"When the quality of the writing is as interesting as yours, I don't mind at all. There's just one thing I'd like to caution you about."

A look crossed Jensen's features, and Vera did not know how to translate it at first. Was it recognition-the look of one who had known that, sooner rather than later, the other shoe would drop?

"It's nothing bad," Vera said hurriedly. "I'd just like to ask you to be careful when writing about your cla.s.smates. And I'm not saying this for the reason you might think. It's not because I'm trying to censor your right to discuss your fellow cla.s.smates in your journals."

"But you'd rather I wrote nicer things about them."

"No, not even that. I'm just concerned that someone might get a hold of your journals and . . . use them against you. You see, this happened to me once, back when I was in high school and had a tendency to write down every little thing that I thought. A notebook got stolen out of my bag in homeroom. I got in a lot of trouble for some of the things I wrote. I'd hate for . . . I'd hate for such a thing to happen to you. That's all."

They sized each other up for a second or two. Vera searched for a way to shift the conversation to Jensen-perhaps something specific about the journals she'd read, something to demonstrably show Jensen that she'd read it and gotten it. She blurted out, "I liked that bit you wrote a couple of weeks ago about Holden's mother not making meat loaf."

Jensen grimaced. "That was kind of a throwaway. I had to end the journal entry somehow."

"Well, it amused me. And it certainly brings to mind the cla.s.s issues in the novel. Holden is well-to-do, by most people's standards. I'll tell you a funny little personal story. One time when I was in a graduate school seminar, I made a pa.s.sing reference to how much I'd enjoyed eating TV dinners when I was a kid-are they even called TV dinners anymore?-and my cla.s.smates, some of who were trust fund kids, were all agog. One girl said, 'Vera, really? You used to eat TV dinners?' They couldn't conceive of it."

Jensen's mouth moved a little-not a grimace this time but not exactly a smile, either. Vera had the distinct feeling that the girl thought she was being silly but was too polite to say so. "I think you'll like my new journal entry then. I actually wrote about . . . um, the haves and the have-nots, I guess you could say."

"Sounds promising," Vera said. "Very good, then. I'll see you tomorrow in cla.s.s, yes?"

"You will," Jensen said. But now she seemed to have forgotten that she'd been on her way out the door. She shifted her weight from foot to foot and said, "I don't think you did anything wrong, by the way."

"I'm sorry?"

"With what you said in cla.s.s. If anything, you might have even copped out a little. Don't worry about what Sufia thinks."

"I appreciate you backing me up on this," Vera said, "but I respect what all of my students think and feel. I know that I try to, anyway."

After Jensen was gone, Vera put her journal on top of the unread freewrites. As she was sorting the rest of them, trying to take her mind off all that had occurred after her last cla.s.s, Sue MacMasters, the head of the English department, walked past her cla.s.sroom, did a double take, and stuck her head in the door.

"Why, h.e.l.lo, stranger," she said, her words curling around Vera in a way that felt like an accusation. "How is everything going? I haven't heard much from you, so I a.s.sume you haven't had any questions."

"I think things are going well. We're already discussing Catcher. The students seem to tolerate me all right."

"I'm sure they tolerate you. They have ways of letting you know if they don't. I'm on my way to a conference with a parent, but please-don't hesitate to ask if you need anything. I know filling in for someone else can be rather overwhelming at first. I was just saying the other day that I've yet to see you come into the faculty lounge. You're a bit of a mystery among the teachers."

"Well," Vera said wryly, "it's good to know I have some mystique."

She was grateful that Sue couldn't linger. The brief attention from her boss had made her more self-conscious than ever. She knew she would have to buck up and start mingling with the other faculty at some point if she wanted any hope of having her contract renewed in the fall. But she was starting to feel, already, that forming close bonds with the faculty would somehow be traitorous to her students. Her first loyalty was to them. The side she was on would most likely always be theirs.

She returned her attention to the freewrites stacked before her. There was an hour-and-a-half gap between her first and second cla.s.s-plenty of time to read and comment on some of these. One student, Chelsea Cutler-not the brightest bulb in the cla.s.s, Vera had quickly ascertained-wrote about how the theme of The Catcher in the Rye is "the 1950s, where people talked different and thought different, which shows how no one can relate to them anymore." Another student, Katherine a.r.s.enault-Vera noticed she had signed her name Kitty-had written, "Holden is someone who takes everything for granite. I think this book is about not taking things for granite." Applying a quasi-feminist a.n.a.lysis, Harmony Phelps wrote, "This is about how guys objectify women and tell lies and try to say they're something that they're not. Men cannot help it."

