Hard Love
Ellen Wittlinger
IT’S BEEN SIX YEARS since John witnessed his parents’ divorce. His mother no longer hugs him, his father barely acknowledges him, and now his soon-to-be stepfather wants to move the family away right before senior year. John’s only pleasures are writing and reading homemade zines like the amazing Escape Velocity by Marisol—a self-proclaimed “Puerto Rican Cuban Yankee lesbian.” When the opportunity arises to meet her, John jumps at the chance.
Awkward introductions aside, Marisol quickly warms up to John and a friendship is born. At first they bond over the safe subjects of zines, dysfunctional families, and dreams of escape. But eventually both John and Marisol learn to shed their protective shells. Together they help each other discover more about themselves than they ever knew existed.
A Michael L. Printz Award Honor Book and Lambda Literary Award winner
Look for the companion novel to Hard Love:
Cover design and hand lettering by Cara E. Petrus
Cover photograph of figure copyright
© 2008 by C. Ebener/plainpicture/Glasshouse Images
Cover photograph of scratches copyright © 2008 by Veer
Simon & Schuster
New York
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Also by Ellen Wittlinger
Love & Lies
Blind Faith
Parrotfish
Sandpiper
Heart on My Sleeve
Zigzag
The Long Night of Leo and Bree
Razzle
What’s in a Name
For Younger Readers
Gracie’s Girl
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1999 by Ellen Wittlinger
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Lyrics on page 110 are from “Names & Dates & Times” by Ani DiFranco.
© 1993 Righteous Babe Records—BMI. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Lyrics on pages 212-213 are from “Hard Love” by Bob Franke.
© 1982 Telephone Pole Music Co. Used by permission.
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Also available in a hardcover edition.
First paperback edition March 2001
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wittlinger, Ellen.
Hard love / Ellen Wittlinger. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: After starting to publish a zine in which he writes his secret feelings about his lonely life and his parents’ divorce, sixteen-year-old John meets an unusual girl and begins to develop a healthier personality.
ISBN 978-0-689-82134-9 (hc)
[1. Authorship—Fiction. 2. Underground press publications—Fiction. 3. Divorce—Fiction. 4. Identity—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.W78436Har 1999 [Fic]—dc21 CIP AC 98006668
ISBN 978-0-689-84154-5 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-4391-1556-5 (eBook)
For Kate and Morgan
And for everyone
whose first love
was a hard love.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
With many thanks to the zine writers
who gave me advice and a glimpse into their world:
Colette Ryder-Hall (Looks Yellow, Tastes Red)
W. Lugh Van Droog (Lugh Spoke)
Amanda Hughes (Paranoy)
Ariel Bordeaux (Deep Girl)
Neil Simon (Gobstopper and automaton)
Ellen Myre (Noisemaker)
Ski-Mask (Riverside Art Scene)
Thanks also to my editor, David Gale, and to my agent, Ginger Knowlton.
And special thanks to Ani DiFranco and Bob Franke
for their generosity in the use of their lyrics.
Chapter One
I am immune to emotion. I have been ever since I can remember. Which is helpful when people appeal to my sympathy. I don’t seem to have any.
“Come on, John. It’s not going to kill you to go to the auditions with me,” Brian begged. “I hate doing stuff alone.” He walked backward to the door of Darlington High’s Little Theater, beckoning to me as though I were his golden retriever.
“Look,” I told him, “I can’t sing, I can’t act, and I don’t like musicals anyway. Especially this one. It’s sappy.” I didn’t bother to remind him that I don’t really go to this school. People think I do, but it’s only my physical body, not me. Brian can’t seem to understand that.
“You think The Sound of Music is sappy? It’s about the rise of the Third Reich! It’s about standing up for your beliefs …”
“It’s about the hills are alive and singing nuns.” As if Brian knows squat about standing up for your beliefs anyway. Brian’s most strongly held belief is that having a girlfriend will make him a viable human being, but let a girl say hi to him in the hallway and his knees buckle.
“How come you’re suddenly so interested in drama?” I asked him, though I didn’t really care. “You never tried out for a play before.”
Brian’s acne turned wine red, which was his charming way of blushing. He glanced quickly up and down the corridor. “She’s trying out. She always gets a big part in the musicals, and everybody says she’ll get the lead this time.”
Jesus. “Who?” I asked, just to annoy him.
Brian rolled his eyes and leaned in close. “Violet Neville,” he whispered. He was so damn close to me he breathed her nauseatingly sweet name right into my mouth.
