Hope Wins, page 2
My dad nodded. “Yeah, honey, I know. I believe you.”
It was this moment of mutual understanding, where I knew we were on the same page.
So I was hoping that this kid was going to get his comeuppance in some way. I didn’t think my dad was going to cause a scene and throw the family out, but couldn’t he at least tell the cooks to hide some chiles in his pad thai? Serve him the brown crusty rice scraped from the bottom of the pot?
Instead, the next time that boy’s family came in to eat, my dad was just as polite as ever. As far as I could tell, they were served their meal with the same good service as always. I watched them clean their plates, pay, and leave with satisfied sighs.
For a girl who had imagined her archnemesis sprinting for the bathroom with his mouth and intestines on fire from an epic Thai chile–burn, it was pretty disappointing.
It wasn’t until later that I realized my dad knew what he was doing. By giving that family quality service and delicious food, he was elevating himself above their ugliness. Now, don’t get me wrong, if they had been violent or disruptive, they would have been kicked out. Otherwise, he was going to give them a meal they would be talking about for weeks.
My dad was an immigrant, born poor, who raised himself from a factory job to open a restaurant that people drove a hundred miles to eat at. There was pride in what he could do. There was dignity in being excellent when others expected him to fail.
The harsh truth is that plenty of terrible people never get their comeuppance or see the error of their ways. But they can’t take away our dignity. They can’t deny our excellence. And we belong here just as much as anyone else.
And if they can’t handle that, then no satay for them. Their loss.
* * *
• • •
WE ARE ALL INFLUENCERS
There is this term in social media right now: influencer. By the time this book goes to print, it will probably have changed, and those people will be called statusticians or beezers or oozebers or something. But the concept will be the same: they are the people with millions of followers who are so popular and influential that they can set global trends.
I didn’t realize it until recently, but our restaurant was full of influencers. One of the biggest influencers of all was our manager and headwaiter, my uncle Donis. Donis didn’t have any social media accounts. He didn’t own anything fashionable. He didn’t jet to glamorous places. In fact, he rarely ever left Weatherford because he usually had to work.
When my uncle passed away this year after battling cancer, we received stacks and stacks of letters from customers and hundreds more heartwarming messages sent via the restaurant. Many of them said similar things:
“Donis always made us feel so welcome.”
“He remembered our favorite dishes and had them ready for us.”
“He treated us like we were family.”
As I read through these messages, it hit me how much a small act of kindness can mean to someone. Too many people in this world feel forgotten or unimportant. Too many people don’t feel like they deserve to be loved. Taking the time to learn someone’s name or what they like to eat, or just greeting them warmly and looking them in the eye—you never know when that is going to make a real difference in someone’s day. Talk about a superpower.
I wish my uncle had known how powerful he was, how much of an influence he had on all these people. Maybe he did know, and maybe he was trying to teach everyone that they have this superpower, too.
We are all influencers. We all have the power to be good to the people in our everyday lives—the people who matter the most. Out of all the lessons I learned in the restaurant, that one is my favorite.
That, and how to pick out the right dipping sauce for grilled chicken.
Now, who’s hungry?
* * *
• • •
CHRISTINA SOONTORNVAT is the award-winning author of over a dozen books for children of all ages, including the beloved Diary of an Ice Princess chapter book series. Her recent works include the middle grade fantasy A Wish in the Dark, which was named a 2021 Newbery Honor Book and was chosen as Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post and School Library Journal, and All Thirteen: The Incredible Cave Rescue of the Thai Boys’ Soccer Team, which has received numerous nonfiction awards and was also named a 2021 Newbery Honor Book. Christina lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, two young daughters, and two old cats.
THE COOLNESS EQUATION
by Adam Gidwitz
My whole life, I’ve wanted the other kids to like me.
Obviously. We all want friends, right?
But when I say, “I wanted the other kids to like me,” I don’t mean that I wanted friends. I mean that there were certain kids whose friendship I craved. Like the way you look at a sheet of brownies with peanut butter chips and you’re like, Oh my gosh, I want that so much I’m going to steal the whole pan and hide in my room and shove all the brownies into my face. (Do you ever feel this way? Or do I just have a weird brownie obsession?) Anyway, there were certain kids who I wanted as my friends so bad.
It started early.
