It was Conrad who caught Jill’s attention. She’d pop in on her then-9-year-old daughter while she was watching the first season of Jenny Han’s YA coming-of-age romance, The Summer I Turned Pretty, just to make sure it was age-appropriate. Her daughter couldn’t get enough of the chaos of Isabel “Belly” Conklin, caught in a love triangle with the two blonde Fisher brothers, and was staunchly Team Jeremiah. But even in passing, Jill, who was 44 and had only dated women for almost a decade, immediately recognized Conrad as the real heartthrob, evocative of all the heartthrobs before him. He was Leonardo DiCaprio gazing through his bangs at Kate Winslet; he was somehow, though the show’s plot didn’t really call for him to repair a roof, Ryan Gosling, hammering shingles in The Notebook. Week by week, a slow burn building in episode snippets, she found herself falling for him. By the time the third and final season premiered, Jill had become a regular viewer, and she now freely admits that her heart actually thumped when Conrad lifted his shirt to ever-so-gently wipe a dribble of peach juice off Belly’s chin in a sun-dappled field.
“It was really confusing at first. I’m fucking gay,” she says. “I will never date a man in real life again, but Conrad Fisher can get it anytime.” She didn’t necessarily really want Conrad, she corrected herself (though Christopher Briney is hot), but as she watched, she started feeling what the characters felt: that intense longing for something or someone you can’t have, the perpetual reaching. She remembered what it was like when you couldn’t capture what you wanted and so you soaked in every close approximation — ruminating, daydreaming, cataloguing every minor interaction as some small, sustaining substitute for the object of your desire.
