“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s Alex.”
“He is.”
“But you don’t love him anymore? You no longer want to date him?”
“Nanette doesn’t know.”
“Okay. I’m glad that we’re hanging out again.”
“Yeah, Nanette is happy about that, too.”
Nanette watches Oliver climb back into his bedroom through the window, and then she pedals home in time for that night’s Scrabble game, which she intentionally loses—setting her parents up again and again for the triple- and double-word scores—in an effort to boost their egos. She imagines that healthy egos are aphrodisiacs and hopes that her parents also begin to make the beast with two backs again on a regular basis—that they might even stay married when Nanette’s crisis is over and she eventually moves out of her parents’ home. She would like them to grow old together, as platitude-ish as that sounds.
Nanette cannot sleep.
She can’t stop thinking about Booker.
For the first time, as she tosses and turns, she realizes that she is very angry—mad at her favorite author for abandoning her when she didn’t do anything wrong.
Mad at him for putting her romance with Alex in motion and then washing his hands clean of Nanette when it blew up in her face.
The next morning, she skips school and goes to Booker’s.
Booker opens the door when Nanette knocks, and she’s glad to find him fully clothed this time.
He says, “Shouldn’t you be in school?”
“School is merely a social construct. Nanette says, fuck it.”
“Why are you cursing? And, perhaps more important, why are you speaking in the third person?”
“Nanette’s therapist, June, theorizes that first-person Nanette is far too accommodating.”
“So you’re in therapy now? Was it my book that drove you to a psychologist? Please don’t tell me that my book did that. I’m not taking responsibility for you, too.”
Nanette thinks about how her reading The Bubblegum Reaper actually was the catalyst—what put her in the rocket ship headed to wherever she is now, but she knows better than to say that to neurotic Booker, and so, taking a page out of first-person Nanette’s playbook, she instead says, “Don’t flatter yourself, old man.”
Booker looks relieved as he says, “Come in.”
Nanette follows him into the living room.
“So,” Booker says.
“So,” Nanette answers.
“A game of Scrabble perhaps? To break the ice?”
Nanette explains that she plays with her parents now. She’s sort of maxed out on Scrabble.
“I’m not sure I like Nanette in the third person.”
“Get used to it.”
“She’s much more sassy, apparently.”
“And openly sad.”
“Oh.”
“Are you in love or something? With Sandra Tackett?”
“As unbelievable as it sounds, I believe I very well may be.”
“Yeah, Nanette thought she was in love, too.”
Booker shifts his weight and says, “I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that my effort to set you up with Alex led to catastrophe for you and romance for me. I’m so very happy and you are clearly miserable. What do you make of that? I feel there must be a moral, but I cannot seem to figure out what it might be.”
Nanette shrugs.
“I’m sorry that things with Alex didn’t work out,” Booker says. “Have you heard from him?”
Nanette says she hasn’t and now she’s no longer sure she wants to.
Booker says he feels the same way.
“So are Nanette and Booker quitting Alex?” Nanette says, just to be a bitch.
Booker frowns and says, “Why do you think people do bad things after they read my novel?”
“Are we allowed to talk about it now?”
“Just this once.”
Nanette doesn’t know. She says, “Maybe because it upsets the balance. It makes you think and makes you mad. Challenges you. Gives you the illusion of permission for once to be on the outside who you really are on the inside all the time. It’s revolutionary, and so, in the hands of rebels, it creates action.”
“And some people should never take a stand. Some people shouldn’t let what’s inside escape into the world. Is that what you’re saying?”
Nanette says she doesn’t know about that. She’s glad that Booker is happy. That he found Sandra and is getting laid.
“Excuse me?” Booker says, but laughs.
“You deserve to get lucky, Booker. Nanette is happy for you.”
“I’m sorry I pushed you into therapy.”
“Nanette isn’t. It’s good for Nanette.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but your talking in third person is positively unnerving. It’s like a punishment for the rest of the world.”
Nanette shrugs.
Unnerving.
Maybe that’s a fringe benefit.
Nanette is more comfortable in third person.
And maybe she wants to punish the world.
“Well, Ms. Third-Person O’Hare, I suppose I’ll have to get used to it. Doctor’s orders.”
And just like that, Booker and Nanette are friends again. It is the first time she ever recovered a friend after having a falling-out. Shannon and the rest of the soccer team had lost their first playoff game back in November, and based on the dirty looks they sent Nanette’s way the week after, she had become the scapegoat for their failure. She didn’t really mind, because she couldn’t care less about soccer records, but it also felt as if a door had officially closed, especially when it came to Shannon, who so desperately wanted to please their coach by becoming a girls’ soccer champion.