Day 31.

first thing i wrote here. assignment was, my trip to csssa.
I live in L.A., so my trip to CSSSA was fairly uneventful. A thirty minute car ride with my dad, who took the opportunity of having me trapped in the car to tell me about drugs, alcohol, sex, and which of them was permissible in extreme emergency.
My real trip to CSSSA started five months ago, when i scribbled out the application an hour before leaving to see RENT at the high school. (We were fifteen minutes late after the detour to the post office.)
But I guess it really started two years ago, when i first applied. My best friend Chelsea had gone the year before, and come back an incredible writer, powerful and beautiful and scary good. I wrote the pieces early for me-- a month before they were due, and when my rejection letter came I sat on the floor near our mail slot sobbing. Actually, my trip here started in the third grade, when Ms. Mintz, a tiny woman with owl eyes and a triangle puff of hair, told Chelsea and I, in front of our families and friends on the last day of school, that we would have bestsellers next to each other on the shelf.