ok

this is an excerpt from a creative non-fiction story i'm working on. i have been so incredibly busy with school and lots of things that i haven't been blogging at allll, writing a TON and going to lots of things, it's story week!


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Robert Says 'Violet'




I choose the purple crayon for two reasons. One is because right now, it is my favorite color. The other reason is because I really like this book called Harold and the Purple Crayon, where a little boy draws houses and blankets and moons and balloons that come to life with the touch of his purple crayon. I do the maze but I figured out one day how to always beat it by starting at the end, so that’s where I begin; On my paper placemat, at the table, over the puffy plastic evergreen and white tablecloth, in a pizzeria where my feet don’t yet reach the floor.
I don’t notice until I hear someone cry out loudly, but all of my family has stood up from the table and left me alone. They have gathered in a cluster near the revolving door. It is the middle of the day, during the week, and I haven’t gone to school today because something special is about to happen, someone special. Or so I’ve been told.
My mother has driven me here in her red Mazda van. I don’t know where my dad is. I like to sit all the way in the back of the van and listen to CDs on my headphones. Randy is here, too. We have the same birthday. I know because last year we celebrated together and we ate at a café in Evanston where everything on the menu was seitan and beans and I wanted to go home and eat cake but they gave me a spice muffin instead.
Randy is the reason for this special day, this special someone. Randy lives in the city in an apartment, and he has glasses and has recently shaved his head so I wonder if maybe he has cancer. Once my dad shaved his head on an impulse and my mom said, you look like a cancer patient. I started to cry and felt very serious and said, that’s not funny, cancer is not funny, lots of people die of cancer all the time. I am a child perpetually frightened of myself and everyone I know dying of brain cancer. I hope Randy doesn’t have brain cancer.
Randy likes genealogy. Genealogy and the internet; that’s why we’re all here, at Giordano’s in Skokie, in the middle of the day, and why i didn’t go to school. Because Randy has found Bob, and no one has ever met Bob, except for today. Right now, everyone in my family who I have ever met is meeting Bob, and I am at the table and I am coloring purple on everything and cheating on the maze, and just as I finish it, someone says, Lisa Beth, come over here and meet Robert, and I let the crayon roll off the table and onto the floor as I slide off my booster chair and clamor to the place where my name has been called in my tiny patent leather shoes.