“How old are you?” I asked, backing away.
“Whataya mean?”
“I mean you’ve been dreaming about that useless girl since the sixth grade. Six years, Brian. Get a life! You’ve never even spoken to her!”
“I have too!”
“You have not. You think just because you get some minuscule part in this play she’s suddenly going to notice you? You think Fräulein Maria is going to fall in love with Nazi Soldier Number Six?”
Brian looked squashed, which, I have to admit, was the look I was after. I’m really a pretty crappy friend. “I didn’t say that. At least I’ll get to be around her. They rehearse after school every day for the next two months.”
The thing is, it makes me feel sick when Brian acts like this. Hangdog—that’s the word for it, and accurate, too. Like one of those skinny mutts that can’t even hold up its tail, the kind that follows you around on the street whining and panting, and you can’t imagine what combination of canine breeds could be behind such a pathetic specimen.<
br />
I just had to bail. “Look, I gotta go. I’ve got something to do this afternoon.”
“Right,” Brian said sarcastically. “Your life’s so full. You don’t even have a dream girl.”
I had to laugh, which probably wasn’t the response Brian was expecting. But I don’t mind him zinging me back. It’s the only reason we’re friends at all. We recognized each other the first day we met—two hollow souls trying to pass for normal. Together we still add up to zero, but at least our hopelessness has a twin. It works well enough. I don’t mind hanging around with a kindly fool, and Brian doesn’t mind hanging around with a witty misanthrope. And it appears to the world as if we each have at least one friend.
Of course, I hadn’t bothered to tell Brian that lately my life didn’t seem quite so yawningly empty as before. He wouldn’t understanding that reading things somebody wrote in a magazine could change you.
“Call me later, if you want to,” I said. It was the least I could do. “Let me know how it goes.”
“Screw you,” Brian said, and turned to go into the theater, his head drooping onto his chest, tail between his legs. At least he was still swearing at me. That was a good sign.
Interview with the Stepfather
BOY:
So, you’d like to interview for the job of stepfather?
STEP:
Well, I will if I have to. I sure would like to marry your mother.
BOY:
And I’d sure like to know your qualifications for the job, if I may.
STEP:
I didn’t think I needed any qualifications. I mean, the real job is being a husband to your mother, isn’t it? This stepfather thing just happens. I didn’t think I’d have to do anything.
BOY:
You don’t have to, however, doing nothing would make you indistinguishable from my real father. Surely you don’t want that to happen.
STEP:
Oh, certainly not. I’m glad you told me. Well, if he doesn’t do anything, I guess that means I’ll have to do a lot. What kinds of things should I do, though? Take you to baseball games? Toss the old football around the yard? You like to go fishing?
BOY:
God, no. How about if you help me pull a few tricks on Mom? Maybe we could put some plastic cockroaches in her bed, or fill her shampoo bottle with maple syrup, or donate all her shoes to the Salvation Army? I think it would help us bond.
STEP:
What! I would never do that to your mother! What’s the matter with you, Boy?
BOY:
I guess I just need a firm but loving hand.
STEP:
You do, young fella, and I’ll be there to give it to you.
BOY:
I’m sure you will. I’m sure you gave it to your own son, didn’t you?
STEP:
My son? Well, I don’t see the boy too often. Lives in another state, you know.
BOY:
State of confusion?
STEP:
Huh?
BOY:
Let’s continue with the interview: Are you aware that when my beloved mother snores it measures six point two on the Richter scale? And did you know that when the cat bit her, she bit him back?
STEP:
Stop it, Boy. You’re lying. You don’t deserve to have such a wonderful mother, if you don’t mind my saying so.
BOY:
Don’t mind in the least. I’d even agree with you. She, however, does deserve me. After all, that wonderful mother raised me, didn’t she? Molded me into the great guy I am today. What you see before you is the result of her hard work.
STEP:
You know what I think? I think you must be just like your dad. It’s not your mother’s fault you’re so rotten—it’s that lousy father of yours.
BOY:
Sir, I think you hit the nail on the head. I’m a reproduction of the old bore: selfish and full of shit. The prize for your insightfulness is the hand of my mother. Long may it wave.
STEP:
Get lost, kid. We don’t need your kind ’round here.
BOY:
My feelings exactly.
I don’t know what it means really—it’s not how I’d ever talk to Mom’s dishwater-drab boyfriend Al—but I like the way it sounds. It’s true, even though it never happened. That’s what I love about writing. Once you get the words down on paper, in print, they start to make sense. It’s like you don’t know what you think until it dribbles from your brain down your arm and into your hand and out through your fingers and shows up on the computer screen, and you read it and realize: That’s really true; I believe that.
