Author's Notes: I felt compelled to add this on, because the first chapter alone seemed too heavy-handed, so I think that this pushes the plot hook back a little bit more and foreshadows more of the main character's conflict. However, I think I may have taken it too far in the other direction and made this too obvious. Am I just fretting over nothing? Am I incapable of being subtle in my writing? I guess time and further updates will tell...
In addition, the following two chapters, as well as a series of flashbacks in later chapters, have original characters in them that are based upon my real-life friends, family, etc. However, I have changed their names and interests to ensure that they will not be recognized, nor will they recognize themselves (except in a few egregious cases, where I have made a game of challenging my friends to read this and see if they can spot themselves). Know that it was all done in good fun, and in a loving manner. Take everything written here with a grain of salt.
Chapter 1: Where it Started
"It all started when…"
Years ago, back when I was little, I promised myself I would never, ever use that phrase to open any essay or any short story I wrote, much less an entire memoir. It was something that I had grown tired of over the years, because, being a young girl whose elementary school emphasized literacy and writing skills, I had heard it on almost every classmate's writing paper since kindergarten, since we were mostly too young and too stupid to care if our introductions were creative or not. Mind you, that generalization includes me as well. Back in those early years, my opinion on writing was that I shouldn't have to do it at all, either by hand or via computer—now, I've discovered writing to be my truest passion, thanks mostly to my learning how to type. To think that I once despised it is almost unnerving. It's like thinking about a different person altogether.
But then, I cared little about writing, so naturally, that was not the reason that I had promised never to open a paper with the stock phrase, "It all started when…"
I have no doubt that the real reason behind it is that I am a natural and die-hard contrarian, and a stubborn one at that. I have been since I can remember, and probably before. It may be one of my greatest character traits sometimes—it kept me from going along with the stupidity of the masses (preteenaged masses are particularly stupid), and keeps me from doing so today.
It may also be one of my greatest flaws.
"Mary, Mary, quite contrary," my mother, Callie Thornton, used to say to me, shaking her finger and smiling, always with a wry sparkle in her eyes. "That's what we should have named you." Then, she would shake her head and scoop me up in her arms, at least until I got too heavy for her after her surgery. "I told your father that when I was pregnant—I could just sense it. But he liked Jay much better."
Even my name is contrary. People are always surprised whenever my parents tell them my name—first, middle, and last always—before they meet the very much female child behind it. I get a National Geographic Kids subscription every month addressed to Mr. Jay Cash Thornton, among other things, which is kind of cool. I'm even so contrary that I'm actually proud of it.
Yes, I'm certain of it—it all started because I'm just too stubborn and too oppositional. If I had gone with the flow my whole life, none of this would have ever come to pass…yet, I wouldn't trade any of it for the world. But that only answers the question of why this started, not when.
Really, who can say exactly when it all started, anyway?
"If you want to get technical," I imagine my childhood friend Clark would say, if I somehow got to tell him about all this, "it started when you were born. Everything that ever happened to you did."
If Clark said that, then I suppose Drake might retort, "And if you want to be up-front about it and not dig too deep, it started at the beginning of the fifth grade, with Mrs. Bean."
I had no idea what Jeremy might say. He would probably throw out one suggestion, then reconsider it, then throw out several more ideas out loud, until somebody who had no business sticking his nose in our affairs would tell him to shut up. That was the one thing that always got on Jeremy's nerves.
"I have Asperger's Syndrome," he felt compelled to remind us all fairly often. "It makes me talk to myself out loud sometimes. So what? I don't see anything wrong with it."
I imagine that Nathan would take a similar approach, adjusting the scope to wider—my birth, my parents' wedding, the formation of the universe, and so on—and smaller points—the fifth grade, or my tenth birthday—as he saw fit, never being fully satisfied. Nobody ever told him to shut up, but he did not have Asperger's Syndrome or any other such disorder; he was simply really odd, and also fairly popular and well-liked, so I guess all that combined meant he got a free pass for doing such things.
This always drove Jeremy crazy, though he never showed any resentment toward Nathan himself for it.
