The Perfect Angsty Storm
That transformed a grouchy teen into a novelist
…What can I say? I write what I wanna read.
This year for NaNoWriMo, I wanna write something I swore for thirty years that I never, EVER would.
As November opens, I shall celebrate the Day of the Dead by resurrecting the first novel I ever completed in eleventh grade. There’s a rattly skeleton in there. One that I never, in a million years, would have thought I’d be unearthing.
It’s called THE WRECK ROOM. ©1990
~From: GUESS I’M DOING NANO AGAIN
The P in the Pool
(P is for problem, not…
you know.)
June 1986
13 years old
A rural town in northern Minnesota, pop. 333
It’s summer, so naturally Johnny and I are hanging out. We always hang out in the summer like we used to when we were best friends before I had to leave him behind for kindergarten. The next year, he made his own cool friends in his own class while I descended into the school’s lowest ranks of Nerds and Kick-Me Dogs.
That’s actually one of the nicknames they have for me. “The Dog.”
It doesn’t matter that Dad got a promotion and Mom went back to work so she no longer has to make my clothes or alter hand-me-downs anymore. It doesn't matter how many different ways I try to be cool. My four-eyes, braces, and those three months I had to wear head-gear 24-7 pushed my Loser reputation over the edge.
Even being the only girl in my class to have earned a cheerleading uniform can’t save me.
Pretty sure they based this character off me:
Seriously. I feel called out by this movie because they’re barely exaggerating.
Johnny doesn’t care about any of that. Never has. Since his and my closest friends ride the bus, whereas he and I are walkers, it’s inevitable that one of us will call the other within the first weeks after school lets out every summer. I called him an hour ago.
It’s Saturday. Usually, my parents and I would be at The Lake by now. But we’re not going to The Lake like we have every single weekend of every single summer for the last few years.
We won’t be going back to The Lake ever.
And I am furious about that.
Last fall, Mom and Dad sold the trailer and gave up the leased dock-side spot that it sits on. They used the money to buy an above-ground, domed pool. It reeks like plastic and chlorine in there. It’s too hot in the afternoon for laying out, and the dome mists up too much to get a decent tan, yet Dad doesn’t keep the temperature warm enough for my skinny, freeze-baby butt to lounge in the water. It’s fine for batting a volleyball around or swimming laps, but I get two-and-a-half strokes in and I have to turn around.
Stupid.
I hate that pool.
It cost me the one place where I could be outside my house among other kids without getting grabbed, pushed, slammed, stalked, tripped, kicked, lied about, called awful names, set up, sucker-punched, shoved into lockers, and threatened with swirlies every time I turn around. Nobody at The Lake has ever killed my nature-friends. Nobody at The Lake has ever stolen my stuff, wrecked my forts, thrown spiders in my food, sicked their dog on me, or threatened to drown me.
Because nobody at The Lake knows who I really am.
I also hate the new fenced patio around the pool. It took up most of my gymnastics-and-dance lawn in the back yard. Now there’s only a small stretch I can practice on before I start edging out from behind the house.
That means big ole BJ and mean Henry and cruel Cal and big-mouth Becky and rat-dog Gilbert with his ankle-biter Spike will all be able to see me from the street.
Suzy, too, when she rides her bike over to Becky’s.
Which she will.
Because it’s summer and that’s what she does in the summer. Sometimes she calls me, too, and I have no idea why I ever agree to hang out with her. I must be as dumb as that pool. But this summer, I would be extra dumb to tell her yes after the way she and Steven Carlson set me up at that dance. It was super embarrassing, and I had to pretend I didn’t care.
But I really, really did.
I don’t want to see any of them this summer, and I really hope they won’t see me, which means being confined to the living room and that tiny stretch of backyard lawn whenever I need to practice cheers, dances, and the back-walkovers I taught myself over the winter.
Stupid pool and its stupid big patio.
I am not going in that thing for the whole summer!
Mom and Dad keep trying to lure me into it. They’re out there right now with the Hillcrest crew, whooping it up with their floaty drinks and plastic loungers, batting that wimpy plastic volleyball around and laughing. I can hear them all the way in the house so I’m super glad that when I called up Johnny and asked if he wanted to hang out today, he said yes.
He has to help his stepdad so I have to wait until 1:30. Only ten more minutes. Then I’ll be free of the splashing and the laughing and the knowledge that I could have been at The Lake right now where there’s a huge swimming area of real water, an even huger area for waterskiing, trails for hiking, friends for friending, and of course, the Rec. Room.
The Rec. Room most of all.
Why? Trust me. It’s not because of the pinball machines, the pool and foozball tables, the jukebox, or all the snacks and pops wedged between fishing paraphernalia. It’s not even because of the sandlot volleyball court out back.
