Questioning Fiction
I remember when Tanner first asked me why I love to read so much.
It was like any other day for us, two children stuck while our mothers ranted about their lives and made random food.
Jonah and Desiree, my neighbor Mrs. Hanesworth’s children, had gone outside to play in the sweltering July heat. Mikey, Lesley, and Hope, Tanner’s siblings, soon joined them. My sisters Jessie, Joana, Rachel, and Kelly had quickly followed suite, leaving Tanner and me in the house.
I was an eight-year-old with the newest Harry Potter book and a heavy prejudice against boys.
Tanner had a bad case of ADD and a broken ankle. Obviously, he was bored.
I, of course, had good reason to ignore him completely, and it didn’t rely totally on the fact that I had an amazing book. I knew there was no such thing as cooties but had concluded some two years previously that boys in general were nothing but a bunch of self-centered, arrogant brats. Not in those words, but certainly the same idea.
So it didn’t come as a surprise when a marble was chucked in my direction. The second marble was no shock. Neither was the third. Nor the fourth. Or the fifth. After marble number eleven, I lowered my book, eyebrows raised.
“I’m bored,” he whined.
I rolled my eyes. “Hmm.”
Another marble.
“Why do you read so much?” he asked.
“So I don’t have to talk to idiots like you,” I snapped and returned to my book.
With my peripherals, I saw him limp to the back door and go outside. Not that I cared. Harry was competing in the second Triwizard task.
I remember the second time Tanner asked me why I read so much just as clearly.
It was October, two years later. By some strange turn of events, his fifth grade class was stuck having recess with my fourth grade class.
I sat with my favorite Lemony Snicket book in my hands, relishing every line like I hadn’t already read it many times before.
“What the heck is an ‘ersatz?’” an obnoxiously familiar voice queried.
I answered Tanner without looking at him. “It means ‘artificial, fake, or counterfeit.’ It’s an adjective so you can’t use it with ‘an’ in front of it unless you want to sound like the dunce you clearly are.”
“How come you read instead of play with the other kids?” he asked. I felt a solid jeering impending.
“Because I can.”
“Wrong,” he said confidently. “I bet it’s ‘cause freaks like you don’t got no friends.”
I ignored the sting of his words and looked up at him. “There’s more grammatical errors in that sentence than I’d like to point out.”
He looked at me for a moment, absorbing my words and probably not comprehending them completely. “Freak,” he muttered before walking off.
I squashed the hurt again and wondered if people really did think I was a freak.
I also recall the third time the question was asked by Tanner as well.
Three years had passed and everyone who was old enough to stay home during the “baking sessions” my mother, Mrs. Hanesworth, and Mrs. Raine had would do so.
My older sisters Joana and Rachel would run off with their boyfriends. Hope and Kelly would find a friend whose house they could go to while Jessie and Desiree went to the mall. I honestly wasn’t sure where Jonah and Lesley went, but it probably had something to do with the fact that he had a car.
I understood why nearly everyone had left. Mrs. Hanesworth was most likely OCD, Mrs. Raine was basically crazy, and my mother was far from normal.
I stayed home and read while Mikey, who was five years younger than me, played Mario Kart on our play station. Sometimes I’d condescend and play with him. After all, he was considerably sweeter than his older brother had ever been.
March brought spring break, during which the “desperate housewives” would congregate at my house, drink wine, and make cookies, all while complaining about their lives. Such multitasking.
Mikey and I spent the first day watching silly kids shows and eating popcorn. Mrs. Raine seemed a little more cordial after seeing me watch four episodes of Spongebob with her son.
With how much fun we’d had the day previously, I’d planned to spend Tuesday teaching Mikey how to play Super Mario of out Nintendo 64.
I thought my plans were ruined when I saw Tanner walk in with Mikey, but my childhood tormentor soon proved my assumption to be very, very wrong.
Tanner shocked me with how nice he was to his little brother, the lengths he went to to get a laugh out of that adorable eight-year-old.
After lunch, Mikey fell deeply asleep on our couch, Wii controller still in his tiny hand. Tanner put a blanket on Mikey and walked over to my family’s seldom-used piano. As he took the fall board off of the keys, I gave him a meaningful look.
“Don’t wake him up!” I hissed.
“Trust me,” Tanner replied at a normal volume, “a plane could crash into your house and that kid wouldn’t wake up.”
I smiled and picked up The Great Gatsby, snagging a quick glance at Tanner. I noticed that, having not spent a considerable amount of time with him in years, he had gotten to be very nice-looking, what with his thin frame and dark hair.
Music suddenly filled the room, music so beautiful that I stopped reading for a moment to enjoy it. I recognized Tanner’s first number to be The Fray’s “Syndicate,” though he didn’t sing along with it. I was immediately interested, bizarrely so, in what his voice sounded like. I pushed away those thoughts, slightly disgusted with myself for sounding so much like my boy-crazy, twelve-year-old sister Kasey and tried to focus on Daisy’s dilemma.