Typed up Interview filled three pages of my zine, which brought the total number of pages to twelve. Not as long as some of the zines I’d seen, but long enough for a first issue. Especially since I still had to get it copied and stapled by tomorrow night before Dad came to pick me up for the weekend.
I’m not much of an artist, so the cover looks a little cheap. Just the title, Bananafish, in fancy letters that took me hours to draw, and a photocopy of an old picture of me when I was three years old, sitting behind a birthday cake screaming my head off. The picture would be grainy when I copied it again, but that was okay. Zines were supposed to look like that, homemade and weird.
I thumbed through my copy of Escape Velocity one more time to see if there was anything I’d forgotten. This was the most incredible zine of all the ones I picked up the past few months at Tower Records. Although the cover was fancier than mine with the kind of clip art and newspaper headlines and crazy drawings that you usually see in zines, inside was mostly writing, wild, funny writing about all kinds of stuff. The author, somebody named Marisol, has this electric brain that leaps from one subject to another, each one stranger than the last. She claims to be seventeen, but she sounds much too cool to still be in high school.
She wrote about walking in the cemetery and imagining old dead families still arguing, lying underground and berating each other over whose fault it was that Junior never made a go of the business, or why Eleanor, though a beauty, had been unlucky in love. She gave a list of Shakespearean insults and begged her readers to call each other “hasty-witted pontificating footlickers,” so as to put some “grit and romance” back into the English language.
There was an article called “Why My Mother Still Has a Dorothy Hamill Haircut,” which actually had me laughing out loud, which goes against my basic instincts. The gist of this one was that her mother wants to remind people that Dorothy Hamill (some Olympic ice-skater from the seventies) should still be their role model. “Mom is on a mission to convince girlkind that big thighs don’t count against you as long as you smile shyly up at folks through a swingy wave of clean hair. She would tell you (if she were here) that a good blunt cut draws the eye away from a low center of gravity.” It goes on like that for pages.
Then there was a page titled “Why My Father Still Watches Lawrence Welk Reruns on Cable.” That was at the top of the page, then halfway down, in the middle of all this white space, it says, “Sometimes the truth is unknowable.”
My favorite piece didn’t even have a title. It was on the first page and it just started right out:
My name is Marisol, which means “bitter sun.” But I am not bitter because that would be a waste of my time, and wasting time is one of the only sins worth worrying about. Marisol, so I’m told, is a very popular name in Puerto Rico, where I have never been. My birth parents were Puerto Rican, and because my adoptive mother, the white Yankee social worker, is particularly sensitive to these kinds of issues, she named me according to my heritage. My adoptive father was born in Cuba, but came to the U.S. when he was twelve. No one is more American than my Cuban college professor daddy. Adopting me was small potatoes after adopting a new country, a new language, new loyalties, new life. And so I became Marisol Guzman, Puerto Rican Cuban Yankee Cambridge, Massachusetts, rich spoiled lesbian private-school gifted-and-talented writer virgin looking for love.
&
nbsp; God! When you read something like that you can’t help but believe it. I mean, it’s not just some smartass trying to impress you with some baloney. I really have to admire the way Marisol just lays her life out for people to see, like she loves the weird way she is, and if you had any sense, you would too. Every time I read that over, I feel like I’m looking down through layer after layer of her, until I’m looking more deeply inside this person I don’t even know than I’ve ever looked inside myself. I want to write like that too. Maybe I even want to be like that. And I sure as hell want to meet her.
The only thing I still needed to do was put my name on the cover and I’d be finished with my zine. But who was I? Marisol might not be her real name. Maybe she just liked that stuff about the “bitter sun.” Like I said, you can be “true” without always telling the truth. People use made-up names for their zines all the time, names like Ratty and Tanker and Whizzer. No way was I going to put “by John F. Galardi Jr.” John Galardi sounded like some dull stiff, some nerd extraordinaire who couldn’t get out of his own way. And that Jr. thing I never used. What’s that about, anyway? It’s like telling your kid, “You’re just a smaller version of me, Son. You’re not really worth a name of your own.”
So, I was thinking I might use “Giovanni.” Why not? One name, foreign, unusual, memorable, but still, almost my real name—if only I’d been born in Italy instead of Darlington, Mass. I inked it in carefully at the bottom of the cover, all the letters slanted backward like these cool dudes walking.
