I'm in love with a young adult novel character.

after all this teen novel reading, I’ve finally fallen for one. I’m not sure if it means I’m a hopeless romantic, or if all this time I’ve been reading serious dick-lit like Murakami and James Joyce, I should have been reading Chick-lit, but I am in love with a character in a book. Mind you, I’ve been in love with characters in books before, I think. I know I was in love with Peter Pan. I think Marcus Flutie, the love interest of the narrator, Jessica Darling, of Sloppy Firsts, is a little like Peter Pan. Elusive, sexy, a little too unavailable.
The book itself, Sloppy Firsts, was, before I was smitten with Marcus, still the best written of any of this stuff, primarily because Jess is not supposed to be a typical teenager, nor is the book written with the condescension that most of these books have. Instead, Jess is a bitter and painfully observant person, stuck in a close minded middle class suburb in New Jersey. She reminds me of me, stuck in High School in San Jose. I didn’t get anyone, no one got me. I didn’t even get me until I got out of San Jose and moved to LA and met other people who thought complete thoughts. Which isn’t really fair: this is a novel, and a romance at that, so the high school football hero wants to sleep with Jess Darling, and I didn’t even know who the high school football hero was in my high school, until he tried to fuck me at my ten year reunion. I was so much in my own world, and still am that even in high school, when I could have been awed by people I wasn’t interested in, I didn’t even know who they were if they weren’t sort of dorky and funny.

Which goes back to my obsession with this character. It’s INSANE. I want him to be a real person, but then again, he wouldn’t love me, if he were. He’s a redhead, for fucks sake. Okay, I’ll stop obsessing. I just wish anyone this cool ever existed. I think maybe he did, in my life, several times around, and that’s why I’m feeling so much like I’m in love right now, because reading this is a reminder of what it was like to feel that way and how it is possible. But it’s also freaking me out. I remember my first “boyfriend” if you could call him that, Scott Simmons, who I didn’t even really like, but he was skater, and tall and blond, so fits the prototype telling me I want everything to be like it’s in a book, which was kind of true, then, books were all I knew, and true now, because I’m in love with a character in a book! Who doesn’t exist, but is the Anne prototype. It’s so freaky. But it also made me remember what I want to be with and is setting my sights on a type who doesn’t even exist a little unrealistic? I think I’m nuts. But it’s nice to have a crush, even if it’s on an imaginary person.