Humiliating Throwback Thursday #5: If the Slipper Fits

Happy Thursday! Sorry for the late post, guys. It's going up late because I'm not at home today, which means I don't have access to my usual desktop treasure trove of ancient humiliation.

But never fear! My wonderful mom, it turns out, has access to even more hilariously bad writing that I had completely forgotten about.

Sadly, GoogleDocs cannot, as I had previously believed, open .cwk files (that's an extension made by an old Mac program called "Appleworks," for you very young or very PC-oriented readers), so my choices were limited to the one story that was in .doc format.

But it's a doozy.

This project was my baby for a long time. The completed book clocks in at just under 50,000 words. It's a tale of portals and princesses, pet rats and dragons, normal teenage life and... falling in love with your cousin. And almost marrying your brother.

It's not as weird as it sounds.

It's weirder.

Anyway, I wrote it 10 years ago, so don't judge me.

You cannot imagine my surprise and delight when I googled "rat dragon" and there was actual art of that.

This story has not seen the light of day since just after I finished it. I eagerly had a few friends read it... and their marked lack of impressed swooning kind of made me hate the book, and writing in general, and myself.

But now you, gentle reader, can benefit from my youthful folly. So please, enjoy this, the unedited and unfiltered first chapter of a novel called "If the Slipper Fits." (Pay particular notice, if you will, to the excruciating metaphor in the first sentence, the heavyhanded foreshadowing, and the transparent projection of my own high school anxieties onto my character.)

Chapter One  

Ordinary Day

The second hand ticked as slowly as a snail slithering through a peanut butter and jello smoothie. Impatiently, I tapped my pencil on my notebook, waiting for three thirty. I saw Mr. Allbert give me a dirty look, but I didn’t care. All I wanted was to be gone. It was time for this day to be over.  Not that school was that bad- I just hated feeling so… invisible. So ordinary. Mediocrity can really wear on a girl.

I never really saw myself as being an important kind of person.

If my life was in a book, I’d be the friend, or the girl the main character gets homework from. Not the heroine. Or if I was, it wouldn’t be in any kind of exciting story. Just one of those books about people’s lives that you read and then you feel like… so what? Why would I care about somebody else’s drama? Or, in my case, lack thereof.

The bell rang. Gratefully I gathered up my books like a tornado was coming. Of course, if a tornado had been coming I would have happily left them behind. I mean, what a great excuse! I’m sorry, Mrs. McWowski, a tornado ate my essay.

I ran outside, but, as usual, I had missed the bus. I started trudging for home. A day like every single other pointless day, I bemoaned to myself. And that, dear children, is called irony. Because this day was going to end very differently than it had begun.

But I am obviously getting ahead of myself. It’s called foreshadowing, you know, but there’s such a thing as overkill. I think the best course of action at this moment is to start right smack dab in the middle.

Once upon a time, there was a girl. She was seventeen at that particular moment, and her name was Ellen Donovan for most particular moments, and that girl was, and is (sort of), me.

“Ellie, is that you?” a voice called as I slammed the door. “Yeah, Mom.” I sighed and slapped my backpack down on the counter. “Well, get in here! You’re missing it!” I snagged a half empty carton of goldfish crackers from the counter and followed her voice into the living room. “What’s going on with ChadBradScott this week?” I leaned against the back of the couch and watched the screen over Mom’s head. She’s not really my mom. She’s my step mom, but since she raised me since I was like 18 months old, it doesn’t seem fitting to call her Lynne. I’ve just always called her Mom. She may not have given birth to me, but she was the one who kissed my scrapes, fixed me chicken noodle soup when I was sick, and attended my parent teacher conferences. And in my opinion, that makes her much more my real mom than the woman who happened to shoot me out of her womb.

Mom has some really weird habits… like she’s obsessed with this low budget soap called Caliente Canyon, which was what she was watching at the moment. I could never keep all the main characters straight no matter how many times she painstakingly explained the plot to me, so I called all the guys ChadBradScott and all the girls MonicaVeronica.

