The Boy Who Loved Books
I was twelve years old when I first fell in love, the quick-burning, star-dazzled kind that hits you suddenly and leaves you dizzy.
It was with a boy I saw after school, a boy who leaned against the railing with its peeling brown paint, unaware of the after-school shrieks and grinding gears of school buses all around him, his eyes never leaving the book he held. I couldn’t see what book it was, but it was a thick book, the long kind with no pictures that only real readers would read.
The Boy Who Loved Books would’ve disappeared into a crowd: long-legged and gangly, with dusty frayed jeans and hair the color of faded corn that badly needed cutting. But something about the book turned him into a mysterious prince of sorts, someone maybe who knew some magic…someone who liked to read and was beautiful on the inside…someone like Ponyboy from The Outsiders! (I had an enormous literary crush on the fictional Ponyboy at this time, a hang-up which would attract me to many questionable types in the years to come.)
I found out the boy’s name was Elmer. Yes, Elmer. That is a name you simply cannot make up. I can’t remember his last name. Right then and there on that hot seventh-grade afternoon, I strode forward and blurted out an invitation to the Valentine’s Day Dance to the Boy Who Loved Books.
He agreed. When he showed up at the dance without his book, he was…Elmer. Awkward, not very good at talking, with sweaty palms and faded clothes, he was as plain and forgettable as a boy could be. I forgot him soon after. That night, in the steamy gym with drooping pink streamers, he was just Elmer. But with a book, he was beautiful.
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