"...Only eighteen months before the suicides, Trip Fontaine had emerged from baby fat to the delight of girls and women alike. Because we had known him as a pudgy boy whose teeth slanted out of his open trolling mouth like those of a deep-sea fish, we had been slow to recognise his transformation. In addition, our fathers and older brothers, our decrepit uncles, had assured us that looks didn't matter if you were a boy. We weren't on the lookout for handsomeness appearing in our midst, and believed it counted for little until the girls, we knew, along with their mothers, fell in love with Trip Fontaine. Their desire was silent yet magnificent, like a thousand daisies attuning their faces toward the path of the sun. At first we hardly we hardly noticed to wadded notes dropped through the grating of Trip's locker, nor the equatorial breezes pursuing him down the hall from so much heated blood; but finally, confronted with clusters of clever girls blushing at Trip's approach, or yanking their braids to keep from smiling too much, we realised that our fathers, brothers and uncles had been lying, and that no one was ever going to love us because of our good grades...
Trip Fontaine rose to full height, adjusted the frames of his aviator sunglasses, flicked back his hair, zipped the breast pocket of his brown leather jacket, and started forward to the juggernauts of his boots...
His new deep voice sounding a foot above our heads, apprehended without understanding the tight seat of his jeans, smelled his cologne and compared our own cheese-coloured skin to his. But his musky scent, the coconut-oil smoothness of his ace, the golden grains of intractable sand still glittering in his eyebrows didn't affect us s it did the girls who, one by one, and then in groups, swooned...
No boy was ever so cool and aloof. Fontaine gave off the sense of having graduated to the next stage of life, of having his hands thrust into the heart of the real world, whereas the rest of us were still memorizing quotations and grade-grubbing. Though he retrieved his books from his locker, we knew they were only props and that he was destined for capitalism and not scholarship, as his drug deals already augured..."
Friday, January 2, 2009
The man of my dreams.
The Virgin Suicides, Jeffery Eugenides.
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