In every well-lived life, one will encounter moments that ultimately define us. These little deviations from the norm may be wholly mundane, but they’re powerful enough to change us in ways we could never have anticipated. At first glance, these deviations seem insignificant, but beneath the surface, they play an important role in the person we become.
Reflecting on my own life, there are a few defining memories that stand out in each stage of growth. My earliest memory comes from when I was nine months old. As a tiny bundle of beauty bound in white fabrics and topped with a veil, I felt fabulous. Everyone kept telling me what a beautiful little bride I was, and I knew I looked great. At some point, my mother set me down in the living room before our massive tube TV. I found myself transfixed by a horrendously cheesy movie, but something outside caught my attention. I turned to gaze out at the falling leaves and orange-hued decorations. This was a special season, I realized, and it was one I really enjoyed.
In theory, that memory should not exist. After all, the regions of the brain that contribute to long-term memory only begin developing around that time. Perhaps it’s an invented scenario, or maybe a memory of a memory… I like to believe it’s real, though. I was speaking in sentences before twelve months of age (though not particularly complex, my ability to string words together stunned and horrified every adult forced to spend time with me), so perhaps my mind was developed enough to cement this transformative moment. Perhaps not.
What I do know for certain is that the defining memory of my preteen years is not an invented scenario. It happened without a doubt, and it still haunts me late at night.
Seventh grade. Middle School. From the outside, the school looked like a prison. White jagged bricks danced in protruding vertical rows above the entryway, topped by a thin black stripe of fascia on the flat roof edge. The bricks were stained with pollution and tiger-striping from long neglected metal elements on the roof. They were chipped and battered in their longitudinal rows like broken teeth.
The interior of the school was every bit as abysmal. Chewed gum sat in dry limescale-coated drinking fountains. Linoleum floors were scuffed by Heelys, ambitiously flirty high heels, and notoriously slippery Vans. Overall, it was an abominable image that accurately summed up my experience.
Ironically, just as with my creeping suspicions about language development assisting in the formation of my earliest toddler-years memory, my defining preteen memory began in Language Arts. The class was taught by Mr. N, a goofy teacher that assigned nicknames to each of his students. On the first day of class, he assigned nicknames that followed us throughout the year.
That year, Mr. N was frustrated by students leaving behind materials in his classroom. It happened so frequently that he started threatening us with detention if we left anything behind. The cool edgy teacher suddenly felt less like an educational entertainer and more like a fed-up babysitter.
“Check under your desk before you leave,” he often reminded. “Remember, I will give you detention if I find anything left behind.”
It was in his class that I realized my Language Arts folder was missing. It was yellow, and I kept all my completed assignments in it. I checked everywhere, but it was gone. Missing in action. I wouldn’t necessarily struggle without it, but my organizational skills had saved my neck when the occasional teacher informed me that projects were unaccounted for. With my respective subject folder in hand, I was able to produce a graded project that I could smugly offer back to the teacher. This is your mistake, Ms. Smith, not mine. Ha ha. The thought would be fleeting, but it was a silent victory that I secretly reveled in.
I accepted that I had lost my work for Mr. N’s class, so defeat was a possibility in this invented arena. However, defeat came for me in another form.
Mr. N rearranged the classroom in the succeeding weeks following the Folder Fiasco. The class spilled in, fueled by an untapped sea of hormones, post-lunch sugar rushes, and fascination at the new layout. As we settled into our seats, the teacher’s eyes settled on me.
“Nikki.” Uh oh. He didn’t use my nickname. I was in trouble. “I found this last night.”
He held up the missing yellow folder. I took a deep breath. “Oh, it’s been missing for weeks. Where did you find it?”
“Behind the bookshelf.”
Fuck, it must have fallen off the tray beneath my desk at some point and became lodged out of sight. “Thank you for finding it, Mr. N. It was an honest mistake.”
“Maybe, but you know my policy about forgotten possessions.”
He turned the folder around – he was holding a pink slip against it. He gestured for me to come claim the pair. The class oooooohhed as I took the walk of shame to claim my folder… and my punishment. I was frustrated, but you had to appreciate the man’s knack for theatrics. He probably rehearsed the big reveal.
At detention, I was given a fun project to work on. Write an essay on why you received this detention and how you will rectify the issue in the future.
Language. If you haven’t figured it out, that’s a common thread in this memoir. This was the instance when I learned to weaponize language.
