Today,
I’m trying something new. I’ve never written
a story before, but I wrote this piece that I think might be the first in a
series of semi-fictional posts loosely based on my life. If you think it’s awful, please tell me. If you love it, please tell me. The same goes for anything in between. If you’d like to keep seeing posts like this,
I’d be more than happy to oblige.
Anyway, here goes nothing:
Chapter 1: Meet Jake
Jake
was still waiting for that growth spurt that he feared would never come. Tomorrow was the first day of twelfth grade
and he stood a proud 5’6”—5’7” with his size 8 ½ Timberland boots. As a toddler he had bleach blond hair but now
it was best described as just plain brown.
People always told him his eyes were bluish green, but he gave up on
seeing colors years ago when his pediatrician kindly informed him that he was
color shade deficient.[1]
Jake did pretty
well in school, but not nearly as well as he could. His parents called him a slacker; he
preferred the term laid back. If he spent half as much time studying as he
did playing beer pong, then he’d be getting A’s instead of B’s. Jake didn’t care about grades, though. In fact, he didn’t really seem to care about
much of anything. While his peers
fretted about tests and grades and college applications, all Jake was worried
about was making the varsity basketball team.
He had plenty of time until tryouts, though. So, on this particular day Jake had other
things on his mind.
He and Dylan sat
at Chipotle, where they ate at least three or four times a week. This was no casual lunch, however; they had
business to discuss. Jake had an
idea. It was a long shot, for sure, but
he thought it was worth a try.
“A blog?” Dylan
asked, a confused look on his face.
Jake was
unfazed. “I’m not writing for the
fucking newspaper.”
“So?”
“So, I’m starting
a blog,” Jake responded, as if it was obvious, “do you want in or not?”
Dylan looked at
him skeptically for a few seconds and finally said, “Sure.”
That very evening,
Jake published the first post. It was
called Student Parking Only. He used that first fateful entry to take a
few jabs at the mediocre reporting of the very school newspaper that denied him
the coveted role of Editor in Chief, and present his peers with an alternative
source of high school centered banter.
He then proceeded to flood Facebook and Twitter with the link to his new
public forum for ranting.
That first night
he got a few hundred page views. A dozen
likes. 4 comments. 1 share.
No retweets, unfortunately (he didn’t have all that many followers). Nonetheless, word was getting out, and the
school year hadn’t even started yet.
Dylan texted him
around 11:30 P.M. “This could be huge,”
he said.
“I know,” Jake
replied, with an implied cockiness that only he could achieve in so few words.
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