When Teddy had experienced his first heartbreak at seventeen, after Brittany Bauer had turned down his invitation to prom, he’d done what any sensitive, intellectual boy would have done: plundered his mother’s first-edition poetry collection, glommed on to Yeats and Byron, and sulked about the house being wretchedly maudlin and cynical for an entire summer. Thankfully, his mother had discovered his hoard of misanthropic literature and put a stop to his otherwise-inevitable slide into insufferable self-absorption that all too often terminated in late-stage virginity, prosaic misogyny, and
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