Tuesday May 8, 2012 - 1:19 AM

Okay, so that last post did work. And, unlike my previous attempts it didn’t disappear. I waited a full day because I wanted to make sure it didn’t delete after the fact. I know this sounds like I’m being paranoid, but the first few times I’d tried to post last week, I ended up losing the work. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention properly and missed a key step. But I’m sure I did it right, and Blogger just hung there, not resolving. And when I came back to it, the post was gone, missing, like I’d never written it.

That’s why I wrote the following entries down. By hand. And now that things are up and working again, I’m going to re-type them below.

Thursday May 3rd, 2012

At the end of English class today, Robbie asked me to hang back a bit because there was something he wanted to ask me. I was terrified. I thought that maybe he knew something about what happened to Monica, that maybe he was going to point a finger at me and tell me he knew it was me -- that somehow, in my sleep, I’d gone and beat and raped her. Or that maybe Monica had been talking to him and told him this herself.

I actually tried to sneak out of the class, tried to just mix into the flow of students out of the room. But he reached right out and grabbed my arm. He grabbed my arm and pulled me back through the crowd. He’d done it so quickly, so forcefully, that I’d thought for sure that he was going to lay blame on me for what happened to Monica.

He held my arm, preventing me from getting away while smiling and making quick small talk with the remaining students filtering out of the class. When the last student left, he let go of my arm and closed the door.

“What’s going on, Peter?” he asked, the concern showing on his face as he leaned on a desk at the front of the classroom. “You’ve been acting really strange ever since you returned to school and Monica is back.”

As I rubbed my arm where he’d grabbed and held me, I didn’t know how to respond. “W-what do you mean?”

His eyes softened even more. He pursed his lips and looked me in the eye. “You’re feeling guilty about Monica, aren’t you?”

I didn’t answer, but turned my head down and looked at the floor.

“C’mon, Peter,” he said. “You can talk to me, man. I think I know what you’re going through.”

My eyes started to tear up, I tried to hold back the sobs, but my voice repeatedly broke when I responded. “How could you . . . possibly . . . know . . . what I’m going through?”

"Because I've been there too." A strange look came over his face just then and he took a deep breath. “When I was a teenager, my girlfriend was raped at a house party. We went in together, the two of us, and then, as we each starting hanging around with different groups of friends, I ended up heading off in a car with a few buddies to pick up some munchies. We did it all the time, go to a party together, split up, do our own thing, then get back together.

“Only this time, this time something happened while I was gone. These guys from another high school showed up. Nobody knew who they were, they just showed up, about ten of them, crashed the party. A few of them picked a couple of fights with a few of the guys, and three of them ended up pushing their way into the bathroom where Sandy -- that was her name -- where Sandy was. She’d had a bit too much to drink and was in there being sick to her stomach.”

At that point, Robbie paced to the far side of the classroom and looked out the window facing away from me. “The three of them had her way with her. They, they pushed her to the floor, then two of them held her down while the third guy ripped off her clothes and raped her. Then they switched, and another guy took over. Then the third.

“It didn’t matter that she’d been sick to her stomach WHILE THEY WERE RAPING HER . . . it didn’t matter that she was retching and throwing up and almost choking on her vomit. Two of them held her down so she was unable to resist while the third one raped her.

“They left her lying on the bathroom floor and that’s where the next person going in to use the washroom found her.

“By the time the person going in to use the washroom had figured out what had happened, the entire gang of guys from that other school, even the ones who had started a few different fights, had left. Sandy spent a long time sitting on the bathroom floor, naked and bleeding and covered in her own vomit. Any time anybody tried to comfort her, to help her get cleaned up and dressed, she pushed them off, not saying anything.

“When I got back to the party the whole thing was long over and a few of her closer friends had been able to get her dressed, despite her protests and struggle, and were walking her to a car to bring her home.

“The only thing that anybody can remember her saying was when she looked up and spotted me getting out of my buddy Henry’s car. She stood straight up, pointed a finger in my direction and said: ‘Thanks for leaving me alone.’ Then she got into the car.

“Those were the last words she spoke to me. They might have been the last words she ever spoke to anybody. Her friends had brought her home and that night she’d swallowed an entire bottle of her mother’s tranquilizers. She never woke up from it.”


