Meets Girl: A Novel Read online

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  MEETS GIRL

  A Novel

  Will Entrekin

  Meets Girl is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No-Derivs 3.0 unported Creative commons license by Will Entrekin and Exciting Media.

  What this means is that you are free to copy, distribute, and transmit the work provided you attribute Will Entrekin (with link to http://willentrekin.com, if possible). You may not use this work for commercial purposes, nor alter, transform, or build upon it.

  Any of those conditions may be waived by contacting the author at [email protected].

  For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear (and fulfill) the terms of this license.

  Meets Girl was edited by Hannah Blum.

  Cover photograph by Georg Sommeregger, who in no way endorses Meets Girl, via Flickr, licensed with similar guidelines as above.

  Once upon a time I fell in love with a girl who didn’t love me in return.

  And while that may not be, as openings go, altogether novel (for who among us has not felt the sharp-barbed long-constant prick-pull of unrequited love?), still I’ve always known it’s how I need to begin this story. I’ve always known I’m going to eventually need the big guns if I intend to make my way through, and I’ve known that since before I even started, back when I was sitting next to Veronica—the girl with whom I fell in love but who did not love me in return—and across from Angus Silver, about whom I will tell you more as we go along, because Angus Silver is an idea you need to be eased into.

  Back then, when I understood, finally, how to tell this story and thus redeem myself, I also realized it wasn’t going to be an easy story to tell, and even that I might not actually have the talent to pull it off.

  Still, I understood, as well, I had to try.

  And so I shall. So I begin to recall and to recount even if not for the first time; I have test-written and re-written this opening so many times I’ve lost count, but not a single one has yet worked. This is, in fact, the only opening so far that has carried me beyond false starts and falser endings, which I can tell you because, in the spirit of honesty, I have already finished this story, and am now swinging back around to revise it, to polish it and to make it gleam.

  Then again, in the spirit of honesty, I must also admit that, though I finished it, I did not do so successfully. Much of the revision before me may be making the words gleam, but I am already aware I need to scrap the ending. The ending is the messy part, of course, and while I think I may be close, the conclusion has not yet felt as right as this opening. There are certainly other ways to begin—

  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.—

  or perhaps—

  Call me Ishmael.—

  but those beginnings have only ever made me wonder why Dickens could never make up his mind, not to mention why parents might name their child Ishmael and whether that was only the beginning of the abuses the poor boy suffered.

  But ‘once upon a time?’ This is how stories are supposed to begin if only because it seems like how they have always begun back since before there were any previous times to pin a ‘once’ upon. Even the phrase itself has a singular power you can feel in your gut, a primal quality that opens us as easily as a key a lock. Simply hearing it makes me believe my father is the smartest person in the world, my mother the most beautiful. Suddenly I feel like I am wearing my old powder-blue Dr. Dentons with the crinkly foot-pouches to protect me from whatever under the bed was drooling.

  It runs silent and deep to find, within me, the memories of my mother reading me Little Bear and “The Leap-frog”—

  A Flea, a Grasshopper, and a Leap-frog once wanted to see which could jump highest; and they invited the whole world, and everybody else besides who chose to come to see the festival.—

  and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—

  Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”—

  and stories about mist-shrouded castles overlooking emerald green realms. Wolves with big teeth, and evil stepsisters. Bears and chairs and porridge-eating intruders, evil witches and alchemical hobgoblins, grandmother’s house and gingerbread cottages. It calls to my mind Disney princes with thick, black hair and big, blue eyes, who gallop trusty steeds through sun-dappled forests in enchanted lands to save from untold danger the women they love, because the one thing all princes charming have in common is the girls in whose names they pursue their noble quests.

  Princes charming are silly like that.

  But then, all boys are. I once heard a story about William Faulkner, known to many as a Nobel laureate—

  It is the writer’s privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.—

  but known to probably more as an Oprah pick, and known to some few besides as a Hollywood writer. My own favorite work ever by William Faulkner is his adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, one of Hollywood’s first, not to mention smartest, action movies, much of which one can attribute to Chandler himself—

  When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.—

  and the thing about The Big Sleep, the reason it’s among Faulkner’s finest work, is simple: Faulkner knew what the story was about. It’s ostensibly a crime-noir, with stolen pictures and missing persons and triple crosses, and it’s easy to get lost in the complicated plot, but Faulkner understood the story was simple and reminded himself of it in a very simple way. His supervisors and managers did not know of his reminder until after he had left Hollywood and they cleaned out his desk to find two items.

  The first was a bottle of Jack Daniels. Which I would say makes sense because Faulkner was a writer, but that would only propagate the myth of writers as drunks and bypass the truth: Faulkner was an alcoholic, who sometimes thought he wrote best when he was intoxicated but, given the state of his novels, perhaps should have waited till he had sobered up to revise them.

