In my first year of university (read: community college) I didn't make a lot of friends. Which is actually also true of my other two years of university (read: community college). My inability to meet and connect with people was one of the driving factors in my decision to take some time away from higher learning, but this is the story about a girl who came very close to changing my mind.
When she walked into the room of our creative writing class, twenty minutes late on the first day, she briefly scanned the room for any available seats and, spotting one next to me, quickly stumbled her way toward it. On her way she tripped on a backpack, tore a poster off the wall, and did a face plant into my lap. She then introduced herself as Grace, which I thought was a joke, but was in fact just her name. Rather than let the situation grow ever more awkward, she took the opportunity to use her lack of coordination as an ice-breaker, and we soon found ourselves paired up with one another for almost every activity throughout the semester.
Grace was an extremely friendly, though slightly awkward, personality and I had the feeling that she didn't often speak to members of the opposite sex. She had a loud, boisterous laugh, tangled, unmanageable hair, and she spoke so fast that most people had difficulty understanding whatever conversation they had found themselves in with her. She was also extremely intelligent, a very gifted writer, and had the most charming smile I had encountered in quite some time.
During our breaks from class, which we naturally spent together, we soon found that we had many of the same interests in books and television, and shared the yen to travel to far off lands. When the day came that we were assigned a co-operative story, wherein one of us would write the first ten pages, and the other would write the last, we agreed to meet in the school's library to plot out our piece. Ours was the tale of a swashbuckling pirate and the barmaid that he loved, and, though I can't remember all of the details, I've fairly confident that, along the way, the pirate meets his end shortly after professing his love, and the barmaid took his title to captain his ship in his memory.
Even though we were the only ones in the library at the time, we were frequently shushed and eventually moved to one of the individual study rooms. We had a long discussion over the barmaid's motivation, and whether or not the pirate was a Robin Hood of the high seas, or a Captain Hook. In the three hours that we bonded over pages and pages of charts and graphs and plans, we managed to plot out what probably would have been a decent-sized novel about our two characters. It was then quite an effort to whittle down what we needed from all of the information we had crafted together to make a manageable piece that could be presented to our class the following evening. In the end, what we decided on, was to forgo writing a proper story, and simply present what would act as a synopsis to the larger story that Grace and I would never end up writing. Granted, a twenty-page synopsis sounds...terrible, but we chose to do so in the form of a poem.
So we split up, and Grace wrote a ten-page poem about the pirate and his love for the barmaid while I wrote a ten-page poem about the barmaid and her love for the pirate. We had agreed on a rhyming scheme, and the rhythm we wanted to keep, and, while we both knew that the poems would intersect only at the beginning and end, neither of us were entirely sure what plot elements the other would include in their piece. We both rushed home, wrote out what we needed, and probably edited what we each had a number of times in the hours before meeting up again.
We met hours before the class was to start, which, at the time, seemed like enough time, but we soon found that we were in a mad dash to finish off everything that we needed. We were attempting to mash our poems together, so that her verses would intertwine with my verses and we could tell the story of the pirate and the barmaid as a single piece, rather than telling the tale of one and doubling back to tell a parallel story. What happened to our twenty-page epic I'm not entirely sure, and I would love to see our story again, but it managed to come together quite nicely...eventually. We did end up cutting things close when our hand-written pages had to be photocopied for every pair in the class, but we still managed.
The most satisfying part of the evening, up to that point, was the hush that fell on the class as Grace and I performed twenty pages of poetry. They seemed quite invested in the story we were telling (Grace having taken to speaking the barmaid's portions while I spoke for the pirate) and we were heartily applauded as soon as we finished. While most of the class was very accepting of our work, our professor had a much more harsh take on the entire thing, going so far as to take off a few marks for not writing a proper twenty-page story (what with our poetry taking up far less of the page than a narrative).
After receiving our less-than-stellar review from the teacher, Grace turned to me and said, "damn...I kind of feel like gorging myself on something unhealthy now," to which I responded, "yeah, I could definitely eat my feelings." I had hoped to discuss the unfairness of our professor's accusations during the break, but Grace had rushed to the phone, as her sister had demanded to know what the class response to our work had been. We spent the rest of the night listening to our classmates' stories, and giving our feedback, and as soon as class let out we both got into the courtyard and let out frustrated sighs.
"We'll do better next time," I told her, hopeful that I would get another chance to work alongside her. She nodded, and headed toward her car. I sat in the courtyard and stared at the night sky, as I often did after class. It wasn't because I was particularly contemplative that night, but because the last bus out of town left a half hour before my class ended, and my ride would not arrive for yet another half hour, so it was just where I sat in the meantime. I waved to Grace as she sped off in her car, and went over the poem in my head, arguing with myself that the creative way with which we tackled the subject was surely impressive enough to outweigh the fact that not every line was filled to the end. As I had quarrelled in my head like a crazy person, I heard the sound of an engine, a bright light washed over me, and two quick honks rang through the night.
When I sat up I saw Grace, in her car, with a pizza. She leaned out the window, "we can celebrate our failure together," she shouted, and I got into her car, and we sat in the parking lot eating pizza, listening to music, and talking about writing.
She may have been awkward, but she was doing everything totally right. It wasn't only her smile that was charming.
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