Letters For You

The Book I Was Telling You About

Write about clichés or stereotypes Thursday, January 25th, 2018

By Emily Davis

You know the book I was reading the night of your accident? The one I picked up from my mother's place? I finished it. I started it all over again and I finished it last night. It is a very good book. It's a love story. Don't roll your eyes. You know I am a sucker for this kind of story. The outsider girl falls in love with the jock. It reminds me of us. I was the outsider. I only had one friend when I met you. You were the guy everybody loved. The captain of the soccer team. The star player.

When I think about it, we are the absolute teen movie stereotype. The lonely and shy girl gets the popular and handsome boy every girl wants. He falls for her personality and she sees him for what he truly is, a normal boy who is more than just a jock. My family is fucked up but loving. Your family was what every family wanted to be. Two loving parents, two kids, one boy and one girl, and a dog. There is a white picket fence in your front yard and everything. If this was the resume of a book, I'd read it. If we would have been a Nicholas Sparks novel, we would have made millions of sales. Imagine our review in the newspaper:

"At Freemont High school, the star soccer player meets the bookworm. Through a mutual friend, they become inseparable. Countless movie nights with butter free popcorn later, romance emerged. It was the love of a lifetime, until a tragic accident forced them apart. Cliché but efficient. You will laugh, you will cry, but mostly, you'll fall in love with love again."

Emma Watson would play me, and Robert Pattinson would play you in the movie version. It would be epic. Why British actors, Em? It makes it more romantic. Like a modern Jane Austen novel. Epic I tell you. Maybe not Oscar worthy but close enough.

It would be the type of movie everyone hates because the guy dies at the end. You remember how I used to say it was unfair to kill the main character? Ironic, right? They killed one of the main characters in my life. Except that I am not one of those girls in movies that, when their boyfriend dies, they find joy in life. I don't smile when I think about you while looking at the sky. I am not the type of girl who could move on in a few weeks because they met another cute guy.

I am not one of those girls because this isn't a movie. It's real life. And in real life, girls like me usually don't get the jock. They usually get bullied by the jocks or their girlfriends. Jocks are usually assholes. There not nice guys who help people that are bad at maths or science. The stereotypical jock would have been drunk driving. That's what would have killed him. There is no book about what happens to the girl or the guy who is left behind after their partner died. The romance novels end after the character's death. Sometimes, there is the epilogue, a few years later, in which the girl is pregnant from her new boyfriend. There are no books about teen grief. No book to help me. Nothing. The one thing that was always there for me couldn't help me when I needed it the most. I needed a stereotype, but it didn't exist. It's a non-normative event they say. Why write about something that doesn't fit the norm? Who will read that?

We are not a stereotype. We are way more than that. You were way more than the star soccer player with a bright future. I am way more than the shy girl whose nose is always buried in a book. We were way more than Logan and Charlie, the characters in that book. By the way, neither of them die. He asks for her hand in marriage in the epilogue. Cute, right? I will always be a sucker for those stories. Everyone needs to believe in love.

Even shy, lonely bookworms like me.

Even nice, smart, handsome jocks like you.