Confession: I love
bad boys. When I was ten years old, a mom
and her two teenage sons moved into the second floor apartment of the house
next door. The boys were too old to hang out with the kids on the block, so we
never really got to know them, only saw them coming and going.
The brothers had epic yelling matches that would sometimes
end up turning physical on their front lawn.
There were also riffs between mother and sons, which would inevitably end
up with one of boys barreling out of the house, cursing. The younger of the two
brothers had unruly brown hair, wore a leather jacket and walked with what I
can only describe as a determined swagger whenever he left the house.
I was smitten.
I don’t know why. Maybe
because he was so different from my parochial school, peanut-butter-and-jelly life. Maybe I wondered what it was that troubled
him so much. Maybe I just liked the way he looked. Whatever the reason, any
time I could steal a glance at this striking, jean clad, teenage creature as he
sauntered up the street…I would. Where
was he going? Who did he hang out
with? Why did he fight so much?
One night his mom fell asleep with a cigarette in her hand,
igniting the bed. The gossip in the neighborhood was
that she’d been drunk at the time. They
left the burnt, powder blue mattress by the curb on garbage day. Shortly after, they moved out. My ten-year-old heart still wonders from time
to time what became of him.
I got another dose of bad boys in Freshman Lit when we read
S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, which is
pretty much a bad-boy-a-palooza. Oh, and
the movie. Matt Dillon as Dallas Winston? Hot. A police record a mile long. Loyal to his
friends. And that pout? When Cherry said “I could fall in love with
him” – Yep, I totally understood.
So it may come as a surprise to some readers that I don’t think of Grayson Barrett as a bad boy. I mean, he is, sort of – but I don’t like to pigeonhole him like that. When I was workshopping The Promise of Amazing with my critique group, I remember some of the first critiques kept mentioning ‘bad boy’ Grayson. And all I could think was “Don’t label him.” A hurt boy. A misguided boy. A boy who doesn’t think before he acts sometimes, but not all bad.
I adore Grayson. He’s
unlike any character I’ve ever written. He’s
a colossal jerk at times, but he knows it. More than once, it felt like I was writing
myself into a corner with his actions but it was always fun figuring a way
out. What I love most about Grayson is
his humanness - his love for his
father, his desire to be a better person, his ability to go after and fight for
what he wants and the fact he wears his heart on his sleeve when it comes to
Wren. Those attributes don’t sound bad to me at all.
Why are we so quick to judge someone? The truth is all of us have the capacity to be
both good and bad. That bad boy neighbor
of mine? I suspect he really wasn’t that
bad. The burnt mattress at the curb must have humiliated him, maybe his family
as well. What if when he left his house
he was heading to the library or a movie and not to the bay to drink with his
friends as I had suspected? And even if
he had been drinking at the bay…does it make him a bad person?
No. It makes him
human.
The allure of a bad boy is undeniable. Bad boys are flawed, sure. That alone makes them interesting, different.
Bad boys live out loud and who doesn’t
want to do that, at least some of the time?
What better place than in the safety of a fictional word can you get a
dose of bad boy, without it really disrupting your life? If someone can be so…bad…isn’t there a chance that at the heart of it, there is some
good? That what it comes down to is that
they are passionate about life, even if at times that passion is misdirected?
These are the reasons why I think the bad boy trope
continues to be popular, but most of all?
When a bad boy smiles…oh, hot damn, there’s nothing like it.
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