“Oh, Roger just proposed to Mimi!” Mom was sighing with the heady romance of it all. “Roger?” I squinted at the face on the screen. “Wait, I thought he got eaten by sharks off the coast of Puerto Rico during his mission trip.”

“Well, yes, so did Mimi! But he was actually rescued, and then kidnapped by the merchant marines. But he fought his way back over the ocean to win Mimi back!” Mom was actually tearing up.

“Mom, no offense, but you need to get out more.” I rolled my eyes. She waved me off, obviously intent on Mimi’s tearful confession- probably that she’d slept with half the cast.

My dad died six years ago, when I was eleven. Since then, Mom hasn’t shown even the slightest interest in dating again. I guess she was a one-love type of person. But still, I don’t think it’s healthy for her. Dad was some corporate bigwig, and he had hefty life insurance, so we are plenty fine for money. So she doesn’t work. Doesn’t date. Doesn’t exit the house, except to make a grocery run once a week. Her whole life is her book club, and us. “Us” being my two sisters and me. Well, they’re my half sisters, actually. Oh, and occasionally Randy. I mean, HE’S not my sister. His name isn’t even really Randy. I just call him that since I found out what it means in England. His real name is Nathan and he’s my cousin and, sadly, my best friend. Besides Rouslin, that is, but he’s a different story.

I used to call Randy Nate, but when we hit about twelve he started making really shallow, immature comments about girls. He was always noticing their butts and their bosoms and saying which ones he’d like to “take home” (as if he even knew what that MEANT at 12) so I started calling him Randy. It kind of stuck. Anyway, Nathan the Randy is my father’s sister’s son. My father’s sister is, shall we say, a shock chamber short of her very own mental institution. She is not what you might call “stable”. So whenever she has a particularly heinous boyfriend, or runs away to join a cult or whatever, Randy stays with us. For a kid with such a messed up background, he’s surprisingly well adjusted and… normal. I blame that on Mom. Sometimes Randy is exactly like a brother. Other times… not so much. 

Of course, those are the facts as I knew them that day. Little did I know.

I retrieved my backpack from the counter and lugged it up the stairs, then down the hall to my room, munching goldfish as I went. “Hey ugly!” Brianna, who was twelve, yelled from her room across the hall. Being the mature young lady that I am, I yelled back “Hay is for horses, smelly!” and slammed my door. “Hey, Rou.” I kicked my backpack under my desk and opened the door of my rat’s cage. He sniffed me with mild curiosity and quickly began sniffing around for the goldfish cracker. “Fine, be a pig.” I put him back in the cage with a couple of crackers.

Rouslin was my best friend, as I mentioned earlier. He was also kind of like my baby. A couple of years ago Randy had a snake, which I thought was pretty cool. It was all slippery and I thought its tongue was awesome. It was pretty small when he got it, and ate stuff like crickets. But when it got bigger, it had to start eating mice, then rats. I was over there the day Randy was going to feed this baby rat to the snake, and, being the freakish sensitive type I am, I got pretty emotional about it. Randy tried to calm me down, telling me that since the baby had been taken away from its mother and handled by humans it was going to die anyway, but I was positive that with the right care, that rat would make it. I guess I exasperated him so much that he gave up and gave me the rat, probably just to see me fail to keep it alive. Anyway, he sold the snake the next week. HE says it was getting too expensive, but personally I think he didn’t like feeding cute rodents to that thing any more than I did.

I spent all night that night on the Internet, researching how to care for a baby rat. And I was up pretty much every night after that, feeding the squirmy thing with a syringe and massaging him with a q-tip to stimulate his digestion. I remember, vaguely, when my sister Ashlinn was a baby eight years ago, and I do NOT recall her being that much work. But it was worth it. Two years later, Rou was a big, happy, and if I may say so, darned ungrateful pet. I called him Rou because, obviously, it was short for Rouslin. Plus, not so obviously, it was like my private joke because in The Princess Bride, which was one of my favorite books ever (even though all the girl really did was wait around to be rescued) in the Fireswamps, there were rodents of unusual size, called R.O.U.’S.

