LitGeek: Oh, right. You’re obviously not married.
HollyG: I’m six. I can’t even legally work in a sweatshop yet.
LitGeek: lol
HollyG: So, LitGeek, who are your favorite authors besides the elusive Mr. Pynchon? Obviously not Capote . . .
It went on like that for weeks. September turned into October and everything else seemed normal. The entire school went crazy when the football team made regional playoffs. I got fitted for costumes at the theater and rehearsals were off-script now. Midterms started and Portia’s dad freaked out when she got a D on her trigonometry test.
I was practically oblivious to all of it. Instead, I constantly checked the forum on my phone. Every time I looked at the PM he’d left a new message. Sometimes we started new PMs for new topics, and a lot of nights we were online at the same time, talking in real time for hours. He told me about Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace and we debated the best works of Tom Stoppard and Edward Albee. We agreed on how fabulous the new Guthrie Theater building was and disagreed on how awful the Rochester theater scene was. I didn’t tell him about my role in Jane Eyre. We were both careful to not say too much about our lives. He called his house a death camp once, but he never talked about his job or his wife. He asked me things like if I could inhabit the life of any character in a book, who would I be? I had no idea. I became the main character in every book I read. I felt myself inside their skin, but it didn’t have anything to do with liking them or wanting to be them. He said when he was young he wanted to be Charlie Bucket and when he was twenty he read Love in the Time of Cholera and felt strangely jealous of Florentino Ariza, who I guess loved a woman he couldn’t have for fifty years. I said if he wanted to be frustrated and sad his whole life, why didn’t he just become a guidance counselor? He laughed and then he said, “Florentino knew what he wanted. Even Charlie knew what he wanted. I guess I’d just like to know what my chocolate factory is.”
He was married and probably bald and fat and gassy, too—and none of that mattered because we weren’t in the real world. I told him how I really felt about everything, how I wanted to move to New York more than anything but that sometimes I was scared, because I didn’t have a plan or know anybody and I couldn’t tell anyone that. He said anything worth doing should scare you a little, and that some of the greatest stories began with a journey. Then I started posting Journey lyrics and pretty soon we were both rocking out to “Don’t Stop Believing.” I started imagining LitGeek when I was in bed at night, feeling my skin and my heartbeat under the sheets, my head bursting with everything I was going to see and do, and I pretended my hands were his as they skimmed up my thighs, that he was exploring me, that he wanted me, too.
LitGeek: You know today is our month anniversary of PMing?
HollyG: Aren’t you the chick this evening?
LitGeek: I guess that makes you the man in our relationship.
HollyG: I don’t know if you can call a couple of messages a relationship. And a month? God, I don’t think anniversaries start until a year.
LitGeek: Of course it’s a relationship. Everything is. You can have a relationship with a chicken, for God’s sake.
HollyG: Only a country girl could read that and not take it the wrong way.
LitGeek: So you admit it at last, Lula Mae.
HollyG: I admit nothing. That was only a general statement. For all you know, I took it completely the wrong way.
LitGeek: Oh really? :P
HollyG: <Imagining> Come here, pretty hens. LitGeek won’t hurt you . . . much.
LitGeek: rotfl
HollyG:
LitGeek: How little you know me. I wouldn’t lure them like that. I’m much more subtle.
HollyG: So what would your approach be?
LitGeek: Hmmm . . . I never thought about seducing a chicken.
I held my breath as his last reply lingered on the monitor. I typed slowly, deliberately, feeling the anticipation bubble in my chest.
HollyG: Pretend I’m a chicken. Give it your best shot.
He didn’t answer for a full minute.
LitGeek: Are you sure?
And that’s when I fell, when I knew I was in love with this ghost of a man. He didn’t try to make it funny or play it off. His reply told me that he was tempted, but he wouldn’t do it unless I was absolutely certain. My heart started racing as I typed.
HollyG: Yes.
LitGeek: Well . . .
My eyes were glued to the screen.
LitGeek: First . . .
He was never this slow a typer. I could practically hear him thinking, see his eyes scan my body as he decided on the first caress.
LitGeek: I would brush my fingertips up your back, starting at your hips and tracing all the way up to your neck, to the hollows beneath your ears where you said you were ticklish. But this won’t tickle . . .
That was the first night we had sex.