Okay, so I stopped writing the note at that point. I just couldn’t continue. I was exhausted and my hand hurt from writing the note. Retyping this whole thing feels a little silly, but I'm glad that I'm doing it. I've stopped often while keying it in to just read and re-read it again, and realize the effect the whole conversation had on me.

I didn’t write in my journal again until the next night, and in it I tried to continue from where I’d left off.


Friday May 4th, 2012

Robbie stood at the window for a long time before he turned back and faced me. When he did turn I could see the moisture welling in his eyes. At that point, an announcement came on the PA system, calling him to the office.

“I’ve got to go, Peter.” He said. “But I’ve told you my story. So, yes, I think I can understand the guilt that you feel. And I really do think that this is something you should talk about. If not to me, then to someone else, anyone else.”

He walked towards the door and just before he stepped out he turned and said. “But I really do think you need to talk this out. And I’d really like to help you through this, if I can.”

I ended up going to see Robbie at the end of the school day. He just stood there, looking at me, without saying a single thing. And I broke down, started to sob and sob, and told him about the dream I'd had about Monica, about the guilt that I felt about it, and about the fact that I realized that while I'd been intrigued with Monica and interested in starting a relationship with her, that all I'd been really feeling had been a kind of intense infatuation, a kind of misplaced lust, and that fact made me feel all the more guilty about what happened to her.

I'd made her out to be an object of lust and sex and desire, and then someone had raped her. The guilt had continued to grow and eat away inside of me.

Robbie explained that rape wasn't about sex -- and I had a sudden memory of that topic coming up in our class discussion from a few weeks ago, but for some reason it didn't really stick. He explained that rape was about power, about dominance, about control over another person.

He talked about my feeling of guilt and my holding Monica in my mind's eye as an object of desire as being typical of teenage infatuation, but that it had nothing to do with what actually happened to Monica. My feelings of lust for her did not lead to her getting raped, and I had nothing to feel guilty about.

We kept talking around and around the issue, and I have to admit that the release I felt to be able to communicate the things I've been feeling for this past while -- to communicate them openly and verbally, was overwhelmingly powerful.

I started sobbing uncontrollable at that point, not just out of the guilty and grief, but out of the simple emotion of relief.

That's when Robbie stepped forward and put his arms around me and just held me while I cried.


And that was the point where my second hand-written journal entry ended. It feels strange re-reading it and typing it in. I know that my buddy Harley would say something to the effect that it was a real homo scene with Robbie giving me a hug. But I needed that hug more than anything, and honestly, truly, it felt good just to have someone, anyone be willing to offer me that gesture of compassion.

It's funny. Robbie and I had another after class chat yesterday, but neither one of us has brought up the shared stories -- the ones of his guilt over what happened to his girlfriend or my guilt of what happened to Monica.

Instead, we just talked about books. It was great. It was glorious. He loaned me another book. Back to the first author he'd introduced me to. Sean Costello. This one was called "Finders Keepers" and was about what happens to a group of people who come across a lottery ticket worth 10 million dollars.

Robbie said that I'd like the thriller aspect of the story, and that the dark humour employed in the tale would be good to get my mind off of everything. I haven't read it yet, but do plan on starting it tomorrow.

Right now, I should really get to bed.

Saturday May 5, 2012 - 2:48 PM

Damn. I've been trying to log onto this blogger account for three days now, and not able to get past the login screen. It's just been hanging there.

I thought, at first, that I'd forgotten my password or something. But that wasn't it. Not sure if it was my connection to the internet or maybe one of the servers at Blogger. Whatever it was, it drove me to start writing my thoughts and stuff in written form, because I've had so many things to sort out lately. Funny, when the guidance counselor first told me to start writing down my thoughts and emotions I thought he was nuts. But it's funny that that seems to be the first thing I do now whenever I need to sort stuff out.

I'm going to copy those thoughts I wrote down onto this online journal. Is it just for the sake of continuity? Because I have to admit, I've gone back and re-read the stuff that I've written several times now. That has been just as therapeutic as writing it down. So I will post that handwritten stuff here, but I'm not sure when.

As it is, I don't even know if this is going to publish or not.

Here goes nothing . . .