“Another essay, Rou. I think Mrs. McWowski is trying to kill me.” I could tell, behind Rou’s intent fascination with the goldfish he was devouring, that he was extremely sympathetic to my plight. “School was torture, thanks for asking.” I sighed, tapping a pencil on my notebook. I had been sitting there for half an hour, trying to brainstorm a thesis statement for this essay. “Why Mrs. McWowski deems it necessary that we devote our precious time to writing an essay about the sexual preferences of great authors, I’ll never know.”

I heard a thump behind me but didn’t turn around. “You need to get out more.” Randy snorted. “I can’t believe you still talk to that thing.”

“Last time I checked, the front door wasn’t broken, Randy.” I sighed, glancing up to see my cousin closing the window behind him. He prefers to shimmy up the oak tree outside my window than to come in by the more conventional method. Randy’s pretty tall, a little over six feet, with a fashion sense that runs to obscure band tees and converse. He used to be one of those really skinny, weedy guys, the type you can just tell spends too much time in front of the computer. Last year, though, he started bulking up and getting tons of attention from girls. I guess that just goes to show that guys aren’t the only shallow ones. There they were, going to school with a totally smart and funny guy since kindergarten, and they’d never given him the time of day. He hits the gym and BAM. They’re cooing and fluttering around like marshmallow covered moths.

Last year, as a way of dissuading the cooing females, he dyed his shoulder length, normally light brown, hair jet black with a white streak down the middle. It makes him look like he’s wearing a dead skunk on his head.

I know he’s my cousin, but objectively I’d say Randy is cute. Aside from the tallness and being sort of muscular now, he’s got really startling gray/green eyes and a very nice nose. I can’t count the times I’ve doodled him when he was totally engrossed in one book or another, and his nose is definitely my favorite feature. It’s long and straight and just extremely nose-ish. Today he was wearing his ridiculous hair like he usually did, pulled back in a loose ponytail. He never cut it anymore, so it had gotten long enough to fall over his shoulder when he leaned down and tapped on Rou’s cage. Rou, the loyal soul he is, naturally looked up, dropped his goldfish and ran towards Randy. “Why do you like HIM so much? He tried to feed you to a snake! Traitor.” I grumbled.

“She’s just jealous of our manly bond. Don’t listen to her.” Randy took Rou out and stuck him on his shoulder, where the rat happily settled down among stray black hairs. “So why do I have the honor of your presence today, dearest cousin?” I sighed, finally looking up from my blank notebook. “Ahh. You see, my mother has, at the moment, the pleasure of Rob’s company, so I thought I’d give them both, and myself, the pleasure of my absence.”

I nodded. Rob was the latest dating fiasco, a CEO with a great car, a couple million, and a lovely wife and two daughters. And a possible connection with the Mob, if Randy’s suspicions were correct. Which I was inclined to believe were NOT, but hey, I’ll take any reason I can get to hate Aunt Alice’s newest flings.  “So what are you currently slaving over?” Randy pointed to my notebook. “Oh, my English teacher’s newest torture device. An essay a week keeps your students too tired to speak.”

“Witty.” Randy stuffed his face with goldfish.

“I know, right? Can’t you see how much smarter high school’s making me?” I rolled my eyes.

“You only have like four more weeks.” Randy shrugged. Even though he’s the same age as I am, he graduated last year.

“Yeah, whatever. Then I can go to college and be as smart as you.” I stuck my tongue out.

“Shut up. College isn’t for everybody.” He said with his mouth full of goldfish, collapsing onto my bed.

“Oh, and working in a grocery store IS?”

My cousin, the child prodigy, who could do square roots in kindergarten, skipped a grade and made me have to work darn hard to keep from looking like a slacker, was now a bagger at our local Save-A-Lot. It was all knight themed, like Camelot, and he had to wear plastic armor and ask customers if they would like to be “escorted” to their “chariots”. Not exactly Ivy League. But Randy was used to me bugging him by now and he just ignored me. “So what are we doing tonight?” he asked, plopping his big dirty feet right on my bed. “I am slaving over an excruciating essay on whether or not Shakespeare was a homo. I have no clue what YOU are doing.” I turned back to my notebook, which inexplicably remained blank. I doodled a quick sketch of Randy’s profile to relive the painful blankness of the page. “Shakespeare’s work remains a classic portal into the human soul, regardless of his sexual preferences.” Randy flipped a goldfish into the air and caught it in his mouth. “Not even fair. I’ve been sitting here for 45 minutes agonizing over a thesis statement, and you just… BAM! By the way, I’m totally stealing that.”