It’s because of how often the Rec. Room has Hunter Oneida, Seth Ruben, his even cuter step-brother Dave Welch, Rock Macy, and of course…the incomparable Winston Rawlings with his Win-some grin, his sky-blue eyes, and his hunky hair. Win looks like Rob Lowe if…like, Rob Lowe was only two years older than me.
Combined with the volleyball lot and my new cute shorts, I might have finally had a chance to be seen as an actual girl instead of The Dog. True, I still have the braces and glasses, but my hair is longer now and I’m a cheerleader. That does something for a girl’s social standing.
Okay, cheerleading is supposed to do something for a girl’s social standing. It hasn’t done squat for mine at school. Not with the seven years of ongoing campaigns waged by Queenie’s Court and the guerrilla attacks launched by The Boys.
But these boys at The Lake know nothing about that. They only know what they can see, and this summer I have a new swimsuit as well as the shorts. Plus, my cousins taught me to start out slalom during Labor Day last year, which is so much cooler than dropping a ski.
Win Rawlings drives the speedboat for everybody who pops cash into his hat for gas.
Correction.
He’ll be driving the speedboat for everybody but me.
Right this very second, he’s probably zinging them around the lake in his mirrored shades with his glorious hair whipping in the breeze. Who wants a stupid tiny pool with their dork parents and their parents’ dork friends when I could have shown off my new swimsuit and skiing skills to Win and Hunter?
Brittany Lawson is probably showing off her little tushie in her ridiculous string-bikini that, I swear, is gonna wind up on the bottom of the lake the next time she biffs it.
If she would ever biff it.
She never does, even while prying her bikini bottoms out of her dripping buttcheeks as she zings away. Slalom, of course. The guys all tease her that she’s gonna lose those trunks one of these days. Probably because they keep wishing she would.
I wear a practical one-piece but it’s super cute. Blue with a nifty white swirl-stripe running diagonally across the hint of boobs I finally have.
Who cares? Nobody to notice them now.
Nobody but parents and Hillcrests and Johnny (who is technically a boy but not really to me. He doesn’t think of me as a girl either. We’ve known each other so long that it’s almost like siblings).
Who wants a fake, plastic volleyball when I might have collided full-body with Dave Welch as we both went after a real volleyball? I might have landed with him in the sand!
Who wants stupid floaty-drinks when I could have made sure to be right behind Rock-n-Roll Macy as we both bought pops and snacks at the Rec. Room?
Who wants squeaky, smelly plastic loungers under a misty, suffocating plastic dome when I could have plopped my butt on top of the pinball machine, singing along to Jessie’s Girl and Dancing Queen on the jukebox to distract the boys while they duke it out over the pool table?
I get cast in leads and solos all the time, so obviously I can sing.
But these boys don’t know that about me. There are all sorts of awful things they don’t know, with not a single person to whisper and sneer about it, and there are so many more things that no boys in the world know about me that I’ve always wanted to show them.
I might have had the chance this summer.
But no.
Even if the boys kept ignoring me, there would have still been Peg, Daisy, and Lacy to go everywhere with, and those girls have never once set me up or done a single mean thing to me. I wish they didn’t all live down in the Cities. They’re the best, and they always make up for missing Mari all summer. So does Johnny, so I go over to his house for the rest of the day. It doesn’t take long before we strike up the Remember Whens.
“Remember when we used to pretend your huge propane tank was Jana of the Jungle’s boat, and I would get ripped off it by the ‘river current?’”
“Yeah, and remember how my yellow ring-frisbee was your throwing necklace?”
“Yeah, and you were my jaguar!”
“Totally! And remember bringing the Star Wars men out to the fallen tree and the boulder section of the stream?”
“And remember pouring water over that Castle Grayskull we made in the snow to freeze it for the whole winter?”
“Oh, my God, remember Video—”
“—Killed the Radio Star!” we both sing at the same time. It was the first song Johnny ever had on cassette tape for his first ever tape player—the small, flat rectangular kind with a clear, pop-up deck and a row of push-buttons in front.
“Remember all those times we made a blanket fort in my bedroom and recorded the stories I wrote into your tape recorder?”
“Oh, yeah! What was that one? The little green blob-guy?”
I beam proudly and proclaim the names of my first ever protagonists that I created in the bathtub when I was four: “Faith the Coo and Norman the Og.”
“Oh, my God! Ogs! That’s right!” Johnny sits up tall on his bed and purses his mouth as he looks down his nose, sneering in that old snooty-Og voice, “‘Heeee’s a perfect circle!’”
I about die with laughter.
We get to reminiscing about all those hours and stories and the funny voices we both came up with for all my different characters. I always hated hearing my voice when we played it back. I sounded way too much like a boy. Got teased about that, too.
“You should write a new story,” Johnny says.
