Three: Tie-Dye.
“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?”
-Henry Ward Beecher
I think that Monday is my favorite day of the week, because on Mondays, my aunt and uncle are at work and can't pick me up from school. Walking home isn't so great, of course, especially during a rainy spell, but I can tolerate it because if I go a little bit out of my way, I pass by the amazing bookstore on Burnside, the one that stretches for an entire city block and has every book ever written in the history of mankind.
Except that by 'pass by', I basically mean go inside and spend hours among the shelves.
I always tell myself, no, Sam, not today; you're going to go straight home, and that's that. But maybe I'm not so good at self-control, because my feet always end up walking through the front door even as my brain is insisting that we continue on. I always lose to myself, anyway, but I guess I just like to pretend that one week I won't.
I gave in again that Monday, and as I went inside I thought that it's lucky I'm not a drug addict, because I'd never be able to stop giving in. You told me once that maybe books are my drug, and I think that's okay. At the very least, it's better than the shit those kids are always smoking in the bathrooms before school, when they think nobody is watching.
It was warm in the bookstore; it's always warm in the bookstore. Everyone was smiling, laughing, reading, because let's be honest with ourselves: it's impossible not to be happy when you have a book in your hands.
I have a tendency to wander through the aisles, not even looking, just breathing, running my fingers over the spines of the volumes and watching people's secret smiles as they uncovered a novel they'd been searching for forever. That's what I was doing when I somehow found my way into the little cafe that caps off the end of the store, where they brew the best Peruvian coffee in all of Portland, and saw someone who was startlingly familiar.
You.
My immediate reaction was to leap behind a shelf, which, in hindsight, was pretty stupid. If you had been looking, I would have just drawn more attention to myself. But you weren't; you were sitting by yourself at one of the round tables with a book and notebook under each elbow, respectively, a pen in your hand, and a paper cup of coffee resting beneath your chin. As I poked my head around a case of self-help books, I saw that you were also wearing a tie-dyed neon t-shirt that was way too big, the kind of thing that would make Aunt Sheridan gag. You later told me that your younger brother made it for you in camp one year, but at the time I just thought that you had terrible fashion sense.
I liked the shirt, though.
Your hair was in a bun that had come loose, and it hung into your face so that every few seconds, you had to pause to blow your bangs away. From the look on your face, it was annoying you, but you were so glued to that notebook in front of you that you refused to pause in your writing to fix it.
You were writing. Again. I wondered for a second time what you were writing; were you a poet? A diarist? J.K. Rowling in disguise? Possibly. But regardless, I found myself enthralled as I watched you, the way every ounce of your energy was focused on that one page. I didn't understand how words could be so important to a person, but I guess they are for you.
I don't know how long I stood there, crouched behind the shelves in a completely obvious way, but it was long enough for the man behind the counter of the cafe to start eyeing me funny. My face in flames, I sneaked out awkwardly and made my way over to the magnetic poetry easel over by the Victorian fiction display. I'm shit with poems, but I rearranged the words absently and just kept watching you out of the corner of my eye.
You took a sip of your coffee (was it java? Colombian? Sumatran?), and when you set the cup back down, I saw the letters of your name scrawled in messy script across the side. E-L-L-E-R-Y. Ellery. Ellery. I murmured the syllables to myself. Ellery.
You looked up suddenly. I whirled around quickly. You slowly went back to your writing, and I breathed out a sigh of relief. I had to stop this; there's nothing healthy about a fascination with a girl who you've never spoken to. Either I would go talk to you, or I would leave.
Maybe, if I were a bolder person, I would have strode right over to your table and sat down at the empty seat, said, Hey Ellery, I'm Sam, and you're beautiful. And you would have smiled the way girls do in movies, and I would have been cool for once in my life.
I'm not a bold person, though, and you weren't the kind of girl who'd look twice at me anyway. So I just left, left you there in your tie-dyed shirt, writing, and walked home in the rain feeling like the world's biggest wimp.
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A/N: So that bookstore, it's actually a real place in my favorite place in the universe (Portland, Oregon), and it's called Powell's and I was just there a couple of weeks ago and it really is an entire city block long. It's heaven, guys. HEAVEN. Like, when I die, that is where I will go. To Powell's. For all of eternity.
