I make a note: This is where I start to cry. It’s so damn beautiful I can’t stop myself.
A few pages later, when he tells Sara, “‘I know you by heart. You are inside my heart,’” I am wiping my eyes with the sleeves of my snowflake-themed flannel pajamas, and bits of the ridiculous glitter get stuck to my teary face. I make another note: This is what love should be.
I don’t hold back. It’s like having a conversation with the book. It tells me things and I respond with semi-illegible scrawlings, and exclamation points, and wild circles around phrases that hit me really hard. We talk like that all night, A Little Princess and I. With only one lamp on and my red-framed glasses in the next room, I have to hold the book so close to my face that I can smell the pages, and it makes it even easier to get lost in this other world. Which is a relief and honestly a testament to how great that book is, because for me to think of anything but Joe is a miracle.
At seven Cate walks in and serves me oatmeal with brown sugar and what she calls a home-latte, which is just French-press coffee and microwaved milk with a heaping tablespoon of sugar. It’s been weeks since she’s been this motherly, so the morning really feels exceptionally good: Joe likes me, I’m in the final chapter of the best book of all time, and I’m eating oatmeal on the superthick carpet of Cate’s office. In a few hours I’ll be kicking myself for not having slept, but right now things are pretty effing great for a Monday morning.
“Drop this off at Recycled Books?” I say, when I finally leave the office and start packing my backpack in the kitchen. Paul and Cate are putting away their meditation mats, and postmeditation is usually the best time to ask Paul for favors.
“I can do even better. I’m heading down to New York for a meeting right now. Quick in and out—I’ll be back this afternoon—but I’ll drop it off with one of those street sellers. What is it this time?” he asks. Paul reads exactly like I do: with a flurry of excitement and messiness.
I hold up the book and he grins.
“Want me to pick something up, too?” he says.
“Wanna see if they have another marked-up copy of A Little Princess?”
“I like the way you think, buttercup. I’ll see what I can do.” Paul winks.
This is the greatest thing my father ever taught me: Taking notes in your own book is fun. Reading someone else’s notes in the same book is even funner.
Paul starts flipping through A Little Princess and raises his eyebrows.
“You sure you want to donate this one?” he asks. I shrug. It’s something I started doing this summer. Not just reading other people’s notes, but letting them read mine. I guess that’s what happens when you’re really, really lonely. You start looking for connections everywhere. Back when I had friends, I could tell them what I was thinking and feeling. Now I tell hypothetical strangers who don’t know I exist. Paul doesn’t judge, but he gives me one of his patented frown-smiles and half a hug. “I got a great copy of the first Harry Potter the other day,” he says. “Weird, I know, but whoever marked that thing up is deep. You want it?” He’s already heading for his bookcase and running his thumb along the spines of the books to find it for me.
“Yeah, I want it,” I say, and throw it in my backpack, as if it weren’t already heavy enough.
“Weirdos,” Cate says. “Aren’t you worried some sociopath is going to pick up that book and learn everything about you and then, you know, use it against you?” she says, which is what she always says when I do this. It’s also more or less what she says when Paul and I get really intent on someone else’s notes, too: What if those are the notes of a serial killer that you are fawning over?
“What kind of sociopath buys a used copy of A Little Princess?” I say.
“I think you just answered your own question,” Cate says, and then she and Paul are giggling like little kids and I’m rolling my eyes, and even if Joe hadn’t told me last night he was falling for me, this would be a great day.
“Our Tabitha’s a romantic,” Paul says. “Just like her old man.” I can’t hide the blush and the smile, and I’m sure they both know me well enough to see I’m thinking even more than usual about love. If my outsides match my insides, I must be glowing. I’m not great at hiding actual feelings.
“Pleeeeease tell us who it is,” Cate says, while I try to will the flush off my cheeks. Pregnancy may be making her read less, but it makes her no less nosy. I shake my head like she’s crazy and bite the insides of my cheeks to at least temper the big-ass smile threatening to spread all over my face.
“I gotta get to school,” I say, matching her singsong voice. And I really, really do. Because I’m afraid if I don’t see Joe immediately, last night’s conversation will somehow disappear, the way things sometimes do.
Two.