5

I MADE MYSELF BREAKFAST. I didn't hear the toast pop up, so the butter didn't melt right. After I ate the toast, and two more slices with properly melted butter, I sat at the kitchen table staring at the crumbs on my plate.

Like every other male in America, I'd grown up certain that one day I'd play in the NFL or the NBA or make the majors in baseball. I was always shorter and pudgier than other kids, but I have good hand-eye coordination, so I held my own in gym class all through elementary school. Those years, I was sure that I'd grow to six four and that my flabby body would morph into pure muscle. As I watched games on TV, I'd imagine myself hitting game-winning home runs, catching last-second touchdown passes, sinking three-pointers at the buzzer.

I stopped believing I was going to be a pro in middle school, but I didn't stop watching the Seahawks and the Mariners on TV. My dad would sprawl out on the sofa, and I'd sit in the rocking chair. What's weird is that we rarely talked during the games, but we'd both remember key plays and discuss them months or even years later.

I don't just dream about being a journalist; I practice being a journalist every chance I get. I've got three marble notebooks filled with newspaper articles I've written based on movies and books. I pretend that what I've seen on the screen or read in the book actually happened. Then I get the who, what, where, why, and how down on the page just like a real reporter would.

Since middle school, I've done the same thing with all the games I watch with my dad. As the images flicker in front of me on the TV, in my head I'll compose a story:

It was fourth down and forever, with everything on the line. The quarterback dropped back to pass as his receivers streaked downfield. With the pocket collapsing around him, he stepped up and fired a long pass toward the end zone. The ball spiraled through the chill night air for what seemed an eternity, and then...

Give me a laptop and twenty minutes, and I can make the dullest game exciting.

So Alyssa was right—I could write sports for the Lincoln Light. But there was a problem. At Lincoln, sports meant Horst Diamond, and I was not going to spend my senior year singing the praises of Horst Diamond. It was impossible. Anybody else, okay. But not Horst.

I had to quit the Lincoln Light.

Newspaper is an after-school club at Lincoln High, so there's never anybody in the newspaper room during the day. During lunch I sneaked in, intending to clean out my desk. I shoved Post-its, pencils, memo pads—everything—into my backpack. It had taken three years to fill the drawer, but it took only thirty seconds to empty it.

At the bottom of the drawer sat my scrapbook. In my freshman year, I'd hole-punched fifty pages of high-quality vellum paper and carefully bound the pages together with twine. My goal had been to fill every page.

Instead of shoving the scrapbook into my backpack, I sat down and started flipping through it. There was my first article: seventy-five words on the new microphone system in the library—the first seventy-five words I'd ever had published. I kept flipping. The animal rights protest ... the vandalism in the greenhouse ... the changes in graduation requirements. Okay, none of the articles was earth-shattering, but I'd sweated over every word, making each story as good as it could possibly be.

The last twenty pages of my scrapbook were blank—they were for my senior year. I leafed through them anyway. The blank pages stared up at me.

I dumped all of the stuff from my pack back into the drawer, shoved the drawer closed, and left. Writing was in my blood—even if it meant writing about Horst Diamond.

I couldn't quit.