Enough, Vera thought. She would have to get to these later. She pulled out Jensen's journal entry. As with the girl's first submission, the t.i.tle on the cover gave her a little jolt.

I Shoot People in This Hat: Journal Entry #2, by Jensen Willard Yesterday morning, before English cla.s.s, we had an a.s.sembly in the auditorium. Were you there? I looked for you.

Vera stopped reading and pushed the paper away an inch, like someone who has resolved to not take another bite from her plate. This direct address took her off guard. But curiosity got the better of her; she pulled the paper closer to her again and continued reading.

I know our cla.s.s talked about themes in The Catcher in the Rye. One of the themes is artifice vs. reality-the real vs. the phony-and I mention this because school a.s.semblies are exercises in artifice. I kind of wish one of Holden's cronies had been there to let out a colossal fart during the proceedings, just to keep things real.

FACT: Getting a bunch of girls together in an auditorium is offensive to the senses. The whole room reeked of Coco Mademoiselle perfume-the fragrance most of the girls here wear. Same fragrance their mothers wear, come to think of it. Little miniatures of their parents these kids are. You can look at them now and see what they'll be like in ten years, in twenty years. They'll be exactly the same, except with more money and more bloat. They'll take positions in local government and build tennis courts in their backyards and complain about neighbors with unsightly, unmowed lawns.

It's the same way with the poor white kids on other side of the river, identifiable by their scruffy pseudo hip-hop clothes and baggy pants. Their futures are just as clearly mapped out, but unlike the rich kids, sometimes I think they know how depressing this is. They take Vocational and General and Remedial cla.s.ses and, whether they make it out of high school or not, will soon crank out litters of sad, doomed, government-funded children-just what we need more of. I know of which I speak, because I'm a poor white kid, too. I live on that side of the river and used to go to their school up until last year. I'm a "scholarship kid" now. Aren't I the special one.

I'm not doing a very good job of setting the scene for the morning a.s.sembly, am I? I get distracted easily. I guess I could tell you how the dean of our school, Mr. Harold Finister, was up onstage doing his usual pointless shtick, handing out some leftover awards that he didn't get around to handing out earlier in the year. If it seems as though I have some bitterness toward Dean Finister, then you are reading this the right way. Earlier this year, thanks to Finister, I had to meet with this shrink and almost ended up in a hospital. This is not the kind of thing I can easily forgive.

Finister's big thing is keeping an eye out for girls who have alcoholic parents or are using substances themselves; he's always checking our eyes for signs of drug-induced pupil enlargement. He can't rag on me for substance abuse, so his thing with me is harping on depression. Every time he sees me he says, "You look sad today, Jensen." Every frigging time without fail. It's my own fault, though, because a couple of months ago he found me crying in the corridor, leaning against the wall because I thought I might collapse from crying so hard. I go on crying jags a lot, especially lately, and once I start I can't stop. He hauled me into his office because I guess it's bad if a girl sees another girl bawling unreservedly in the halls; it's either an eyesore or it's bad for morale, I'm not sure which. I sat there in the chair across from him and couldn't stop crying, and finally he handed me a Kleenex. "You're makeup's getting all smudged," he said. That was all he said at the time.

Later he called my parents and told them he was referring me to this shrink who charges on a sliding scale. I think this made my mother sad and worried, thinking I needed therapy, and I felt awful about that. I felt even worse when I met the shrink-a woman named Dr. Haskell who has some kind of weird mental defect that makes her incapable of saying anything other than "Uh-huh." I'm not kidding. No matter what you say, that's all she says back: "Uh-huh." You could say, "Dr. Haskell, the reception desk just got hijacked by Libyans," and she'll croak, "Uh-huh," and leave it at that. I suppose that's a therapeutic method, but I didn't think much of it. I think my parents were relieved when I told them I refused to go to therapy after the third week. Sliding scale or no sliding scale, forty dollars a week is a lot to pay for "Uh-huhs."

Poor Dean Finister. I ought to have more sympathy for him. It can't be easy having to spew that same silly pap about school spirit and cla.s.s pride all the time, and then there's his home life. His daughter, Lyndsey, is the most matronly teenager known to man-only seventeen years old, and she already has a pigeon breast and a paunch. Looks just like her mother. It can't be easy having to go home to a wife and daughter who look like pigeon-shaped bookends. And then there's all that business with his dead niece. That can't be as fun as a barrel of monkeys, either.

