Page 24 of Drawn Together
2:01 p.m. – Calendar blocked: Emotionally intensive speculation (RE: stranger at the bookstore, scarf, aura of melancholy).
3:14 p.m. – Listen to exactly 2.5 sad songs. Crying optional. Insight mandatory.
All-day recurring: “Be inexplicably invested in your own mystery.”
I take a sip of my coffee and allow the silence to linger. “None of your concern.”
Fletcher lets me grill him on the book—each scene, every moment, every reaction leading up to the ending. We talk about character arcs, plot points, theories, and ideas of how we would have changed it. He says Rochester should have died in the end, and I gasp like I just saw him kick a puppy. I say I wouldn’t change a thing, because even if it has flaws, Jane Eyre is wonderfully perfect. He groans like maybe he saw me kick a puppy.
“She leaves him. And she comes back? Just like that?” he asks, eyebrows raised.
“Not just like that,” I say, sitting forward and imitating his deep tones. “She leaves because she has to. She comes back because she wants to. There’s a difference.”
“I still think Rochester should have died.”
“You probably like movies where horses die.”
“I mean I’m not searching for that, exactly. I just think Rochester is…” He looks over my shoulder, like maybe the word would float in the air for him.
“Mercurial? Discombobulated?” I rack my brain for another. “Tumultuous?”
“Uh, yeah. One of those.”
“Oh, he is. But that’s not the point. It’s not about him. It’s about her choosing herself first. Then deciding—on her own terms—to go back. Some people say it’s not a romance, but I think they’re not thinking of the story as a whole. She loves him despite the fact that he’s a mess and everything they’ve both been through.”
In a way, it’s a lot more realistic than more contemporary romances—which I also love. But there’s something about watching these two love each other through the depths of fire—literally—and still making it that feels like maybe, despite all our dirty rotten flaws, there’s someone out there who could love us no matter what.
Fletcher nods slowly, lips pressed together in thought, before taking another sip of the green sludge in his cup. He took the lid off earlier, and it smelled like a grass smoothie, despite him saying it was a ‘gut cleanse tea’—which sounds like the worst thing in the world.
“So, do you get it now?” I take a sip of my own drink—decidedly not a grass smoothie.
“Get what?”
“Romance. Do you understand it more?”
“Oh.” He dips his chin. “Not at all. But, I can admit it was a fine read.”
A fine read. I scoff.
“And Coraline?” He taps the paperback I gave back to him after borrowing it the last week. I am more than glad to get it out of my possession, now.
“Deeply frightening. How they expect an eight-year-old to read that is absurd.”
“It’s one of those books known to be written for older kids, but adults like it just as much. It’s got a ton of theory threads and online groups to discuss what the ending really meant.”
“I will say it had me on edge. I was staring at my closet last night waiting for the other mother to pop out.”
“I’m surprised.”
“That I was on edge?”
“That your apartment has a closet.”
“I should specify that by closet, I mean a door leading to a room taken up by an air return system, two boxes, and four stuffed animals.”
“Ah.” A woman passes by Fletcher and brushes her purse against his shoulder by accident, he curls into himself a little and leans closer to my side of the table. “So, do you get it now?”
“The closet?”
