Holly and Her Naughty eReader (12 page)

I have no idea why the hell I
sat down and turned on my Kindle when Vivian was so clearly in distress, but
I’m glad I did. For as soon as I hit that button and the Kindle came back to
life, so did Vivian. With a giant gasp of air and a jerk-like movement, she sat
up. Her eyes were wide open.

“I’m back,” she said. “Jesus
Mary and Joseph what a ride that was. But I’m back. I made it. Was I…was….bloody
hell what happened to my head?”

She put her hand to the spot on
her forehead where she’d hit the desk.

“Your body keeled over for a
bit,” I said. “It was…I think it was my fault.”

“Your fault? What did you do?
I’m the one who wanted to go back so bad. And holy hell am I glad I did.
Christoph did things to me--”

“Christoph! You were supposed to
be reading Mane of the Werewolf!”

“Whatever Holly. I just said
that to get you out of here for a minute, then I went back in and visited our
friend and his Den of Decadence. He did things to me that I didn’t know were
possible. I guess they aren’t possible. That’s the point, isn’t it? He’s a
magic man. A magic man with a magic wand between his legs. I don’t know if I
can ever be with another man again. I mean, who can possibly compete with that?
I’d be perfectly happy to spend the rest of my days on this earth as Annabelle
Stone and just let him have his way with me again and again and again. Good
night in Heaven the heights of pleasure to which--”

“Stop it! Just stop it! I’m
Annabelle Stone and you can’t have--”

Hearing my own words, I cut my
sentence short.

“Did you say,
you’re
Annabelle Stone?”

“Yes, I think I did.”

“Oh Holly. You have a problem.”

I slumped back in my chair.
Vivian spoke the words and I knew they were true. She was right. I did have a
problem.

I had a problem with my Kindle.
I was so addicted to it that I didn’t know what was real anymore. First I was
craving raw meat like Blair the Werewolf. Now I was shouting at Vivian that I
was Annabelle Stone.

Worse than that, I had turned
off the Kindle, knocking Vivian’s body into some comatose state, facedown on
the table, and I didn’t even try to help her. Instead, while she crashed into
the table, I sat down and turned on the Kindle.

I was about to start reading
when my friend was….was what?

“Vivian, did you feel anything
weird while you were in there?” I said.

“I think we were talking about
you, Holly.”

“Just answer the question!” I
snapped. “While you were reading, I turned off the Kindle, and your body fell
forward on the table. Then I turned it on again and you woke up.”

Vivian’s eyebrows shot up.

“You know, there was a time in
there when things were different,” she said. “I was lying in bed with
Christoph, and it was like, suddenly it wasn’t fantasy anymore. It felt like I
couldn’t escape even if I wanted to. I was a part of the story for good.”

“Oh my God,” I whispered,
wondering if I had almost confined Vivian to some eternal
Inception
mind limbo or something.

“Holly, give me the Kindle,”
Vivian said.

Like a kid with a candy bar, I
pulled the Kindle close to me.

“Holly. It’s for your own good.
Give it to me.”

“I don’t know if I can,” I said.

“It doesn’t have to be
permanent,” Vivian said. “You just need a night off.”

“A night off,” I repeated.

“You need to get yourself
grounded again in the real world. When you realize you’re Holly again, and not
Annabelle--”

“Vivian, it’s my Kindle,” I said.
I pointed at the sticker of the blue holly flower on the back. “See this
flower? That means it’s mine!”

“I’m afraid the law wouldn’t
side with you on this one, even if you do have a flower sticker on the back. It
was your Kindle when it was the plain old eReader you bought, but this new
version is a totally different animal. I made it magic, Holly. It was my spell
that summoned the Dream Spirit and put it in your Kindle.”

“The Dream Spirit? You don’t
know--”

“I do so know. This is exactly
how the Dream Spirit works. When you summon the Dream Spirit, she comes into
your life to give you exactly what you need. You and I were both there and I
called her to be with us, not with you. She decided we need a magic Kindle with
a beautifully disturbed sex wizard inside it. She let you play around and get
lost in there so you could see how easy it is to lose yourself. Don’t you get
it, Holly? The Kindle is Derek. You haven’t let go of him. But if you let go of
the Kindle now, you’ll be free.”

