hotel. With help from a book about how to use hypnosis to travel back in time, Christopher Reeve goes back to 1912 and falls in love with the woman in the picture.
So here’s where it gets a bit stupid. My life, that is, not the movie. I’m sitting on the edge of my bed after the most miserable day ever, I’m sobbing at the end of this time travel romance movie (seriously, if you haven’t seen it, watch it and prepare to cry your eyes out), and I get caught up in a daydream about a meeting with my future self. In the daydream, a 28-year-old version of me used hypnosis to go back in time, just like Christopher Reeve, but instead of coming back to find a lost love, she came back to talk to the teenage version of herself.
She came back to talk to me. I know. Kind of a weird, pathetic daydream, but I think a little weirdness was justified. Max stood me up!
Anyway, 28-year-old me showed up at the front door and rang the bell. I answered it and we talked.
“Hi Holly.”
“Hi Holly.”
“You wanna go for a walk, Holly?”
“What would we talk about, Holly?”
“Our life.”
“Okay.”
As we walked around the block, future me gave teenage me all sorts of advice. She told me to be more patient in life. She said this Max Brody thing would be a blip on the map and one day I’d laugh about it. She cautioned me not to spend more time with my books than with my friends. And she told me to make time for exercise every day.
Had USA Network aired another Christopher Reeve movie, or another obscure time travel romance (Dead Again with Kenneth Branagh would have been a nice follow-up) I would have stayed in bed and watched TV until I fell asleep. But after Somewhere in Time they went straight to wrestling. I wasn’t in the mood for grown men dancing around a ring in their underwear, so I turned off the TV and went to my desk. Still enamored with the vision of my future self, I decided to write a letter.
Dear Future Holly, the letter began. I’m writing this letter to you with the intent of sealing it for 10 years and opening it on my 28th birthday. Hopefully as you’re reading this, I’ve kept my promise.
I went on to tell future me all the things I wanted her to know, things like:
Don’t be evil.
Smile more than anyone else you know.
Be the kind of adult that teenage you wants to become.
Be responsible but not boring.
Seek out adventure.
Don’t let fear make your decisions for you.
Don’t settle for a loser boyfriend.
I sealed up the envelope and wrote REMEMBER MY LAST on the front of it. I’ll now pause so you can think about what that reference means. Remember my last….
Come on now. I bet it’s right on the tip of your tongue. Where have you heard the phrase, “Remember my last?”
Give up? It’s from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. In the book, REMEMBER MY LAST is a message from Dumbledore to Harry’s Aunt Petunia reminding her to keep a promise she made a long time ago. Just like Petunia, I would read that phrase and remember my promise to leave the envelope closed until my 28th birthday.
And yes, I’m a big ol’ Harry Potter nerd (and a Twilight nerd, and a Hunger Games nerd, and a Narnia nerd. I’m a nerd for A Wrinkle in Time and for The Dark is Rising. I’m also a nerd for Victorian romances, most erotica, Star Wars novels, good urban fantasy, and Dune, and before you judge me on Dune, just go read it. It’s not just for boys). This was the summer of 2003, and Order of the Phoenix had just come out. I was one of 10 million teenagers who went to a midnight release party and then raced like mad to finish it so I could go on Livejournal and tell my friends I was done.
Hehe….Livejournal. Man, that was a long time ago.
Anyway, that fall I left Albuquerque and moved to Dallas for college. Four years later I graduated from SMU with a degree in English and a secondary education license. I took a job as a 12th grade English teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School. I got my masters in a night-school program. I dated a few guys. I got serious with one of them, he gave me a huge rock of an engagement ring which I later threw back at him while shouting, You stupid lying fuckface…
And for all that time I kept the envelope marked REMEMBER MY LAST safely tucked away in my closet.
I had mixed feelings when my twenty-eighth birthday arrived. On the one hand, I was excited to finally open the envelope, secure in the knowledge I had kept the promise I made to myself. On the other hand, I was afraid that the letter inside would be an epic disappointment.
How could the letter be anything else? Over the years, I had given it so much significance, transforming the simple words of an adolescent girl into wisdom for the ages. It wasn’t like there were any surprises in there. I knew what the letter said. I wrote it after all.
I was with my friends Angela and Natalie when I opened the envelope. We all giggled as I read aloud the advice from the past.
Be responsible but not boring.
Seek out adventure.
Don’t let fear make your decisions for you.
