Dear Reader

by Mary O'Connell

  Of course it was the too that thrilled Flannery. Smart was nothing, smart was easy, smart was a big fat score on her SAT, her name on the 4.00 honor roll, her name ringing out at the school assembly for GeographyBeeNationalHonorSocietyNationalMeritScholar, and so what? Smart was old news, a yawn fest. People had praised and mocked the smart part for years. What no one had never noticed was the too. The angels took note and sang an improvised version of “Take a Walk on the Wild Side”: Too too too too too too! Flannery Fields, you, you, you, with your heartbreaking beauty, are smart, too! Too! Too! Too!

  Flannery tried to stifle her zooming joy; she tried to resume some shred of equilibrium and take a stab at normal conversation. “So, anyway. If you still feel like hearing the craziness…”

  “Hit me. I’m ready. I’ve actually never been more ready.”

  “So the reason I’m here, the reason that I’m skipping school—”

  He made a bullhorn with his hand. “Attention NYPD: The girl I’m walking with is a truant. Cuff her immediately!”

  “I know, right? But, um…” Flannery was a little breathless from the fast walking. Her name had never been called out at a sports assembly. “So my favorite teacher disappeared this morning, and I took the train to Manhattan based on some things that I’ve read … and a few things that she said in class yesterday … I know she’s here. She’s in trouble, and I’m trying to help her. I’m trying to find her.”

  To her relief, Heath didn’t say: You chose to enjoy grilled cheese and cappuccinos in the midst of this valiant pilgrimage?

  She raised her hand—“Though I know it seems sort of impossible”—and arced it through the air to acknowledge all the buildings, and billions of people, all the kitchens and closets, the maze of clubs and commerce …

  Heath shrugged. “If nobody ever went looking for anyone, we’d all stay lost.” He sighed, and Flannery wondered if he were contemplating his own driftlessness. “I think you’re going to find your teacher. I don’t think it’s the least bit crazy. And I can help you if you like.”

  “Um, thanks.” Oh my God, she thought, Heath Smith is going to help me! “I haven’t actually gotten to the crazy part yet.”

  “That changes things up, I suppose.”

  “So in my English class we’ve been reading … Wuthering Heights.” In her peripheral vision, Flannery watched for his reaction.

  Heath nodded, slowly, decisively, and with a smug half-smile, the, oh-yeah-seen-it-all-before gesture of a person for whom nothing could be truly surprising, said, “Do you perhaps attend an all-girls school, Flannery?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Mmmhmm,” he said decisively.

  “What?”

  “Well. Old Wuthering Heights? It’s a bit of a girl’s book, really.”

  “What? It’s not! It’s a novel for anybody! For everybody! It shows that love and obsession are perfectly gender neutral, like when Cathy says: ‘I am Heathcliff!’ Nobody’s specifically masculine or feminine in Wuthering Heights or in life, either. What makes us alike, or different, is our emotional connection to the world.”

  Despite the day’s miraculous trajectory, Flannery found it surprisingly easy to revert to nerd-girl mode. “I hate that whole girl’s book/boy’s book thing anyway, it’s so sexist and goofy and demeaning to everyone’s intelligence, it’s not like anyone’s brain has a penis sticking out of it, or—”

  “I should hope not!” Heath burst out laughing. “That sounds like it would take a very delicate surgery to correct.”

  Flannery, whose face was currently on fire, couldn’t recall ever saying the word penis out loud before—it sounded fleshy and hideous—and NOW was the time she had thought to bust it out?

  “Flannery, how does a dentist apologize during a root canal?”

  Her flustered response was also the appropriate one: “What? What?”

  “Sorry, it appears I have touched a nerve. I won’t refer to Wuthering Heights as a girl’s book ever again.”

  “Good, because seriously, it’s really not a girl’s book, or a Gothic prequel to Twilight. Wuthering Heights is about obsessiveness, delusions, and purity and evil … Wow, I’m just thinking out loud here but I think it’s not about mourning the past, but how the finality of the past can drive you insane. You know, how wishing someone you love were Christ himself, so that they could rise again.”

