Feathers of Struggle

My jaw dropped as far as it could go.  “What?” the sixth graders said in a single voice. I looked over at my friend Natalie and silently whined. There were scattered groans and muffled complaints, accompanied by the shushing of our teacher, Leticia.

“This will be due next Wednesday. You don’t have to copy this in your book, because I am going to leave it up here, but I highly suggest that you do. The paragraphs have to have at least five sentences in each.” She said, glancing at her watch. With an elegant wave of her hand, she dismissed us to do our work. I copied the sentence from the whiteboard: Write a ten-paragraph creative story using the three types of adjectives at least five times each. I never liked assignments from grammar, but this officially made me hate it. I was sure this homework would cause my death.

“I’m too young to die.” I muttered.

            When I finally started up Word, all of my high hopes shriveled into raisins. I had only written one thing: the title goes here. I sighed and let my face fall into my hands. Come on brain, I thought at myself. Give me something to work with, here. I opened my eyes and looked back at the monitor, coerced by the blankness of the white page. I finally gave up fighting writer’s block and picked up my book. At the time, I was reading Maximum Ride by James Patterson. In my head, I conversed with the main character. So, is having wings fun? I interrogated her.

She laughed. What do you think? It’s amazing! How many times in your life do you get to fly with freaking wings?

I smirked. Sounds awesome…I said, not just to her, but also to myself. Thus, an idea was formed. I put the book down and began to write. I changed the title from "the Tile Goes here" to "Betrayal".

            I didn’t know how many pages were filled with words, but all I knew is that I wouldn’t stop writing. I had only written about five really long paragraphs; still a way from being finished.  Screams made their way across the basketball court from the monkey bars. The sound of a basketball being beat against the pavement echoed throughout the campus. I was sitting on the cold concrete ramp leading to my blue classroom door. i didn't mind missing recess because i loved to write so much.  I soon felt vibrations on the ramp from my friend, Abby, skipping up the ramp to greet me.

            “Hey, Riles!” she smiled and plopped down next to me.

            “Hi.” I replied, not looking up at her. My fingers slowed down on the keys of the NEO.

            Abby quickly snatched the NEO from my lap. “What’cha writing? A report?” she questioned in a singsong accent.

            “Sort of, yeah. It’s for grammar.”

            “Oh really? What’s it about? Something not boring, I hope.”

            “It’s about a girl who wakes up and she has wings. It’s still a work-in-progress. You can read it if you like.”

            Abby read, and she read quickly. When she finished she said, “Can I borrow this to show my friends?”

            I didn’t expect her to say that. “Really? It’s that good?”

            “Yeah!” she laughed. After a while, I snapped out of extreme-happy-Zen mode, handed her the NEO, and walked over to by backpack and started to read my book.

            I finally felt satisfied with my work, and I hit the print button. I wanted to get some more peer comments, so I handed the three-page story to my fifth-grade friend, Dash. Again, I got a really good review. I then turned my paper into Leticia, two days after we got the assignment. I printed another copy to keep to myself because I was really proud of my work. After all, I had spent a whole lunch until the next afternoon to finish it. The next morning, Dash came up to me, excited and waving his USB in my face. “I have something to show you!” he said.

            “Okay then. What is it?”

            “Something that I wrote last night. Its awesome!” he grabbed his laptop out of his backpack and ran up to the classroom, me tagging along. When he opened up the USB window, I saw the title of a paper that I was quite familiar of: Betrayal.

            “Hey!” I said, thinking that he copied my idea. He smirked and opened up the file. Instead of a copied masterpiece, I saw another perspective.  Dash’s version was about a boy, similar age to the girl in my story, with claws. When I finished reading, Dash explained his big idea.

            “I was thinking that this could be turned into a book.” he said, really pleased by his brilliance.

            “A book?” I never expected this grammar assignment to get this far.

            “Yeah! And we could add some people, people who are great at writing, obviously. Like Kate and Mark!” I contemplated his idea. It sounded pretty legit.

            “Okay. Lets do this.”

            After a while, we had written twenty or so pages. Our characters all had some sort of special mutation ability: Angelique (my character) had wings, Tylon (Dash’s character) had claws, Thalia (Kate’s character) could make her hair turn into fire when she was angry, and Crypton (Mark’s character) could change his skin into any surface that he touched. It went well for the first few months, but then we realized that graduation was coming up, and our group would be split into halves. We planned to e-mail each other our new chapters over the summer, so that problem was solved.

            That wasn’t the only part that we were worrying about. We were running out of ideas. We had begun to copy from Maximum Ride and take characters from movies or other books. It bothered me. But what bothered me the most was that a lot of times, when I was doing other work, the three had group discussions in the middle office - without telling me or asking me if I wanted to join - and decided on things that should’ve been voted on as a whole group, such as adding characters and adding people into the “Betrayal Group”. Finally, I decided to quit. They didn’t seem so happy about that. One by one, they each came out of the center office where they were having a discussion to ask me why I was leaving and/or tried to persuade me to come back. Each time, I said the same thing.

            “Riley, why are you quitting?” Dash looked really hurt, the most out of the three. I could see that my part in the group was important to them, but at the same time I was thinking that if they didn’t mind involving me, why would they mind if I were gone?

            “You guys exclude me a lot, and were not being so original…after all, I'm the one that started this whole thing, so anyway, I’m just resigning.” I shrugged off his painful look and continued to work on my homework. Dash opened his mouth to say something, but quickly shut it and walked back into the center office. For the rest of the year, we all stayed really good friends, but we kept our distance from the topic of the book or my resignation.

            After this, we sort of stopped writing Betrayal as four people and instead made our own versions. Dash finished the one that we started and shared it with the school in October of this year (everyone really liked it, as I’ve heard), I’ve made a really long excerpt from my favorite part in the story, Mark made a second book, but Kate didn’t really write anything.

            This has been one of my favorite moments in my life, no matter what negative feelings arose. Feeling like we were making a revelation in the literature world was the best part because it made us feel like geniuses - of that we are. The one thing I learned from this experience was that I want to be a writer, and that unfinished, poorly written, and quirky or not - I want to publish my favorite written work: Betrayal.