Fourteen

Katie loves the ALA weekend, when the American Library Association awards its numerous awards to deserving books for teens and children. But she doesn’t get around to reviewing the winners and honorees until Tuesday. She’s outgrown the Newberry Award, but makes a note of the title for her little cousin. The Printz Award recipient (the young adult equivalent of a Newberry) is a book called Ship Breaker, about a kid eking out an existence near New Orleans; she’s not overly enthused. Skipping past the little kid awards Katie finds the newest award to be added to the ALA list, the Stonewall Award, which honors LGBT fiction. One of her favorite books has received an honor, but not the award proper. Katie reads the winner’s synopsis and is intrigued. More than intrigued, she gets on Amazon and buys it, dipping into the twenty-five dollars He gave her in gift card form. Merry Christmas.

The kids are on their second snow day and word comes down that tomorrow will be a third. Katie thinks she might kill them. Which isn’t fair, because they aren’t so bad really; Katie’s ready to kill anyone, she’s not too concerned by specifics. She has cabin fever, but not the kind which sets in from being indoors too long, the kind that comes from being inside her soul too long. The book is a portal from her soul to someone else’s. Katie is a writer, she knows that the pain and the happiness on the page isn’t the character’s, it’s the author’s. Maybe if I write a happy scene I’ll feel better. But Katie knows that isn’t how it works. She’d be faking it and later delete whatever she wrote because it wouldn’t ring true. Pretending to be happy just reminds her she isn’t.

Reading on her Kindle, Katie checks her progress. Thirteen percent.

A lifetime passes in the space of a couple hours. Forty-two percent.

Damnnit, do I really need to eat? Fifty percent.

Katie knows she won’t be putting the book down any time soon. Seventy-one percent.

She has to stop. It hurts too much. She turns the reader off. Eighty-eight percent.

Katie and her sister occasionally make jokes that they can get away with a lot of shit now because they have “daddy issues.” It always makes Katie think of Charlie from Two and a Half Men describing his prerequisites for women; or Barney from How I Met Your Mother, all the sit com man whores. Now it isn’t funny. Katie gets a glass of water and waits for her heart to stop pounding. She wants to kill the character’s father. The girl just wants a scrap of love and a shred of understanding, but he can’t give her that. Katie’s situation isn’t as bad as the character, and He’s never told her he would rather she die than be who she is, but Katie can’t shake the parallels. Envisioning taking out her frustration on the couch, Katie sighs. She can’t break down, not here, not now.

Katie knows on a philosophical level that the great tragedy of the human race is that humans can never attain the level of connection they desire. But goddamn, why can’t they love each other with their little hearts as much as they can? Why conditions? Why pride? Why reservations? Why prejudices? WHY? WHY? WHY? Great, I’ve reverted to a three year old.

Katie is scared to pick up the book again. She knows she won’t be able to put it down again, but she’s not going to be able to sleep until she finishes it, so she might as well get to it.