Holly and Her Naughty eReader (8 page)

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I
said. “I guess we all have our hangups.”

“With Rick it’s more than a
hangup. I’ve told him he needs to talk to a doctor about it. You know we put
Owen on Ritalin last year and it’s changed everything. I think it would work
wonders for Rick.”

As Michelle went on about the
shortcomings of her husband, I found myself sympathizing with the guy. I could
relate to the feeling that everyone else was having more fun than you. I think
it’s a common trait among bookworms. The real joy of reading is the release it
gives for all those fantasies you have of what it might be like to be someone
else. Were it not for my books, I have no doubt I’d be a career-hopping nomad
who packed up her car every few months and went looking for the newest
adventure. How could you not? There’s something hardwired into our brains from
the hunter gatherer days that makes us need an escape, and for me, the need is
only satisfied with a good book.

I resisted the urge to tell Michelle
that her husband needed a Kindle rather than a prescription. This wasn’t my
place to speak. As had been quite clear to me at the reunion, Michelle and I
were no longer the sister-like best friends we had been in high school. Her
life was here. My life….

Well, my life was nowhere at the
moment, except in my eReader.

We finished our lunches, I
played with Michelle’s kids, we packed up, I hugged everyone goodbye, we swore
to do better about staying in touch, and we were off. On the way back to the
hotel, I thought about the plight of Michelle’s husband. How cool would it be
to live someone else’s life for a while? How awesome was it that my Kindle was
letting me do so, over and over again?

When I got back to the room I
brought up
Mane of the Werewolf
on
the Kindle and started reading. Once again I was Sula Valkyrie, the beautiful
badass who falls in love with Blair the Werewolf. And, for a time, it was fun.
But I’d already been Sula. Wouldn’t it be fun to experience this story from
someone else’s point of view? Wouldn’t it be fun to get a completely different
look on life, one that I’d never have the chance to experience in the real
world?

Remembering how in
Wuthering Heights
I ditched Nelly’s body
and hopped into Catherine’s, I approached Blair, now in his lovely human form,
but only a few hours from the next full moon, and I stared him down.

“Sula, my darling, why do you
look at me so?” Blair said.

Because I want to be you
, I thought.

And then I was. Like a movie
camera swinging around a set, my vision shifted from Sula’s westward facing
view to Blair’s taller, eastward vision. I was him. I was looking at the woman
whose body I had just left. For half a second she stared at me with the
intensity I had left for her, but then she looked away.

“I….I don’t know,” Sula said. “What
was I saying? I felt for a moment that I was not myself.”

“Then who were you?” I said.

The words came from my mouth
without any effort of my own to speak them. My voice was sultry. I was speaking
in a seductive tone. It was simultaneously the most natural and strange way of
speaking I had ever felt. The part of me that was Blair, the wolf man, spoke
this way without thinking about it. Blair wanted Sula. He always wanted her.
And when he spoke, his words conveyed this desire.

But Holly, who was sharing
brain-space with Blair, had never spoken this way to anyone, and she almost let
out a giggle of delight.

A gender switcheroo. I was in a
man’s body.
Tootsie
in reverse. This
was gonna be fun.

Right away I noticed some
fundamental differences. My desire for Sula wasn’t wrought of love or
tenderness, but more from a kind of aggression. I wanted to take her body and
have it all for me before anyone else beat me to it. It was an odd sensation,
like I was angry and wanted to punish her for not making love to me right this
moment.

And I felt less in control of my
actions. You know that joke we like to make about men thinking with their
penises? Turns out there’s some truth to it. Not that my penis was talking to
me in words, just that it was ready to rock and roll and I had no choice but to
do its bidding. It reminded me of a short story I read once where a man was a
slave to the whims of his own hand. In that story, the man’s hand wanted to
kill, so he became a murderer.

In my story, as Blair the
werewolf, it wasn’t my hand that was in charge. My whole body was slave now to
the desires of ‘my nether regions.’ I grabbed Sula and kissed her hard, and my
penis went to full attention. Holy smokes that thing is weird! It was like
there was a dog down there that wanted to poke its head out and start sniffing
at something
. Something’s there. Want it
now. Must have it. MUST HAVE IT!

