Chapter Two
The problem with teaching seventh graders The Outsiders was that they were exactly the right age to read it and exactly the wrong age to know why it mattered. Marco had taught it three years running and every September he watched the same thing happen: thirty kids picked up a fifty-year-old book about teenagers who felt like nobody understood them, and felt, privately, that nobody understood them either, and somehow the two feelings never quite touched.
He'd tried everything. The historical context unit. The socioeconomic lens. The character-mapping exercise that his department head loved and his students endured with the patience of people waiting for a bus that was definitely coming, probably, eventually.
Nothing landed the way he wanted it to. He knew the book worked — he'd read it himself at thirteen and it had briefly rearranged something in his chest — but he couldn't find the door back in.
So at eleven-fifteen on a Tuesday night, sitting at his kitchen table with a pile of ungraded dialectical journals and a bowl of cereal he'd been meaning to eat for forty minutes, he typed outsiders ponyboy why it still matters into YouTube and hit enter.
The third result was a video called "Books That Were Written Specifically To Ruin You (A List)" from a channel called dog-eared. The thumbnail was just a stack of paperbacks and a hand — no face. Twelve thousand views. He clicked it because he was tired and it was either that or grade another journal where a student had written I think Ponyboy is relatable because he has problems and he could not do that yet.
The video was twenty-two minutes long. He watched all of it.
She didn't talk about The Outsiders the way a teacher would. She talked about it the way someone talks about a thing that happened to them — present tense, a little indignant, like the book had done something to her without asking permission and she was still deciding whether to forgive it. She said: "The whole book is about the moment right before you understand that the world isn't going to accommodate your feelings, and Hinton wrote it when she was sixteen, which means she was writing it from inside that moment, which is insane if you think about it, so don't think about it."
Marco thought about it for the rest of the week.
He used it in class on Thursday. Not quoted — he didn't know how to explain where it came from — just the idea, reworked into his own words: she wrote this from inside the feeling. A girl in the third row named Destiny put her pencil down and said "oh" very quietly, like something had just been confirmed. Two rows back, a kid named Trevor who had not visibly engaged with anything since August reread the first chapter that night. Marco found this out later, from Trevor's mother, at conferences.
He subscribed to dog-eared that Thursday. He watched seven more videos over the following two weeks, in the way you do when you find something good and want to ration it but keep failing to.
The Metcha link was in her channel description. He'd noticed it but hadn't thought much about it until the night he finished her video on A Fine and Private Place and felt — not lonely exactly, but aware of the specific silence of his apartment in a way he usually managed not to be — and clicked it without entirely meaning to.
Four ninety-nine. He stared at it for longer than a reasonable person would stare at four dollars and ninety-nine cents. It wasn't the money. It was the category of thing it was — the purchasing of access to a person, the formalizing of what had been, until now, a perfectly comfortable one-way relationship. He watched her videos. She did not know he existed. That was a clean arrangement.
He bought the ticket.
He told himself it was research. He was an English teacher. Understanding how people talked about books in new formats was professionally relevant. He was practically required to do this.
He did not examine this reasoning very closely.