Becoming the Story

by L. E. Henderson

once loved so much were untrue, she decided to write true ones, or at least the ones she thought were true. So she wrote down the stories life had told her. They were all about an un-pretty girl who had come along and ruined things, and then smiled at boys and got glowered at.

  She wrote the story again and again, in many different ways, but however she wrote it, she was unsatisfied. She did not like the story. She thought of returning to her fairy tales, but there was no going back. It was like she had been cast out of Eden and was barred from it by cherubim holding flaming swords.

  She asked herself, “What makes a story good?” She asked herself that question a lot. She started to read books meant for the older kids, which seemed truer, at least some of them, because not all of them ended well.

  She also found some books on writing and studied them. She learned that stories had plots and resolutions. Finally, she got an idea. She would not write a fairy tale, nor the story life had given her. She would write a story she liked, but one that would be believable.

  For the first time in her life, she felt the wind of inspiration blow through her, tinged with a minty chill. With a pencil and a sheet of spiral notebook paper, she wrote about a girl who was not pretty and had come and made everything awful. But in her story, her parents were bad people for telling her so, villains.

  It was not until she wrote that down that she realized: she had not just been hurt; she was angry. She had had no choice but to come along. No one had ever asked her what she thought about it.

  The revelation was so stunning that she stopped writing and stared at the sentence for a long time and took it in. It was not her fault. She was not to blame.

  The angrier she became, the more she began to believe that she was virtuous and her parents bad. In her new story she made herself better than she actually was, and her parents worse than they actually were. In her story her mother was secretly an evil witch that boiled babies in her cauldron full of nasty things. And her dad was a bank robber who slaughtered kittens for fun.

  Her own character was practically a saint, a beautiful avatar of goodness and light who never asked anything for herself. In her stories she went around giving candy and medicine to sick children and even though she was not pretty and had come along and made a mess of things, everyone loved her because she was doing so much good for the world.

  Meanwhile her parents went to jail and received lashings and were imprisoned for life for eating babies and robbing banks and killing kittens.

  After she wrote the story, she glowed inside. Her mood soared to the skies. It was her first truly original effort. She had finally written a story she liked.

  A week later, after a receiving a good glowering, she took out her story and read it again to cheer herself up. But instead of it making her happy, it upset her. She read the story several times. Something was wrong.

  She asked herself what is was and finally understood: the story was not true to life. She remembered, uncomfortably, moments when her parents had been kind to her. Her father had brought her a puppy once, squirming and warm, its heartbeat thumping into her hand as she held it close. And there had been a time, when she was ill, that her mother had baked her a crumbly cake and made a smiley face on top with yellow lemon icing. She had never seen either of her parents kill anything except for bugs.

  Even her own character was questionable. The part about her giving candy to sick children triggered an uncomfortable memory. When she was five, her kindergarten teacher had brought into the class a piñata of a reindeer filled with candy.

  A boy had broken it apart with a stick and the children had descended on the candy like ants on honey. She had been slow to act and ended up with no candy at all. The disappointment had been unbearable.

  Afterward, she had seen a boy lay down his candy on a table in order to bend down an tie his shoe. While he was not looking, she had swiped his tootsie rolls, lollipops, and bubble gum. All of it. And stuffed it into her pocket. She had not given it back even when the boy looked around for his candy and began to cry. She had not enjoyed the candy after that and had not eaten most of it.

  But if she remembered correctly, that same boy had had a terrible cough that day. He had been sick.

  She was so sickened herself by the memory, she did not write anything for days. But she still had a hungry imagination, so she read instead. The new books she read were more complex. She noticed that some of the characters in them were not all good or all bad.

  Even the most likable characters had flaws. She had a revelation. Maybe she did not have to be a saint. But maybe she could still be a likable character with flaws. And maybe her parents could be villains who sometimes did good things.

  She wrote a story about a girl who stole candy from a sick boy. But the girl felt so remorseful about what she had done that she grew up and gave candy to all the sick children she met. One day she met the boy she had stolen candy from and she gave him candy tenfold what she had stolen from him, and they became best friends.

  She liked that story.

  Meanwhile, life began throwing its own stories at her. Boys continued to glower at her even when she did not smile at them, and now she never did. She was not popular with the girls either. Most of them were pretty. They did not read much on their own, and she had little to discuss with them.

  She did have one friend, a girl in a wheelchair named Rita who had been born unable to walk. During recess she would talk to Rita. Rita fascinated her, because Rita was like the characters in her favorite stories, a kind of underdog who had not soured on life but seemed because of her situation to have found strength.

  Rita was never bitter about not walking. She was a humorous girl who did not care what the popular girls thought of her. Maggi was inspired.

  Maggi realized, too, that she did not have to make herself the main character of every story. She could write about dogs or birds or imagine how the world must look from the point of view of Rita. Maggie started to look around and observe other kids. The creativity this allowed was liberating. Some of the stories were silly, and others too serious. But she kept writing anyway.

  But life was an insistent author; it had its own ideas. Her mother died. And afterward she could not even bring herself to say the words “die” or “death” for many weeks. Even in her thinking, she substituted the expression “went away.”

  The “going away” was sudden and stupefying and incomprehensible, an accident caused by a shaky ladder that occurred while her mother was painting the window shutters.

  And after the funeral, Maggi could not think of any of the bad things her mother had done. Maggi thought about the smiley face cake and all the dinners her mother had cooked for her, even when she was tired. And Maggi thought about the grieving face of her father and how much she wanted to comfort him, even though they had always been distant, and she did not feel free to hug him.

  She wrote new stories, stories of tragedy and forgiveness; of loss and hope. Her teachers began to praise her stories, and Maggie would have beamed, except grief was a dark seam in her pride.

  By this time Maggie was thirteen, and her appearance had changed. She was still not pretty in any conventional way, but the way she carried herself had changed. Her figure had rounded out, and her eyes were curious and sympathetic.

  She did not hunch but stood straight, and she did not bow her head anymore the way she had when she was younger. And when she started to, she thought of how Rita had never pitied herself, and how – though physically weak – she had somehow seemed more whole and more beautiful than any of the other girls in the class.

  Maggi was still awkward in some ways. She had gotten taller. Her limbs were gangly like that of a puppy that had grown too fast and had not processed the change.

  The rejections of her life still haunted and in many ways shaped her, and they could be seen in the hesitancy of the gestures, a tendency to pause before speaking, and the softness of her voice.

  But something had changed. She had a dream now.
An ambition. Her dream brightened the colors around her and enhanced the flavor of her meals. The glow of her cheeks might have been expected of a girl in love, but she did not have a crush. She knew what she wanted to do with her life. She was going to become a writer.

  Writing was power. It was the power to take the stories life had told her and change them.

  She had a new story in her head. It was about a girl who had come along and got glowered at by boys. But then she met a girl in a wheelchair and realized she could make choices about what to do with the circumstances life had given her.

  She became more compassionate because of her personal rejections and befriended others who had suffered from them. Or suffered from anything. And that included her dad.

  The girl in the story named “Margie” was estranged from her dad. So she made him cookies and went to him with them. And they were such good cookies he told her he loved her and was proud of her, and he gave her a hug.

  She reread her story but it did not sound true. And she did not know how to make it sound true, so she decided to try doing what the girl in her story had done.

  So that night did bake cookies, chocolate chip. They were soft and warm, and the chocolate had melted. When she left the kitchen she was filled with happy anticipation. Then she went to her dad who was reading on the sofa and set the plate of