Still. Tina brings up some good points. Why didn’t I ask him? When the ads for the prom started appearing in the Atom, why didn’t I clip one out and stick it on J.P.’s locker door with Are we going to this? written on it?
Why didn’t I just ask him, point-blank, if we were going to the prom, when everybody else was talking about it at lunch? It’s true J.P.’s been distracted with his play and Stacey Cheeseman sucking so majorly in it (it would probably help if he weren’t always rewriting it and giving her new lines to memorize).
I easily could have gotten a yes or no answer out of him.
And, of course, because he’s J.P., it would have been a yes.
Because J.P., unlike my last boyfriend, has nothing against the prom.
The thing is, I don’t need to check in with Dr. K to figure out why I didn’t ask J.P. about the prom. It isn’t exactly a mystery. To Tina, maybe, but not to me.
But I don’t want to get into that right now.
You know, prom’s not that big a deal to me anymore, T. It’s really kind of lame. I actually wouldn’t mind blowing it off. So why waste time shopping for some dress I might not ever wear? You guys have fun shopping without me. I have stuff to do anyway.
Stuff. When am I going to stop calling my novel “stuff”? Seriously, if there’s one person in the world I can be honest about it with, it’s Tina. Tina wouldn’t laugh if I told her I’d written a novel…especially a romance novel. Tina is the person who introduced me to romance novels, who got me to appreciate them and realize how fabulously cool they are, not just as an introduction into the publishing world (although more of them are published than any other genre, so your chances of getting published are statistically higher if you write a romance as opposed to, say, a science fiction novel), but because they’re the perfect story. You have a strong female protagonist, a compelling male lead, a conflict that keeps them apart, and then, after a lot of nail-biting, a satisfying conclusion…the ultimate happy ending.
Why would anyone want to write anything else, really?
If Tina knew I wrote a romance, she’d ask to read it—especially if she knew it was about something other than the history of Genovian olive oil presses, a subject no rational person would want to read about….
Well, except one person.
Which, really, every time I think about it, I want to start crying, because it’s just about the sweetest thing anyone’s ever said to me. Or e-mailed me, actually, because that’s how Michael sent it to me…his
request to read my senior project, I mean. We only randomly e-mail a couple of times a month, anyway, keeping it strictly light and impersonal, like that first message I sent him after he broke up with me: “Hi, how are you? Things are fine, it’s snowing here, isn’t that weird? Well, I have to go, bye.”
I’d been shocked when he’d been all, “Your senior project’s on the history of Genovian olive oil presses, circa 1254–1650? Cool, Thermopolis. Can I read it?”
You could have knocked me over with one of Lana’s pom-poms. Because no one had asked to read my senior project. No one. Not even Mom. I thought I’d picked such a safe subject, I was safe from anybody asking to read it.
Ever.
And here was Michael Moscovitz, all the way in Japan (where he’s been for the past two years, slaving away on his robotic arm—which I’m so sure is never going to get done, I’ve given up asking about it, since it doesn’t seem polite to bring it up anymore, since he barely acknowledges the question), asking to read it.
I told him it was four hundred pages long.
He said he didn’t care.
I told him it was single-spaced and in 9-point font.
He said he’d enlarge it when it came.
I told him it was really boring.
And he said he didn’t believe anything I wrote could be boring.
That’s when I stopped e-mailing him back.
What else could I do? I couldn’t send it to him! Yeah, I can send it to publishers I’ve never even met before. But not my ex-boyfriend! Not Michael! I mean…it’s got sex in it!
It’s just…how could he say that? That he didn’t believe anything I wrote could be boring? What was he talking about? Of course something I wrote could be boring! The history of Genovian olive oil presses, circa 1254–1650. That’s boring! That’s really, really boring!
And okay, that’s not what my book is really about.
But still! He doesn’t know that.
How could he say something like that? How could he? That’s not the kind of thing exes—or even mere friends—say to each other.