Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [30]
I popped the Austin picture from its frame and held it up to the lamp. It was one of the few photos of my father I’d managed to salvage. My mother was a revisionist. Under the guise of scrapbooking projects, she had systematically removed him from our family photo albums. By the time I realized what was happening, he had been erased from our documented family history.
Turning, I ran my fingers along the notebook bindings lined along the bookshelf. They came to rest on the smallest of the journals, a ratty notebook with its spiral spine undone and sharp at top and bottom. I had used an eraser to etch the title Space Adventure into the purple ink of the notebook cover.
Chapter One: The Wograt Invasion
Once, in the blackness of space, the human race was a people without a land. It had been taken from them by the Wograts.
Wograts are hideous, ugly, and stupid. They have pig noses that stick out of their hair and usually stand between 6 or 9 feet tall. Their ears are hardly notisable since they are covered in hair. Their little black eyes get very large and red when they’re mad or in battle.
If you were ever to meet a Wograt and if you, let’s say, shot off one of the two larger horns on it’s head, you probably wouldn’t live to see what the Wograt looked like without that horn. Wograts consider their horns their only pride and joy, exept for a capture or a prisoner. One Wograt named Barthogly-Nud, grew 3 horns. That’s why he is now the main leader of the Wograts. Some people say that his brain turned into another horn, because Barthogly Nud is not only considered (by Wograts) the greatest Wograt, but by humans is considered the dumbest.
All Wograts think that they should be in charge of everything and everyone. Although the only races that they control are like small fish or little animals.
The novel was written entirely in pencil. The graphite had begun to fade, the words blurring and softening the pages. I’d written to the very last page and then some, chapter four spilling over onto the cardboard backing of the notebook where I was forced to resort to pen. The novel ended where the cardboard ended. I couldn’t have been more than nine.
I ran my hands affectionately over the manuscript, before setting the notebook aside and reaching for another. My penmanship had changed. I’d retrained the broad, fat loops of childhood stories into a self-conscious cursive scrawled in pen. Behind every pinched curl and carefully crafted sentence, the torment of being a freshman was raw on the page. In junior high, all my girlfriends traded dolls and dress-up clothes for bras and tampons. They took pride in their budding breasts and whispered complaints about their periods with martyrdom many women spend their adult lives exploiting. And the boys watched as they sunbathed, as their still narrow hips switched back and forth in hot pink bikinis, in silky sundresses.
I was just as admiring of their beauty. I grew up, rather than out. My padded bra vexed me almost as much as my gangly height. I despised the Time of the Month, as my mother hygienically called it. Hormones roared in my body like too much alcohol in the blood, clouding my judgment, and puberty coiled my hair into tight ringlets so thick my ponytails snapped hair twisties. I fell in love with a new boy every semester, but only ever adored them from a distance. I worked hard, with hopes of studying chemistry in college, but I had no talent for science.
Then toward the end of my sophomore year, our English teacher read one of my essays to the entire class, to my combined pleasure and mortification. I wasn’t particularly bright in other classes, so people forgave my talent for English. Within a week, fellow students were calling me for help with their papers, and I was invited to write editorials for the school newspaper. Both improved my social