“We both should write new stories. You were always the best at coming up with new Star Wars episodes and all those awesome Lego vehicles.”
“Oh, man…” He lies back against his pillow, hands laced behind his head, staring at the ceiling. I can tell his mind is already a-swirl with ideas.
“Do you have any notebooks we could use?” I prod.
Indeed, he does, as every school year always leaves plenty of unused pages. So he plops down with a POOF in his huge beanbag chair, while I claim the pillow, the bed, and the wall. His pen taps on his notebook. The foot he has propped up on one knee bounces in the air as he goes back to staring at the ceiling.
I, meanwhile, am doing what I always do when a new idea strikes. Scribble-scribble--scratch-scrawl. I write out names (or placeholders), then add looks, personality, relationships. Snatches of plot ideas. Snippets of conversation. Location descriptions.
This time, it’s a girl and her brother. Runaways. The girl is so much cooler than me. I don’t know what to call her yet, but her brother’s name is Jesse. Has to be. There’s an abandoned cabin in the woods that they claim as their own…no parents anywhere…and the nasty kid rivalry and the rec. room crew and the super-cool punk girl who’s like Lacy-Meets-Mari.
That time two summers ago when that little boy got knocked out of his father’s boat and drowned—oh, gosh, that has to go in there. So does a Win-some speedboat-driving boy with a gold necklace and junked-up Nikes.
I love the way S.E. Hinton started my favorite book, The Outsiders, and so the first lines pop out like nothing. As I stepped through the creaky doorway, the musty scent hit me in the nose. So did the dust…
The words flood out of me. My pen can barely keep up. I have so many scenes in my mind already that I just know. This is not a short story.
This is a novel.
Everything Around Me Swirls Into Fiction
By the time Johnny and I part ways for the night, we each have the start of a story. For the whole next week, we work on them together, but on Saturday my parents and I pack up the van. Not for a trip to The Lake. We’re headed out in the morning for our big cross-country trip of the summer.
The pipeline Dad works for is getting bought out by a bigger one. They plan to connect it, from Canada to Texas. Dad has to go down to Austin for meetings or training or something. Since the company is paying for that part of the trip, we get to stay at the Embassy Suites and even eat in the hotel restaurant.
I’ve never seen anything like this place before! The whole hotel is built like a gladiator arena with floor after floor of rooms in a ring on the outside, and the ground floor restaurant in the middle. A jungle of plants makes a maze to the dining tables, while the ring of railings and rooms goes up-up-up to the skylight over our heads.
It is the neatest building I have ever seen!
All the rooms are suites, with their own kitchen and mini living room. Mom and Dad take the bedroom in the back, while I get the pull-out couch in the living room. But this is no rickety-spring, hard pullout like the one poor Grandma has to sleep on whenever she visits. In the worst heat of summer before we got central air, my parents and I all used to pile in there together because it was the only room with a window AC unit, so I know what that bed feels like.
This one is huge and soft and silent, and it’s all for me!
Next, we have to go to Houston, where the company also pays for us to stay in a ritzy hotel at The Galleria. Supposedly it’s The Place, but I don’t like it nearly as well as Embassy. I don’t care that it’s attached to a mall. This place feels boxy and cold after that towering arena ring, the lobby jungle, and the homey, burgundy tones of our suite at Embassy.
I’m happy to leave it and travel onward to El Paso and New Mexico. On the road, if I’m not looking at cool scenery and huge cacti or singing along to Air Supply with my parents, there is only one thing I’m doing.
Writing.
I spend the majority of our road-time sprawled out across the bed in the back of the van, scribbling away.
We go to the Petrified Forest and the Grand Canyon—so amazing!—then sweat across the desert, do avoidance maneuvers with Los Angeles, and head up to San Jose where my aunt and uncle live. After doing some family stuff, we head up the Pacific Coastal Highway.
Since my scribbling-nook is folded up to make room for the additional family members who have joined us, and the redwoods and coastlines are so astounding, I do way more gawking than writing.
But then we get to that transition between northern California and southern Oregon. My jaw drops. It’s like right out of The Goonies! Those huge rocks and the way the waves crash against them! The color of the sand and the sky. The sounds and smells and feel of the ocean air. The birds and their little footprints.
It all starts pummeling me like those ocean waves: scene after scene. Image after image.
The location of my entire novel changes. This is where my girl and her brother have come! They are no longer runaways. That was starting to get problematic in my plot line. The more scenes I wanted to add in, the more difficult that certain events would have been to manage without parents.
Of course, having good parental guidance? Not necessary. In fact, giving these kids problematic parenting delivers even more scenes. So does putting them in a rundown apartment complex after growing up in a fancy house.
