Chapter Five: And Then Keanu

          When high school started I was alone. Sure I still had the same old smart crew to hang out with, but I didn’t have anyone to be myself with. I started the year semi-lovesick even though I wasn’t sure what lovesickness was back then. I’d lost the one person I felt was safe enough to tell all my secrets to. I walked into my freshman year with nothing but the false friends I’d grow accustomed to.

          We were assigned lockers by last name, meaning I got stuck between a popular boy named Ryan and some girl I’d never heard of before. Ryan was jockish and annoying. The girl…well her name was Megan. She had dark brown hair, a giant a*s, and she didn’t know how to shut up. Every time I came to my locker she would start to babble. For some reason she felt telling me her life story was a good idea and it drove me wild.

          I thought that by ignoring her she’d stop eventually. Then she realized that I was the girl in front of her in history and I became a target there too. On and on and on she talked like some annoying bird. Finally I changed my tactic to try and actually talk to her. Eventually she’d see we were nothing alike and fade back into the background. That backfired when I realized I liked this girl. She was no Melanie, but she would certainly be enough to fill the void left when my best friend disappeared.

          Once we’d started talking it all spiraled out of my control. We both liked to write and that spawned a crazy idea. We were going to write a book. Not just any book, a book about a fairy and an angel like being we called an Accompany that would fall from the sky and help her save her kingdom from some plague that was killing everyone. To top it off he’d have a magical being that could be anything it wanted to be.

          We spent weeks holed up in the library writing and called each other late at night to plan what was to be written next. I spent all of my free time on this book and the talks we had were some of the best times of my life. We could talk about anything at all and it didn’t matter how weird it sounded. The book became our baby and we were the proudest parents you ever saw.

          One book became two while the first was torn apart and put back together. Then a third was written, then a fourth and fifth were fully planned out and outlined. Our little project turned into a massive, living being right before our eyes. It was so much more than we could ever dream.

Our main characters had a kid named Keanu, who became the one person we followed through every other book we wrote. Our villains became worse and our heroes got stronger. Their lives were ruined, characters died and new ones appeared. We had become gods of our own little world and it was an empire only we controlled.

          We became glued at the hip that year and every year after. Life was good, pure, and lovely. I had something to look forward to each day. And of course, Megan was good friends with who else but Dalton. As the year went by I learned he wasn’t such a bad guy after all and even started to hang out with him more often. Over the summer after that year I asked him out and we became an inseparable couple.

          I guess that’s one thing I can still say I owe Megan. She gave me the chance to trust men by giving me Dalton. Even when we started fighting and our tower of books tumbled down around us, I still remember that she gave me Dalton. But she also tried to take him away from me, and that is something I can never forgive.