  She mentally scolded herself—Really? Really with the resurrection talk?—for being instructional and creepy, or maybe just creepy. And the brain/penis joke! What in the world is wrong with me, and can it be fixed? God. I deserve to be mocked. The Sacred Heart girls are perhaps not horrible, just discerning, on to something …

  But Heath merely nodded. He didn’t seem at all freaked out! Then again, Flannery didn’t detect the intense interest she’d hoped to spark—she was now apparently a glutton for magic moments. She noted the moody boredom in his expression, and thought of how Miss Sweeney had written on her paper about the complex narration in Wuthering Heights: “Axe the meandering.”

  “And anyway, my teacher, she really loves the book, and she’s really smart, like scary smart, but also, you know—”

  He nodded. “Troubled?”

  “Yes. She’s just … different. She’s totally sarcastic, but in a refreshing way, mostly. And she wrote me this really crazy good recommendation letter that got me into Columbia.”

  “Congrats!” He touched her shoulder, and Flannery felt the heat of his hand radiate through the leather jacket, to her sweater and blouse, to her skin …

  “Thanks.” Ugh, but she sounded so smug with the Columbia talk! If only she could communicate via snail mail, a parchment-and-pen missive wherein she could labor over every word so as not to sound so monumentally stupid. “Anyway, Miss Sweeney didn’t show up for school this morning, and the police came to school … and I remembered Miss Sweeney told me how Manhattan was a great place to get lost, how you can be surrounded but still have your anonymity.”

  He nodded. “That’s what I’m here for.”

  Flannery waited for Heath to elaborate. When he didn’t, she filled the silence, breathlessly: “Yesterday in class we discussed where Heathcliff might have gone when he dropped out of Wuthering Heights. I surmised that he would come here, to New York City.”

  “You’re quite the surmiser, Flannery.”

  Flannery wished she’d used the phrase “I figured” instead of the woefully mockable “I surmised.” And Miss Sweeney rang in too, a distillation of so many red-inked comments: The better word is rarely the fancier word, Flannery. Yet Heath was smiling at her as if he found her words dear, not grandiloquent. She blushed, not the standard flash fire of humiliation, but a soft burn of pleasure.

  “Miss Sweeney thought Heathcliff would flee to Manhattan too. The book you found that had dropped out of my backpack? It’s her copy.”

  “She’s Caitlin Sweeney?”

  Flannery nodded. “I found her book at school this morning.” She hoped Heath was entertaining the image of her casually selecting the book from Miss Sweeney’s classroom bookshelf, not rifling through a handbag in a bathroom. “I read it this morning at school, and I read a little more when we were at the restaurant and you were…” She placed two fingers to her mouth, in imitation of a smoker. “I had some time to dip into Wuthering Heights.” How, exactly, should she say it? “It’s different now, changed. The book is full of Miss Sweeney’s thoughts.”

  “I do that all the time myself. I’m always buying books, which is a bit funny as I was never really one for school. But I can never sell my used books. Luckily, I only pay a dollar or so for them in the first place. Those guys with blankets of books spread on the sidewalk? They’ve curated my American education. So, granted my used books are especially used, but that’s not the issue. The last time I took a stack to the Strand, the guy was like, ‘Dude, you wrote more in the margins than the author wrote in the actual text, we cannot possibly sell these.’”

  Flannery had a blissful moment daydr
eaming of Heath’s marginalia as she walked along Broadway. Perhaps he would pencil a bold gray box around a passage that stumped or inflamed him and add corresponding question marks or exclamation points with a lighter hand, the ghostliest graphite there in the side margin. And his words, of course, his notes to himself about the text, or maybe not relevant to it at all. Maybe he used the margins like a diary?

  Flannery thought about Lockwood, the hapless tenant at Wuthering Heights who happened upon Cathy’s childhood Bible in her stack of books: “A fly-leaf bore the inscription—‘Catherine Earnshaw, her book.’ … I shut it, and took up another and another, till I had examined all. Catherine’s library was select, and its state of dilapidation proved it to have been well used, though not altogether for a legitimate purpose: scarcely one chapter had escaped a pen-and-ink commentary—at least the appearance of one—covering every morsel of blank that the printer had left. Some were detached sentences; other parts took the form of a regular diary, scrawled in an unformed, childish hand.”