I remember feeling this way in the first grade. There was a girl named Jenny who was, through preschool and kindergarten, my best friend. And then Meghan showed up.
Meghan. My blood boils just thinking about her.
Suddenly, Meghan and Jenny were hanging out all the time, and I felt super left out and unreasonably angry. I can still feel those emotions in my chest, right now. I remember one day it got so bad that I swiped a box of thumbtacks from the teacher’s desk. And as Meghan and Jenny sat beside each other on the rug, listening to the lesson, I took the thumbtacks, one by one, and I threw them at Meghan.
None of them hit her, because I was in the first grade and thumbtacks are terrible projectiles.
But I wanted them to hit her. A lot.
This feeling is jealousy, and we all feel it sometimes. But the feeling transformed as I got older.
When I was in the third grade, there was a boy in my class named Evan. I thought Evan was cool. Cool became an important word in my life, probably starting right then. Evan didn’t have the most friends. He wasn’t the best at sports. But he was the funniest kid in our class. He also gave off the impression that he didn’t really need any of us—maybe because he had two older sisters, who he could hang out with at home.
So he was funny, and independent of us, and he didn’t really seem to care what we thought. Without ever realizing it, I came to associate this combination with the word cool. I think it became for me an unconscious definition: funny + independent + impervious = cool.
Starting in third grade, I coveted friendship with cool kids like Evan. Like a tray of warm brownies with melty peanut butter chips inside. I wanted.
And in third grade, I got! I actually managed to be friends with Evan. We created a little comedy routine together. We called it “The Bouncing Baby Blues Brothers.” We would sit next to each other and bounce against each other and sing: “We’re the Bouncing Baby Blues Brothers / All we want is our mothers / WAHHH! WAHHH!” Over and over. And the other kids thought it was hilarious. Oh, how I loved it.
But I wasn’t cool, like Evan, even though I was a Bouncing Baby Blues Brother. I knew it, and everyone knew it. I might have been funny, sometimes. But I wasn’t independent—because I so clearly wanted to be friends with Evan. And I certainly wasn’t impervious—because if ever someone insulted me, I’d feel really upset. You know, like everyone else. Everyone else, that is, except the cool kids. According to my math, they never did.
Over the next few years, the cool boys in my grade started identifying each other and hanging out together. There were four of them.
(Disclaimer: If you asked someone else in my grade who the cool kids were, they may well have named totally different kids as cool. These four weren’t good at sports—so they weren’t the jocks—and they didn’t have the largest friend group—so they weren’t the most popular. But in my mind, they were the coolest. They had funny + independent + impervious = cool down cold. And there is some objective truth to their coolness, I think. It wasn’t all in my head. Because after high school, two of them started a rock band and became kinda famous, and they were on a couple of TV shows playing rock music. Which, by many definitions, is cool.)
Well, you can imagine how I felt about this group of cool kids. I desperately, so badly, painfully, achingly wanted to be their friend. And you might be thinking, “Why? What’s so great about being cool?”
I have no clue. But I did know that they were truly funny—when I sat at the lunch table with them, they could make me laugh so hard milk came out of my nose.
So they might have been truly cool, but they definitely weren’t truly kind. A group of us boys would try to hang out with these four cool kids, and they would regularly call us “followers.” “Don’t be such a follower!” they would say. And whoever they said it to would feel shame—while the rest of the followers would laugh and feel secretly relieved that it wasn’t their day to be shamed. Or the cool boys would “ditch” a follower—they’d propose a game of hide-and-seek tag (like hide-and-seek but faster and more dangerous) in the hallways during lunch or after school. When we all were hiding, the cool kids would secretly organize everyone to “ditch” one of the followers, so he’d keep hiding and have no idea that everyone else was gone.
I remember one day, I was successfully hanging out with the cool kids—and feeling really good about it—when one of them said to me, “You remember that time? With that guy? Wasn’t that so funny?”
And I, desperately wanting to be a part of this cool group, eagerly said, “Yeah!”
And the cool kid said, “That guy, with that thing?”
“Yes!” I said, laughing along. “Oh my gosh, that was hilarious!”
And then the cool kid suddenly stopped laughing and said, “What are you talking about?” And I felt like an idiot, because clearly there was no “guy” with a “thing.” And all the boys laughed at how eagerly I had gone along with whatever the cool kid had said. What a follower I was.