Tuesday May 1, 2012 - 11:58 PM

I didn't see Monica at school at all yesterday. The day was mostly just a big blur, it was like my ears were stuffed with cotton and I was seeing everything through a smoky haze. My heart kept racing every time a girl passed me in the hall, because I thought it might be her.

But I saw her today. She was far down the hall, and I don't think she saw me. But I saw her, and my heart burned, it ached, and I wept. I wept to see this once strong and confident girl, sexy, bright and cheery slowly slink down the hallway, her head down turned. Walking tight to the lockers, she moved down the hall with these little brisk steps like she was afraid someone was going to step on her.

It broke my heart. But, this wasn't Monica. No, not her. There was barely nothing left of the Monica that I knew as I watched this meek person scuttle down the hall.

And the guilt returned to me full force.

I wonder if that's how Hamlet felt when he came upon the grave being dug for Ophelia. It's funny, someone left a comment about whether or not Hamlet was mad or if he was just allowing others to think he was. Honestly? I actually think it was a bit of both. I'm sure that he played up his madness because it put others at unease, but I also think that there was some truth to his affliction. He was filled with anger, confusion, guilt.

And, of course, I think back to my own situation, my own anger, my own confusion, my own guilt. There was that horrid dream, that awful nightmare of hurting Monica. I feel guilty for having it, but not because I believe I actually hurt her. No, I think that was my unconscious mind telling me I was responsible for her getting hurt. That she was hurt because of me, because of this curse surrounding me.

I just can't get the image of her slinking down the hall like a fearful mouse out of my mind.

Friday April 27, 2012 - 7:11 AM

I don't know what hit me.

I went to bed Monday night, and when I woke up Tuesday morning, I could barely get out of bed and my throat felt like it was full of sandpaper, closed up tight. Just swallowing air felt like I was trying to choke down a mouthful of broken glass. I was running a pretty nasty fever as well, my sheets were completely soaked.

Needless to say I didn't go in to school on Tuesday. Aunt Shelley made me a doctor's appointment. Turns out I have strep throat. I barely had the energy to get out of bed while she changed my sheets. Barely had the energy to get dressed and get to the doctor's office.

The rest of Tuesday is pretty much a blur. I spent the rest of the day Tuesday falling in and out of feverish dreams. There were pretty vivid, I know that, but I can't recall what was happening in them or who was in them. The only thing that sticks with me is this freaky laughing skull that occasionally flashed into my peripheral vision. And the name "Jimmy" was whispered in my left ear whenever I saw that image.

I have no idea what that means. But that's all I can remember about these dreams. Pretty freaky.

I was feeling better enough on Wednesday that I wasn't just a groggy lump. I mostly stayed in bed and when I was up to it I read. I finished reading the Sawyer book that Robbie had loaned to me. It was really good. An alien on trial for murder in a U.S. court.

But now I'm torn. I want to read another Sawyer book, I want to read that collection by van Belkom. I also want to read more stuff by Laymon.

But I didn't have any of those books with me to read. So I went back to reading Hamlet again. It's funny, I enjoyed Hamlet even more when in a semi-feverish state. The two kind of went well together. And I don't know, but reading about Hamlet strutting about and fretting about his peril reminded me of the things going through my mind, the guilt, the grief, the frustrated anger. It made me feel good in a sad sort of way. What's that saying? Misery loves company?

I felt good enough yesterday to get out of bed. My fever was still there and my throat still had that sandpaper quality to it, but swallowing was getting a bit easier. I sat up and spent most of the day watching movies from Uncle Bob's DVD collection. I ended up watching two different versions of Hamlet. One with Mel Gibson and the other with Ethan Hawke, which was like a modernized version. Except in the new one, something is rotten in the state of Denmark Corporation in Manhattan. Interesting.

Last night Harley called me. It was good to touch base with what I was missing in school. Not that I really cared all that much about what was going on in class, except, of course for Robbie's English class. Apparently, Robbie spent most of the week talking about books that discussed native issues in Canada, and they spent two full classes setting up mock Parliamentary debates over how to deal with the situation going on in Southern Ontario for years now. Apparently there are a group of natives protesting a new housing development and they have this highway and section of land that was sold or taken away from them blocked off, preventing the new houses from being finished. It has apparently stirred up a lot of controversy over the years, including a book written by a journalist who took a harsh view at the natives actions.

