Ronnie's Blood

This is a very different work from my other works. I haven't invested that much in this project (I'm focusing on some other works at this moment), but I decided this one has potential for later on. Please comment. And please press the like button if you like it--I like to know.

Dear Lawsuit Man/Woman,

I was told to tell you about my case, and now I am. And I hope I will not have to pay a fee, or get landed in juvenile detention, because I believe what I did was right. Here’s my letter. Or my autobiography. It’s a tad long, but a lot of it will help me, I hope.

I know you probably will think that this is silly or extensive. And I suppose it is in a way. And you may wonder why I’m telling you all that I’m about to tell you, but this isn’t only for you. It’s for everybody, because I want everybody to know what it’s like to live on earth in a little horse-town that sometimes make me feel like I’m in the middle of freaking nowhere even though we’re actually on the outskirts of Atlanta. And I want people to know what’s it’s like to be grown up and yet locked in a school, and to have friends and yet no friends, and to go mad. This isn’t only for you. It’s for everybody.

Here’s why I did what I did.

Proceed.

Chapter 1

I’m not a superb writer. I won’t lie. I may just be a failure. I like to write, but let’s be frank, I suck at it. But Ronnie is really good. It’s too bad she can’t write the letter for me.

Ronnie is good at everything. She hates math, but she still has an eighty-something in the class, and she’s in AP Calculus, which is pretty good. She hates science, and I admit she totally sucks at earth science, but she did pretty well for biology and physics, a steady A. She’s so really good at history and English, because she can recite all of the wars from the Crusades to the Afghan War, and she can tick off her fingers all of the rules of grammar and stuff. Not me. Okay, I admit, I am really good at geography and history, but not so much in English. I love to read and like to write, but that’s not really what English class is all about. It’s a bit different. It kind of sucks sometimes.

My main things I’m good at:

--Reading (J.K. Rowling I love you)

--Music (I’m sort of like that lead singer of Beirut, the multi-instrumentalist prodigy. It’s unfortunate my parents won’t let me drop out of high school)

--Acting

Acting is sort of what brought me and Ronnie to friendship. It started with our middle school productions. Our middle school was famous for amazing musicals. For one, only seventh and eighth graders were allowed to play older characters, so that everybody looked old enough. And it wasn’t like they tried to go easy on us or anything like that. They pushed us hard. They made us sing every song with perfection. If there was a love role, you were required to kiss. Like, not that little cute quick kiss that they made kids do at most middle schools. You know, just a momentary peck. Or worse, where one kid turns their back to the audience and pretend to kiss their lover, and the jip is real obvious to the crowd and they’re just like, “Oh, the little darlings.” I mean real kisses (which is what middle school students do outside of school, so nobody should actually make a big deal about doing it in a play).

Our friendship was not that complex blooming like it was with Harry and Ron and Hermione. It didn’t have a lot of transitions or anything. It was sort of like we became friends starting in seventh grade. It just came. 

We were at auditions for The Sound of Music. We were in middle school at the time. There were a lot of people at the auditions. More than two hundred students, just in one day. I’m telling you, our musicals are a big deal. And since there were plenty of roles to fill in with all seven of the children and Maria and the father and the Nazis and Rolf and that other woman and the nuns, everyone felt like they had a pretty good chance of landing a spot. I was nervous, and I could tell she was too. She was just a few steps away.

“Hi, Ansel,” Ronnie greeted.

“Oh, hi, Ronnie.”

Yeah, we already knew each other. We’d actually known each other since we were really young, back in first grade. That’s when she first started calling herself Ronnie. She was really getting into Harry Potter at that point, and had this huge crush on Ron Weasley. That day she was wearing a Hogwarts sweatshirt over a flannel shirt. She looked like she was actually attending Hogwarts.

“Who are you hoping to get?”

I shrugged. “Any of the brothers. Maybe Rolf, it would be fun to sing that duet."

She shrugged, too, smiling. “Yeah, I’m hoping for Maria or Liesl.”

“Those are good characters.”

And then I was like, Woah, those are some crazy eyes. She looked liked the Afghan girl on the front of the National Geographic magazine. I would fall right through if I stepped into those eyes. I knew her for six years. Like, not that well. We had only managed to get a few classes together in those six years. But still, I should've noticed her eyes before.

"You've got amazing eyes," I blushed as soon as I had said it. Like, really why would I say that? 

"Oh--oh, thanks." She was not perturbed.

"I mean, like, I didn't mean to say that..." Real smooth, Ansel.

"You're not the only one who's thought that," Ronnie smoothed back her hair. "They're kind of strange."

"No, I mean, they're really cool."

"Thanks, nobody has ever told me that before."

I wanted to tell her that her eyes reminded me of a song I had heard, and I wasn't quite sure why. Like, I thought of The Rip Tide. Not Riptide by Vance Joy. The Rip Tide by Beirut. It's sort of a haunting song, like its sound is going to close all around you. Even the Gulag Orkestar, which is an amazing song about genocide camps (again by Beirut, they're really amazing). 

I didn't really know what I was in for. I didn't know that her eyes would become truth.