Did you ever read that old email
forward about the dog named Mypenis? I always thought that email was stupid,
and I never understood why guys found it so funny.

Now I know. Imagining my penis
as some voraciously sniffing hound dog, that email popped in my mind and I
started giggling at how perfectly hilarious it was.

Mypenis ate my homework.

Mypenis likes it when people pet him.

Mypenis gets excited whenever the mailman comes.

Sorry I'm late. I was playing with Mypenis.

You’ll have to forgive me. At
this point, not only was I a slave to the desires of that strange organ, but I
also found it insanely amusing. As Blair, I had a new appreciation for a good
penis joke. The thoughts were so simple. The jokes so elegant.

Penis is funny!

Sula is hot!

Penis wants her!

Or should I say, Mypenis wants
her?

I grabbed Sula by the back of
the head, pressed our lips together, and pushed my tongue down her throat.
Yeah, baby, you like that
, I thought.
I’m kissing you now and you like it, doncha?
Yep. It’s real good.
Uh-huh. Penis.

What happened over the next minute
and twenty seconds gives me incredible respect for any guy who has ever brought
a woman to climax, because I’m pretty sure what I did to Sula was about as
stimulating to her as a quick ride on a mechanical bull. Pants off, skirt up,
panties down, Mypenis inside, updown updown herewego, happy, happy, happy dog.
It’s interesting that, for a guy, it’s all RIGHT THERE. Your wanker feels good
while you’re doing it and great at the climax and you don’t want to make love
you want to go up and down and up and down and maybe bark like a dog while
you’re doing it.

SHA-ZING!!! That’s what climax
feels like for a guy. You can’t help but make that stupid face they make,
because it’s all….SHA-ZING! Your toes curl up and you grunt and it’s just so
fucking awesome.

But when it’s over….fartknobs
and joysticks you cannot get out of there fast enough. It’s like there’s some
biological imperative to bolt, like nature’s telling you if you stick around
she might make you change a diaper some day. She wanted to snuggle and cuddle
and I was all BITCH PUH-LEEZ (bitch, get it? Cuz I’m….a werewolf…ha ha….
PENIS!!
).

I left
Mane of the Werewolf
feeling wiser about how the world works and
much more forgiving of all the guys I’ve known who were less than stellar in
bed. That hyper little doggie that men carry around between their legs is
crazy. I don’t know how they get through the day with that thing.

Chapter 8

I spent the better part of the
next day messing around in the Kindle.

I went into
Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows
, jumped into Hermione’s
character, and kissed everybody’s favorite boy wizard on the lips, just to see
what would happen.

What happened is I felt
immensely oogie, like I was kissing my brother, so I left.

Next I went into
Mockingjay
, jumped into Prim’s
character, and kept her away from all exploding parachutes because, seriously,
what Suzanne Collins did to Prim in that book kind of ruined the whole series.

I went into
Gone Girl
and…oh, I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t
read the book. Let’s just say I loved that novel and would have loved it a lot
more with a different ending, so I crawled into Nick’s head and made him behave
how I’d wanted him to when I read the book.

I went into
The Last Battle
by C.S. Lewis and corrected an offensive bit of
that book where the author condemned Susan to hell because she liked to go
shopping.

I went into
Atlas Shrugged
and lurked around inside John Galt’s body. Every
time somebody asked “Who is John Galt?” I jumped out and shouted, “I am!”

I went into
Breaking Dawn
and experienced the bed breaking scene for myself.
Good times.

After it was done, I jumped into
Edward’s character for a change, and was inside his body when Bella spoke aloud
her thoughts on the baby’s name.

“I want to name her…Renesmee,”
Bella said.

Once again, I think we need to
give credit to any guy who keeps it together and can act even halfway civilized
in daily life. You all remember how accommodating Edward was to Bella when she
wanted to go with this ridiculous name. Well, this time through, with me inside
his brain, he was unable to be such a gentleman.

