Scars And Stories: That Time I Wrote Fanfic For A Grade

Today we have an actual story rather than an incident where I got injured. YEAH!

So, most every nerd on the internet has read or at least heard of fanfiction. Many of us book nerds have seen it on Tumblr. Some of you may have written it.

I did. I wrote a lot of fanfic in middle school (which none of you will never find, hopefully).

This is one such fanfic. The difference that makes me willing to show you?

I wrote this for a grade. I turned this in to a teacher, who had it read and grade it. And she gave me an A?! I know, I’m shocked too.

THAT was an awkward conversation. Our assignment was to look at this picture (it was like, a girl sitting on a tire next to a broken down car in the middle of the street or something I don’t remember very well.) and we had to write a short story using figurative language based on this “picture prompt”. Now, this was the seventh grade. The time of braces and having my hair dyed purple/bleached to hell. Clearly 13 year old Sam was a fan of vaguely mortifying decisions (she also managed to fall down stairs and into puddles a lot). Mind you, this was also a few months after the first Avengers movie come out (so the height of the craze) and also shortly after I discovered fanfic.

Do you see where this is going?

So, because I not feel very confident in writing short stories with good charaters, I asked if I could use characters from the Avengers… She didn’t want me using THE AVENGERS themselves, but she let me write my story as a backstory for Jane Foster. Mind you, I had this conversation IN CLASS with a TEACHER. Three years ago I saw nothing wrong with this. Now? I want to shoot things.

Why am I bringing this up? Because I found the assignment. Not the file on my computer, no, the actual paper where my teacher wrote my grade on it. So you can’t say that I’m making this up because its funny or to seem dramatic. No, this was a thing.

Now that you’ve seen it intact, with my weird figurative language work scribbled on it and my grade, I’m going to type it up in case you’d like to read it because even if it wasn’t in a terrible picture, my handwriting is roughly on par with a five year old’s.

Here goes nothing. Feel free to make fun of this.

(And yes I am such a pack rat that I have paper assignments from the seventh grade saved.)

(FYI this physically pained me to read as I typed)

If Dreams Could Meet Reality

When asked how she decided to be an astrophysicist, Jane Foster would smile and say “As a child, I promised to discover something out there in the stars. I intend to fulfill that promise.” and then walk away or then change the subject. It had always been a well known fact that Jane loved the stars and everything to do with them; however, where this fascination came from was not as well known…

A nine-year-old, sullen faced, Jane sat in the back of her godfather’s (Erik Selvig) silver Toyota on the way to his small, rural, hometown in New Mexico. It was a warm day, the sky a cloudless blue, and she was miserable. As long as she could remember, she had lived in New York. It had been just her and her dad, and now she’d never see him again, all because of a catalytic car crash. Now, she was moving to the Middle-Of-No-Where, New Mexico.

Of course, it was just her luck that the car broke down. As Erik changed the tire, she leaned against the broken one. She could just imagine that it popped purposely to irritate her. She really didn’t want to move. She was used to snow and huge, crazy cities, not an old-fashoined town in the middle of a desert half-way across the country; as much as she loved her godfather, she really loathed New Mexico. The hot desert air blew scorching hot grains of sand at her face and whipped her fire red hair around like she’d been thrown from an airplane; yes, she really didn’t want to move.

When Erik, finally, fixed the car, they were back on their way to New Mexico. When they had about a 20 minute drive left, Erik told her, “cheer up Jane, it’ll be fun. I set up a sleepover for you and my neighbor’s little girl, Darcy. She loves science too. She might even be your new best friend.” Yeah, right; she was going to get on a plane to her aunt’s house in Brooklyn first chance; she didn’t want to make friends…

That changed when she first meet Darcy Lewis; who was loud, brash, hyperactive, talkative and boy-crazy where Jane was quiet, logical, and shy. They shouldn’t have gotten along for a minute, lest their mutual love of science and the stars. The day of the sleepover found an eight-ear-old Darcy Lewis in Jane’s backyard, in sleeping bags under the stars. By the time an hour had gone, they’d pelted each other with popcorn, light a campfire, and named dozens of constellations. Jane loved them, and how Darcy seemed to know so much about the glittering sparks of light far out in the inky blackness of space. With the heat of the fire and the rough grains of sand under her it almost felt like home. Then Darcy said “For someone who claims to hate it here oh so much, you sure seem to love it.” and sent her into peals of laughter all over again. Maybe New Mexico wouldn’t be so bad…

That was 20 years ago and to this day she remember how they show a shooting star and made wishes on it. Darcy wished a hot guy would fall out of the sky; Jane wished she could prove that someone, something lived out there. They both laughed at each other, not expecting it to come true. Looks like they both got their wishes granted, albeit a bit differently than expected…

Okay. I hate everything. I took SO MUCH willpower not to edit everything about that.

What do you think? Make me feel better, what awkward choices did you make in seventh grade?