Losing something is frustrating. Losing an object robs you of situational control, it disrupts your routine, and it apparently can earn you detention.
How did I receive detention? Why, dear essay reader, I’m glad you asked. I lost a folder a few weeks ago, and Mr. N found it last night. He has a policy in place to punish forgetfulness and a lack of discipline, which is understandable. However, to enforce this policy, he felt it necessary to punish me for an honest-to-goodness mistake.
Allow me to walk you through student life. We carry mounds of books from class to class, and we have to set them on the trays beneath our desks to work with the space we have. My desk was right in front of the bookshelf, which my lost folder was found behind. It fell off my teetering mountain of books and, evidently, became lodged out of sight. I was aware it was lost, but I hadn’t seen it in weeks. I had not considered checking the half-centimeter of space behind the bookshelf.
How can I correct this behavior to prevent future detentions? I suppose carrying a pocket flashlight could help, or perhaps moving my desk and getting on my hands and knees to peer behind furniture as soon as the bell rings could prevent a detention.
That’s probably not what the essay actually looked like, but it was doubtlessly bitter in tone. I was bitter enough about this highly unnecessary mark on my record that I found myself inspired by the opportunity to turn my essay into a nail-biting tell all.
At the time, I was Morning Announcement Girl. Each day at a designated time, I stepped out of class and walked to the main office to use the coveted intercom. “Good morning! Today is Wednesday, January 23rd, and we’ve got an exciting day ahead of us. The Science Club is meeting after school today, and intramural sports are just kicking off. For lunch, the cafeteria will be serving Mexican pizza, PB&Js, French fries, and everyone’s favorite: MILK! Now, please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.”
In my burgeoning career as a soon-to-be radio personality (I’ll get into that later), I’d also developed a camaraderie with the office staff and principles. That day, the Vice Principal approached me after the morning announcement concluded.
“Detention, eh?”
I cracked a smile. “Yeah, Mr. M, I got detention. I outlined everything in my essay.”
He studied me before moving to open a drawer. He removed a manilla envelope, found my essay, and skimmed through it.
He snorted. He tried to hold in his laughter, but it escaped nonetheless.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “Wow, this is scathing. You were really mad.”
“I still am.”
“I’ll take care of it,” he assured me.
At the time, I wasn’t sure what that meant. I continued stewing in my bitterness for a couple weeks until, once again, someone left something behind in Language Arts.
When Mr. N returned it, he was quiet with his announcement. Defeated. The student approached the desk to claim his notebook and his anticipated punishment, but one of those two things was never passed off to him. Detention never came.
I had broken the detention curse, effectively freeing my pubescent peers from the thing we dreaded most. However, I didn’t feel victorious. I felt even more bitter. Fair was fair – I did the crime and served my time, but my peers wouldn’t have to face the same fate.
In retrospect, I was a young Joan of Arc. I protected the sovereignty of the student body and coronated an era of detention-free forgetfulness. But even now as I write about that one time I got detention, I’m still bitter.
Not every moment becomes a memory. In fact, much of my middle school career is a blur. I remember that I discovered the joys of menstruation not long after the Folder Fiasco, and I remember convincing my mom to let me get highlights and start wearing makeup. These developments segued into my experience as an eighth grader, which was significantly less bitter than my seventh grade affair.
Clad in black, caked with eyeliner, and donning aggressively hued high heels, I prowled the halls with confidence. I continued doing morning announcements, color-coding my folders and notebooks for each subject, and, amazingly, writing.
I don’t credit detention with sparking a desire to write scathing manuscripts, but it might not be a coincidence that I began writing fiction the following year. While the inciting incident is lost from memory, I do recall sitting down to pen my first story.
When I say pen, I mean pen. That year, I knocked out three separate handwritten manuscripts. They were doubtlessly filled with spelling errors, horribly corny dialogue, and poor worldbuilding. Nonetheless, I found solace in writing my own stories between devouring books.
The first manuscript was some alien thingamajig, so we’ll call it a space opera for the sake of assigning a genre. I couldn’t even tell you what happened in the story if I tried, but I’m pretty sure the main character found love and had a badass alien lion thing as a pet. In retrospect, the latter storyline sounds pretty neat. I might enjoy having an alien lion thing in my life, especially if it’s an icy shade of blue, which I believe the aforementioned creature was.
