Back in the general vicinity of the mid to late 1970s there was a young adults / juvenile fiction book… I was under the vague impression that it was one of Paul Zindel’s offerings but Google isn’t bringing me any joy in that direction so probably not. Anyway, here’s what I recall of the plot:
Popular easy-going jock type guy is one main character and 1st person narrator of the book. He has a regular girlfriend, who is 2nd main character. A new guy transfers into the school, I think? and is kind of alternative and nowadays would probably be described as emo or goth, bit of a dark & moody streak about how he comes across… anyway he starts…some kind of periodical, and unless the gears in my head are badly stripped the name of this periodical was Remote. He is 3rd main character.
And Remote had (or maybe simply consisted OF) some weird esoteric personal ads. This being a juvenile fiction about characters who were themselves in high school, no R or X rated content but … OK here are a couple of the best reconstructions I can come up with to try to capture the general sense of the weird personal ads, but ONLY the general sense because I don’t remember any actual content:
• I will be sitting alone at the café reading a book. You will approach wordlessly and toss a rose onto the tabletop. You will take a seat then begin whispering in my ear. You will say crude and offensive things to me until I begin to cry, shedding a single tear, at which point you will rise and leave. We will never speak or meet again.
• I want someone to creep up behind me in the library and put her hands over my eyes and make me guess your name.
• I’d like to meet a guy wearing an English pea coat who will take me out dancing on the deserted docks down by the wharf and sing old wartime songs. We will kiss for an hour then go home.
OK, then this one which gets posted by the jock’s girlfriend, even though the jock has sort of made fun of emo boy and his weird periodical; in this one case, at least the part about the mind-reading was actually part of the content of her ad:
• I will know when my secret lover writes to me because he will be able to read my mind. He will write “larkspur” to me at my PO box and by that I will know that he is the one for me and I will go out with him on a wonderful date.
(I don’t recall if the magic word was larkspur or rosebud or pansy or squashblossom; but that’s the general ilk of her ad).
So emo boy cheats, because it’s his periodical and he writes something to her akin to:
• Larkspur! Larkspur! Larkspur! It’s me, emo guy, and of course I’m cheating but I had to write to you, I’ve always wanted to be with you.
So she goes out with them, and soon the two of them are an item and she’s no longer going out with jock boy. Jock boy gets all philosophical and meditative and by the end of the book is commenting, as narrator of the book, that his world-view has come to resemble that of emo boy or at least the attitudes and perspectives that emo boy claimed to have when he arrived at the school; whereas emo boy has become all mainstream and etc now that he has a regular girlfriend.