Hey guys! I know this is a late posting. I wanted to share this with you earlier, but real life demanded attention. It has a way of doing that sometimes.
Though I haven't gotten as much work done as I'd have liked at this point, I have been trying to expand on and polish "Adam's Apple", which some of you may remember as my April A-Z Challenge story. There's plenty more I'd like to do, but patience and persistence will get me there.
I wanted to share a little bit of the back story I've been writing for the protagonist Adam Evans. Consider it bonus content. While not crucial to the main story, it's still fun.
Here's an excerpt from "A Brief History of Adam Evans and His
Failed Romantic Encounters." The story about the go kart, the peach, and the turtle follows this piece, but I have to keep some things to myself. At least for now.
Failed
Encounter #1
Teenage
Letdown
Adam Evans never knew quite how to interact with girls when
he was high school. His especially
scrawny frame didn’t help, either, because he felt invisible next to the
athletic types who seemed to have no trouble attracting female attention. He needed to make an extra effort to stand
out. A lot of other boys his age might
have been able to say they felt the same way, of course, but Adam seemed to
have a special talent for screwing up each romantic possibility with dramatic
flair.
He wanted to be confident around women, because he’d heard
from plenty of people that women preferred a man who was confident. However, he quickly learned that, when
feigned badly, the confidence he hoped to display could come across as
arrogance. More than once he walked away
from a girl with a well-deserved welt rising on his cheek. Each injury, whether it was physical in
nature or simply manifested itself as a bad case of wounded pride, steered him
in the right direction. The course
corrections were gradual, and he often wondered if he would ever achieve the
desired result.
Fortunately for Adam (or so he reckoned at the time,
anyway), the course corrections eventually led him to Magdalena White during
his senior year. She had stunning long
brown hair and . . . well, he would have noticed her gorgeous green eyes sooner
if his attention hadn’t been drawn to certain other attributes. Yet, even with this distraction competing for
his attention, he couldn’t help but notice Magdalena’s sense of humor and
casual demeanor. She was cool without
even trying.
One day he approached her in the hall. On any other day, he might not have managed
it, but he noticed she was wearing a Captain
McNinja and the Bonehead Brigade t-shirt.
This had been his favorite comic book series since he was a kid, and if
nothing else, he could surely talk to her about that. Shoving one hand into his jeans pocket, he
tried to adopt the relaxed walk he’d seen some of the more popular guys employ. Unfortunately, the unnatural gait required so
much attention that he didn’t see the classroom door swinging open directly in
front of him.
A smash to the face and painful collision with the floor
ensued. Adam sat up as quickly as he
could manage in an attempt to salvage his dignity. Not that this was possible in a hallway
filled with students. A crowd grew
around him within moments. Several students
were snickering, while others simply looked on in awe at how quickly Adam’s
damaged nose released blood onto the floor.
Magdalena, however, stepped forward with a handful of
tissues. “Here, it looks like you need
these.”
Humiliated, Adam took the offering and used it to stem the
crimson tide that was threatening to wash away the last of his nerve. Pushing himself to his feet, he decided to
forge ahead before the blood loss made his head go fuzzy. “I like your shirt.”
It didn’t take him long to see how disjointed that scene
from his life must have looked to any outsider.
Magdalena surely thought he was already delirious, but she simply
smiled. “Thank you.”
She walked with him to the school nurse, holding on to his
elbow the entire time.
“Did you hear they’re making a new Captain McNinja total immersion game?” Adam asked. He wanted to get some kind of conversation
going since she was still there.
“Yes, I did. I hope
it’s better than the last one.” She
shook her head. “They completely ruined
the ending with the reveal that McNinja’s father was actually the
Assassin. It only introduced a bunch of
continuity errors, and it’s an overused plot point anyway.”
Hearing those words come from her mouth made him dizzy with
awe. Or perhaps it was the continued
blood loss.
After being patched up by a doctor, he returned to school
the following day. Adam successfully
engaged Magdalena in conversation every day for the rest of the week without
offending her, or without embarrassing himself a second time. After accomplishing that seemingly impossible
feat, he worked up the nerve to ask her out.
She even said yes!
They had exactly one date.
All went well until he dropped her off at home. He got his first real kiss that night, which
was fairly amazing. At least for
him. Apparently the feeling wasn’t
mutual.
“You deserve a girl who can appreciate everything you have
to offer,” she told him afterwards. “I
think you’re a cool guy, but the kiss didn’t do anything for me. That’s essential, you know?”
Adam went home feeling more dejected than ever. How could he guess that this would be the
most normal of his romantic failures?