Being a follower was the opposite of being independent. And I certainly wasn’t impervious to what other kids said about me—when they teased me, it hurt, and everyone could see it. I might have still been funny on occasion, but even that was ebbing away. Because it’s hard to be funny when you’re constantly worried about saying the right thing or the wrong thing. Trying really hard to be funny is a bad way to be funny.
So I was spending more and more time around the cool kids, and I was getting further and further away from being cool.
One thing that the cool kids had in common was that they liked to skateboard. They weren’t amazing at it or anything, but they all did it, and they wore skateboarding shirts and shoes and wallets with chains on them (wallets with chains were, apparently, a skater thing).
I will never forget one trip to the mall, in seventh grade, with my mom. We were looking for clothes for me to wear. And we saw a brand of skater T-shirts that the cool kids often wore. Since I thought the kids were cool, I thought the shirts were, too. Since we were looking for clothes for me anyway, my mom agreed to buy me one.
I wore this shirt to school a few days later. In science class, all the kids had gotten there before the teacher. And one of the cool kids—his name was Chris—looked at me and said, “Why are you wearing that shirt?”
I said, “I don’t know. I like it?”
“That’s a skater shirt. You’re not a skater.”
I didn’t know what to say.
I knew I wasn’t a skater. In fact, I didn’t know what I was.
But Chris did. He said, “Poseur.”
Which was a word I hadn’t heard before. I figured out pretty quickly that it meant “someone who pretends they’re something they’re not.” I also figured out pretty quickly that it was the opposite of being cool.
Somehow, through some magic I still do not understand, Chris got the entire class to point at me and chant, “Poseur! Poseur! Poseur!” over and over and over again. It must have ended somehow, sometime, because I am not still surrounded by chanting seventh graders. I imagine the teacher probably came in eventually. But I don’t remember it ending. In my head, it never did.
I continued to subject myself to the cool kids’ teasing, to their invitations to hang out and then be ditched. I wanted to be their friend so, so badly. More than I wanted to eat those brownies. A lot more.
Until eighth grade. By then, I had given up. It was too painful. My adolescent heart just couldn’t take it anymore. I started hanging out with some other kids—and this was maybe worse than the cool kids, because these kids were into bad stuff, and I got into it as well. And then we all got caught, and I stopped hanging out with them, too.
Just before ninth grade began, I made a decision. I decided that I couldn’t be trusted to make friends. Either I was gonna subject myself to cruel, torturous teasing or I would get myself arrested. So I decided that—starting in ninth grade—I would have no friends.
And I didn’t. Sometimes I sat by myself at lunch. Other times I sat with whoever was around. From time to time I even found myself at the table with Chris and the other cool kids—but I didn’t care about them anymore. If they made me laugh, fine. But when we all stood up to take our trays to the trash cans, I made sure to leave the cafeteria alone. And if ever they, or anyone else, asked me if I wanted to hang out after school or come over to their house, I would always half smile and say, “No thanks.”
That might sound sad to you. And it did, in fact, feel a little melancholy. But that year, something really strange started to happen. I realized—for the first time in my life—that I kinda liked school and was good at it. History class was all about interesting stories from history! Who knew? English class was just a teacher giving you a good book and telling you to read it, and enjoy it, and explain why you enjoyed it. Uh . . . sure! In science, we looked at freaky little monsters under a microscope. That’s awesome, actually.
I started to discover what I actually liked. Not what I thought would make the “cool” kids like me. What I liked. And I did those things. I often did them well. And I felt proud of myself. For the first time in my life.
I was independent.
Also, I didn’t care if the cool kids said something mean about me anymore. Since I didn’t care, and also I wasn’t trying to hang around with them, they pretty much stopped saying mean things about me. Or, if they said them, I wasn’t around to hear them. It created a virtuous cycle. All because I didn’t care what they said. So I had become impervious, too.
One day after school, near the end of the year, some boys from my grade were hanging out. I’d never really tried to get to know these guys—they weren’t cool, and they weren’t popular. But we started chatting, and it turned out they liked a lot of the same things that I did—we geeked out over cool stories from history class, in fact. We started to hang out in the hallways after school more often. And then I was invited over to one of their houses—and I went. We stayed up all night playing a nerdy World War II simulation board game. It was one of the best nights of my life.