And lastly, I imagine that Tess, Misty, and Dan wouldn't give a hoot where it started; all they knew was that it started sometime and someplace, and it didn't bear thinking about—to them. I thought it required some thinking about.
So, barring events such as my birth and the formation of the universe, that most likely left my school years.
It probably didn't start in kindergarten. That was the year in which I had no friends in school. I did my work, I played with the alphabet blocks, and I sifted through the gravel out in the playground at recess. This worried my mother, who started to come to school with me in the morning when I told her, "I didn't really make any friends today, Mom," every single day when prompted. Not that it bothered me in the least.
"There are so many sweet kids in your class," she said after about a week of observing. "What's the name of that girl who always says hi when you walk into class?"
"Which girl?"
"The one with the black hair at her shoulders."
I had no idea that anybody had been saying hi to me, and shrugged it off. I stayed alone for the rest of the year, and it did nothing to affect me. I had many close friends outside of school, anyway.
Perhaps it started in the first grade. That was the year I met Jeremy, after remaining alone for another month.
I remember that I was in charge of delivering the attendance to the office for the week, and…well, he was in trouble for asking Miss Aisle to leave him alone.
"Well, that wasn't exactly what happened," he later admitted, after saying that all he had done was ask her to stop being mean to him. "I mean, she wasn't being very nice and all. She hasn't been nice to me at all. I guess I just…had it. I yelled at her and ran out of the room. They rounded me up here." He shrugged and smiled. He was always more cheerful back then. "So, what are you in for?"
"I'm the attendance girl for Mrs. Meyer."
"Fantastic. I have nobody to share my misery with." He shook his head. "My mom says I have Asperger's Syndrome."
"You mean you're one of those kids who moons people from the back of the bus?"
"No. She says it's a form of high-functioning autism."
"Okay." I forced on a smile and waved. "Well, good luck. I have to go back now. See you!"
That day, I asked my mom what Asperger's Syndrome—and autism—was. She told me that she had once suspected me of having it, but after running me through some tests, she concluded that I was just a bit obstinate and not much for change. That was also the day I became familiar with the term "contrarian."
Jeremy and I didn't see each other at recess for a week—no surprise, considering that he probably got into trouble a lot—but by coincidence, Mrs. Meyer and Miss Aisle's classes shared a lunch table. That week, Jeremy sat with me at lunch every day, and we really hit it off. We agreed on most things, and had a lot of the same ideas, not to mention our varying quirks.
When I told my mother about him, she immediately declared that Miss Aisle was not equipped with the patience to teach first graders, let alone one with autism, and called Jeremy's mother. She introduced herself as the mother of Jeremy's friend from school and invited him to transfer classes.
Jeremy was in my class for the rest of the year starting the very next week, and so it stayed for many years.
Clark joined us in the second grade, and I must admit that for a while, I missed the two-person dynamic. I missed me and Jeremy just sitting, talking. I missed always having one partner for two-person assignments and not having to choose. But more than that, I missed when I could be in line, and the line would stop suddenly, and the person behind me wouldn't bump into me every single time.
That was what it was like with Clark. He had a crush on me, it seemed, and had since we met. I had no idea why. I wasn't very crushable. I was whisper-quiet, and hardly came out of my shell talking to anybody except Jeremy, because I was already familiar with him.
Jeremy-Jay-Clark. That was the order in which we sat at lunch, always. At least, at first it was me and Jeremy and Clark. Then, it became either me and Jeremy, or me and Clark, and the latter was prevalent. Clark never gave me a moment's peace at lunch, or anywhere, pressing his face almost directly up to mine and reading in a painfully slow and monotone voice out of his stupid Kid's Almanac 2006.
Every day at lunch, our nurse, Mrs. Macintosh, would come bearing a little plastic cup full of pills for Clark. He often took them with great reluctance, but one day, it seemed he didn't want to take them at all. He screamed and kicked at the nurse and taunted her to call Principal Rodriguez, who arrived and carried Clark, still kicking and screaming, out of the room in short order.
