The Book Rebel

Though it seems a shame of wasted youth to admit it, I didn’t really rebel much in high school. And it wasn’t because I was a preacher’s kid. My parents didn’t make me wear a chastity belt, or a long denim skirt. I was never forced to recite Psalms as penance for wearing red nail polish.

No, in truth, my restraint was more self-imposed. It was me who harbored the secret fear that I’d spontaneously combust if I so much as put one foot out of line. (And actually, my skirts were quite short. Though, now that I think about it, most of them were actually skorts. Sigh…yes. I chickened out and went to skorts when things reached a certain length. But I tried.)

But I (and my dork-goody-two-shoes buddies, I later learned) did have one wild and crazy outlet. I was a book rebel. By that, I mean that I read things that would have burned the corneas off my mother’s eyes.

The best part was, I was encouraged to do it. My parents revelled in the idea that any reading was good reading. If we all went to the mall together, my sister and I may not have always scored the sweaters or shoes we begged for, but –why, of course! — we were always allowed to get a book. I can still recall the pride in my mother’s eyes in the Florence Mall Waldenbooks, when I’d shuffle nonchalantly through the Teen magazines, then toss them aside with a practiced look of boredom and head for the real books. The Young Adult shelves. Sharon and Greg Hancock beemed at this person they’d raised– not just a common Teen, but their own Young Adult.  She was a woman to bo reckoned with; like a spiral-permed heroine of old, she was far more interested in a complete work of literature than in some cheap rag.

And I’d stifle a devious smile, because I knew a great truth that seemed to escape all parents of my generation:

The YA section of the bookstore was a cesspool of NC-17 debauchery. Maybe it was the fact that the parents of my generation grew up in the 50s and 60s, when real books (as opposed to comics or television) were the white hats that identified good, wholesome kids. Nevermind the content. “At least she’s reading!”

I don’t think a single parent in existence has ever actually read the jacket flap of Flowers in the Attic before handing over payment to the store clerk, patting her daughter proudly on the back, and rushing her off to choir practice. And no police force seems to have detected the locker-to-honor-student-locker pattern across America in which Judy Blume’s Forever is traded with the stealth of an illegal street drug.

My favorite vice was always Christopher Pike. Remember him? He had sex, suspense, gore, revenge, the S word. He was the perfect gateway to Stephen King. Or pregnancy. If our mothers had only known.

But they didn’t. They just shouted toward the kitchen table, as we sat with copies of Chain Letter hidden in our Algebra textbooks, “How’s the book, sweetheart? Looks scary!” And we’d just smile, mumble something about lots of haunted houses and black cats, and dive back in.

They were cheaper and less outlandish than tatoos and piercings, but those books left their marks, just the same. They made me feel dangerous and different.

And that’s why, a few nights ago, as I sat poring over a copy of the Slash autobiography (complete with the tagline It seems excessive…but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen), and my husband smiled and said, “You enjoying your book there, honey? What is it?” I just pulled the cover closer, as if it were a flask inside my pajama top.

“It’s nothing, darling. You go right on back to CNN Online.”

Comments