Was This Creepy?

I was at the library today, where I happened to meet my friend H., who is my main reading buddy. We ended up by the YA stack (notice I said stack not stacks) so she could pick up Octavian Nothing, and then I got her to take American Born Chinese. She's a substitute teacher at an intermediate school and is hoping that walking into class with a graphic novel will make her cool.

So we're chatting away about this and about that and the subject of the Stephanie Meyer vampire books comes up because I'm still dwelling on it, okay? When this young woman, maybe somewhere between 15 and 17 years old, comes around the stack holding New Moon and starts talking about how much she loved Twilight. She'd already read New Moon because she ended up reading that first and going back to Twilight and she was hoping to find Eclipse, which wasn't there, though it wasn't my fault because I returned it last week.

So, I didn't talk her ear off about how Eclipse offended my feminist sensibilities because I'm not stupid. No adult woman-of-a-certain-age says something like that to a teenager unless she wants to be thought a pathetic old fool. I can get that from young people I'm related to, I don't need to go looking for it from strangers. So I just said that I found Bella too dependent in Eclipse, but that I loved Twilight, too.

So, then, I say to my friend, H., "This book is so hot, so erotic, but nobody actually has sex."

Teenage Girl says, "They can't."

Friend H. says:, "Because it's YA?"

I laugh and say, "Oh, no. YA is full of sex. No, they couldn't have sex because he was afraid that if they did, he would kill her."

So then I tell Teenage Girl that I'd been to the author's website and that two more books are planned for the series. She was ecstatic. I told her I'd heard a rumor that Meyer might write the next book from Edward's point of view. (Actually, I heard her say it in an interview.) She said, "That would be so awesome."

Friend H. says something like, "Don't get your hopes up. My favorite author just died before he could finish his series."

I assured Teenage Girl that Stephanie Meyer is very young.

At the time, I was feeling all excited to be able to talk about a book I liked with someone else who also liked it and thinking that maybe I should just hang out by the YA stack more often. But a few hours later, I started thinking about how I'd been in the library talking to a young person I had never seen before about an erotic book, which is a bit like talking to her about sex. Yikes! "Hey, Mom! The town children's author was talking to me about sex at the library!" (My computer guy came up with that line. He got the seedy implications of this story right away. Computer guys do that.)

On top of that, that teenage girl has probably read a lot hotter books and is thinking I'm a pathetic old fool even though I didn't let slip the feminist bit.

Oh, well. I've survived worse encounters.