That day, I told my mother about the event.
"Clark has bipolar disorder," she informed me. "When he was still in the womb, his mother decided that she did not want him. She took drugs and smoked and drank alcohol and fell down stairs and did all sorts of things, trying to kill him. When he was born, she put him up for adoption. Mark a few streets away took him in."
"Him and his friend Michael? No wonder Clark's messed up. They're really weird."
"Uh…" Mom hesitated. "I wouldn't call Mark and Michael friends, honey. Hasn't Clark told you that he has two dads?"
Only in the third grade did I learn exactly what that meant. I learned a lot about what such things meant that year, actually, thanks to Dan.
Dan was new at Westlake that year, and by chance, he sat at the same table with me and Clark and Jeremy.
"Hey, I'm Dan. Dan Fallow," he greeted us, letting his weight go as he plopped into his chair. He was huge for a third grader.
"Shoot." Dan shook his head and looked around the room. "This is real different from where I went to school. I went to some ghetto school in another part of town. Don't know which, or what it was called. Shoot."
I tried to make small talk, making sure he knew he was welcome. "Must be hard to move to a new place like that."
"Right in the middle of my career, too!" He slammed his fist down on the table, then sighed. "Actually, it wasn't that hard. Everyone there hated me. Prob'ly 'cause I'm black."
"But…wasn't everyone black there?" asked Clark.
"Dude, how would you know?" Dan burst out.
"But you said it was a ghetto school!"
Dan leaned forward inches from Clark's face with his fist raised like he was going to punch him, then sank back into his chair, releasing the air from his lungs. "Damn racist."
"I'm not a racist!" Clark defended himself. Jeremy and I exchanged worried glances. We could already tell that Clark was asking for trouble. They both seemed hot-blooded, and the worst part was that Dan could probably crush him like a bug. "My gay dads are Mexican!"
"Mexican? Aw, shoot, you're a white boy!" Dan was silent for a moment, then seemed to have some sort of delayed epiphany. His eyes lit up as he said, "Wait, your dads are gay? Do they still get booty?"
Jeremy spat out his orange juice and reached over to cover my ears. I brushed him off and told him that I could plug my own ears, thank you very much, but not after Clark told him that he had walked in on his dads recently, while leading his baby sister by the hand.
"It was rated U for Ugly," he informed us all cheerfully. Dan bawled and moaned like he was about to throw up, all while laughing. In fact, he laughed so hard he actually did throw up (all over the desk, too), and that was the last Clark and Jeremy saw of him for the day.
I, on the other hand, was the one responsible for escorting him to the nurse.
"Shoot, that's not going to do my reputation any good," Dan muttered. "I know everyone here's gonna hate me. This school looks all proper 'n' stuff, and I got some depression going on. I take meds. By the way, what's your name?"
"Jay Cash Thornton, at your service."
"That's a funny name for a girl." He squinted and crinkled his nose, looking me over with scrutiny. "Are you a drag queen?"
Of course, Dan had to explain exactly what a drag queen was, which I thought was the weirdest thing I'd ever heard.
"Well," I said, trying to find the positive, "you learn something new every day. And I'm not one."
There was silence as I pushed open the door to the main hallway, until Dan said, "I ain't got no love at home. My parents never even gave me a hug as a kid."
"You still are a kid!"
"All I really need is a friend." Dan shuffled his feet as we approached the doorway of the nurse's office.
"Shoot," I said with a welcoming grin, "we'll be your friends. There's always room for one more in our group!"
Mrs. Macintosh appeared at the door and pulled Dan into her office. As I turned to go back to class, he shouted after me, "'Shoot'? That's my word!"
Third grade was also the year that I met Tess. Our meeting was similar to mine and Jeremy's—I was doing some work on the bench, making up for a sick day, and Tess was in trouble. For what, she wouldn't specify.
"Yeah, it's the ADHD," she said. "I get in trouble a lot."
"Well, good luck with that, then." I pretended to write down some more answers to my questions, but Tess called my bluff by looking over my shoulder, unbeknownst to me.
