Blind Sight by Meg Howrey

Author:Meg Howrey [Howrey, Meg]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780307739292
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2011-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

This latest essay attempt is pretty hilarious. My dad helped me write it. I’m saving it under the title “If All Else Fails!”

We’re on the plane now. He’s asleep.

He totally surprised me at the airport in Chicago. Instead of going back to Los Angeles, we’re actually en route now to Hawaii.

“Seriously?” I asked, at the ticket counter. “We are seriously going to Hawaii?”

“You ranked camping in the Sequoia National Forest above Hawaii,” he said. “And we’re definitely going to do that too. But I thought maybe you were afraid to put Hawaii first ’cause you thought it was too big a thing to ask for? I’m counting on the fact that everybody wants to go to Hawaii, right? Like, you don’t have a problem with Hawaii or anything like that?”

I assured him that I have no problems with Hawaii.

“We’re going to the main island,” he explained. “It’s less touristy. And I rented a little condo instead of doing the five-star luxury thing. I thought you’d like that better. We’re gonna rough it. Slightly smaller wide-screen television, ha-ha.”

Then he pulled a guidebook to Hawaii out of his carry-on bag.

“You’re in charge of itinerary,” he said. “Research and report back. I am in your hands.”

“Well, what would you like to do?” I asked. “It’s your vacation too.”

“I would like to know that we are doing what you want to do,” he said.

Mark fell asleep shortly after takeoff, and I read the guidebook. I made a list: visiting the black sand beaches, snorkeling, hiking on the volcano. Definitely surfing.

Then I pulled 50 Successful College Application Essays out of my backpack and read two successful essays. I set up my laptop and wrote things like:

Glugglugglugdugglugglug.

And then deleted them.

Mark woke up and asked me what I was doing.

“Yesterday,” I told him, “I had this great idea about how to turn all these random free-writes I’ve been doing into an actual essay. It’s supposed to be between three and five hundred words, right? Well, that’s about twenty-five lines if you use four hundred words as a target point. So all I needed to do was extract three of the best sentences from each of the seven free-writes and combine those sentences together.”

“Yeah, but your free-writes have all been about different things,” he pointed out. “The sentences won’t go together.”

That’s what I found out when I tried it. I don’t know why I didn’t realize that.

“All the childhood stuff you’ve been doing is great,” he said.

“Yeah, but it’s all really rambling,” I explained. “Like the other day I tried doing what you suggested … on being the one guy in a family of women? And I ended up writing, like, six hundred words about playing Barbies with my sisters.”

“You didn’t have GI Joe? I had GI Joe,” he said.

I had Spider-Man and Batman. The girls just had one Barbie each because Sara didn’t approve of Barbie’s shape. But Rory got one as a birthday present from her friend, and then Pearl had to have one so Sara got her African American Barbie.

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