The worst thing about school a.s.semblies, aside from having to look at Finister, is that the right people never get awards. It's always the people like Cecily-Anne or Autumn who do-the ones whose parents give money to the school. Take somebody like Martha True from our cla.s.s-she's actually not stupid, but she's not what Wallace likes to think of itself as promoting, so she's not going to get squat. I'm not even going to get into me. Which is not to say I deserve any awards, really. I don't go out of my way to get noticed. I don't like raising my hand or speaking up because this anxiety creeps in and I feel like I can't get any breath in my lungs as soon as I think about responding to a question or a point.

The phone is ringing for me-my Sunday night phone call. I will get back to this and write more later, if you don't mind too much.

LATER-1 a.m.

Ugh, I can't sleep.

I did sleep for a little while earlier, maybe an hour and a half, but I woke up and thought I saw someone in my window. My bedroom is on the second floor, so I'm pretty sure no one was there-no one could have been there-but for just one second I was sure a man was pressing his sunken face up against the gla.s.s. This used to be a regular thing with me, a trick of the eye in the dark. I used to sleep with my head completely covered so that if I woke up in the night, I wouldn't be tempted to look at the window because seeing a face in it was always my greatest fear. I've started doing that again, covering my head, ever since Angela Galvez was killed.

I don't think I should write about Angela Galvez, though. I need to try to calm myself down, not get myself worked up further. I guess this might be a good time to tell you a little bit about my boyfriend-the Sunday night phone caller.

But no, something even better: I want to tell you about my parents. I should start by telling you that earlier tonight, before I got started on this journal entry, the three of us-me, my mom, and my stepfather, Les-all watched Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! together, like we do every night. "What?" you're probably asking. "A teenage girl who actually admits to doing something civil with her parents?" I'm all about defying expectations, but the truth is, I get along with them well enough.

I know this is uncommon. Maybe other teenagers just don't know how to work their parents, don't know a good thing when they've got it. I saw that stupid old movie The Breakfast Club on TV a couple of months ago, and I couldn't believe how the characters kept linking their unhappiness back to their parents. Worst of all was when this character, the supposedly weird girl who is really just a normal girl trying to play a weird girl, has that dumb line where she says: "When you grow up, your heart dies." When, I wondered, has my heart ever lived? I swear to G.o.d, if I do make it to adulthood, it'll only be for the satisfaction of not having to be a teenager anymore.

My mother is this really funny mixture of earthy redneck, hippie, and prude; she swears like a sailor, but when you get her going on the subject of dating, all of a sudden she turns into a debutante from the 1950s. More about that later.

My stepdad is Les Cudahy. He's from San Fernando, California, originally, and he went to high school with some kids who later became movie stars. Not big names, but people you'd recognize if you saw them. His real first name is Leslie, but you'd have to call him that at your own peril. He is more than twenty-five years older than my mother; she's his second wife. He's older than most of my cla.s.smates' grandfathers, and in fact he does have grandchildren from his first marriage who are older than I am. But he's been my stepfather since I was two, after my biological dad, Mr. Stephen Willard, took off and became a champion deadbeat. (I don't even think I have any memories of him. No, that isn't true-I do have one memory, if you can call it that. I must have been about two years old, and I'd had a nightmare, so I'd gone to my parents' room and stood by their bedside in the dark, waiting for one of them to wake up. I was near my dad's side of the bed, and he was sleeping facedown in his pillow. Eventually he lifted his head a little-his hair was all matted, I remember that. "Jesus Christ!" he said when he saw me, and buried his face in the pillow again. In hindsight I wish I'd grabbed the back of his head and pushed his face in a little deeper. Thus ends my first, last, and only fond memory of champion deadbeat Stephen Willard.) So those are my parents. Neither one of whom is exactly enthralled about my having a boyfriend, by the way. I can't say that I'm always one hundred percent enthralled about it, either.

I first met Bret Folger last summer when I was taking one of those courses in French at the community college. Bret was taking the same course, as some kind of precollege thing. He actually goes to Columbia University now. You might think that sounds bad, me dating a college freshman when I'm only a tenth grader, but he's a respectable sixteen years old-he did some kind of homeschooling thing where he got his high school degree two years early.