"Hey!" She laughed and threw her arm around my shoulders, squeezing me tight. "You're not writing anything! Talk to me!"
I did—I told her about how my weekend was, how I had been sick for a few days, how my first-ever Girl Scout cookies season was coming up (she said that she used to be a Girl Scout). Then I told her about my friends, and her nose wrinkled a bit. She put her arm around my shoulder again and squeezed even tighter.
"Tess." Ms. Bernard's voice came from the teachers' bench behind us. "Stop talking to her! You're supposed to be in time-out."
"But why?"
"For putting bugs on Analise's back!"
"Yes, Ms. Bernard." Tess lowered her voice and pulled me away from the bench. "I'm new here, and I don't know everyone who's in my class. Which teacher do you have?"
"Ms. Bernard."
"Great!" She wrapped me in a crushing bear-hug. "Me, too! I'll ask her if I can move to sit next to you tomorrow! I'll see you then!"
Tess tried to hog me much as Clark did, and seemed to only tolerate my friends because I absolutely refused to leave them. She constantly had her arm around me, touching my hair, telling me how I would look so great in torn jeans and a low-cut shirt and some high-sheen lip gloss. She told me what shampoo to use, what bath gels I should by, and what earrings I should get. "What do you mean, you don't want any?" was her mantra for the entire semester, and longer. Eventually, however, she became more accustomed to my reluctance to change, as well as the group dynamic.
The fourth grade was a wonderful year. Our group was strong as ever, and our numbers grew by three more before the year was out. I suspect it was the direct result of Jeremy, as a joke, making a cardboard sign reading "Misfits Welcome Here" and hanging it around my neck. For an entire week, he made me wear it whenever we could get away with it, and when he caught my trying to put it in my desk, he called me out and watched for several minutes, making sure I kept it on. When Jeremy got something in his head, even something as trivial as that, he could never let it go.
First came Misty. Our meeting was unremarkable enough—we were partners for an exercise in PE, we struck up a conversation, we learned each other's names and remembered that we were in the same class, and she moved to our group's table.
She was a lovely girl, with a line of freckles bridging her cheeks and loose, long copper curls down to her back. She had a bright smile and laugh and a skip in her step that seemed full of potential, and it wasn't hard to tell she was very smart.
"I do well in school 'cause I take all sorts of meds," she told us once, pulling out a bag of pills from her pocket. "This one is for my ADHD—it's really bad. This one is for my bipolar. This is for my dyslexia…"
After school, when Jeremy, Clark and I were walking home, Jeremy asked me, "So, what do you think of her now?"
"Wow…" I shook my head. "I've never met somebody who has every disorder known to man."
"I don't think she has a very good home life," said Jeremy. "She's taking care of two younger siblings and wearing low-cut shirts! Think about it: she said her mom named her after an obscure alcoholic beverage! Doesn't that mean anything to you?"
"My birth name is Samuel Adams," Clark said, sounding slightly offended. "Of course, with my birth mom being a drunk and a druggy and all…"
"Aren't you glad your dads named you something different?"
"Yep."
Then came Nathan, about halfway through the first semester. Even then, Nathan seemed odd, but still fairly popular in the "underground" crowd—the "theater kids" mostly, with his eccentric personality and strange mannerisms, which he kept up willfully rather than out of habit or some chronic disorder. He was mostly friends with me and Jeremy and Misty, though he dutifully reached out to the others, and somehow got sucked into our group in that odd, subtle way that our new members always did. Throughout the rest of the year and the fifth grade, he remained the only group member with enough personality and connections to straddle our coven and the mainstream population.
And lastly, there was Drake.
Drake came to us midway through the school year after Christmas break, and when he was introduced to the class and allowed to sit wherever he wanted, he picked a chair next to our table and started to strike up a conversation with us. We all had an unspoken agreement then: He was to be our new member, one way or another. Any new student who sat next to us seemed to immediately become one.
Jeremy was the first to tell him this, and by that point, he, like the rest of us, had wised up enough to ask him, "And what's wrong with you?"