It sounds like I missed some fun stuff. Of course, Harley's take on the situation was pretty much a one-sided view of a bunch of lazy welfare slobs with nothing better to do than prevent other people from making a living. Big suprise there. I honestly don't know how I feel about the situation. From what I’ve read about it on the net, there are a lot of upset townspeople who couldn’t get in to their newly bought homes, and are prevented from getting to work and school. But the native people do have rights; I mean, we pretty much stole Canada from them, and pushed them off onto these reserves, corrupted their lifestyle. I kind of feel sorry for both sides. I don't know how I would have argued in those class debates.

That's one of the things I like about the way Robbie teaches his class. He really makes you start to think

After that Harley told me that Monica was back in school on Thursday. He said that she didn't look good, that her face was all swollen, her cheeks puffy. She had a pretty nasty black eye, a fat lip, and her right arm was in a sling. He said that she wasn't speaking to anyone except for a few of her close friends. I didn't ask if Sarah was one of the people she was talking to.

I know this sounds like I'm a chicken, but I was glad that I wasn't there and didn't see her.

I still have this odd feeling about her, like I might be responsible for what happened. I've tried to block that nasty dream where I'm the one hurting her, where I'm the one in the alley with her, trying to tell her to get away from me, and at the same time raining blows down on her. But I can't entirely push it away.

I'm actually feeling better this morning, possibly good enough to go in to school. But I faked it, pretended I felt worse than I really do. I need a few more days before I face Monica again.

Monday April 23, 2012 - 11:37 PM

This is so cool. Following Robbie’s advice, I decided to leave a comment for Robert Sawyer on his website blog. I told him how much I enjoyed the section of the book that my teacher read to our class and asked for his advice on which of his stand alone books he would recommend I read.

He responded -- pretty quickly too -- that his novels Factoring Humanity, Frameshift or Calculating God were the three stand-alone novels he was proudest of. I thought that was really cool, how he thanked me for my comment and then answered my questions.

I wonder how many authors do that type of thing.

So then I started scrolling through Sawyer’s blog archives and found a “book tag” thing he responded to. Apparently he was tagged by Mark Leslie. It’s interesting how there are all these connections somehow. Anyways, I followed the link back to Leslie’s site and found that he mentioned Sawyer’s Frameshift as a book that inspired him in a life-altering way. He didn’t mention what it was, but I wonder if maybe that’s the book that inspired him to become a writer.

He says to email him and he’ll reveal what it was about the book that inspired him. But just knowing it inspired him, and that he’s originally from this area -- well, that’s enough for me to want to read Frameshift and perhaps discover what that might be.

Today in class, Robbie went on about Canada Book Day (which, apparently, was today). He talked about how it had been inspired by International Book & Copyright Day, and that at one time a big deal was made about it. He said that April 23rd was chosen as an important “book day” because a bunch of different authors were either born or had died on this day. He mentioned a bunch of them, but the only one I remember was Shakespeare. Although Robbie wasn’t clear if April 23rd was his birthday or the day he died. Maybe it was both.

He said that he wanted to share different authors with us, particularly Canadian authors, and that, since on Friday he’d mentioned Robert J. Sawyer, he thought he would mention an author who was a friend of Sawyer’s and has been referred to as Canada’s answer to Stephen King. The fellow’s name is Edo van Belkom. Robbie said that van Belkom, an author from the Toronto area, not only won the Bram Stroker Award (the highest honour in horror), but has published more than two dozen books, hundreds of short stories and for a short time was even the host of a late night horror movie show on the specialty horror channel SCREAM.

Apparently van Belkom was also known by Sawyer, and Robbie showed us van Belkom’s book Death Drives A Semi, which was a collection of van Belkom’s short fiction. The introduction to the book was written by, you guessed it -- Robert J. Sawyer, and Robbie read to us from the book. He read a story about a superhero stricken with the one enemy he couldn’t fight. Cancer.

Wow. Powerful stuff. Robbie went on to read the essay that followed this tale -- it was the story on how van Belkom wrote the story on a laptop borrowed from his friend Sawyer while he sat in the hospital room where his wife was recovering from a cancer surgery.

