The beginnings of a story

Here's a little thing that I wrote a month or so ago. Part of it is true, part of it isn't. It's a work in process, obviously, and this is only the first part of what should be a longer story. If you like it please let me know. If you don't and know a way for me to improve, let me know that, too. 

When I ran into George it didn’t seem like a life-changing moment. We were just kids at daycare, waiting for our parents to come and running in circles. The building had a playground with swings but kids don’t need that. Give them an island with some bushes in the middle of a parking lot and they’ve got hours of entertainment. Everybody knew that you were supposed to run clockwise around the shrub island, it was a law that nobody spoke but everybody felt. I don’t know if George went the wrong way on purpose or if his inner compass was off kilter and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we were running in one direction, our band of pirates or Vikings or marines or whatever we were that day, and he was running in the other.

It happened at night, though it wasn’t stormy, and that accounts for our poor vision. I rounded a corner, running away from my friends or towards them, depending on how you look at it. That’s the beauty of childhood games. There doesn’t need to be a reason for anything. Run this way because it is fun, run that way because it’s fun, too. Be a dinosaur, be a superhero, be a gust of wind, be a kid. One lap you’re flying in a spaceship, the next you’re driving a racecar. You can’t be wrong when you’re in third grade and running in a circle. Accidents, however, do happen. They usually end up with a bruised knee or a scraped hand. This time I became a supervillain.

When George and I collided we became a mirror for each other. Both of us led with our heads, our faces hot and cold at the same time thanks to the wind and our exertion. I hit my forehead on his and we fell straight on our backs. The next part isn’t so much a blur as it is a red smear. My injury this time was not a bruised knee or a scraped hand but a gash in my right eyebrow, cutting it diagonally in half, leaning away from my nose. I know a friend’s dad, a policeman, wrapped my head so tight that I couldn’t feel the wound anymore and did the same for George. We were put in a room inside the daycare building and seated on opposing sides of the room. I’m told that I was crying and crying and crying and I believe it. I’m also told that George just sat and watched as I cried. He had the same injury that I did and we ended up with the same number of stitches. I don’t understand how he could be stoic in the face of such an event.

After my mom came and brought me to the local walk-in clinic to see if we could get my wound treated quickly (thanks to my crying and yelling, we couldn’t) she took me to the hospital. I left the hospital with eight stitches and major swelling. I know my dad and some large male nurses had to hold me still while the doctor was stitching my eyebrow back together. It’s hard to sit still when you can see a person putting a needle through your skin right above your eye. On the positive end, I got eight lollipops to go with the eight stitches but during the ride home my mom told me that girls like a boy with a scar. In third grade that’s not a good thing. Girls are the enemy and you can’t have them liking you. Eww.

The rest of my childhood and adolescence was normal. I did some-to-most of my school work and talked with my classmates. I never had any real, hang out after class friends but that was ok, I guess. I was always a bit on the scared end of the confidence scale and I never had a real girlfriend in High School, either. College was much the same, except in that I actually liked the school work and I had friends. Still no girlfriend but again, that was fine by me. I guess my mom didn’t know much about how girls think about a guy with a scar. I don’t think Harry Potter helped me all that much either. As a nerd with glasses and a scar in his eyebrow people believed I was trying to cash in on that popular trend but really I was just a guy that got unlucky.

My senior year of college was filled with a kind of melancholy that I hadn’t experienced before. Here I was, about to graduate and move on to the next part of my life and that was exciting. But I liked this part of my life. I liked writing papers. I liked watching my basketball team play. I liked going to parties. I liked learning. What was I going to do next? My English degree didn’t offer a firm path. You can do anything with a degree in English, but what do I want to do? Teaching is an option, sure, but that requires more education. And teach what? High School? College? Younger? Older? I could write a mean paper but I took no journalism classes so that would be a hard thing to break into. I took a creative writing class but my writing wasn’t all that great. A lot of comma splices and too little description. Sentence fragments, too. So what? My parents asked me every time we talked and I never had an answer. Do I try the writing thing and see if I can get better? Do I join the corporate world and try to hold on to my creative side some other way? Choosing courses at the beginning of each semester was a lot easier than choosing the rest of your life.

And then the decision was made for me. At the end of my final semester I awoke to the sound of an envelope shoved under my door. I don’t know how they, whoever they were, got into my apartment to slip the envelope under my bedroom door but the contents shocked me more than the intrusion of privacy did. It had only two sentences.

Dear Alex,

You are now officially a supervillain-in-training. Please report to the sixth subbasement of the Empire State Building for your uniform measurements and mentor assignment.

Evilly yours,

The Destroyer

Senior Recruitment Advisor