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Sweet Valley High: Senior Year - Creative Writing Class
Read Elizabeth and Connor's essays from Creative Writing, featured in Sweet Valley High: Senior Year books #1, Can't Stay Away and #2, Say It to My Face
"Due Wednesday: a one-page essay on the subject of loss. Be creative, not maudlin."
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"Due Wednesday: a one-page essay on the subject of loss. Be creative, not maudlin."
"Conner McDermott
Creative Writing
Loss
My first experience with loss came along when my bike was still a four-wheeler and I was the neighbourhood spitball target. The guy with the perpetual gapped teeth and bad hair. The one whose mother dressed him just this side of feminine because she always wanted a girl. I was a bully’s dream.
But there was one thing I had over everyone else. One claim to fame that gave me this slight advantage over the rest. I had the greatest collection of baseball cards in the history of William Walters Grade School. Everyone envied it. And no-one stood a chance of trading up in this world if he couldn’t trade with me.
The most impressive care I had – the one every kid in the neighbourhood came by to view at least once a month – was a Roger Maris rookie card, signed by the legend himself. It had been given to me by my father in a rare show of parental affection. I had been warned to take good care of it. There were only so many treasures in this life, and this was one of them.
The day after my dad walked out on us, Ricky Ramirez, the most evil guy on my block, got his brothers to distract me while he broke into my room and took my card. When his lackeys let me go, I ran straight to my stash and knew instantly that it was gone. Hours later I was still laying on my floor, covered in baseball cards and staring at my ceiling, when Ricky’s little sister, Tia, walked into my room. She told me Ricky had buried it somewhere in her backyard, but he wouldn’t tell her where.
We dug up the whole place, she and I. Dug until our fingernails were gone. I had never even spoken to this girl before, but she stayed out there with me, skipping dinner, skipping desert, digging until it was dark. We never found it.
It wasn’t until about ten years later, when I was listening to Tia give a blow-by-blow of one of her parents’ legendary fights and subsequent make-out marathons, that it hit me. If I hadn’t lost that card, I would never have met my best friend.
My father was right. There are few treasures in this life, and that useless piece of cardboard helped me find one."
Elizabeth Wakefield
Creative Writing
Loss
I used to believe that inherent in the word loss was the implication that what is lost can be found. A girl cries over the loss of her dog – then shouts with joy when a neighbour returns him. A mother finds her child’s mittens in a department store’s overflowing lost-and-found bin. A business loses his fortune one year, then recovers it the next.
When I was six years old, I found a beautiful shell on the beach – pale, translucent pink, the curvature so delicate and fine, I believed it held magical powers. I kept it in an old cigar box lined with gleaming red silk. I decorated the outside of the box with several of the shell’s more ordinary cousins. I only took it out when I needed a special wish granted. One day I went to the box and discovered the shell shattered into a million tiny pieces…not much more than a layer of dust to dull the silk. The shell was gone, and it could never be replaced.
This summer I lost another, much more beautiful treasure. Her name was Olivia Davidson, and she was a fiery gem among the colourless stones that make up our world. I wake up every morning, and for the first few seconds of my day everything seems in its place. Then I remember.
Now I understand the true meaning of loss: the recognition, day after day, that the thing you lost can never be found.
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"An original Character Study"
"Elizabeth Wakefield
Creative Writing
Character Study
Lea Jessup had always had one, good, true friend. Mara Sanders. And she was grateful for that blessing. She never needed to be surrounded by a huge group of people because she knew they’d do her no good. She knew that to be part of a crowd meant just that – one of many – and no one in the crowd really cared about who the others were. Not for real.
But now Lea’s life was starting to change. There were new people. People who didn’t seem like a stereotypical group. People who seemed to want to know Lea. And suddenly her one friendship with Mara seemed old, tired, tarnished. Boring.
This feeling made Lea do things she wouldn’t normally do. She still loved her one true friend, and she still wanted what was best for her. But she was also starting to wonder what was best for herself. It was hard for Lea, who had always seen the distinction between right and wrong very clearly. Now the distinction was fading, and Lea didn’t like the feeling.
She didn’t like it at all."
"Conner McDermott
Creative Writing
Character Study
Evan Mulroney had figured out when he was still just a kid that the worst advice people gave was “just be yourself.” It didn’t take long before he understood that being yourself was the most pitiful move you could make.
Evan wasn’t a fake. He just made a point of keeping what he was to himself.
Seeing what made people tick was boring at best, depressing at worst. Nothing could be more pathetic than the losers on talk shows who bawled about their traumatic childhoods, their negligent parents, their tragic lives.
Evan saw people he knew pulling that emotional crap all the time, and he hated how weak it made them look. He’d be damned if he was going to open himself up that way. Revealing yourself meant revealing weakness.
He had found that if he kept to himself, if he gave nothing, people stayed away. People were usually so insecure, they just assumed if he was aloof, he must somehow be better than them. They projected their own idealized images onto him. And all Evan had to do to live up to those images was not be himself.
Evan undoubtedly felt alone sometimes. But it was better to be alone by choice than to end up being left alone."