It was great to see behind the scenes into the author’s mind and how he came up with the tale. Robbie went on to say that he’d been to a reading that van Belkom gave when his book had first come out, and that van Belkom was one of the best readers he’d ever listened to.

He mentioned that he thought this particular book was now out of print, and that van Belkom had also published a book called Scream Queen that poked fun at the reality television trend (something else we’d covered in class a few weeks ago) as well as a series of very popular werewolf books for young adults that were just as enjoyable for adults to read.

At the end of class, I was so excited to learn more about this van Belkom fellow that I almost forgot to ask Robbie if he had a copy of Frameshift that I could borrow.

He said he did own Frameshift, that he owned every single copy of books Sawyer had written, and that he’d have to think about whether or not he would lend me his copy of van Belkom’s Death Drives A Semi. He said that the copy he owned had been signed by van Belkom and since it was out of print, he was worried about losing that copy.

He then turned to me and asked whether or not I had finished reading the book he had loaned me over the weekend, Sawyer's Illegal Alien. I'd completely forgotten about it, because I was so into browsing Sawyer's website and then so excited that he had responded to my question on his blog.

I was a bit disappointed. I mean, I would have thought that by now Robbie would have trusted me with loaning me his books. I've returned all of them in good condition. But it also feels like I let him down by asking for another book without having read the first one. I've just gotten so excited over discovering so many new authors lately.

I can be so stupid sometimes.

Friday April 20, 2012 - 10:35 PM

I spent a bit of time last night after posting on my blog browsing through Robert J. Sawyer’s website. Wow, Robbie wasn’t kidding. There’s lots of great stuff there.

It’s funny, way back when I first started this online journal, someone left a comment, I think it was that guy named Frank, telling me that I should consider writing as a career. I’m still not decided, but I started thinking about that a bit after visiting Sawyer’s website, and he also has some articles posted there about the art of writing. Pretty cool stuff.

Many of my classmates were on his site today, and we spent half of the class talking about Sawyer and his writing. Robbie suggested that we start with something like Hominids, which was set in Sudbury, and then read the next two books in the series. But he suggested, for those of us who weren’t in to reading a whole three books that we go with one of his earlier works. He’d mentioned that The Terminal Experiment, Sawyer’s Nebula Award winning book, was a favourite of many, and that an alien being tried in the courtroom in Illegal Alien was also an enjoyable one, particularly for anyone who liked courtroom thrillers or was a Law & Order fan.

I stayed after class today to talk to Robbie and tell him about some of the things I found on Sawyer’s site. I’d mentioned how Sawyer did really seem like a nice guy, often responding to comments that fans left on his blog.

Robbie suggested that I take the time to comment on his blog, to tell him I liked his writing, that it moved me. And then he loaned me a copy of Illegal Alien, which I took home and am eager to start reading. I was going to ask to borrow Hominids, but I’ve never read science fiction all that much before, so I think I’d like to start with the alien one. An alien on trial for murder in a U.S. court sounds like it could be fun. (Maybe I also didn’t want to read that rape scene -- listening to Robbie read it was emotional enough for me right now, thank you very much)

Robbie did something when we were chatting that surprised me a bit. He confided something to me. Apparently, when our guidance counselor got wind of the discussion we’d had in Robbie’s class yesterday, he’d complained to the principal that Robbie was stepping into his territory.

At a meeting in the principal’s office, Robbie defended his position, telling them that if the guidance counselor was going to address the issue of a student who had been raped, he certainly had a funny way of doing it by not doing anything. Then he went on to explain that the best way to introduce literature was to make it relevant to topics that were pertinent to students.

He said that the guidance counselor said something like: “Literature. Humph. I’ve heard what you’ve been reading and talking to students about. Science Fiction. Cave men. Aliens. Hack and slash horror. That’s not literature. That’s crap. Mind-wasting rubbish.”

Robbie said that he didn’t have to listen to that from someone who was not only ill-read and thought only in stereotypes but could barely manage to do his own job, never mind tread on the job of the English teacher. He invited the counselor to take over his class so he could see how fast he could put the students to sleep.

The principal put a stop to the argument between the two, taking the side of the guidance counselor, and warning Robbie to not discuss delicate issues without first consulting either him or the guidance counselor.

