Read Becoming the Story for Free Online

damn carton. Cookies. Shit. They look
like organ meat.”
    The words might as well have been a physical
blow. She felt like she had been knocked off a precipice. She lost
her grip on the tray. It fell on the wooden floor with a clatter.
She stared at it in alarm for a moment, then ran from the room and
through the front door and into the darkness, where her body shook
with the sobs that broke from her. Who knew how long she stayed
there?
    She heard a rustling and a chirp, and she
looked around. Nestled into one of the cracks in the brick wall of
the carport was a baby bird, just a ball of blue feathers really,
with tiny searching eyes.
    She stared at the bird for a long time and
listened to its little cheeps. After a point the tears stopped
coming, and she became painfully sober. She stood, took a deep
breath, and went back into the house and into her bedroom where her
desk was.
    She had planned to write the whole exchange
with a new ending. She wanted to replace reality with a happy
ending, but she found that she could not. The notebook paper
blurred as she took up her pen. She had to write something, so
instead, she wrote about the baby bird.
    She pretended she was the baby bird and it
told its story of how it had come to be in a darkened carport with
a crying girl.
    She knew that one day she would have to
write the story about the exchange with her father but she could
not do it now. The pain of rejection was too fresh. And she did not
know how to make the story end.
    Her story endings simply could not always
match reality. They could not predict it. They existed in their own
bubble. And sometimes, that had to be enough.
    She entered high school and noticed that
boys did not glower at her anymore, and even if they never asked
her out, she thought she had made progress.
    In high school, though, a boy did ask her
out. It was shocking. What was he thinking? The boy was
good-looking, and she did not think she was in his league. The
ordeal caused her so much anxiety, she said no to him. He was taken
aback, as if no one had ever said that word to him before.
    He continued to stare at her in the classes
she shared with him, with a look of longing that baffled her. A
week later, the bullying began. A former girlfriend of his began to
taunt her and say things like, “Do you think you are too good for
him? What are you, some kind of tease?”
    She did not know what to say to that, so she
said nothing. Soon afterward, rumors began to spread that she was
having sex with him and that she was a tease and a slut. Books were
knocked from her hand as she walked down the hall. Fake blood was
smeared on her locker.
    And even the boy who had asked her out
participated in the taunting. Afterward she went to her locker to
get her books for the next class. The words “ugly bitch” were
scrawled on her locker. She got through her classes the best she
could, and luckily no one ever assaulted her.
    But real damage had been done. She had
endured a lifetime of rejections. She did not think she could take
one more. She even felt guilty for rejecting the boy who had liked
her. Who was she to say no to him?
    For the first time, she wished she had never
been born. She wanted to die. Instead, she went to her room and
wrote a story.
    She wrote a story about an unattractive girl
who had “come along” and gotten bullied and was called an ugly
bitch, so the girl swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills and died
and had a small funeral. Not even her father was there. She reread
the story. Once. Twice. Three times.
    She did not like the story. She tore it up
and wrote another. Like the first, it was about a girl who had been
bullied. The girl was hurt and considered overdosing, but she
changed her mind. She remembered legions of bullied kids she had
grown up with, others like her who had been teased and
ridiculed.
    She had always been afraid to talk to them
for fear the more popular kids would like her even less. But her
alter ego “Margie” in the story