After those nights in the Embassy Suites, I got a taste of what it must be like to live crammed up in a little apartment. That size dwelling seemed huge for a couple nights in a hotel, but it would be something else to try to live there with parents and go to school and practice dances and gymnastics and music with thin walls and other people living in every direction, above and below, rather than our three-bedroom house with basement, garage, and big lawns.
(And now a too-small pool and too-big patio, when I could have been at The Lake with cool kids and cute boys who don’t hate me as a general rule.)
(I decide my fictional apartment complex needs an empty pool with a cracked foundation. After all those palm trees, I keep picturing Daniel LaRusso walking through the apartment complex for the first time after landing in California.)
The rest of the trip blows my mind with the wonders we visit. Crater Lake. Yellowstone. Mount Rushmore. The Badlands. I can barely believe my eyes!
Yet there is a piece of me writing scene after scene in the background. Whenever my brain starts to get full and the landscape starts to get boring, I hunch over the notebook on my knees to jot notes or scrawl chapters.
When we finally get back home after three weeks away, I learn that Johnny wrote a tiny bit more of his story, but then lost interest. Not me. I keep writing page after page after page all summer.
Since I never learn, I also write the depths of my swooning heart and mail it to Win Rawlings. It’s bad enough that he tells me he doesn’t like me back—I do appreciate him just saying it to me straight, unlike somebody else. (Not naming names—ahem, Steven Carlson.) But then Win also informs me that I should be grateful he even bothered replying.
Grateful.
Winston Rawlings can suck my other big, grass-stained dancer’s toe. (The left one is already reserved for Steve.)
At least Win didn’t give that note to my enemies so they could pin it up on the board for the whole school to heckle like somebody else did with the first one I ever wrote. Whatever, man. At the end of summer, I meet a super-hunk named Trent. He’s older, wild, even cuter than any of the boys at school or The Lake, and he sees me as an actual girl—wants to kiss me and everything!
As it turns out, that is not nearly as fun as I thought it would be.
Eighth grade comes. I keep writing.
I see a new movie called Stand By Me. It’s really good. Before I know it, everybody’s talking about the kid who played Chris Chambers and WHAM! Out of nowhere, my novel’s main girl finally tells me her name.
Phoenix.
She had a hippy mom and got teased about that when she was little, but then River Phoenix got popular and suddenly her name became cool.
(I won’t realize that I have lyzdexized the spelling of her name until I re-read what I wrote thirty years later. No spell-check on an Apple II.) 🤣
This name provides some ribbing banter between Phoenix and the boy she makes friends with early in the story. He’d already told me up on the ninth floor of the Embassy Suites that his name is Austin. When his family took a trip down south, he came back with such a bad drawl that all his friends gave him the nickname Tex.
I mean, that was back in ‘82 and that movie had just come out so his nickname stuck. The fact that Austin looks like a cross between Matt Dillon and Hunter Oneida is—
Okay, not at all coincidental.
(It’s also the tip of the cowboy hat to my favorite author.)
Winter rolls in. I keep writing.
I fall in love for the first time. Get my heart ripped to shreds by some sort of freak accident. The fact that nobody will tell me what happened to him on that trip kicks the snot out of me even worse than the breakup itself. A bunch of really awful crap happens. It messes me up big time.
I keep writing.
At our rival school’s last dance of the year, I get back in the saddle. Day after day for most of June, my new boyfriend rides his bike out to see me while my parents are at work. I decide that I’ve been an idiot to boycott that pool. It is the coolest thing ever!
Alas. Just like my cheer uniform, being the only kid in town with a pool does zilch for my social standing. I can tell the ones who only like me for my water. That’s all right. Whenever Nick Berenger and I are not out there swimming, we’re in my bedroom where he introduces me to all sorts of…
Things.
Nick looks a lot like the boy Phoenix will eventually fall in love with. Nick is…well, I love to stare at him. To kiss him. To touch him. He loves to stare at me and kiss me and touch me back.
Until he doesn’t.
I keep writing.
And editing.
And writing.
And writing.
Until I turn seventeen and finally type those fateful words in the spring of 1990:
THE END.
Daily progress of this project and its creative process will be tracked on Notes:
**Names have been changed to protect the befriended, the enemied, and the ogled. Except celebrities. Shameless ogling abounds with them.
© 2023 Hartebeast
NaNoWriMo - come play with me!
More ‘80s nerd-out vids on PlackBack80!
Princess Leer and Darth Vahhdor - one of the gazillion reasons why Johnny was so much cooler than I was. He had all the right stuff, man.
Daniel LaRusso arrives in California
1986 Swimwear - Mine was never half this sexy. And ooooh…celebrating their 100th Centennial! 🤘 Rad. 🤘
This was such an interesting and well-written story, Alexx. It’s so cool that you have such a detailed memory of how you came to writing. And it’s so impressive that you could write so well even back then.