Robbie told me that he loved being a teacher, loved connecting with students and helping open their eyes to the vast landscape of literature, but that he was tired of working with “close-minded jerkass literary snobs.” The same kinds of people who praise Dickens today, but if they were around when Dickens was writing, they’d have dismissed his work as commercial tripe that pandered to the masses.

I’ve never heard a teacher talk about another teacher like that. I almost pissed myself laughing.

Thursday April 19, 2012 - 10:19 PM

Again, Monica wasn’t at school. I shouldn’t be surprised, but I keep hoping. Hoping that the rumours weren’t true, that it really wasn’t her that it happened to.

Robbie turned things around a bit for me today with in English class. He always seems to have a knack for knowing the right thing to say, the topics he covers always seem to hit home perfectly.

“There’s a lot of talk around the school about something that happened to one of our students this past weekend,” he said. “I’d like to read you a scene from a novel that might help us talk about it.”

“The book I’m about to read not only has to do with the Sudbury area, but is written by a man known as the Dean of Canadian Science Fiction. He has won the Hugo, the top international science fiction award, the Nebula, the “Academy Award” of the sci-fi genre, is the only writer in history to win the top SF awards in the United States, Japan, France, and Spain, has one of the most extensive and content rich science fiction web sites available, has made countless media appearances over the years, had an ABC television show made which was based on one of his novels and is known far and wide as an all around great guy.

“I’m talking about Toronto writer Robert J. Sawyer.

“For those of you looking for a connection between Sawyer and one of the other authors we have discussed in class, Sawyer, the generous person that he is, is one of the authors who gave Mark Leslie a very positive review blurb for Leslie’s short story collection One Hand Screaming. And for those of you who have read that collection, you might note that in the notes, Leslie mentions losing an Aurora Award nomination to Sawyer for Best Short Story English, but that he couldn’t have lost to a nicer guy. And for those of you who like their connections in threes, an additional connection between the two is that Sawyer wrote the introduction for a horror anthology called Campus Chills that Mark Leslie edited a few years ago.

“Now for Sawyer’s connection to the Sudbury area. Sawyer wrote a trilogy of books called the Neanderthal Parallax. While preparing to write the first book in the series he came to Sudbury, stayed for a few weeks and did research at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. The science in this trilogy explores the concept of a parallel world in which Neanderthals survived and Homo sapiens died off, and what happens when a portal opens between those worlds and a Neanderthal appears in the Neutrino Observatory. Sawyer also received an honorary Doctorate at Laurentian University.

“Sawyer has a strong proven track record for using grand “What if” concepts in his writing, often based on cutting edge advances and discoveries in the scientific world. He is not a scientist -- his background is in media -- but he thoroughly researches his books, and that work shows through in his stories. And if you want to understand the scientific principles he explores in greater detail, I suggest you get Mr. Nelly or Mr. Gravante to bring them up in your science classes with them.

“Because in my mind, the real strength, the true beauty in Sawyer’s writing stems not so much from the scientific concepts he explores, but from the characters and character struggles that occur.

“Case in point: Mary Vaughan, one of the main characters from the Neanderthal Parallax, becomes a rape victim in Chapter 6, within one of the very first scenes that we meet her in the first book in the trilogy, Hominids. I’d like to read you a scene from that chapter and talk a bit about it.”

Robbie went on to read the scene to the class. Wow. It was disturbing and terrifying, and it really hit home to a lot of students. A few of them actually started to cry. And I don’t just mean the girls. I was one of the guys who had tears in his eyes.

When he finished the reading, Robbie talked a bit about the concept of rape. Asked the class questions like was rape about sex, or about power? He explored the reaction that Mary, an intelligent and professional woman, a professor at a Canadian University, had to being a victim of rape. We tried to understand her state of mind after such a brutal attack and explored the reasons why she didn’t want to go to the police. We talked about whether or not the scene itself was gratuitous. Then we discussed the idea of the rapist as behaving in a stereotypical Neanderthal way. He asked several males in the class how the scene made them feel -- both about themselves as well as about males in society in general.

The class was so involved and moved and eagerly participating in the discussion, that Robbie had to wrap up the class without the whole thing seeming to finish. Several of the students requested more, wanting to keep talking about it. Robbie handed out pamphlets with a toll-free number to a kids-line help group in case anyone wanted to speak in detail about how this incident made them feel.

