A story

In seventh grade, a young Canadian had just moved back to a soccer mom community on the East Coast after spending three years gallivanting about a sheep and cheese farming island off the Northern coast of The Netherlands. Like all pubescent tragedies, this one story wasn’t pretty. It was filled with realizations for our dear hero – realizations like, dutch accents are not considered cool when everyone else is trying to look, act and sound the same. And having a tremendous fondness for the Spice Girls and knowing each of their full names and style influences is not something a thirteen-year-old boy should boast about.

Remember, this was a pre-Gaga world.

After seven months or so of slowly learning just how uncool he was – actually, let’s take this shit into first person because eventually I’m going to screw it up and everyone will be confused even though you all knew that I was talking about me this whole time and were just being polite – I stumbled across my way in. You know…’IN’. Like, people-might-not-spend-all-day-circling-me-like-a-pack-of-vulture-hyena-crossbreeds-with-a-tremendous-vocabulary-when-it-came-to-synonyms-for-gay, ‘IN’.

I started writing.

It wasn’t anything special, groundbreaking, or creative. It was hand-scrawled across loose leaf pages that would get more and more crinkled as they were passed around the class while we all tried to avoid learning anything related to Canadian railroad or fur trappers. They may have aged faster than Lindsay Lohan, but those pages? They were my coup.

It was a simple story about mobsters set in the twenties with questionable historical accuracy. There were killings, betrayals, sex (or at least what I thought sex was which basically boiled down to steamed up windows and eggs in the morning), and way too many clichés. Each chapter would be about six pages, front and back, and would end on cliffhangers worthy of a Goosebumps paperback about a killer picture frame.

But with each of the characters modeled and named after one of the cool kids? You’d think I had recast the Bible with Leonardo DiCaprio circa Titanic and Mariah Carey circa the Heartbreaker remix.

And all of a sudden, things were different. They’d be tripping over themselves to make sure they wouldn’t get killed off in the next chapter as I wrote it in health class, or dropping hints to make their next love interest in the story would be their real life crushes. It was superficial and it faded once the story stopped, but even when the pages stopped turning and I could finally start feeling my fingers again, I was still slightly better off on the social ladder than I was before and it felt pretty good.

And I really don’t think I’ve really ever given it a tremendous amount of thought until just now.