cornvillenutmeg

Today I have invited a guest to contribute to the Cornvillenutmeg.

     My name is Brian Lister. My sophomore year in high school was so far the hardest year of my life. Because of that, and maybe so I’d understand it all better, I wrote down everything that happened. For a long time, what I wrote sat in a drawer in a large manila envelope. Now the whole story is in a book, Jimmy the Geek.
     I read it again a couple of weeks ago. After all this time, it surprised me how many different subjects came up: friendship, loyalty, betrayal, homophobia, bullying, bigotry, and basically what’s fair and not fair. And everything that happened was the result one physically weak high school sophomore and the effect he had on both his friends and enemies.
     When Jimmy moved to town during the summer, he interrupted my friendship with Harry, who was my best friend and always had been. Pretty much from then on, Harry and I stopped doing what we used to do, like playing touch football or ultimate Frisbee with other kids, fishing, camping, going to the beach. That was because Jimmy wasn’t really strong enough to do things like that on account of he had a health issue. So instead, Harry and I spent the rest of the summer doing mostly what Jimmy preferred, like listening to opera, going to see a ballet, cooking, every once in a while a movie.
     By the time school started Harry and I were more or less used to Jimmy and had gotten to like him okay – well, Harry more than me, really. Most of the other kids, though? Not so much. That was the main problem which got to be a bigger and bigger deal as the year went on until everything more or less exploded into an epic mess that changed everything and pretty much everyone.
     What you’re going to see when you read this book, these kinds of things are happening all the time. In fact, I’ll bet you a dollar you won’t have to look very hard to see stuff a lot like them in your own school.

Brian Lister