Oh, and we made each other laugh. A lot. They were funny. And I was funny.
And also independent.
And impervious.
So was I, according to my own equation . . . cool?
Maybe? I don’t know.
But I do know that those boys I played board games with are still my best friends today, twenty-five years later. I created a book series with one of them. The other one is my daughter’s godfather.
Ninth grade—the year I spent without friends—might have been the most important year of my life. Because whether I became “cool” or not, I did learn how to be independent. And impervious.
When I was twenty-five years old, I decided to quit my first job to try to write a novel. It was not easy. I needed the strength to abandon my colleagues. I needed the strength to ignore everyone who doubted that I could become a published author. I needed the strength to be alone, every day, working on a book that no one had read or would read for a year. Once someone finally did read it, I needed the strength to hear their criticism—“I’d recommend starting again from scratch”—and not crumble. To keep going.
To be an author, you must be independent and impervious. Or close to it.
I don’t thank the “cool” kids for being mean to me. They don’t get credit for what happened.
I thank my ninth-grade self for finding the strength, somehow, to be alone, and find what I genuinely liked, and allow some true friends to find me.
I don’t know how a fourteen-year-old decided to do that—except that I was reacting to an enormous amount of pain.
My response to that pain made me who I am.
And I don’t care what you say: now I think I’m actually pretty cool.
* * *
• • •
ADAM GIDWITZ spent most of his childhood playing with action figures and imagining that he was the greatest basketball player ever. Now he writes books like the scary fairy tale A Tale Dark & Grimm, the Unicorn Rescue Society series, and the only Newbery Honor winner ever to feature a dragon with deadly farts, The Inquisitor’s Tale. A Tale Dark & Grimm is now an animated series on Netflix.
THIS CAN’T BE HAPPENING TO GORDON KORMAN
by Gordon Korman
“. . . and so, starting tomorrow, everyone’s going to write a novel.”
The word landed with a resounding thump in our seventh-grade English class, like construction workers outside had dropped something really heavy—a telephone pole or a three-ton block of granite. Heads swiveled around on necks, creating an interlocking network of anxious glances around the room. A novel? Us? We were twelve. A couple of us had turned thirteen. And this guy expected us to write a book?
It was this moment of mutual understanding, where I knew we were on the same page.
So I was hoping that this kid was going to get his comeuppance in some way. I didn’t think my dad was going to cause a scene and throw the family out, but couldn’t he at least tell the cooks to hide some chiles in his pad thai? Serve him the brown crusty rice scraped from the bottom of the pot?
Instead, the next time that boy’s family came in to eat, my dad was just as polite as ever. As far as I could tell, they were served their meal with the same good service as always. I watched them clean their plates, pay, and leave with satisfied sighs.
For a girl who had imagined her archnemesis sprinting for the bathroom with his mouth and intestines on fire from an epic Thai chile–burn, it was pretty disappointing.
It wasn’t until later that I realized my dad knew what he was doing. By giving that family quality service and delicious food, he was elevating himself above their ugliness. Now, don’t get me wrong, if they had been violent or disruptive, they would have been kicked out. Otherwise, he was going to give them a meal they would be talking about for weeks.
My dad was an immigrant, born poor, who raised himself from a factory job to open a restaurant that people drove a hundred miles to eat at. There was pride in what he could do. There was dignity in being excellent when others expected him to fail.
The harsh truth is that plenty of terrible people never get their comeuppance or see the error of their ways. But they can’t take away our dignity. They can’t deny our excellence. And we belong here just as much as anyone else.
And if they can’t handle that, then no satay for them. Their loss.
* * *
• • •
WE ARE ALL INFLUENCERS
There is this term in social media right now: influencer. By the time this book goes to print, it will probably have changed, and those people will be called statusticians or beezers or oozebers or something. But the concept will be the same: they are the people with millions of followers who are so popular and influential that they can set global trends.
I didn’t realize it until recently, but our restaurant was full of influencers. One of the biggest influencers of all was our manager and headwaiter, my uncle Donis. Donis didn’t have any social media accounts. He didn’t own anything fashionable. He didn’t jet to glamorous places. In fact, he rarely ever left Weatherford because he usually had to work.
When my uncle passed away this year after battling cancer, we received stacks and stacks of letters from customers and hundreds more heartwarming messages sent via the restaurant. Many of them said similar things:
“Donis always made us feel so welcome.”