That night, as I checked my Facebook feed before bed, I saw an invitation to attend my 10-year reunion. Had the invite come a day earlier, I’m certain I would have deleted it and moved on. Remember that part about throwing an engagement ring while sho
uting, You stupid lying fuckface? Yeah, I was only a few weeks removed from that mess on my 28th birthday, and I was hardly in the mood to fly to Albuquerque in search of a Gross Point Blank moment.
But the invite came less than an hour after I read aloud the words of teenage Holly, who had waited patiently for ten years to tell me to seek out adventure and not be boring.
Be the kind of adult that teenage you wants to become.
It was that line more than any other from teenage Holly’s letter that sealed it. I knew with certainty that teenage Holly would want me to go to the reunion.
I opened the invite on Facebook and RSVP’d that I would be there. Before I went to bed I bought a plane ticket to Albuquerque.
And, a few months later, when I arrived in my hometown, mere hours before my 10-year high school reunion was to begin, I dropped my Kindle at the baggage claim of the Albuquerque Airport and broke it.
So, as you can see, it’s all Max Brody’s fault.
Had Max showed up for our date, I wouldn’t have been an emotional train wreck locked in the bedroom watching Somewhere in Time. Had I not watched Somewhere in Time, I wouldn’t have had time travel on my mind, and wouldn’t have daydreamed about a visit from future Holly. If I hadn’t daydreamed about future Holly, I wouldn’t have written a letter to her to be opened on her 28th birthday. If I hadn’t written that letter, I wouldn’t have read it the same night the invitation to my reunion arrived. Had I not read the letter, I wouldn’t have gone to my reunion.
If I hadn’t gone to my reunion, I wouldn’t have dropped my Kindle. Man….just thinking about that Kindle clattering around on the floor. It gives me the shivers.
The Kindle fell out of my handbag when I was pulling my suitcase off the luggage carousel. It landed hard, bounced, and landed hard again. It was a miserable, heartbreaking sight.When I picked it up, the screen was black and it wouldn’t wake up. No amount of button pushing, screen swiping, shaking, or swearing at the universe would bring it to life.
It was the height of carelessness. My Kindle deserved better. Perhaps a few words are in order:
My dear, dear, First Generation Kindle Fire. I pre-ordered you on the day you were announced. I was slow to hop on the eReader train, to be sure, but I read a review on CNET that said you were a steal at the price. I bought you because I saw how much fun my students had playing games on their tablets, and thought it would be fun to play Plants Versus Zombies during my prep period.
I never intended for you to replace my lovely library of physical books. But I grew fond of the way you organized my books in a spinning carousel. It was so beautiful to watch the covers swing by as I went shopping for the next read. I liked swiping the screen rather than turning the page. And I fell into the habit of reading your glow-in-the-dark screen with the light off, letting you gently carry me to sleep every night.
You were such a natural progression for me, Dear Kindle. From hardback library editions of Beverly Cleary in first grade to paperback Judy Blooms in second…From A Wrinkle in Time to The Dark is Rising and back again, with Narnia, Prydain, Sweet Valley High, and Nancy Drew stuffed somewhere in the middle, I’ve been a bookworm for as long as I can remember, and you were just waiting to fill me up with the literature I craved. With you, I went from a novel a week to a novel every few days, sometimes finishing one every night. You brought me an endless supply of free and cheap books. You let me browse the entire catalog of the world from the comfort of my bed, and I got to read a sample of anything that suited my fancy.
I came to identify with you so strongly, Dear Kindle, that I put my brand on your back. The blue flower of the holly bush. My symbol since elementary school. I found a nice sticker of a blue holly flower and I put it on your back, and let the world know you were mine.
You were more than an eReader tablet to me and you deserved better. I’m sorry I dropped you.
Sniff, sniff.
I went to the rental counter at the airport, arranged for a car, took the shuttle to the lot, picked up a nearly new Dodge Intrepid, and drove to the hotel, thinking of what I’d say to Max if I saw him at the reunion. This was his fault. The blood of my beloved Kindle was on his hands.
Chapter 2
Here’s a summary of my high school experience by year.
Freshman year: Arrived in the fall of 1999 bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Literally. My eyes are bright green and my hair is a frizzy explosion that I had tied back in a bushy tail on the first day of high school. I found my niche in the band (French Horn, the bookish girls always play French Horn), and on the basketball team (I’ve always had a decent jump shot) and in speech and debate (go ahead, try and argue with me) and in drama (is it apparent that I can be dramatic?)
