My Speculative Origin Story

For me, it all started with an invisible line.

    As a kid, I was acutely aware of invisible things. By day, I defended my backyard from them in pitched battles. By night, I trapped them inside my closet by blocking the door with a mushroom-shaped ottoman. I never noticed the line. It was a different kind of invisible.

   The line, which divided my street neatly down the middle, marked the extreme edge of the school district. All of my friends lived on the other side of it. When we graduated from our elementary school, they all went to one school. I went to a much different one.

    My elementary was nestled in the heart of middle class suburbia. The students there wore clothes from places like Dillard’s and Macy’s. Only two kids in my entire grade had qualified for reduced lunch. Everyone felt sorry for them.

    My new school was a different paradigm. One of the buildings, a two story concrete corpse in the middle of campus, was condemned and boarded up. Most of the students ate lunch for free. There were three carjackings within a four block radius during my first nine weeks. 
    I stood out like a bull’s eye. On my third day there, I got into my fist real fight. Years before, my father, a retired career military man, prepared me for this eventually with a bit of sage advice. “Swing first and put everything you’ve got behind that punch,” he said. “If the other guy’s still standing after that, you’re screwed*.” Turns out, he was right.

    I came home with two black eyes, a bloody nose, and a split lip. I also got suspended for fighting. Two days later, I went back to school and experienced another first. I’d never heard the phrase “being jumped” before. Turns out, it sucks. The four boys that jumped me were suspended and, in according with the school’s policy on fighting, so was I. Again.

    Upon returning from my second suspension in as many weeks, I found myself in something of a precarious situation. I had no friends, and the chest-thumping coalition had marked me as persona non grata, or as they called it, “get him!” With the constant threat of being jumped (and suspended) looming over me, I started looking for someplace to go--someplace where I wouldn’t be found.

    Ms. Care, the school librarian, was a perfect storm of apropos attributes--the kind of person you simply cannot use in fiction lest you face that most scathing pejorative “cliché”. She was mousey and ancient. She wore bifocals, of course, with a little chain that ran from one earpiece to the other so that she could wear her glasses as a necklace if she so chose. As a finishing touch, a medical condition physically prevented her from speaking in anything more than a raspy whisper.

    Her lunch break coincided with mine, which meant that the library was closed at that time every day. Ms. Care locked the doors, and passed the time behind her desk, reading new books and eating unidentifiable things from Tupperware containers. I knocked on her door, and to my surprise, she let me in with no questions asked. She did it again the next day. And the next.

    By the third or fourth day, with nothing better to do, I resorted to reading. The library had two floors. The first was dominated by nonfiction, so that’s where I began--with books that had titles like “Gunmen of the American West”, “Great Battles of the Civil War”, and “The Life of a Medieval Knight”. A week or so passed this way. Ms. Care would let me in, lock the door behind me, and then return to her lunch, never once inquiring about my purpose. For my part, I spent the time learning a lot about nothing in particular.

    One dreary afternoon, Ms. Care deviated from the script. “Would you mind putting these books where they go for me?” she asked, gesturing toward a small, perfectly stacked pile of books on the returns table. I was delighted. It was a chance to repay her kindness. “These go on the second floor,” she rasped. I collected the books, all small hardbacks, and set about my task.

     I thought I was doing a favor for Ms. Care. Ah, but she was a clever one. In her quiet, unassuming way, this was just another example of her helping me. You see, the second floor was where fiction lived, and every book she gave me belonged in the science fiction and fantasy section. I went up the stairs with about a dozen books. I came back down with three.

     One was by Isaac Asimov. The other two featured dragons prominently on their covers. Ms. Care smiled in her gentle way, and stamped them with their new due dates. I returned all three the next day and promptly checked out replacements. This became my habit, and every day Ms. Care would smile and give me few stacks of books, always science fiction and fantasy, to put back on the shelves.

     Eventually, the resident ruffians forgot about me. I can’t really say when it happened. I wasn’t paying attention. There were new worlds to discover, arcane beasts to confront, and the occasional damsel (or planet) to rescue. One again, I was immersed in a world of invisible things.

     Time went on, and Ms. Care began openly recommending books. I unfailingly read them. Rather than eating her lunch in peace and quiet, she would invite me to join her at her desk to discuss my impressions of her suggested readings. We spoke of things like magic and plotlines. She never once spoke down to me.

    When boxes of new books would arrive, there were always a couple of works that seemed almost deliberately chosen to pique my interest. In retrospect, I’m sure that they were. Ms. Care would let me open the boxes, watching me like a parent on Christmas morning. That was how I discovered Rose Estes. She wrote delightfully gimmicky books commonly known as “choose your own adventure”.

    For the uninitiated, these books allowed the reader to direct the story by choosing which page to read next. Will you fight the dragon? If so, turn to page 12. Want to run for your life, instead? Turn to page 45. Ms. Care had purchased three of Rose’s books--The Pillars of Pentegarn, Dragon of Doom, and Mountain of Mirrors. I spent the rest of that day exploring fallen empires, battling frost giants, and bargaining with a dragon to save the world. It was glorious.

     No, it was more than glorious.

     It was inspiring.

     The idea of participating in a story, of deciding what happens next, led me to a new frontier. The blank page. When I’d filled a dozen of them with the beginning of my first story--the tale of a knight commanded by a mad king to singlehandedly rid the realm of dragons--Ms. Care was the first person to read it. I sat nervously across the desk from her as she read, struggling to obey her single commandment--“Don’t say anything until I’m finished.”

    “Well?” I asked the moment she sat the last page down.

    My grasp of grammatical conventions was poor, and my spelling and penmanship were worse. In short, my writing was a red pen’s dream. Despite that, Ms. Care looked up thoughtfully and asked, “This is good, but how will you maintain the action in the next part?”

    “More dragons!” I replied. And that’s exactly how I did it, too.

    When I returned from the summer break, Ms. Care was gone. I would later be told that her throat condition had been some kind of cancer.  About a month before the semester started, Ms. Care had crossed another kind of invisible line.

    But thanks to her, I remain acutely aware of invisible things, so I can still see her. She’s on every page I fill with words.

* "Screwed" wasn't precisely the word he used, but I think I've conveyed the spirit of it.