“He remembered our favorite dishes and had them ready for us.”
“He treated us like we were family.”
As I read through these messages, it hit me how much a small act of kindness can mean to someone. Too many people in this world feel forgotten or unimportant. Too many people don’t feel like they deserve to be loved. Taking the time to learn someone’s name or what they like to eat, or just greeting them warmly and looking them in the eye—you never know when that is going to make a real difference in someone’s day. Talk about a superpower.
I wish my uncle had known how powerful he was, how much of an influence he had on all these people. Maybe he did know, and maybe he was trying to teach everyone that they have this superpower, too.
We are all influencers. We all have the power to be good to the people in our everyday lives—the people who matter the most. Out of all the lessons I learned in the restaurant, that one is my favorite.
That, and how to pick out the right dipping sauce for grilled chicken.
Now, who’s hungry?
* * *
• • •
CHRISTINA SOONTORNVAT is the award-winning author of over a dozen books for children of all ages, including the beloved Diary of an Ice Princess chapter book series. Her recent works include the middle grade fantasy A Wish in the Dark, which was named a 2021 Newbery Honor Book and was chosen as Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post and School Library Journal, and All Thirteen: The Incredible Cave Rescue of the Thai Boys’ Soccer Team, which has received numerous nonfiction awards and was also named a 2021 Newbery Honor Book. Christina lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband, two young daughters, and two old cats.
THE COOLNESS EQUATION
by Adam Gidwitz
My whole life, I’ve wanted the other kids to like me.
Obviously. We all want friends, right?
But when I say, “I wanted the other kids to like me,” I don’t mean that I wanted friends. I mean that there were certain kids whose friendship I craved. Like the way you look at a sheet of brownies with peanut butter chips and you’re like, Oh my gosh, I want that so much I’m going to steal the whole pan and hide in my room and shove all the brownies into my face. (Do you ever feel this way? Or do I just have a weird brownie obsession?) Anyway, there were certain kids who I wanted as my friends so bad.
It started early.
I remember feeling this way in the first grade. There was a girl named Jenny who was, through preschool and kindergarten, my best friend. And then Meghan showed up.
Meghan. My blood boils just thinking about her.
Suddenly, Meghan and Jenny were hanging out all the time, and I felt super left out and unreasonably angry. I can still feel those emotions in my chest, right now. I remember one day it got so bad that I swiped a box of thumbtacks from the teacher’s desk. And as Meghan and Jenny sat beside each other on the rug, listening to the lesson, I took the thumbtacks, one by one, and I threw them at Meghan.
None of them hit her, because I was in the first grade and thumbtacks are terrible projectiles.
But I wanted them to hit her. A lot.
This feeling is jealousy, and we all feel it sometimes. But the feeling transformed as I got older.
When I was in the third grade, there was a boy in my class named Evan. I thought Evan was cool. Cool became an important word in my life, probably starting right then. Evan didn’t have the most friends. He wasn’t the best at sports. But he was the funniest kid in our class. He also gave off the impression that he didn’t really need any of us—maybe because he had two older sisters, who he could hang out with at home.
So he was funny, and independent of us, and he didn’t really seem to care what we thought. Without ever realizing it, I came to associate this combination with the word cool. I think it became for me an unconscious definition: funny + independent + impervious = cool.
Starting in third grade, I coveted friendship with cool kids like Evan. Like a tray of warm brownies with melty peanut butter chips inside. I wanted.
And in third grade, I got! I actually managed to be friends with Evan. We created a little comedy routine together. We called it “The Bouncing Baby Blues Brothers.” We would sit next to each other and bounce against each other and sing: “We’re the Bouncing Baby Blues Brothers / All we want is our mothers / WAHHH! WAHHH!” Over and over. And the other kids thought it was hilarious. Oh, how I loved it.
But I wasn’t cool, like Evan, even though I was a Bouncing Baby Blues Brother. I knew it, and everyone knew it. I might have been funny, sometimes. But I wasn’t independent—because I so clearly wanted to be friends with Evan. And I certainly wasn’t impervious—because if ever someone insulted me, I’d feel really upset. You know, like everyone else. Everyone else, that is, except the cool kids. According to my math, they never did.