My efforts collapsed when Tanner played “Hallelujah,” singing along softly. I hummed along with him, letting him distract me.
A while later, after I finished The Great Gatsby and had moved on to The Princess Bride, an old favorite, when Tanner’s music had tuned to soft, jazzy improv and scents of baking snickerdoodles filled the room, we exchanged flirtatious glances, determined not to catch the other’s eye.
The music stopped suddenly, much to my disappointment. We made eye contact for the first time since he played “Syndicate.”
“Why do you read so much?” Tanner asked. This time, his voice held no judgment, no derogatory air, merely curiosity.
For the first time said question was asked, I answered with honesty and bewilderment. “I don’t know.”
Thankfully, Mikey chose that moment to wake up, saving me from any other awkward or intimate questions. I avoided both types like the plague.
It would be a long time before that recurring question was asked again. Nearly three years, in fact.
The day after Thanksgiving of my sophomore year brought solitude, with my mother and sisters at the mall. Obviously, I took this opportunity to curl up with a dog-eared copy of To Kill a Mocking Bird.
I shivered as I left my place on the couch to get more hot chocolate. I sipped the searing liquid cautiously, staring out the kitchen window, which overlooked the street. I was shocked to see a familiar figure standing in the street, wearing basketball shorts and a tshirt. I grabbed the blanket, pulled on a pair of boots, and left.
I walked up behind him slowly, feeling the snow crunch beneath my feet and the sleet brush against my face. Tanner continued to stare off into the distance as I approached.
I knew what he was thinking about. Rather, who he was thinking about. Mikey.
Mikey had unwillingly lost a battle with cancer two months previously. I hadn’t realized until now that this would be Tanner’s family’s first Thanksgiving with an empty chair at their table.
When I tapped him on the shoulder, he didn’t jump out of his skin like I’d expected he might, like when he freaked out after I snuck up behind him as he played piano. Tanner just began speaking, his voice even more hollow than the look in his eyes.
“You know, Lacey, Mikey and I played out here before he…” He swallowed heavily, Adam’s apple bobbing. “Got sick. Just tossing a baseball. In the street. Having fun, like brothers. I was messing with him, backing up farther than he could throw. He…he started crying. And I never said sorry. He’s gone, and I can never tell him that I’m sorry, how much he means…meant to me.” His voice broke, and a few tears slid down his face.
“Tanner,” I said quietly. “We change the past. Mikey’s gone. Don’t lose yourself. Please. He wouldn’t want you to stop living.” It was me pleading with him, but my pride stopped being important when someone I cared about was so broken.
I wrapped the blanket I’d brought around his shaking shoulders and pulled him towards my house. Once we were inside, I got Tanner to sit on the couch while I made some warm beverages. I brought his tea and my hot chocolate out to the living to find him flipping through To Kill a Mockingbird.
“It’s got a great ending.” I smiled.
Tanner nodded. “I actually read that one.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes, with words we weren’t sure how to say.
“Lacey?” Tanner said.
“Hmm?”
“Why do you read so much?”
I really wasn’t sure what to say, since I wasn’t sure of the answer. “Well…”
“Is it because,” he interrupted, “sometimes, fiction is just better than reality?”
It’s not like he wasn’t right, because he was. Joana, at twenty, was an unemployed college drop out. Rachel jumped the gun in following Joana’s example and quit high school the day she turned eighteen. Jessie was pregnant at fifteen, and Kelly seemed to be copying that behavior at thirteen. An absentee father and a shopaholic mother completed the image of your average, dysfunctional family.
I chose my words carefully. “It’s not to remind me that fiction is better than reality. Just to show me what reality really could be.”
I saw what reality could be years and years later, after a double major in psychology and literature at Brown and two impending years of grad school for an MFA in fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College, I sat on a plane doing the thing I still loved. Reading.
“Anything change since the last eight hundred times you read that book?” Tanner asked as he sank into the seat next to mine.
“Don’t hate The Raging Quiet because it’s out of print,” I admonished.
“I liked The Lord of the Rings more,” he muttered.
“To each his own.” I shrugged. “I’m just impressed that you actually read The Raging Quiet.”
“I’m pretty sure it was a condition that I had to read it before I married you.” He smirked.
I glanced at the gold ring on my finger. “Well, I read a book on the rules of baseball, so it was only fair.”
“And don’t you understand it so much better?”
“Nope.”
Tanner turned on his iPod after the plane took off, and I returned to my book. A question from Tanner pulled from the pages, as always.
“Fiction still better than reality?”
I took his hand in mine. “No. Way.”