"What?" Drake was taken aback, and started to laugh wryly. "What do you mean, what's wrong with me? What's wrong with you?"
"Asperger's Syndrome," Jeremy answered, even though Drake was probably not expecting one. He had little concept of rhetorical questions; he neither asked them nor left them unanswered when asked.
"I have bipolar disorder," said Clark. "My mom didn't want me and tried to miscarry me. I'm adopted and I have two gay dads. But, uh,"—he threw a glance at me and put his hand on mine—"I'm not gay."
I brushed him off as gently as I could. I didn't have the heart to break it to him that what he felt was not mutual. I was far too young for a boyfriend, and with him, likewise, though he didn't necessarily understand this.
"And I got depression," Dan chimed in.
Tess: "Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder."
"And I," began Misty, as she prepared for her speech, "have ADHD, bipolar disorder, dyslexia, maybe some autism, and, uh…I forget what else. My mom drank a lot and did drugs when she was pregnant with me and my brother and sister. I have to look after them. She's usually out drinking with my new stepdad." She added cheerfully, "They're thinking about taking me off some of my medication!"
"I…see…" muttered Drake. "And what about you two?" he asked, looking toward me and Nathan.
"Pay no mind to me," Nathan replied. "I'm just really weird."
"And you?"
I beamed and shrugged. "Nothing, really. Just a misfit magnet, I guess. They're all mostly my friends, but we're pretty tight."
"Well…" Drake rocked back and forth on his toes, a mischievous grin on his face. "Uh, I'm not disabled or anything. I'm just a new kid from Melody Academy, and you know how Melody kids are around here…"
"I went to Melody in the first grade," Clark said. "Welcome aboard."
That appeared to be the final number for the year: me, Jeremy, Clark, Dan, Tess, Misty, Nathan, and Drake, and so it has been ever since.
After the first conversation with Drake, I approached my teacher, Ms. Cornfield, after school one day, asking her, "Why do all my friends have disorders?"
"What do you mean?" she asked.
I immediately launched into a long explanation of how I had met all my friends and how much trouble I had almost gotten into with them over the years—guilt by association, she called it—and how they had always been there to get me out. I described all their idiosyncrasies, good and bad, in minute detail, and gave anecdotes so that she could hear how they worked in action.
To this day, I have no idea how much of my life story I told to Ms. Cornfield, but after I was done, I was practically panting, and she just sat there with a broad smile on her face. "I have the perfect answer for you," she said. "You yourself may have a condition after all: you attract needy people."
"I didn't need anybody to tell me that!" I made sure to laugh so she would know I was joking. "But why?"
"I've always attracted needy people, too, Jay. Remember that. It's a good thing. Folk like you are usually very good folk. Kind, affectionate, always loyal, always accepting, very forgiving of people's faults and failings, can see the good in just about everyone…"
"Are they contrarians?" I asked, proud of being able to use the word in context.
After Ms. Cornfield stopped laughing, she quieted entirely, tapping her chin, considering this for the longest time. She finally answered, "I guess in a way, they are. They make it a point to be nice to people that not everybody else is nice to, and they're often rewarded with friends for life."
I left the school without a care in the world, walking alongside Jeremy and Clark as I always did; only now, I felt a new, stronger affection and appreciation for these wonderful, quirky friends. As soon as I got home, I took out a pencil and a notepad, and wrote down everything Ms. Cornfield had said.
"Loyalty," I muttered as I wrote, "acceptance…forgiveness…affection…see the good in everybody."
Afterward, I wrote "Jay Cash Thornton's Code of Honor" at the top in the best cursive I could muster, and took out a pushpin and stuck the paper on my bulletin board, where I could see it and remember it every day.
I'll never forget that piece of paper. Not for as long as I live.
Closing Notes: So, what do you think? Please review if you have anything to say, and constructive (constructive!) criticism is always appreciated. Thanks for your time. (And yes, this is still an Avatar fanfic. A loose fanfic, granted, but it's set in the universe of Avatar, and the canon characters do play large roles. We'll get to that.)
