EricaO

This is my new Lunchtime Reading book. I haven't read a book at lunch for a really long time. However, I'm feeling uncomfortable in my body lately and since I don't really do diets or exercise, I'm going to kill my appetite by reading horrifying books during my main eating times.
Because, dude, this thing is going to give me nightmares. It starts out with a dirty foot being tongue washed.
I hate feet. Here's a total aside that sort of relates: I remember riding the bus home from middle school one afternoon. We'd just stopped at the high school to pick up those kids and a discussion on the grosses part of the body started. Some fellow (but younger) middle schooler piped up that the butt was the ugliest part of the body, which got a huge laugh and some mockery from the big kids. When it was my turn to give input, I said, "Feet." Everyone looked at me like I had said something so unrelated to the topic at hand that maybe I should go sit up in the front. Obviously, feet have grossed me out for a really long time. I handle it much better now than I did in my youth, but still. No. Feet. Ugh. Not my friends.

That's why the first chapter caught me, like a train catches a cow on the tracks. It ran me over instead of throwing me aside, though.
I had to skim a lot of this book when I cataloged it because, at the time, there wasn't much info to be found regarding the contents. When I was done, I had a general idea of the plot and it's one that intrigues me - a female teacher having sex and probably even being in (some form of) love with her really young student - because I can't wrap my mind around it. But it was the first chapter in which this scrawny eleven-year-old is tied to a bed in a motel and the adult in there with him washes his feet in order to earn the kid's trust (yeah, crazy. That's kind of the point) and realizes the way to show the kid full-on trustworthiness to to LICK THE DIRTY FOOT CLEAN?? Dude, have you ever seen/smelled a boychild's foot? Unsanitary! Horrific! The rank smell is even mentioned and yet...ugh. Ok. To quote the tribe of vapid white girls, "I can't even."

And that is why I am reading this book during my lunch breaks. I don't know if I'm going to make it through in tact but kudos to me for jumping way outside my psychological comfort zone. And probably losing about ten pounds as I starve to death every day.