  Was excessive marginalia a trait of the British?

  But Miss Sweeney’s narrative was not marginalia. Her words were the original typeset pages, transformed.

  “Um. Not quite like that. The book is now written from her point of view. The margins are blank. It’s the standard text, but Miss Sweeney is the narrator.”

  “And Miss Brontë’s original tale?”

  Flannery raised her hands. “That’s the thing … It’s not there.”

  Heath seemed unfazed, or maybe he simply didn’t believe what she was saying. “Well, that’s quite a twist, then. Talk about an abridged edition. You were correct Flannery. That is in fact officially crazy.”

  The fortunate people of New York were walking about drinking coffees and talking on cell phones and buying newspapers, ignorant of the particular miracle that was unfolding, the miracle of the book, of the boy. Flannery had not met his eye when explaining about Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights, but now she looked up; his eyes were so deep and dark brown that Flannery felt like she could spend days trying to discern his irises from his pupils.

  Miss Sweeney chuckled in her mind, and scribbled a quick note: You’d like to discern his irises! My, that’s some contemplative gardening.

  But there were also people on Broadway who looked haggard, the formerly fortunate, Flannery supposed, or worse: those who had never known good days. A man with a full Grizzly Adams beard and a downtrodden, layered look—a great many shirts but no coat—approached Flannery and Heath, wobbling a bit, pushing cans and plastic bags and a smiling Papa Smurf doll in a rusted metal trolley. “Sir! Can you help out a vet?”

  As Heath pulled a crumpled-up bill from his pocket and offered it to the man, Flannery nearly swooned with delight, thinking: For he is good, too. But Heath had not actually put the money into the man’s hand—he’d held the bill by a corner and grimaced as the man daintily plucked it away: God bless, God bless. The purity of her infatuation stayed strong, but Flannery felt emboldened by Heath’s rather priggish donation. Because if he, too, acted questionably at times, perhaps he wouldn’t judge her for going out to a leisurely lunch when he learned she had known all along that her beloved teacher was in peril.

  “I don’t mean for this next part to sound quite so ‘crazy.’” Flannery even made the dreaded finger quotes. “The bouquet I had earlier? I left it at the statue, and she picked it up. I could literally look over my shoulder and see Miss Sweeney walking down the street with those red roses. And she’s struggling with some … mental issues.”

  Heath stopped walking. “So you’re reading about her day in the city? This very day? In Wuthering Heights?”

  Flannery glanced down, hoping he wouldn’t slap his forehead and suddenly remember an important appointment—“Nice meeting you, though! Best of luck!”—and disappear down a side street. When she looked back up at him, Heath brought his hand to Flannery’s face, and brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes.

  He nodded at her backpack. “Let’s have a look.”

  His hand. His hand. Flannery’s great American novel, composed of her complex thoughts and jaunty wordplay, would contain only those two words, typed over and over until they blended and devolved into a new, unintelligible word: Hishand Hishand Hishand. Flannery opened her mouth to speak, but the ghost of Heath’s fingertips on her cheek seemed to have cut her vocal chords.

  Miss Sweeney rang in with her own marginalia scrolled beneath the text of Flannery’s two-syllable magnum opus: So … his phantom phalanges have spirited away your words? She also doodled a quick pencil likeness of Edvard Munch’s The Scream: the anguished man with his hands covering his ears, and the open, oblong mouth with a cartoon bubble, not seen in the original, that read: O, unholy hyperbole!

  Heath raised his hand and fanned his fingers toward his chest. “Give me Wuthering Heights, Flannery.”

  Flannery unzipped her backpack and pulled out the book. She knew she was right; she knew she wasn’t making this up, yet she still felt relieved when Heath read aloud: “Manhattan, my old Alpha and Omega.”

  Heath read a bit further, as if the sidewalk were a standing- room-only library, and let out a low whistle when he flipped the page. He ran his finger along the inner binding of the book, just as Flannery had done in the bathroom stall at Sacred Heart.

  “I need to read more,” Flannery said. “I need to see where she’s going.”

  “I’d say.”

