Author’s Note: The Real Prophecy

My name is Jill.

In seventh grade, I began writing poetry and loving the praise that I got from teachers for my work. I felt like I had a talent for the first time in my young life.

In the beginning of ninth grade, a few dreamy images began to form the foundation for a very crappy novel. At the time, I thought it would be an ingenious work that would make me famous and win me millions of dollars.

It was about a boy named Joe Riece. It followed his life from the end of sixth grade to his senior year, when after a long struggle against his feelings for the painfully shy outcast Cleo Robinson, he finally lost her. Each character in the book (save for Joe) was based on someone that I knew.

I wrote the whole thing in a three-subject notebook and finished it in around five months. As I wrote, I shared with a very talented friend who was also working on an extended piece of fiction.

I hated the novel after a while—I never even finished typing it onto my computer. I set it into a drawer in my room and walked away from it for over a year.

Half way through tenth grade, I met a boy named Joe Reader. He had brown hair like my character and we seemed to hit it off instantly. By the end of our first conversation, I knew that I was in love. I kept these feelings inside myself, continuing to let our friendship blossom in silence.

Over the time that I knew him, other parallels popped up here and there (the fight at the lunch table with the ex-girlfriend, for instance). In mid-August of 2004, a fight between Joe and my brother made it seem like we may never be able to see each other again. My parents had begun to resent him. I exchanged E-mail secretly with him and was startled by how devastated we both seemed to be over the situation. He ended one particularly heartbreaking message with “Goodbye,” which held a startling finality I had never heard from him before.

Almost without thinking, I replied with anger at the situation, with sorrow at my loss, and finally…with love. “If it helps any of this…” I began,

I REALLY care about you, love you even. I guess it’s safe to tell you now. My heart’s beating faster then it has in a long time, but I just thought you should know. Despite what I told those people in Absegami (our high school) that came up to me and asked if I liked you in that giddy teenage way, I do... I have diary entries describing you as the "love of my life” and "my soul mate” dating back to February. And I still write them now…

The E-mail continued for close to a page, and after sending it, I was filled with a feeling of panic. I sent another E-mail, which was at least a page in length, apologizing for the desperate, loving tone in which I’d written the E-mail before it, explaining the fate of my previous friendships in relation to my hesitance to tell him before that time, and finally apologizing for telling him at all, begging him to be honest to me in his reply, and assuring him that after all this time, I would be as grateful to be alone as I would be grateful for continuing my relationship with him.

It wasn’t until the next day that I received his reply.

Oh, THANK GOD you had the guts to say it, ’cause I surely didn't. Ever since I got to know you, I've had a secret love for you…

My new paramour went on to admit that he understood my unusual fear of closeness completely, and that it had greatly contributed to his hesitance to tell me how he felt.

So there is no reason for you to fret, we both feel the same way and it makes me SO happy to be able to say that. (Friday, August 13, 2004)

Our relationship had its ups and downs, the bad portions almost never connected to ourselves. Our love was powerful, and, I thought, eternal.

In eleventh grade, I went through the same conundrum of deciding how to make the story publishable. I began one version, very frank and in the third person point of view of both Cleo and Joe (with room for others, if the story warranted it), but decided about ten MS Word pages into it that I didn’t like it, and began to write this one, which became the first extended work since the original book (excerpts of which can be found throughout this story) that I had finished. I still can’t say that it’s publishable; in fact, I doubt that it is. But I finished it again and I guess there’s always room for a third rewrite.

When I began writing this author’s note over a year ago, Joe and I were still together. Early in the summer of 2006, we broke up. There was no anger, no betrayal, just a painful and mutual admission that there was plenty of love but no chemistry in our relationship. Perhaps we’ll marry in forty or fifty years when these things no longer matter; who knows?

By the way, I was Cleo. I’m eighteen and I haven’t died.

Thanks for reading.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this novel.

--Jill Scheer (Veromorphia)