“You’re just making all this
up,” I said. “How do you know what the Dream Spirit wants?”

“Because I summoned her!”

“That doesn’t mean you get to
speak for her. It’s my Kindle!”

“It’s my Dream Spirit, Holly. I
called her out. I can send her back.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” I hissed.

“You need to take a break, Holly.
You’re getting too attached. Look at you. You came in here tonight with your
hair all in knots and your clothes wrinkled and you stink.”

As she spoke, I looked at the
Kindle, which was on a black screen at the moment, and I saw my own reflection.

Vivian was right. I looked
terrible.

“Do I really stink?” I said.

“You smell like a homeless
person, and you’ll thank me later for telling you. Right now you’re like a
heroin addict who is nearing a precipice. It’s not too late for you to break
away for a bit and regain control of yourself, but you’re close. Another night
with this Kindle and you’re not coming back.”

“I always come back,” I said,
hearing the trepidation in my own voice. Vivian heard it too, and she pounced.

“This is a big night for you,”
she said. “You’ve got a big decision to make. Are you going to take charge of
your own life, or are you going to give in to your addiction and become a
junkie who dies on the streets.”

“I’m not gonna die on the
streets,” I said, but without any confidence. Vivian’s words were striking a
nerve. As she said them, I thought about how frantic I’d become while she was
reading the Kindle. I remembered taking the Kindle out of Vivian’s hands as she
fell flat on the table, dead for all I knew, and not feeling distraught over
her condition, but excited that the Kindle was mine again.

“A night off would really do you
some good, my friend,” Vivian said. “I’ll take good care of your Kindle.”

I sat still, holding the Kindle
to my chest. It pained me to think of letting it go again, but that in itself
was proof of what Vivian was saying. I had a problem.

“I don’t want to die in the
streets,” I whispered.

Moving slowly, I pulled the
Kindle away from my chest and gave it to Vivian. She snatched it out of my
hands.

“I have a flight back to Dallas
tomorrow,” I said.

“Cancel it,” said Vivian.
“There’s no way I’m letting you leave here with this until you’ve got it under
control.”

“My home is in Dallas,” I said.

“I’ll pay for your room.”

“I can’t make you pay for my
room,” I said.

“Yes you can and yes I will. Now
go home and get some rest.”

I got the feeling this was the
way Vivian spoke to the other employees in her office. She had the distinct
tone of a bitchy boss.

“When do I get my Kindle back?”
I said.

“Come to my house tomorrow
morning and we’ll talk,” Vivian said.

“Alright. I guess I can--”

“And close the door on your way
out, will you?”

Close the door? Was this really
goodbye? Could I really do it? No more Kindle?

Yes, I had to do it. I had to
rejoin the waking world.

“Tomorrow morning,” I said.

Vivian smiled and stood up.

“Let me just help you here,” she
said, and she gave me a gentle push out of her office.

Then she closed the door in my
face.

Chapter 13

I left Vivian’s office and drove
aimlessly in the rental car for a while. I didn’t want to go back to the Wyndham
without my Kindle. I felt like it would be a cold, empty place, and had no
interest in arriving there until it was time for me to sleep.

I landed at a Barnes &
Noble.

It felt like I was stepping into
another life.

All these beautiful books—just
eighteen months ago, a bookstore like this one was my favorite place in the
world to be. But the Kindle had changed all of that, even before it had become
a magic portal to a not-so-virtual realm of fantasy and play (lots of play, God
I wanted to have it in my hands and be on my way to play with Christoph again).

I went to the literature section
and pulled down a copy of
Life of Pi
.
Flipping through the pages, feeling the soft paper on my fingers, looking at
the font, I felt nostalgic for the first time I read the book in paperback. A young
man cast away at sea with a motley crew of zoo animals as companions. An
outrageous adventure that, along the way, makes us think about the biggest
questions of all—that’s a fine, fine book.

