Flipside

By: Lizzie Bundick

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In high school everyone has a dream; many of them are of greater and more glorious things than working at McDonalds. You have the girl who wants to be an actress, you have the football player who dreams of the NFL and you have the geek who dreams of becoming the next Bill Gates. Back in high school I didn’t dream of any of these things, I dreamed of become the next great detective. I wanted to be Sam Spade, Lenny Briscoe and Sherlock Holmes all rolled into one, while still having the charm of the all American heroine. Now I had a friend in high school, Cory, who worked with me third hour as an English office page, a page was the office slave, and sometimes we’d have nothing to do. On one of these slow days Cory and I started tossing out ideas for what would happen if we ran into each other in the future, with me being a detective and Cory owning a stripper joint and being my snitch. Soon the scenarios we created with each other grew to include our circle of friends and then I decided to put the ideas we came up with onto paper. Together we had created New Haven, USA, what our high school would be if it were a city. I took all four years of my high school career, all the people I had met, all the friends I had made, and turned them into my cast of characters. Their personalities helped me create their jobs, their life styles, and their relationships to me. I may have tweaked a personality trait a little bit, I may have tweaked what the person wanted to be, but I always made sure that when they read the story they could go ‘That’s me, right there.’ Some of my friends have had their names change to protect them from embarrassment, and then some of the characters are completely made up. What? My high school wasn’t that interesting. This is New Haven, USA, a city where the truth is often funnier than fiction.