Page 2 of An Overdue Match
Which only leaves villain or hero as options. The fact that he’s in a library does give him a tally mark under the Hero heading, in my opinion. All good heroes should be well-read. However, his handling of books—or mishandling, rather—is definitely a slash against him. (No, I’m not harping on the dog-ear thing too much. If people want to treat library books as their own personal collection, then they can keep the book they ruined and buy the library a new copy.) Then there’s his neck tattoo. Of a rose. Does that make him bad? Or good?
It makes him neither because tattoos have no moral standing on a person’s character.
The cover of a book closing with a puff of air on the other side of the shelves snaps me out of ... whateverthatwas. Mr. Davis pivots to face the opposite direction and strides toward the exit. I wait a couple of seconds so he can get ahead of me before tailing him again since I don’t know if he will bank left toward the fiction section or right toward the audiobooks and DVDs. I’m not exactly sure what he would do to mar those media platforms, but as long as I’m around, the answer will be nothing. Unless, of course, he checks them out. There’s not much I can do once inventory leaves the library.
“Excuse me.” A woman’s voice behind me stops my feet from moving after Mr. Davis.
I turn around and smile pleasantly at the woman with her arm slung across a young boy’s shoulders. “How can I help you?”
The mother looks down at her son. “Go ahead and ask,” she encourages him with a small push between his shoulder blades.
“Um.” The boy raises his bright blue eyes from underneath a shock of wheat-colored hair, then lowers them back down to the patterned carpet again. “I’m looking for a book.”
I sneak a quick peek over my shoulder, but my mark is gone. Next time I’ll just tag his return as damaged and charge him for a new copy. I glance back down at the boy in front of me and feel the muscles in my face relax. There’s no question here.Thisboy is hero material, on par with Henry Huggins or Max Crumbly.
I squat down to eye level. “Then you’ve come to the right place. What book are you looking for?”
He shrugs. “A good one?”
I sneak one more peek toward the exit as I lead the mother and son toward the children’s section. This time I get a glimpseof black leather as the automatic doors close, a single book tucked between the muscular curve of a hip and arm.
Pistols at dawn, I think facetiously at his retreating form before turning to introduce my new little friend to the wonderful world of Perodia, where Tag and his squirrel companion, Skyla, meet the last firehawk. Boy, is he in for an adventure.
2
The reasons I’m not heroine material, based on genre:
Sci-fi—I’m afraid of heights. I have trouble even crossing bridges and would pass out if forced to, say, go to the top of the Space Needle (ask me how I know). There’s no way that I could explore intergalactic regions and interact with extraterrestrial intelligence from a spaceship in actual space.
Western—I’m allergic to horses. I found this out the hard way one year in sleepaway camp. I was so excited to flex my inner Annie Oakley only to find out that if I got within ten feet of a horse, my eyes would swell shut and I’d break out in a rash that would give me the nickname Blind Ketchup Girl for a week. A little on the nose, as far as demeaning names go, but nine-year-old bullies aren’t particularly bright. The point is, you really can’t have a compelling western without horses.
Mystery/Thriller/Suspense—A search-and-rescue team had to get me out of a corn maze once. Also, I’ve never been able to win even a single game of Clue. Being able to puzzle out scenarios seems like a pretty basic prerequisite for the genre.
Fantasy—Sadly, I have no magical powers with which to save humanity.
Historical—Automatically disqualified by being born in the current century. Also, I’m kind of partial to breathing deeply and thus would refuse to wear a corset. There’s also my love of indoor plumbing.
And that leaves romance. This genre took me a little longer than the others to realize I also didn’t qualify for a leading role. My ex-fiancé, Brett, was the first to let me in on the secret, although I missed the clues to begin with because, as I’ve established, I’d never make it as a mystery-solving sleuth. But looking back, I can see the hints along the way even before he sat me down for the big reveal.
The ebbing interest in his eyes when he looked at me. The loss of touch that coincided with the loss of my hair. The tie of attraction that had at one time bound him to me unraveling, until one day it just wasn’t there anymore. At least for him.
At first, I convinced myself Brett’s actions and words had nothing to do with my heroine status and everything to do with demoting him from leading man to villain. I mean, it was classic villainous behavior for him to have such a shallow depth of feeling that he was no longer attracted to me and stopped loving me when I developed alopecia, an autoimmune disease in which my T cells sound the bugle cry to attack my hair follicles like the swarm of bees that kept Winnie the Pooh from the honey in the tree (that’s probably a strange analogy, but I subbed for Martha at story time yesterday and the toddlers and preschoolers made buzzing sounds when we came to that page, so it’s still fresh in my mind).
That reflects on Brett and his character, not me. If it were true love, then when my hair fell out—first in patches, then at an increased rate that I ended up shaving the remainingvaliant strands that had resisted the attack—he would’ve still run his fingers over the soft buzz of fuzz around my crown, kissed the widening spots that were as smooth as a baby’s bottom, and tried to convince me that I was still beautiful, hair or no hair.
But Brett’s rejection wasn’t a quiet confession in an empty room. It was more like a kid at the top of a mountain shouting into the wind so his words bounce off the range in an endless echo. The same words reverberating over and over and over again.
There’s a study someone conducted somewhere about how a person can disbelieve something told to them once as a lie, but when that same thing is repeated x amount of times, they accept it as truth. I can probably look up the study in the reference section, but I really don’t want to.
The point is, Brett might have been the first voice to tell me I’m not heroine material, but it wasn’t until I kept hearing the echo from sources all around me that I began to believe he might be right.
Echoes like the ones from romance books themselves, in fact.
I pick up a stack of books from a basket at the end of the A–E aisle of fiction. Books that people have taken off the shelves to look at but ultimately decided not to check out. Instead of reshelving the titles themselves, we encourage patrons to place the books in the baskets so we librarians can reshelve them properly. You’d be surprised how many people will just put a book willy-nilly on a shelf instead of paying attention to alphabetical and numerical order. Melvil Dewey would roll over in his grave.
I shuffle the trio of books, looking at their covers. Romances, all of them. And all proving my point. The first is a bodice-ripper from the early 2000s, with a Fabio-esque cover model. His luscious locks flow in the breeze, and the woman in hisarms, décolletage on full display, has a head of hair that Pantene would be privileged to put in one of their commercials. The next is a book with a contemporary setting. The military man with a black past has a high and tight crew cut, but the woman he’s staring at broodily has a mane of curls running the full length of her back. The third is much the same.
I don’t have to read the stories within to know that (A) every hero dreams of running his fingers through the woman’s hair, and (B) every hero equates anything false—I’m talking even a little bit of lipstick or rouge, in the case of the bodice-ripper—as some sort of moral deficiency in the heroine, stripping her of heroine status.