Bret and I never talked the whole time we were in French, but later that July I'd gone to this extremely pathetic student art exhibit at the library. The only reason I was there is because my semi-friend Scotty was supposed to have a painting on display. I refer to Scotty as a semi-friend because we used to be pretty close last year when we went to the same school; we were in the same gym cla.s.s for a while, and we both had rage in common. Before gym would start, we'd have some downtime where we'd sit on the bleachers, both of us looking ridiculous in sweatpants and T-shirts, and he'd talk to me very enthusiastically about new kinds of homemade bombs he was working on. He's big on weaponry and explosives. We were always talking about blowing up the school, in a humorous way, of course, and that solidified our bond.

Also, Scotty and I were always comparing notes on how we wanted to kill ourselves if we were going to do it. (Do you think less of me now that you know this about me? Have you downgraded me to just some stupid punk kid? Or maybe placed me in the ranks of one of those wannabe school shooters who is really just looking for attention?) I said I would jump off a bridge, and he said he would slit his wrists. A couple times he tried, or said he did, but I'm not really sure how serious his intention was-he came to school one time with his wrists all bandaged, but when he showed me the cuts underneath, the cuts went across his wrists like bracelets instead of straight up and down, like you're supposed to do them.

The other main thing that Scotty and I both had in common was that we were both signed up for archery. In ninth grade you could choose between three different sports in gym, and I signed up for archery because it seemed a lesser evil than the alternatives-volleyball and basketball. I don't like things flying at me from overhead, and I don't like having to chase things around for no reason. So archery it is-me, Scotty, the fat girls who also don't like to run around and chase things, and the dorky guys who think they want to be Braveheart when they grow up.

Anyway, I was in the library looking for Scotty's painting and hoping to see Scotty there, too, I suppose. I hadn't seen him since school let out. Though we got pretty tight in gym, we were never close enough friends where I saw him after school or had his phone number or anything along those lines, so I guess he falls in the category of "lost" friends, right up there with Annabel. I didn't see Scotty, and I didn't see his painting there, either-just a bunch of other students' work, painful to behold. The product of my former high school's art cla.s.ses reflected the preferences of the art teacher, Mrs. Plum, who thinks that drawings and paintings must celebrate Maine's Maine-ness and therefore be all about loons and lighthouses and lakes. I was standing there in front of a picture of a boat in the Pen.o.bscot River. It looked like someone had barfed up a bottle of Scope and superimposed a stick-figure boat over it. Then I got this uncanny sense that someone was standing far too close. I'm pretty good at telling when someone invades my personal s.p.a.ce because my personal s.p.a.ce takes up a little more room than most people's.

I turned around and saw all six foot five inches of Bret Folger hulking over me. I should say here that he is not a very attractive guy, physically. At least I didn't think so in the beginning. He's about a hundred and thirty pounds, tops, which gives him the appearance of a giant, slightly stooped tapeworm. He also has reddish-blondish hair that his mother cuts for him-it literally looks like one of those cuts where someone puts a bowl over your head and snips away to beat the band. I knew from French cla.s.s that he was very smart, though, by scholarly standards.

"Hi," he said. "I know you. Jensen, right?"

I was surprised he knew my name. I was surprised, too, that he was bothering to speak to me. That's just not something that people ordinarily do. Even more surprising, he kept on talking.

"Do you like art?" he asked me.

"Some of it. Not this stuff."

"More modern?"

"No. Not too modern. Do you mean like crumpling up a Big Mac wrapper and throwing it on the floor and calling that art? I hate that kind of thing." I thought for a moment. Under his heavy lids, Bret's eyes-beetle eyes, practically all pupils-were looking at me like he wanted to gobble me up. It made me want to mess with him a little. "I like the Pre-Raphaelites. I know some people think they're tacky, but I like them. Anyone who exhumes the corpse of his dead wife like Rossetti did is probably a pretty interesting person."

Bret stared at me even more closely with those beetle eyes, trying to see if I was serious. This crazy-looking flush had started surging up behind his acne, and this made me think less of him-why would anyone blush on my account?

"You know," Bret said, "I'd always meant to talk to you in French cla.s.s. You seemed pretty cool. I was wondering . . . do you like movies? Sometimes a group of us gets together on Thursday nights and rents stuff. Sometimes at my place, and sometimes at my friend Dave Epstein's, and sometimes at my friend Colin Mackay's. Last week we watched, um, Plan 9 from Outer s.p.a.ce? It was pretty cool. Anyway, tonight's Thursday, and we're meeting at my house."