  The second is more important: a single sheet of paper on which was typed, over and over and over again, in classic 12-point Courier font, a single phrase:

  Boy meets girl.

  Because that is what so many stories hinge upon. Not all of them, I know: some are about whales or a young girl’s adventures in a strange world or even—well, I’m not entirely certain what A Tale of Two Cities was about, but then, who is?—but many of the real ones, the true ones, begin with a boy meeting a girl.

  Because that’s what we do. We meet girls, and we fall in love with them, and then the real silliness begins. In ode to their beauty we compose poetry—

  Who will believe my verse in time to come?—

  and in honor of their faces we launch a thousand ships. In pursuits of their oft-capricious affections, we undertake quests of monumental foolishness. We tilt at windm
ills. We storm castles using only a wheelbarrow and holocaust cloak despite that we were mostly dead mere moments before and have been revived solely via ingestion of miraculous chocolate dispensed by Billy Crystal in bad prosthetics. Hell, I’m not sure what sort of motivation Melville said Ahab had, but he gave his character a peg-leg and an obsessive quest for a marine creature whose most distinguishing feature, besides a ‘hump like a snow-hill,’ was a blowhole, both of which sound more than a little Freudian to me.

  Being a boy myself, I am no different, which is how I found myself needing to tell this story to redeem myself, and that girl with whom I fell in love—who did not love me in return—was Veronica Sawyer. Veronica Sawyer has wavy, black hair highlit blonde and eyes the color of natural emeralds in mahogany. Veronica has a quick laugh and an easy smile and dresses like she belongs in a Banana Republic catalogue. Veronica speaks no fewer than three languages and knows how to request wine in several others besides. Veronica believes there is some point to graduate study in philosophy, and if you think, now, that I have somehow idealized Veronica Sawyer, I will say, simply, well, yes, that’s very much the point, isn’t it?

  Because it truly was that sort of Love. Veronica is that sort of girl whom boys meet and fall in love with and do spectacularly blunderous things for. Veronica Sawyer is the sort of girl who makes writers capitalize words, who in times of yore would have inspired gallant knights to find dragons solely that they might fight and slay them. Veronica is the sort of girl the memory of whom could have inspired Cervantes, in his squalid prison cell, to write of Quixote’s Dulcinea, to dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe. All of which, of course, is why I felt I needed to begin with those four famous words.

  Because, you see, once upon a time, a man who told me to call him Angus offered me what should have been a very simple choice between someone I thought I deeply loved and something I very deeply loved to do. I, being the sort of boy who would, if not storm a castle (for want of a cloud) nor launch a thousand ships (for want of an armada), certainly compose bad poetry to win the affections of a girl I loved who did not love me in return made a spectacularly bad decision.

  When she discovered what I had done, Veronica became the kind of infuriated I would need phrases like ‘hellfire and brimstone’ and words like ‘venomous’ to adequately describe, and even then I’d be comically understating her degree of righteous indignation. Then again, she certainly had every reason to become so righteously indignant, because the choice I made had every bit as much to do with her and her future as it did with me and my own, even if I didn’t quite realize that at the time.

  I didn’t realize a lot of things at the time. If I had, I might not have made such a spectacularly bad decision, a choice so bad, in fact, that the only way I can make it right, the only way I can redeem it, is to tell this story. I’m very much aware that much hinges upon my ability to tell it, which is in addition why I began with ‘once upon a time’—not just because of old stories or big guns or fairy tales or romanticism, but because two futures depend on my ability to tell this story through to its rightful end, and beginning with those four words inspires some hope, however small and however distant, of three other small words.

  I think I can reach them.

  So help me, I’m going to try.

  And so help me, I promise you one thing: I will pull out every damned trick I’ve got to do so. You can look up my sleeves and examine my hat to confirm that I have absolutely nothing in either, but in the end I promise you that I will either produce the flowers and the rabbit you so desire, or I will fail spectacularly and conclusively to do so, and really, isn’t it worth reading even if only to find out which one occurs?

  On my honor, I will do my best.

  Words, don’t fail me now.

  Chapter Two (I didn’t start with ‘Chapter One’ because I wanted to open with ‘Once upon a time’), in which we encounter the reason this story has a conflict (because a boy meeting a girl is not one)

  What should come next, according to conventions of both literature and drama, is my eloquent recounting of the moment I first glimpsed Veronica Sawyer. I’m supposed to tell you that sunlight cast her in a halo that burned her very image onto my oh-so-sensitive soul; that the beautiful smile upon her perfect lips made mine quiver with want of her; that she stirred within me the calls of both wild and poet alike; that I, to put it simply and to paraphrase Eddie Izzard alluding to Albert Schweitzer, quite fancied her.