Over the next few years, the cool boys in my grade started identifying each other and hanging out together. There were four of them.
(Disclaimer: If you asked someone else in my grade who the cool kids were, they may well have named totally different kids as cool. These four weren’t good at sports—so they weren’t the jocks—and they didn’t have the largest friend group—so they weren’t the most popular. But in my mind, they were the coolest. They had funny + independent + impervious = cool down cold. And there is some objective truth to their coolness, I think. It wasn’t all in my head. Because after high school, two of them started a rock band and became kinda famous, and they were on a couple of TV shows playing rock music. Which, by many definitions, is cool.)
Well, you can imagine how I felt about this group of cool kids. I desperately, so badly, painfully, achingly wanted to be their friend. And you might be thinking, “Why? What’s so great about being cool?”
I have no clue. But I did know that they were truly funny—when I sat at the lunch table with them, they could make me laugh so hard milk came out of my nose.
So they might have been truly cool, but they definitely weren’t truly kind. A group of us boys would try to hang out with these four cool kids, and they would regularly call us “followers.” “Don’t be such a follower!” they would say. And whoever they said it to would feel shame—while the rest of the followers would laugh and feel secretly relieved that it wasn’t their day to be shamed. Or the cool boys would “ditch” a follower—they’d propose a game of hide-and-seek tag (like hide-and-seek but faster and more dangerous) in the hallways during lunch or after school. When we all were hiding, the cool kids would secretly organize everyone to “ditch” one of the followers, so he’d keep hiding and have no idea that everyone else was gone.
I remember one day, I was successfully hanging out with the cool kids—and feeling really good about it—when one of them said to me, “You remember that time? With that guy? Wasn’t that so funny?”
And I, desperately wanting to be a part of this cool group, eagerly said, “Yeah!”
And the cool kid said, “That guy, with that thing?”
“Yes!” I said, laughing along. “Oh my gosh, that was hilarious!”
And then the cool kid suddenly stopped laughing and said, “What are you talking about?” And I felt like an idiot, because clearly there was no “guy” with a “thing.” And all the boys laughed at how eagerly I had gone along with whatever the cool kid had said. What a follower I was.
Being a follower was the opposite of being independent. And I certainly wasn’t impervious to what other kids said about me—when they teased me, it hurt, and everyone could see it. I might have still been funny on occasion, but even that was ebbing away. Because it’s hard to be funny when you’re constantly worried about saying the right thing or the wrong thing. Trying really hard to be funny is a bad way to be funny.
So I was spending more and more time around the cool kids, and I was getting further and further away from being cool.
One thing that the cool kids had in common was that they liked to skateboard. They weren’t amazing at it or anything, but they all did it, and they wore skateboarding shirts and shoes and wallets with chains on them (wallets with chains were, apparently, a skater thing).
I will never forget one trip to the mall, in seventh grade, with my mom. We were looking for clothes for me to wear. And we saw a brand of skater T-shirts that the cool kids often wore. Since I thought the kids were cool, I thought the shirts were, too. Since we were looking for clothes for me anyway, my mom agreed to buy me one.
I wore this shirt to school a few days later. In science class, all the kids had gotten there before the teacher. And one of the cool kids—his name was Chris—looked at me and said, “Why are you wearing that shirt?”
I said, “I don’t know. I like it?”
“That’s a skater shirt. You’re not a skater.”
I didn’t know what to say.
I knew I wasn’t a skater. In fact, I didn’t know what I was.
But Chris did. He said, “Poseur.”
Which was a word I hadn’t heard before. I figured out pretty quickly that it meant “someone who pretends they’re something they’re not.” I also figured out pretty quickly that it was the opposite of being cool.
Somehow, through some magic I still do not understand, Chris got the entire class to point at me and chant, “Poseur! Poseur! Poseur!” over and over and over again. It must have ended somehow, sometime, because I am not still surrounded by chanting seventh graders. I imagine the teacher probably came in eventually. But I don’t remember it ending. In my head, it never did.
I continued to subject myself to the cool kids’ teasing, to their invitations to hang out and then be ditched. I wanted to be their friend so, so badly. More than I wanted to eat those brownies. A lot more.
Until eighth grade. By then, I had given up. It was too painful. My adolescent heart just couldn’t take it anymore. I started hanging out with some other kids—and this was maybe worse than the cool kids, because these kids were into bad stuff, and I got into it as well. And then we all got caught, and I stopped hanging out with them, too.
