Reading

I like to read.  I read compulsively.  On the way to and from work on the bus, I devour books at the rate of two or three a week—and I’m not talking about novellas, I’m talking about Rowling and Cussler and Dekker and others that average four, five, even six or seven hundred pages a pop.

This is not a new habit.  In grade school, I spent every lunch recess in the library, reading about astronauts and the Boxcar Children and the Redwall mice while other kids played on the playground.  I mean, if I was inside reading during lunch, then it was I who was shunning their company, not them refusing to pick me to be on one of the kickball teams like they did at morning and afternoon recess.  Junior high was much the same, although I took choir during lunch with twenty other geeks instead of hiding in the library.  But that’s what it really was: hiding.  And regardless of what I did or who I spent it with, it was really no different than what I did in High School, devouring a yogurt and a bunch of diet pills and then spending my lunch break doing homework on the school lawn and trying not to think about what was going on in The Ditch and the Hidey-Ho across the street.

I claimed to be busy.  But the truth is, if even one person who was not a geek like me had asked me to do something with them, I would have done it in a heartbeat.  It wouldn’t have mattered to me if it was stupid or cheesy.  Shoot, even if it had been another geek, one of my “friends”, I would have gladly spent more time with them.

I never realized then that I could have asked them.

I was the outsider, the Other.  Moving around a lot as a child may have given me the opportunity to do a lot of cool things and see wonderful things, to visit other countries and have conversation points for the rest of my like.  But it hamstrung my relationships.

I never became one of the In group, of any of the In groups.  Even the geeks had known each other for years and had their own clique going.  Meanwhile, I was a new kid who often spoke up in class but never said a word outside of it.  I was always waiting for someone else to make the first move, and I guess they figured I wasn’t interested.  So I hid in books.  I laughed at the humorous bits, cried with the sad characters, and even raged at my books when I thought the characters were being stupid.  “Can’t you see it coming?” I’d yell at the pages and sure enough, a few pages later, they’d get their comeuppance.

You see, that was another thing that made books better than real life.  Not only would they never reject me, I was proficient with books.  I could see plots' turns coming and often even predict the ending.  They were exciting, yes, and occasionally surprised me, but anytime I got uncomfortable, I could always put the book down.

If only real life were like that.  It would have been so nice to put my life on hold when my best friend laughed in my face at the fact that I had rewritten the words to “Danny Boy” so that it named my secret crush instead.  It would have been so nice to put the story of my life on hold when I got hit by a car crossing the street.  And when I saw Bewitched, I laughed at the part where she rewinds her life . . . but secretly I was eating my heart out with jealousy and I went home and cried because life is never that easy.

And then I cheered myself up... by rereading one of my favorite books.