Let me interject here that I can't stand the word cool. It just sounds so stupid, and Bret had gone ahead and used it twice. I wanted to walk away instantly. But something compelled me not to.

"I could come," I said without even thinking about it. You might well ask, "Why would you go to Bret Folger's house when you find him repugnant and hadn't had a real social outing since the last time Annabel invited you to a pool party three years ago?" Maybe because the last social outing I'd had was when Annabel invited me to a pool party three years ago.

Bret gave me his address on this piece of wadded-up paper he'd had in his pocket-the paper felt warm, which was a little disgusting-and I put it in my knapsack. Funny, when I was on my way out the library about a half an hour later, I saw this kid Joey Fitts, who I knew a little from my old school; he used to skateboard down by the waterfront parking lot with Scotty sometimes. I asked him how Scotty was doing, and he told me Scotty hadn't been in school for a month or two, and that maybe he was either locked up somewhere or had dropped out. And yes, I felt a little jealous of my old friend, hearing that. I miss that kid sometimes.

Later that day, it took my parents some convincing that it would be okay for me to watch movies with a bunch of guys I'd never met, at the home of a boy I barely knew. "We don't even know this boy," my mother said, turning on her prim persona in a flash. "I'd feel better if we met him first."

"Why would you have to meet him? It isn't a date. My G.o.d, he repulses me."

"That sounds like a h.e.l.l of a basis for a friendship. I guess you can go if Les is willing to drive you."

Poor Les is always driving me around everywhere, but he does it uncomplainingly for the most part. When it comes right down to it, my parents will do just about anything for me. There was no question that I'd be able to go.

So that's how I ended up lounging around in Bret Folger's living room, which turned out to be the sort of suburban s.p.a.ce that looked as though it'd been lifted straight out of a catalog-leather couches that made squeaking, farting noises when you got on and off them, and those dumb little end tables that serve no real purpose stuck everywhere. Knickknack shelves with completely insignificant knickknacks on them; you could tell Mrs. Folger had just gone wild at a Pottery Barn sale rather than looking for interesting objects that would make a statement. The lights were turned down low, maybe to make the movie on the big-screen TV seem a little more cinematic. The cinematic masterpiece itself was Repo Man, some movie from the '80s starring Emilio Estevez.

The other people in the living room were Bret's aforementioned friends, Dave and Colin. Introductions were made all around. Dave has gla.s.ses and an eruption of frizzy hair, and he was sitting on an armchair with an afghan covering up his legs like an invalid. As for Colin, he was wearing eyeliner and mascara, which can look good on pretty, androgynous men, but not on Colin's big, blunt-featured face.

"We made a bet you wouldn't come," Colin had said as soon as I showed up.

"Sorry to disappoint."

I took a seat on a corner chair and tried to pretend I was paying attention to what was on TV. That it was perfectly ordinary for me to be someplace other than in my living room watching Jeopardy! with my parents on a Thursday night. That I was used to sitting around with a small group of overly intense and slightly sweaty boys who had the lights turned down low.

Colin and Dave, who go to the same high school, kept talking about something that had gone on earlier, involving Colin's car and a questionable driving tactic that Dave referred to as a "wicked burnout," when all of a sudden, right in the middle of the stunning dual dialogue of Repo Man and Dave and Colin, Bret Folger asked me, "Do you like Poe? You look like somebody who would like Poe."

"He's a little overrated, but he has his place."

"I agree with you. I mean, he has predecessors in the Gothic genre who were just as good but are barely remembered today. What are you reading right now . . . for nona.s.signed reading?"

"Madame Bovary."

"Madame Ovary," Colin said joyfully.

"Shut up, Mackay," Bret said. Then, to me: "What do you think of Kerouac?"

"Kerouac? Also overrated. It's the kind of writing that people with no real life think they can relate to. Also the kind of writing that all writers think they can imitate but shouldn't." I could feel myself turning very red at this point, saying all this.

"I kind of like him. Allen Ginsberg, too. Have you read 'Howl'?"

"I can't hear!" Dave Epstein whined. A bowl of potato chips had somehow migrated to his afghan-covered lap, and he was clutching it as though it would keep him afloat in times of crisis.

"Like you weren't talking over the movie yourself two seconds ago," Bret said. At me, he said, "Let's go into the bathroom and talk some more about books. This movie kind of sucks, anyway."

"The bathroom?"

