Reincarnated Poet: I haven't been able to actually finish a fan fiction piece in what feels like ages. This is my attempt at doing as such. It's a bit of a mosh bit of things, so I'm not sure where it's going to end up. Hopefully on the corner or decent and well written, but I'm not sure.
0 Prologue Not Going to Be the Hero
It's a Saturday. It's twelve noon. It's time to play.
You could call this a game. You could call it a sport. I call it war.
It's hard to play softball in Massachusetts. The weather isn't conducive, and games such as soccer and golf are more the order of the day. The air's cold most of the time. It's hard to breathe and muscles cramp easily, but this is what I do. It's who I am, and who I am is going to affect this story. There are a few things you need to know, if you're going to listen to my story and fully understand why I made the decisions I made. Then again, you could end up looking back, at the end and thinking that I was a sad lost little girl. Maybe I was, maybe I still am.
I pitch. I'm in charge of the team, and there are certain character traits that I inherently have as such. I'm a pusher. I'll give you everything I think I have in one moment, and in another I'll give you more. I didn't used to be the best at what I did, and as such I worked through it until I was. Because I did that, I expect others to do the same. I'm a fighter. I'd sooner put a good hitter on her ass than walk her, and I've been known to do just that a few times.
I just wanted you to know that, before I tell you my story, because, in this fairytale, I'm not the hero. I'm not dressed in a white linen dress waiting for my knight to come and rescue me. I make foolish decisions, but they're based on these facts. I used to watch movies with my father and think, "why did she do that?" Well I think I know now. No, I'm not the girl grabbing the chef's knife instead of the twenty-two, and I'm not the skinny blonde that panics and leaves her boy-toy to defend himself. But I need you to know that I'm not the heroine. I'm not Domino Harvey. I'm not Wonder Woman or Hawk Girl or even that chick in the Reign of Fire movie that flew the helicopter.
So now you know.
I grew up hard and I grew up fast, living in a small town in the middle of Illinois. The daughter of a jack of all trades with a bad back and a worse temper, I brought up my younger two siblings with as much care and dedication that I showed my softball glove. Okay, so the glove was oiled biweekly, but the kids always got their breakfast before school.
The community wasn't what you'd call a town or even a village. It was more of a place where a few people silently agreed to build houses off the side of Interstate 55, and our most promising attraction was the old water tower the mayor was too cheap to have torn down. Before it finally became too dangerous to let go, the thing leaned at almost a sixty degree angle.
But all of that doesn't really matter. You don't want to know that I wanted to become a novelist, or that I planned on pitching for Arizona State. You don't have to know any of that, because it didn't happen. What really happened was that I grew up, and as I grew up, my body stopped healing as fast as it used to. I took a line drive to my pitching hand and was supposed to be done for the rest of my life. My father, seeing a dream vanish into thin air did the only thing he felt he could do. He arrange for my education.
By education, I mean he called up a distant relative, or was it a friend? Anyway, he made a call or two, and pulling a few strings, found that he could squeeze me into a preparatory school in Massachusetts. The graduating classes always matriculated at least ten percent of the student body at Harvard, and Harvard was golden. I won't tell you how I felt about that, because growing up wanting to be a novelist I know that showing is better than telling, so I'll end my monologue here, and let you see the rest for yourself. Just keep in mind that I've never been the hero, and I hope never to be.