  Unfortunately, I can’t, mainly because I don’t actually remember meeting her—

  and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.—

  which is, perhaps, not the most romantic way to continue this story, but then again might be the most realistic. I played in a tee-ball league with Veronica’s brother, Tom, back when Tom and I were kids. The only things I remember about back then are the lopsided tees, the coach who would yell at me to ask what I was swinging at, and the Big League Chew. My teammates and I would stalk across the parking lot between innings to purchase from the snack-shack stale nachos smothered in half-melted Velveeta. My puking on second base became the highlight of an otherwise low season.

  Quick and agile and preternaturally athletic, Tom was the shortstop for our team the Jacksonboro Bobcats, whereas I was small and uncoordinated and had instincts better suited to deep left. One day, Tom stopped Jacky Malone, the opposing team’s big, slow catcher, from beating the shit out of me, and from that moment forward, Tom and I became fast, if unlikely, friends. We were probably ten years old, and we wore cotton tee shirts as uniforms and hats that cost a dollar. Our folks and siblings came to our games, all of which were held on the field behind the local grade school, and I met Veronica for the first time at some point during the three seasons that Tom and I played in the league.

  Three seasons of shredded gum and adolescent chaos, and the sole reason I’d ever joined was that I wanted to knock the stitches off a slowball. I think I believed that if I could just hit a single homerun, I might wake up the following morning taller and faster and better.

  I spent three seasons playing deep left, and no ball I ever hit made it past the pitcher’s mound; hits fair and foul alike dribbled off the end of my bat.

  Eventually I gave up the idea that I had any athletic potential and turned instead to school and grades. I sucked at math and hated recess, but then I discovered books. I fell in love with stories, and instead of returning to the league during sixth grade, I whipped through our town’s small library, which included everything H.G. Wells—

  The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand.—

  and more Lewis Carroll—

  “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

  Did gyre and gimble in the wade—”

  I mention all this because this story is not solely about how hard I fell for Veronica. Any real story must contain conflict, and falling in love with a girl who didn’t love me in return isn’t one. That’s the way life so often happens. You fall for some girl or some guy who barely even notices you, and you can’t understand why you fell so hard for them, because you know, rationally, logically, they’re no great shakes, but you don’t care and you do it anyway. It’s a lopsided smile, a carefree smirk, a winking eye. Calloused fingertips with crescent moons of darkness under the nails or slender hands with elegant knuckles. It’s never chests or asses or anything so common, though you don’t look away from those, either.

  No, the reason this story has conflict is simple; one day, the librarian at my grade school set aside for me a book she thought I would like, about an orphaned boy wizard who had a mop of unruly black hair over a zigzag scar. The big, bright cover seemed a little more colorful and a little more childish than I had begun to read by then (the Hardy Boys were always running from explosions), but I t
ook the book home and began that evening to read, and by the following morning, I wanted nothing less in the world than to be . . .

  Neville Longbottom.

  You thought I was going to say Harry, didn’t you? The Boy Who Lived, as he was always known in those books? But no, because, you see, though Harry was the titular hero who fought the bad guy, if you read that first book, the character who actually came through in the end, the character who saved the day for Gryffindor, was Neville. I remember laughing with glee when Dumbledore awarded those final points to Neville, and I also remember realizing right then, as I closed that book, precisely what I wanted to do: I wanted to tell stories. Exciting stories. Awesome stories. I wanted to make some reader, somewhere, somewhen, feel what I did during that moment: a sense of infinite possibility.

  The following day, I found myself scribbling through class, missing most of the notes I was supposed to take in favor of a story about . . . well, you know, I want to say I don’t recall that first, earliest story, but I do; two young boys very similar to Tom and me met space aliens who gave them special superpowers.

  That story never made it past the acquisition of said powers, and neither, for years, did any story I ever started. What can I say? I only ever wanted to fly.

  Progression finally began as I started to read more. After blazing through both the Hardy Boys and A Wrinkle in Time, I moved on to Poe—

  Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation.—

  before I found Stephen King’s Needful Things and Eyes of the Dragon and Dean Koontz’s Strangers and Watchers and Lightning.

  Is it too melodramatic to say those stories saved me? It’s not as though there was ever anything particularly malevolent in my life, not like I sought in my library refuge from a drunken step-father. Still, in those stories, I found the potential for the possibility I so wanted, and I’m not sure what my life would have become without books. I grew up in that small town, where everyone knew the quarterback but nobody really cared about the valedictorian, nevermind whoever finished second (as I did), and most people just kind of stuck around. Most of the residents of my hometown had grown up there, often just as their parents had.