Just before ninth grade began, I made a decision. I decided that I couldn’t be trusted to make friends. Either I was gonna subject myself to cruel, torturous teasing or I would get myself arrested. So I decided that—starting in ninth grade—I would have no friends.
And I didn’t. Sometimes I sat by myself at lunch. Other times I sat with whoever was around. From time to time I even found myself at the table with Chris and the other cool kids—but I didn’t care about them anymore. If they made me laugh, fine. But when we all stood up to take our trays to the trash cans, I made sure to leave the cafeteria alone. And if ever they, or anyone else, asked me if I wanted to hang out after school or come over to their house, I would always half smile and say, “No thanks.”
That might sound sad to you. And it did, in fact, feel a little melancholy. But that year, something really strange started to happen. I realized—for the first time in my life—that I kinda liked school and was good at it. History class was all about interesting stories from history! Who knew? English class was just a teacher giving you a good book and telling you to read it, and enjoy it, and explain why you enjoyed it. Uh . . . sure! In science, we looked at freaky little monsters under a microscope. That’s awesome, actually.
I started to discover what I actually liked. Not what I thought would make the “cool” kids like me. What I liked. And I did those things. I often did them well. And I felt proud of myself. For the first time in my life.
I was independent.
Also, I didn’t care if the cool kids said something mean about me anymore. Since I didn’t care, and also I wasn’t trying to hang around with them, they pretty much stopped saying mean things about me. Or, if they said them, I wasn’t around to hear them. It created a virtuous cycle. All because I didn’t care what they said. So I had become impervious, too.
One day after school, near the end of the year, some boys from my grade were hanging out. I’d never really tried to get to know these guys—they weren’t cool, and they weren’t popular. But we started chatting, and it turned out they liked a lot of the same things that I did—we geeked out over cool stories from history class, in fact. We started to hang out in the hallways after school more often. And then I was invited over to one of their houses—and I went. We stayed up all night playing a nerdy World War II simulation board game. It was one of the best nights of my life.
Oh, and we made each other laugh. A lot. They were funny. And I was funny.
And also independent.
And impervious.
So was I, according to my own equation . . . cool?
Maybe? I don’t know.
But I do know that those boys I played board games with are still my best friends today, twenty-five years later. I created a book series with one of them. The other one is my daughter’s godfather.
Ninth grade—the year I spent without friends—might have been the most important year of my life. Because whether I became “cool” or not, I did learn how to be independent. And impervious.
When I was twenty-five years old, I decided to quit my first job to try to write a novel. It was not easy. I needed the strength to abandon my colleagues. I needed the strength to ignore everyone who doubted that I could become a published author. I needed the strength to be alone, every day, working on a book that no one had read or would read for a year. Once someone finally did read it, I needed the strength to hear their criticism—“I’d recommend starting again from scratch”—and not crumble. To keep going.
To be an author, you must be independent and impervious. Or close to it.
I don’t thank the “cool” kids for being mean to me. They don’t get credit for what happened.
I thank my ninth-grade self for finding the strength, somehow, to be alone, and find what I genuinely liked, and allow some true friends to find me.
I don’t know how a fourteen-year-old decided to do that—except that I was reacting to an enormous amount of pain.
My response to that pain made me who I am.
And I don’t care what you say: now I think I’m actually pretty cool.
* * *
• • •
ADAM GIDWITZ spent most of his childhood playing with action figures and imagining that he was the greatest basketball player ever. Now he writes books like the scary fairy tale A Tale Dark & Grimm, the Unicorn Rescue Society series, and the only Newbery Honor winner ever to feature a dragon with deadly farts, The Inquisitor’s Tale. A Tale Dark & Grimm is now an animated series on Netflix.
THIS CAN’T BE HAPPENING TO GORDON KORMAN
by Gordon Korman
“. . . and so, starting tomorrow, everyone’s going to write a novel.”
The word landed with a resounding thump in our seventh-grade English class, like construction workers outside had dropped something really heavy—a telephone pole or a three-ton block of granite. Heads swiveled around on necks, creating an interlocking network of anxious glances around the room. A novel? Us? We were twelve. A couple of us had turned thirteen. And this guy expected us to write a book?