“I’m sorry, what?” I said from
inside Edward’s body.

“Renesmee,” Bella said.

“Re-nez-may?”

“Renesmee.”

“Renezzzzmaaaay.”

“Yes, Renesmee.”

What happened next wasn’t
entirely my fault. I can tell you with absolute certainty that it’s what Edward
wanted to do. I know. I was right there in his mind. Edward the silent, stoic,
supporter of his wife was on the outside. On the inside…well….it was a bit
different. All I did was let his true thoughts come out.

“BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HA!”

“What?” Bella said. “What’s so
funny?”

I was bent over at the waist,
holding my stomach from laughing so hard.

“Renez…” I snorted from inside
Edward’s body. “Renez..” I coughed from fits of hysterical laughter. “Are you
seriously thinking of naming that baby…Renez…Oh my God, Bella. You’re a riot!
Renesmee! Have you ever heard something so fucking stupid in your life!
HAHAHAHA!”

Having thoroughly angered Bella,
I decided to get out of the book. I returned to my own body, finding myself on
the bed in the hotel room with absolutely no idea what time or even what day it
was.

“I’ve got to take a break from
this thing,” I said. “I’m losing track of my life, I’m forgetting to eat and to
shower, and….and I’m talking to myself.”

I put down the Kindle and set
out to rejoin the real world for a little while. A shower, a change of clothes,
some makeup, and I headed out. There was an Applebee’s across the parking lot
from my hotel. I walked there and got a table for one.

I don’t know what I was
expecting to happen at Applebee’s—I was only trying to get out of my hotel
room—but as soon as I stepped inside, the smell of meat made me a wee bit
crazy. When the waiter came to take my drink order, I told him I wanted, “A
water and a big hamburger cooked as rare as your chef is willing to make it.”

This was not a normal meal order
for me. I’m not a full-on vegetarian, but I did read
Diet For a New America
and thought it was pretty compelling. I can
go many months between hamburgers, and never once in my life have I asked for
it to be rare, much less ‘rare as the chef is willing to make it.’

When the burger came, I pulled
the meat out of the bun, cut off a slice with my fork, and stuffed it in my
mouth. It was so….disappointing. Some part of my brain had expected this meat
to be the filling, juicy,
bloody
treat I needed, but when I bit into it, my body was like, “Eh. It’s a
hamburger.”

And then it occurred to me that
the craving for fresh meat was something I’d been carrying around with me all
day long. When I was in
Harry Potter
,
I saw a possum in the woods and wanted to roast it with some fiendfyre so I could
gnaw on it. When I was in
Gone Girl
I
nervously ate cold cuts out of the refrigerator. When I was in
Atlas Shrugged
I remember improvising a
crazy long off-the-cuff speech that included the line, “John Galt is the man
who loves meat.”

That love of meat began with my
stint as Blair the Werewolf. It hung around with me all day and was morphed
when I became Edward the vampire, who wanted that meat to be bloody. Could it
be that, as I was inhabiting these characters, I was adopting some of their
traits?

I thought about a lecture I gave
to my twelfth graders at the end of last year.

“When you read a novel, you aren’t a passive observer.”
I told
them.
“You are a full partner in the
telling of the story. The novels we’re reading in this class are more than a
collection of scribbles on a page. They are an invitation for you to join hands
with the author and build an entire universe in your mind where reader and
character become one, and if you’re lucky, you’ll come out of the experience
with a different outlook than you took in.”

 
Was that what was happening here? Had I come
out of these Kindle books a different person thanI was when I went in? Were the
characters from inside the books sharing space in my head, just as I had shared
space in theirs?

I looked down at the undercooked
hamburger and pushed it away. Strange how quickly the craving had left me as
soon as I’d tried to satisfy it. When I bit into the hamburger, it was like my
body reminded my brain I was Holly, not Blair, not Edward, and I was no longer
interested in bloody meat.

But as quickly as that craving
disappeared, a new craving took its place, and I could tell that this one would
not be so easily dismissed. I wanted to go back to the hotel room, get back in
the Kindle, and read
His Golden Shackles
.