“But that, my dear child, is plagiarism.”

“Can I just tell my teacher I’m genetically disadvantaged in the cerebral area?”

“I think just saying that sentence proves your cerebral area is fully functioning.”

“Aarrrgh. I hate English.”

“Bullcrap. You love English.”

“Okay, I hate essays. Specifically this essay. Who gives a crap if Shakespeare was gay? We’ll never know for sure, so why speculate? It’s so pointless. What difference does it make, anyway?” I pounded my head with the still blank notebook.

“Did we fail to inform you? Let me clarify. You, Ellie, are in high school. The purpose of which is NOT to educate, but to train you how to put up with ridiculous pointlessness. If you learn good BS, you’ve mastered high school.”

“Bitter much?”

“I’m serious! They make this huge stink like grades and the SATs really mean something. But take it from me, that stuff means nothing in the real world.”

“Why do you think I don’t try that hard?” I shrugged.

“The whole thing’s bogus, Ell. That’s why I couldn’t hack college, y’know? It’s like, more pointless hoop-jumping.”

“I know. But college is different.”

“Yeah, sure, if you have something you want to do, college is great. But I don’t know what I’m gonna do. So I might as well be earning money as wasting time in some useless class.”

“I get it.” I pulled my laptop out of my backpack and started typing.

All was quiet for the next hour or so as I wrote. I kind of forgot that Randy was even there. That’s one of the things I loved about him. He could just… be. He didn’t need to be entertained; he didn’t have to talk all the time. He was great at talking, but equally good at just being quiet. I guess he was like me: if nothing’s going on, I just kind of go into my head. Trust me, there’s enough stuff in there to keep me entertained and/ or shocked for hours.

By the time I hit save and again became aware of the world outside my word-editing program, it was dark. Randy was flipping through one of my comic books, with Rou happily asleep on his head. “I’m hungry.” I announced, stretching. 

“I smell lasagna.” Randy replied, not putting down the comic book. I sniffed. “I don’t smell anything.”

“Let’s go check.” Randy put down the book and extricated Rou from his hair.

“Hey, guys. Dinner’s ready.” Mom waved us in the direction of the counter. She was pretty used to Randy showing up at random times, so she wasn’t surprised to see him. “See? Told ya so.” He pointed at the lasagna steaming on the counter.

“I swear, he’s part rat.” I shook my head and grabbed a paper plate from on top of the fridge.

“That’s why Rou likes me so much.” He grinned. “Rats of a feather float together, I guess.”

This was normal. This was my life. Hanging out with my genius loser cousin, talking to my rat, writing awful 

essays and counting the heartbeats til graduation. Not perfect, but it was pretty good. Too bad. It was all 

about to change. (How’s THAT for foreshadowing?!)

Just to clarify: that last parenthetical? Not a commentary I added 

later. That's genuinely how the first chapter ended.

I particularly like how I titled the first two chapters "Ordinary Day" and "Things Get Weird," respectively. Like, those aren't chapter titles, 15-year-old-Emily. That's just a plot diagram. What's next, a book where Chapter 23 is called "The All-is-Lost Moment," and Chapter 24 is "Things Look Up?"

Anyway, thank you for tuning in for today's peek back at my old work! What was your favorite terrible part?

Also, I am currently accepting requests for Chapter 2 of any of my Humiliating Throwback Thursday posts. If I get at least 3 requests for a Chapter 2 of any I've posted so far, then next week you shall get it!

In case you missed them, here are links to my past HTH posts:

Greens (there is no chapter 2 to this, because it's a poem, but I suppose I could post more haaawful poetry. I've got a LOT.)

Cariadnae's Quest

Found: Missing?

Ryder Secrets