Despite all those activities, my true love was the library. Any library. The school library, the public library, or the burgeoning library of paperbacks in my room. Christmas of freshman year is when I discovered Harry Potter. It’s also when my parents began their outrageously bitter divorce. My dad kind of dropped out of my life that year, and Dumbledore took his place.
Sophomore year: I started dating Steve Wachowski at band camp. I broke up with him two months later while trick-or-treating after Becca’s Halloween party. Steve was dressed as Neo from The Matrix and wanted me to dress up as Trinity. When I came as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz instead we both knew it was over.
Junior year: Max Brody showed up to band camp with a sexy new swagger to match his new title as lead trumpet, and I decided I had a crush on him. I also decided that, rather than tell Max I liked him, I would tell no one at all about any of my feelings and instead I would brood about in dark makeup with intense paperbacks under my arm like Catcher in the Rye, Dune, and the complete works of Anne Rice.
Senior year: Michelle Flores, the strong forward on the basketball team, became my best friend. I went to prom with Chris Tooley and he got sore with me when I refused to give it up that night. I read and re-read and re-read again Harry Potter 1, 2, 3, and 4. At a nighttime astronomy lab, Max Brody and I made a connection, and at Clarissa’s graduation party, I danced with Max to Faithfully by Journey. The next day he stood me up on our date.
Now, here’s a summary of my 10-year high school reunion by hour.
Hour 1: Lots of hugs, lots of “you look good’s” exchanged, a gin and tonic downed.
Hour 2: Sat at a table with Michelle, some other band geeks, and their spouses. While my friends told stories about their little children, I drank two glasses of wine. By the time Michelle finally made an effort to get me involved in the conversation, I was in that stage of drunkenness when you know everything you say is hysterical. I told the story about finding my fiancée in bed with a nineteen-year-old girl.
“And so I took off the engagement ring,” I said, “I threw it across the room, and I shouted..”
--at this point I should note that I’m pretty sure I didn’t just say the words, but actually gave my friends a full volume demonstration of my scorned woman shouting voice--
“…and I shouted, ‘You stupid lying fuckface!’”
My story was met with utter silence, not only at the table, but, it seemed, throughout the entire ballroom. Michelle’s mouth hung open, and I remembered from high school that she had a bunch of silver fillings, and then I wondered if my generation was the very last to ever get silver fillings because I know they use tooth-colored fillings now, and then I wondered what else my generation was last at, and then I said, “You guys remember where you were on 9/11?” and Michelle smiled and said, “Someone’s had one too many, I think,” and they all laughed.
Hour 3: Danced in the large group for the fast songs. Went to the bar for a vodka sour every time there was a slow song.
Hour 4: My blood alcohol level somewhere between blitzed and wasted, I plopped down by myself at an empty table and started an internal debate about what was making me feel the most sad. I couldn’t decide it if was:
a) The fact that Michelle was clearly best friends with Kayla now. Their
children were in preschool together and they spoke in a constant stream of snappy inside jokes of the sort Michelle used to use with me.
b) That Max Brody didn’t show at the reunion so there wasn’t even a chance at some sort of closure with him over that time he stood me up and never called me back. I hadn’t come into the night looking for a confrontation, but now that I was good and drunk I was ready to have one.
c) That no one was hitting on me. Maybe I’ve read too many books about high school reunions, but a part of me was just certain that I would show up and reconnect with someone I hadn’t thought about in years and we’d have this great chemistry and then who knew what would happen.
d) That my Kindle was busted.
I think I was more sad about the Kindle than anything. Don’t laugh. To you, a broken Kindle might not be comparable to the disillusionment of coming to your 10-year-reunion and realizing you don’t belong anymore, but to me, they were one in the same, especially in my drunken haze.
At times like these, I looked to my Kindle to provide me comfort. How I would have loved to bail on this reunion, go back to my hotel, and read a quick ditty about a smoking hot werewolf from an abusive family who just needs a nice girl to understand his pain and love him for who he is.
And then tomorrow, when I dealt with the hangover that was sure to come, I could spend the day in my pajamas, reading samples until I found the perfect one to buy.
Ahhh….samples. One of the great joys the eReader revolution hath wrought. Sure, we all got to sample in the bookstore too, but it wasn’t the same. In the bookstore you had to be careful with the $30 paper prize you didn’t own. You had to turn the pages with the lightest of touches, always wary of getting a fingerprint on someone else’s volume, always mindful of the fact that, until you went to the register and made the purchase, you were loitering on someone else’s property.
Holly and Her Naughty eReader Page 1