And he gave us another one of his cool homework assignment. He wrote the link to Sawyer’s website (www.sfwriter.com) on the blackboard and asked us to do some research there. Some of the research questions he threw out were: How was Sawyer able to write a rape scene from a woman’s point of view? Where does a science fiction writer get his ideas? If a story is about characters, how important is the actual research into the science?

I’m only realizing this after the fact, of course, but Robbie has accomplished two things with today’s lesson. He not only addressed a frightening and difficult to broach issue and gave us the means to talk about it openly, but he also put a spin to it that has allowed us to enjoy the writing of yet another phenomenal author, and issued a task that will help keep us occupied, interested and learning; not just dwelling on the horrors of what happened to Monica.

I still feel terrible about what happened to Miss Hamilton. But I can’t imagine this class anymore without Mr. Robinson teaching it.

Wednesday April 18, 2012 - 10:14 PM

Monica still wasn’t at school today.

Of course.

She’s not going to be back for a while. Who knows when.

I pretty much muddled my way through the day. Sure, the rumours about Monica being raped and beaten half to death kept flying around. They seemed to have more details in them. How she was attacked by three guys at knifepoint. How she’d been stabbed. One of the rumours was that she had lost an eye.

All rumours, of course. Nobody knows the real truth.

I ended up cutting my afternoon classes today completely. I’m going to catch hell for it, but I don’t really give a shit right now. There’s too much on my mind.

And, when I got home from school today and saw the comment that someone left -- speculating that perhaps I had done this to her while in my sleep -- well, that just freaks me out.

I was thinking that maybe a curse around me did this to her. But what if I was the person who did it? What if the dream was somehow a memory of something that I’d done? Done while sleepwalking or something.

And how could I have gotten from Levack in to Sudbury to do this to her in my sleep?

It boggles the fucking mind.

Wednesday April 18, 2012 - 6:12 AM

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Saturday April 14, 2012 - 4:30 AM

I didn't end up going to the movies with Neil on Thursday night. We went last night instead. While waiting to be let in to the movie (we were there about half an hour early) we played a game of air hockey and chatted.

It felt good - I haven't hung out much with any of my buddies all that much for several months now.

Neil wasn't all lecturing and stuff, but he told me, in no uncertain terms, that he thought it wouldn't be a good idea if I asked Monica out. He cited some of the things I saw posted in comments here. It's funny, because he made that statement, and then we moved on to other things.

It wasn't until just before the movie started, when we were sitting in the darkened theatre, that he turned to me and said. "I always thought that you and Sarah made a pretty decent couple. Do you think there's a chance you guys might patch things up?" I didn't respond because the first trailer had started. A new movie in the Die Hard series with Bruce Willis. It looked good, and instead of thinking about it or responding, I just watched the trailer. I didn't know what to say to that.

About midway through the movie, I got up to go to the snack stand. This was one of those movies that had its funny moments, but I wouldn't be missing anything while I was gone.

I bumped into Monica who was getting popcorn. I asked her about that Costello novel I'd seen her with the other day, and she started raving about it. We chatted about Costello, and Laymon and about how cool Robbie was for introducing us to them. I told her about Costello and Leslie offering "praise blurbs" for each other's work, and she told me she had found an anthology from a Sudbury publisher that includes a story from Costello and one from Leslie. It was called "Bluffs" - I thought it was so cool that she had made a similar connection between the two.

It felt good.

Then I went and blew it all by tossing out this clumsy little question about whether or not she would be interested in going out with me some time.

She paused. Her face went white, and I knew immediately that it had been a mistake. "You're kidding, right?" she said. "I'm, like, Sarah's friend. That would be so, like weird." She didn't say anything else at that point, just walked off, leaving me standing there with a bag of nibs in my hand, feeling like a complete loser. I almost didn't go back into the theatre.

For the first time since Sarah and I broke up, I was having fun just chatting with a beautiful girl. And I blew it. Not only that, I blew it by doing something that Neil and some online friends warned me against.

I'm such an idiot.

I didn't tell Neil about what had happened. I know that he wouldn't have said "I told you so" but just the same, I didn't want him to know how much of a fool I'd been.