Becoming the Story

by L. E. Henderson

cookies on the coffee table. He glanced at the cookies mildly. “What is the occasion?” he said.

  She told him she had made the cookies for him. She told him thank you for the puppy he had once bought her and how she was sorry she had never thanked him more, and asked if there was anything she could do to make him feel better.

  His eyes seemed to soften as he stared at her, but all of the sudden, his face became mask-like until he grimaced. “That dog I got you, it was a mutt. No need to thank me, the damn dog was free. In fact, the guy who gave it practically made me take the damn thing. I figured it would be my dog, but what do you know? You took him over. Just like you and your selfish mother have always done. Nothing in this godforsaken house has ever been mine.”

  She did not know what to say to that. A lump formed in the back of her eyes and moisture clouded her eyes. She picked up the tray and offered it to him. “I made these for you,” she said in a tremulous voice.

  “Cookies?” he said. “You think what I need is cookies? Little girl, if you want to help me, bring me a beer. In fact, bring me the whole damn carton. Cookies. Shit. They look like organ meat.”

  The words might as well have been a physical blow. She felt like she had been knocked off a precipice. She lost her grip on the tray. It fell on the wooden floor with a clatter. She stared at it in alarm for a moment, then ran from the room and through the front door and into the darkness, where her body shook with the sobs that broke from her. Who knew how long she stayed there?

  She heard a rustling and a chirp, and she looked around. Nestled into one of the cracks in the brick wall of the carport was a baby bird, just a ball of blue feathers really, with tiny searching eyes.

  She stared at the bird for a long time and listened to its little cheeps. After a point the tears stopped coming, and she became painfully sober. She stood, took a deep breath, and went back into the house and into her bedroom where her desk was.

  She had planned to write the whole exchange with a new ending. She wanted to replace reality with a happy ending, but she found that she could not. The notebook paper blurred as she took up her pen. She had to write something, so instead, she wrote about the baby bird.

  She pretended she was the baby bird and it told its story of how it had come to be in a darkened carport with a crying girl.

  She knew that one day she would have to write the story about the exchange with her father but she could not do it now. The pain of rejection was too fresh. And she did not know how to make the story end.

  Her story endings simply could not always match reality. They could not predict it. They existed in their own bubble. And sometimes, that had to be enough.

  She entered high school and noticed that boys did not glower at her anymore, and even if they never asked her out, she thought she had made progress.

  In high school, though, a boy did ask her out. It was shocking. What was he thinking? The boy was good-looking, and she did not think she was in his league. The ordeal caused her so much anxiety, she said no to him. He was taken aback, as if no one had ever said that word to him before.

  He continued to stare at her in the classes she shared with him, with a look of longing that baffled her. A week later, the bullying began. A former girlfriend of his began to taunt her and say things like, “Do you think you are too good for him? What are you, some kind of tease?”

  She did not know what to say to that, so she said nothing. Soon afterward, rumors began to spread that she was having sex with him and that she was a tease and a slut. Books were knocked from her hand as she walked down the hall. Fake blood was smeared on her locker.

  And even the boy who had asked her out participated in the taunting. Afterward she went to her locker to get her books for the next class. The words “ugly bitch” were scrawled on her locker. She got through her classes the best she could, and luckily no one ever assaulted her.

  But real damage had been done. She had endured a lifetime of rejections. She did not think she could take one more. She even felt guilty for rejecting the boy who had liked her. Who was she to say no to him?

  For the first time, she wished she had never been born. She wanted to die. Instead, she went to her room and wrote a story.

  She wrote a story about an unattractive girl who had “come along” and gotten bullied and was called an ugly bitch, so the girl swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills and died and had a small funeral. Not even her father was there. She reread the story. Once. Twice. Three times.

  She did not like the story. She tore it up and wrote another. Like the first, it was about a girl who had been bullied. The girl was hurt and considered overdosing, but she changed her mind. She remembered legions of bullied kids she had grown up with, others like her who had been teased and ridiculed.

  She had always been afraid to talk to them for fear the more popular kids would like her even less. But her alter ego “Margie” in the story decided that the fear had been silly, so Margie befriended others who were bullied and tried to make them feel better.

  The story character Margie made it through the persecution to graduate from high school and became an acclaimed writer and everyone who had ever hurt her was ashamed because of her glowing success. And after the graduation, she and her bullied friends all went to dinner to celebrate and they all ate ice cream for dessert.

  Maggie liked that story. So left her pen and paper on the desk. In the following months she reached out to everyone she saw who was bullied and compared experiences. They were all unhappy and she tried to encourage them and told them it was not their fault. Sometimes they listened.

  She was able to endure the bullying better because she felt obligated to take the advice she had given them. She told herself the encouraging words she said to them: It is not your fault.

  That was hard for even her to remember sometimes: It is not my fault. At school she put on a brave face. She thought she had to because the bullied kids were now looking to her for morale and guidance.

  But as soon as she got home, she would drop her book bag on the kitchen floor and head to her room. There she would lean against the wall while taking short quick breaths and let herself slide to the floor where she muffled sobs into her palms until her fit of emotion had run its course. Then she would rise, make herself a sandwich, and write.

  Maggie decided to apply her insights to writing. Her fictional character Margie weathered her abuse although, when alone, sometimes she cried. At school she bore the abuse with as much dignity as she could. She graduated and afterward, she turned all of her attention to becoming a writer.

  Maggie liked that idea, about becoming a writer.

  After Maggie graduated, she wrote story after story and sent them off to publishers. She would wait with happy anticipation, until one by one, her stories came back to her with form rejection slips that said, “Not what we are looking for,” or “It is not right for us,” or “it does not fit our editorial style.”

  All her life she had heard that writers got rejected. But experiencing rejections from faceless industry experts was a different matter entirely. They hurt. She had always gotten effusive praise for her writing in school.

  But the guardians of the publishing world were playing a different game than the one she was used to. Some of the rejections were caustic: “self-indulgent” or “trite” or “tedious.”

  She read magazines with titles like “Current Marketing Trends” or “What Publishers Like,” or “Ten Ways to Impress an Agent.” She followed their advice and looked at the magazines to discover the editorial styles of the publications in order to mimic them as much as she could.

  She tried writing about topics from a list of “What Publishers are Looking For” or “What is Trending This Year.” Many of the suggested topics bored her, but she tried writing about them anyway, because writing what she wanted to write was considered “self-indulgent.”

  She became blocked. She could not write anything anymore without thinking “self-indulgent,” “trite” or “
dull.” The power that she had used to understand and change her life had abandoned her.

  Writing was no longer a way to cope; instead, it was painful. She had never in her life felt so helpless. Being unable to write was worse than being bullied; worse that being accused of having come along, worse than being glowered at, because she had no defense against them now.

  For many months she went through life in a daze. She had experienced so much rejection in her life, but she could not get over being rejected by writing, her one power and the thing she loved most in the world.

  For the first time since she had discovered the power of writing, she had no story. She could taste her meals and do her chores and read. But her activities had no context. It was like the world had broken into tiny pieces that had no association with each other anymore.

  She had wanted so much to make a living writing, to be an “official writer,” but the stories she had to tell were not the stories the publishers wanted to hear. She felt silenced.

  She saw herself as living in a fragmented world with skewed lines and disorder and uncertainty. It was intolerable.

  She picked up a pen again and wrote. They were scrawls at first, nothing special, just marks. She looked at them, and they seemed as broken, as fragmented as her life had become. Where had the power gone?

  She wrote every day, even though it hurt