  Flannery thought he sounded sarcastic but nice. Nice enough. He handed her the book and raised his hand like a maître d’, toward a small park that seemingly had popped up out of nowhere and intersected the uptown and downtown lanes of Broadway. Straus Park. Flannery made a mental note to research this later and find out who, exactly, this Straus fellow was, and why there was a funny little park named after him. But the girl who took pleasure in sitting with a mocha and Googling random bits of intrigue seemed awfully far away right now.

  “Thank you,” Flannery said again, this time with such bare sincerity that it was Heath’s turn to look flustered. They took the crosswalk and cut over to Straus Park. One bench was occupied by a man holding a dachshund wearing a hot-pink rhinestone collar, but the other was not only open, it supplied reading material: a New York Post that some thoughtful recycler had carefully tucked between the slats on the bench.

  A small, satisfied sound came from the back of Heath’s throat as he dislodged the paper. “Ah, the Post. A guilty pleasure.” He sat and shook a cigarette out of his pack, and Flannery considered again how all the health class information was factually incorrect, that smoking was in fact completely sexy, and besides, you could get cancer even if you didn’t smoke, as everyone knew.

  Heath lit a match—the gorgeous sulfur strike sounded magnificent—and Flannery sat on the bench next to him and opened Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights. She read, completely engrossed, but also periodically floating out of her body to observe herself sitting on the bench with Heath, to watch the two of them reading together.

  She thought about the prelude to everyday romance, the essentials of advertising: baiting yourself with smoky gel eyeliner and the CHI iron, with witty Twittering and hot yoga for a hot bod, with the Paleo diet to de-flab the wheat/dairy belly. And when one achieved an actual romance, things became even trickier. Sure, you could have the pleasure and status of being someone’s sweetheart, but a girl had to work pretty hard for her flowers and Valentine chocolates. Flannery rarely listened to music at school; instead, she put in her earbuds and eavesdropped: Nobody wanted the Scarlet A in their medical records, or their psyche, so having a boyfriend involved making the essential, covert trip to Planned Parenthood before stopping at the mall to quickly purchase a random decoy item, for later: Look Mom! I spent three hours at Sephora but found the perfect opalescent lip gloss! (And, no, you old goose! I do not have birth control pills in my purse!) And if the tedious Science Fair of chemically separating the egg from the sperm wasn’t enough fun, one could also coun
t on enduring the relationship problems documented in women’s magazines that made all of romance sound like a draining part-time job with no perks—working the always-slammed Target Starbucks that didn’t have a tip cup. But reading with another person didn’t require appointments, or any particular vigor, and it was something you could do throughout your life. Sure, Mrs. Schmidt, the cranky PE teacher at Sacred Heart, had made a similar observation about swimming laps, but Flannery knew what she was doing right now was superior to the American crawl stroke; Flannery knew she had shattered the chemical candy heart of romance and was feeling something real. Because reading next to someone that you loved or might love, depending? Well, it was breathtaking.

  Five

  Dear Reader, I cradled the bouquet to my chest. The roses were softening, their furled edges blackening from the freezing air, and I imagined them as delicious as whorled red-velvet cakes edged with dark chocolate. I wanted to eat them, petal by petal, even if they tasted of petroleum and fertilizer. I would devour the long stems, too, and let the thorns pierce my tongue and tonsils, a penitent’s delight! I gasped out, “Oh, my love,” and then his name came out of my mouth, essential as breathing: “Brandon Brandon Brandon Brandon.”

  Because there he was, crossing Broadway. He had changed out of his fatigues.

  Two girls in the pedestrian crosswalk looked over at him, their shared gaze fawning and unsubtle, because in his pea coat and dark jeans, Brandon was every inch a James Dean dreamboat, a trite and familiar description of faux nostalgia, but also God’s truth. I lowered my face to the bouquet and breathed in before I took off running. I raced across Broadway, zigzagging around clusters of pedestrians, always keeping my eyes trained on the back of his head. I longed to scream out, Brandon! I’m right here! Look back! But I also didn’t want to break the spell. I wanted to walk next to him, to flip my hair and say casually: Hey, you. I wanted to look fetching and composed and let my eyes tell the story of true love: I have come for you. Things will be different now.