The second manuscript was something-or-another about Ancient Egypt. Go figure. It was called The Secret of Sekhmet, and I genuinely remember nothing about the story beyond the name. Maybe it was about an Egyptologist discovering previously undocumented lore? A yarn about an ancient artifact with the potential to rewrite history as we know it? A field trip to a local museum that goes horribly wrong? Your guess is as good as mine.
The final story of that year was one I recall rather well – I don’t know if it had a name, but it followed a girl in Lucinda, Pennsylvania as she discovers a baby griffin in the woods. Growing up, my family had a cabin in nearby Tionesta, so I was familiar with the area and believed there was pure magic in the woods. Rather than subjecting the animal to the horror of scientific study, the main character decides to preserve the mystery of the woods and keep her discovery a secret. As legend stompers descend on her town for a televised investigation, she gathers a crew of friends and former frenemies to sabotage the filming.
As eighth grade wrapped up, my Language Arts teacher asked me to stay behind one day. Mrs. C was an incredible teacher, and fun, too – we watched Edward Scissorhands in her class and read The Outsiders. She encouraged creativity and loved fostering friendships with her students.
“I’ve noticed you and friends exchanging a notebook,” she said. “Are you writing a book in there?”
“Yes!” I told her proudly. “Kaylee was reading it, and she passed it to Candice, who returned it today. Wanna see?”
With bright eyes, she watched me flip through the pages and explain the plot. She listened as I told her about the projected ending and asked questions that helped me infuse added personality into the characters.
When I finished my speech, she smiled at me knowingly. “Awesome. What’s next?”
“That’s it,” I said. “The story ends there.”
She shook her head, causing her strawberry-blonde bob to brush against her fashionable scarf. “That story might end, sure, but what are you writing next?”
That moment sparked a realization for me, as I’m certain she expected it to. I had to keep writing, and I had to do this seriously.
That summer, I set out to learn about the publishing industry. I joined writing workshops, attended lectures, and ultimately found myself as the only child in a room full of experienced literary adults. As with Mrs. C, my newfound peer group encouraged me to keep writing. They encouraged me to pursue publication, but first, I had to complete a manuscript.
The first manuscript I wrote was Wolfsbane, and it was a project that spanned the entire summer break and at least half of freshman year in high school. I typed it out, learned to format for print, and ultimately wove a tale that came out to one hundred nineteen Microsoft Word pages. At over fifty two thousand words, it was a mere novella. Nonetheless, I queried it to literary agents.
Amazingly, those kind individuals took the time to respond to me, and they did so gently. I was informed that the story was outside of normal word counts, so it unfortunately would not make sense for them to represent. After all, publishers have a certain expectation when they’re considering books, and word count is often taken into account. However, the agents said, receiving a query from a fourteen-year-old was so far out of the norm that most of them read the beginning of the story and enjoyed it.
And it was a fun opening:
Angel Salisbury sat before her uneaten sandwich. With each passing second, it looked more unappetizing on that humid late August day. It was a bologna sandwich. Two pieces of whole wheat bread, a chunk of lettuce, mayonnaise, ketchup. How easy it was to categorize things that had order.
Angel’s life had no order.
She had learned that she liked things much better when they were in a category. Her life had been easy to categorize. She was a competitive cheerleader – the best in Virginia, arguably. She was a violinist, and a disciplined one at that. Angel was outgoing, unabashedly weird, and optimistic.
Was.
Her house caught fire when she graduated high school. What should have been a day of celebration became a time of mourning. What was meant to be a milestone became a headstone, and one for her father. Along with his passing, Angel lost nearly all of her possessions. She had seen how quickly an entire life could crumble, and she was depressed as she looked on toward a future as an adult.
While the story was just my first attempt at querying, it evolved into something much more frightening. It became the first series I ever wrote. The trilogy kept progressing until the brand was totally out of control, and it gained a cult following among friends entrusted with reading it. And, of course, the encouragement of agents pushed me to keep going until I had the perfect book for publication.
Of course, publication was a far-off goal for me – it was years away at best, so I allowed myself to let loose and type my teenage years away.
Long story short, I, like many authors, remember my journey to publication vividly. It’s marred with bitterness, possibly incorrect memories, but above all else, a love of language. I ended up putting my creative writing career on the backburner while I focused on a professional writing career in corporate communications, but I found my way back and published my first book in April of 2024.
I’m just beginning my creative journey now, but all this rambling and reflecting is to say one thing: Don’t lose touch with your inner child. They’re still in there, still passionate, and still waiting to tell their tale.
Keep writing.