I flipped to chapter 1 and read
the first few sentences, wondering if I would find myself in the body of a
young man from India.

Nothing happened though. Nothing
other than the magic of reading a book. It was fun, actually, to let the words
build an image in my mind, to enjoy the sound of their poetry. With my wacky
Kindle, I wasn’t really reading this way anymore. I was getting entirely
immersed in the world with all my senses, but in this old-school reading
session on a paper page in an actual bookstore, I was having to do it the old
fashioned way. I was having to use my imagination.

I spent a few more minutes
reading
Life of Pi
, then I put it
back on the shelf and kept browsing.

Water for Stone, The Night Circus, The Corrections, Gold
—I spent an
hour pulling down some of my favorite titles and letting the author have her
way with me (or his). That’s how Stephen King described fiction writing: mind
control. You sit down as a reader and consent to let the author take control of
your thoughts for a time.

I like telling that one to my
students. It gets them thinking about how amazing this thing is that we do.
Books and reading, as well as all the other forms of art, are about mind
control. We step away from the world we know for a time and let someone have at
our thoughts. If that someone is skilled, we enjoy the experience and come away
from it a little wiser about the human condition. Reading broadens our
comprehension of the world. It allows us to see things more clearly from
someone else’s point of view.

I tell my students that I became
an English teacher because I wanted to bring about peace on earth. I truly
believe that art has the power to do that. Good art brings people together in a
way that eliminates the need to fight. No joke: I had a student in my senior
class the year before last who told one of his friends, in total seriousness,
that he thought the earth would be a better place if the US turned the entire
Arab world into a radioactive wasteland. That year I pulled
A Tale of Two Cities
from the curriculum
and instead had my seniors read
The Kite
Runner
and write an essay about their thoughts on the Middle East before
and after reading it.

The boy who wanted to nuke them
all wrote five moving paragraphs about how
The
Kite Runner
made him realize that the guerillas with guns were a small part
of the population in Afghanistan, and that most of the people there wanted to
live their lives in peace.

After I’d gotten my fill of
paperback browsing, I went to the eReader counter and picked up a Nook. It had
a copy of
Divergent
preloaded on it.
I opened up the book and read it, a piece of me hopeful that I could bring some
of the magic from my Kindle with me.

Nothing happened. I read the
first two screens of the dystopian young adult novel with mild interest, then I
put the eReader down and left.

I drove south from Barnes &
Noble, heading back towards the airport and my hotel. I was sitting at a
stoplight when my phone rang. The name on the screen was entirely unexpected,
and to a woman who had spent the better part of her day living in a fantasy
world, the incoming call from reality, from her previous reality, was
unsettling.

Incoming call from Derek Yost.

We hadn’t spoken since I’d moved
out. Why was he calling now?

My first instinct was to leave
it. There was nothing Derek and I needed to talk about. Was there?

No, there is nothing
, I told myself.
Besides, I’m driving. It’s irresponsible to take a phone call when
you’re driving.

Yep. No phone calls. Derek can…

But was I going to call him
back? Was I going to say, ‘Hey, I missed your call because I was driving.
What’s up?’

How desperate would that be to
actually call him back?

The phone was still ringing. I
set it down in the cup holder. Think of the children, Holly. There are children
on the road and the adults need to be responsible and not talk on their cell phones
while driving. Besides, it’s Derek. You aren’t obligated to take his call. The
best thing you could do is make him call you a few times before you ever talk
to him. So don’t you dare take that call. Don’t you—

“Ah fuck it,” I said, and
answered the phone.

“Hello?”

Nobody answered on the other
side.

“Hello?”

There was the distinct sound of
chatter, like I was sitting at a crowded bar and listening to a hundred
conversations, but no one was talking to me.

“Hello, Derek? Are you there?”

More chatter, and then a sound
that made my teeth hurt. The cackling, squeaky laugh of Marianne Masterson. I
had come to know that laugh in the final months of my relationship with Derek,
when it seemed that Marianne was around all the time.