"My little brother's doing homework in the den, and my mom might need the kitchen."

Either one of them might need the bathroom, too, I thought, but I didn't argue. As we got up, Colin said something in a low voice that I couldn't make out, and Dave sn.i.g.g.e.red. I have never used the word sn.i.g.g.e.red in my life, with good reason-it's a stupid word. But I swear that's what Dave did.

The Folgers' downstairs bathroom was perfect and pristine. Nothing like ours at home, with its stained, pink, ruffly curtains and the weird stuffed animals that my mother is so fond of-the ones that seem to leer at you when you're naked. Expensive toiletries were lined on a rack against the Folgers' bathroom wall, and a lot of pricey department store makeup caught my eye; I h.o.a.rd makeup and toiletries, even though I don't use them much. I wondered if there might be something I could slip into my pocket, an eyeliner or whatever, but then I remembered that I didn't have pockets. Besides, nothing was in my color-just boring nude lipsticks and the dark beige foundation of someone who tans. His mother's stuff, probably. There was a wicker chair in the bathroom, too-what for, I'm not sure. In case someone needed to sit down and wait while someone else took a dump, I suppose. I sat down in it.

"So," I drawled, "literature. What about it?"

To my horror and-I hate to admit it-exhilaration, Bret reached out with one of his bony hands and swept away the hank of hair that always hangs in my eyes. "Your face is always covered," he said.

"Now you sound like my mom. She tells me I look better with my hair out of my face. But I think all mothers have some kind of contractual obligation to say that."

"I think it's better in your face. You look like a little rat peering out from under things. A pleasant rat."

"A pleasant rat?" I said doubtfully.

And then something sort of hideous happened-something I feel funny even writing about, but I've gone this far. Bret's face moved toward mine. He had to stoop way down to reach me sitting in the armchair. I could see the pores of his nose up close. They looked like little strawberry seeds. He's going to try to kiss me, I thought in a panic. No one had ever tried to kiss me. Not even close. I imagined his mouth forcing my lips apart-a wormlike tongue, like you see sometimes inside parrots' beaks at the pet stores. I turned my face away.

"Why are you turning away? Do you have bad breath or something?"

That made me laugh. "No. Well, maybe. Probably."

"Let me smell."

I breathed into his face.

"It's a little bit bad," he said, "but it could be worse."

I laughed some more. I couldn't help it.

"Are you going out with anyone?"

"Me? No. I mean . . . definitely, no, I'm not."

"Would you go out with me? I mean, just to try? I'm leaving for Columbia in about six weeks. But six weeks is kind of a long time away."

"Okay," I said. Just like that. I couldn't even begin to explain to myself or to you how this happened if you asked me. But I said okay. I really did. There was a part of me that thought: Well, maybe he'll come in handy somehow. You just never know.

It's almost nine months later, and Bret and I are still boyfriend and girlfriend. It's a funny kind of relationship, as you can imagine. Even in those six weeks while Bret was still in Dorset, we mostly just talked on the phone, and when we saw each other in person, it was mostly in groups with his friends. Every once in a while, he'd sneak me over to his house when his parents were out and his brother was away. More often, we'd go to his Aunt Miriam's cottage when she wasn't there. But mostly it was phone calls for us.

Our phone conversations were epic. They still are, usually. I don't have a cell phone, so I have to talk on my parents' old corded phone in the kitchen-pacing around, sometimes going in circles and winding the cord around my body till I'm trapped in a web of cord and have to untangle my way out of it. And sometimes I lie on the carpet in the dining room and talk to Bret in the dark because conversations in the dark always feel a little more meaningful. In general, the subject of our conversations is predetermined by Bret; that is, we talk about things that he feels like talking about or is interested in. He is interested not only in fiction and poetry but also in the philosophical writings of Nietzsche, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. I'm having to do a little brushing up on this stuff to act as though I can keep up with him, to be honest.

We write letters, too-real old-fashioned letters, with a strict no-email rule. That's what I spend most of my time doing: writing him letters. I write him four or five a week, and I'm lucky if he sends me two a month. When he was here over Christmas break, we did this thing where we'd leave notes for each other inside books at the Dorset library, and it would be like this Easter egg hunt to find which book the other person had left the note in. Usually there were clues, though. Like if Bret said something about being a.s.signed The Vicar of Wakefield for cla.s.s, I'd leave a note for him inside the cover of The Vicar of Wakefield. That was the most fun correspondence we ever had.