The week after I turned twenty-one I had made a series of good decisions. I hadn’t gotten drunk yet (because as soon as it was legal it suddenly lost its charm), and I’d been really focused on my anorexia, which is one of the best mental illnesses to have, because at least you look hot while you’re starving yourself to death. Except your hair looks like shit because it’s falling out in clumps, and you find yourself lying awake at night obsessing about how your hip bones stick out too far and wondering how much it would hurt to file them down with a cheese grater. Wait, did I say “good decisions”? Let’s start again.
The week after I turned twenty-one I was bored, sober, and dangerously underweight in that way that makes people think you’re on heroin or dying of cancer. It was nine o’clock at night when I decided I needed to get out of the house, so I threw on a coat and drove to the only bookstore still open that late in the nearby town. My childhood love of horror novels had side-railed into a brief fling with witchcraft. (Which lasted just long enough for me to realize that none of the spells and charms I made ever worked. When it called for “a white candle waved over newly broken seeds,” I would shrug and wave my dad’s flashlight over a jar of peanut butter. I would eventually denounce witchcraft as completely useless, but to be fair, it’s possible that it was less about the potency of the spells, and more that I was just a really bad cook. Plus, it was the kind of peanut butter that already had the jelly mixed in it, which was a real time-saver, but probably not exactly what the druids had in mind.)
I walked back to the New Age section of the bookstore and for once I was not alone, as there was a guy there about my age who would not stop staring at me. Also, he looked almost exactly like Doogie Howser, M.D. (Special notes for people reading this book who were born after 1990: (1) I kind of hate you. Please stop looking so good in shorts. (2) Doogie Howser, M.D., was one of the first shows Neil Patrick Harris did. It was before he got all hot. No one ever had a crush on him at that point. Then he came out of the closet and suddenly he was totally hot, and every girl in the world wanted to sleep with him. This is just how girls work. We can’t explain it either.) The (probably unintentional) Doogie Howser impersonator was wearing a denim vest, so I was fairly sure he was gay, but this was the nineties, so all bets were off. He wouldn’t stop staring at me, and every time I’d pull out a book he’d casually remark, “Oh, I have that book.” It was extremely annoying, and I found myself wishing there was a book in this section about tampons just to throw him off, but this was a small-town bookstore, so even if a tampon-witchcraft book existed, they probably wouldn’t have had it in stock. Then Doogie smiled, picked up an astrology book, and asked me what my sign was. He swears that this never happened, but it totally did. And the entire time I was thinking, “This guy’s probably a stalker.” He was thinking, “I’m going to marry this girl.” Mostly because he’d had a dream that he was going to marry a girl wearing a certain coat, and when I walked into the bookstore I was wearing the same coat as the girl in his dream. (I should mention that this was the same coat I’d had since I was fifteen, when my mom was in the hospital having a hernia operation and she was so high she was all, “Jenny needs a new coat,” which my father should have recognized as drug-induced delirium, because we never got new coats, but he totally took me out and bought me the coat and I was all, “Oh, and I need a new hat too.” And when we got back to the hospital room, my mom was still on morphine and she was all, “Hey, nice hat!” Then two days later she sobered up and was all, “The hell? I’m unconscious for one day and suddenly everyone goes crazy with hats?!”)
Doogie Howser noticed my coat from the moment I walked in the bookstore and became obsessed with finding out who I was. I refused to tell him my last name or give him my number, and I told him very clearly, “I have a boyfriend,” because I didn’t want him to stalk me. Doogie introduced himself as Victor and suggested that I was wasting my money by buying any of these books, since he had them all and would lend them to me. I pointed out that I didn’t actually have any money and was planning on stealing them. The last part was a lie, but it was one that he genuinely chuckled at, which was a refreshing change from the uncomfortable laughter that I got from most men. He took the book I held in my hand and put it back on the shelf. “You’re far too adorable to go to jail. Come to my dorm room and you can steal them from me.”