Where Ya' Rowing, Rowan North?

Where Ya' Rowing, Rowan North? (AKA The Saddest Thing Ever Written)

(This tis be a sad, strange little (exceptionally long) diddy that I wrote at the age of twelve.  I am not ashamed to admit that, despite its terrible quality and obvious plotholes, it is by far the funniest thing I have ever written.  So, please, sit back, grab some tea and some friends, and enjoy the strange tale of Rowan North.)

CHAPTER ONE: Rowan North: Basketball Extraordinaire

Have you ever felt that maybe, somehow, you’re just different than everyone else? And that maybe, just possibly, it goes beyond your naturally velvet-cupcake-red hair, or your summer-colored eyes, or the fact that you’re so hard-headed you could probably go one-on-one with a bull? Well, maybe not exactly like that; I’m not expecting you to be just like me. No one is just like anyone else. And some people just happen to be incredibly, indisputably, freakishly, totally not normal, as out of place as a wolf caught up in a herd of giraffes. I had to find this little lesson out the hard way, because, you see, I am… well, lets save that for later. I should start at the beginning of my story, anyways. Because, weird or normal, popular or not, I do have a story to tell. A tale that is exceptionally out of the ordinary.

You see, it started at a perfectly normal school, at a perfectly normal basketball game. Well, perfectly normal except for the fact that, I, Rowan North, was embarrassed to say that Westchester Middle School was losing miserably, twenty-three to one in our opponents favor. But considering the state of our team, even that wasn’t incredibly unusual.

But there was one thing about that game that had caused more than a few jaws to drop. I had just made a slam-dunk. Me, a thirteen-year-old that hardly could touch the five-foot-mark on a growth chart if I stood on my tippy-toes. And even if there were only a few people in the run-down old stands surrounding the court (my parents not among them), it had been a pretty amazing feeling, having everyone that was there cheering for me. Actually, strike that. It had been nothing less than a brilliant.

Sure didn’t last long, though.

“How did you do that, Rowan?” Ms. Bane, my basketball coach, glared down at me from her towering height of six-foot-three. Her ice blue eyes bore into mine. Not long after the game, the young woman (hardly ten years older than me) had dismissed the rest of my team with a laugh and a pearly white smile, and then, suddenly furious, hauled me out the door and into the cold of the school parking lot.

I gritted my teeth, tugged my black sweat jacket closer to me as a stiff wind sliced through the parking lot, and sighed. “How did I do what What do you mean?” Yeah, I was being difficult. But what right did she have to get mad at me for no good reason, when I had just done something that actually helped our team? When I had done something that people actually appreciated?

“What do you think I‘m talking about, Rowan?” Bane put a stiff, freezing hand on my shoulder, and suddenly her blue eyes seemed like chips of ice themselves, even colder than the frigid air that clawed at my face. “How did you do that?”

I fought the overwhelming urge to say something sarcastic, but with every accusing word I was growing more and more furious, and more and more confused. So I made a managed a slam-dunk? I’m sure that somewhere out in this big wide world there were other seventh-graders that could make shots like that. Why was it such a big deal? “I just did it, okay? I meant to make a jump shot, I guess I jumped a little too high. I made the basket, didn’t I?”

Ms. Bane shook her dark-haired head slowly, her voice even slower as she spoke. Calculating, thoughtful. “Rowan, people don’t just ‘accidentally’ jump seven feet into the air. Not even NBA players, and especially not a thirteen-year-old girl.” She narrowed her eyes slowly. “I was right all along.” She sort of looked away from me, twirling her black hair around and around and around her finger with a sigh. “I always hate having to explain this. Rowan, have you ever heard of a Out-Of-The-Ordinary?”