text: The question wasn’t actually a question. Of course it was good. She just wanted her friend to agree, and then the day could go on and she could keep working on that great story, and keep working on it until something came of it and she could put it somewhere for other people to see and agree it was good. Her friend nodded as she read and when she came to the final paragraph, she smiled and said, “it seems like the kind of thing you would write.” She felt like she’d been slapped across the face. “What do you mean?” This time it was actually a question. “Oh you know. Good versus evil and all that, it’s very you.” “Like how?” she asked, again, still not understanding. Her friend had not said it was good. She had said it was like the sort of thing she would write. That wasn’t ‘good’. “I don’t know,” her friend shrugged, “it’s just your kind of thing right? Bad versus good... fantasy and all that. I don’t know.” Her friend gave her back the notebook and she looked down at it. Suddenly, her mind was full of other times her friends had not called her stories good. She remembered that time her friends had taken her note book during morning break, and she had thought they had been just so excited to see the next exciting chapter she had been working on, and she remembered coming back to a classroom and finding all her friends huddled over her notebook, and they had been giggling. She had thought they were giggling at the right times with the story, but now she realized that was not what had been happening. They had been giggling at the stories. When they had seen her seeing them and they had suddenly scattered with snickers and she had taken back the book and no one had said anything, no one had said it was good. She didn’t call it good. She said it seemed like the kind of thing she’d write. What did that mean? Her eyes scanned the page at the excited scrawls across it, looking for what it was exactly that made anything particularly ‘her’, what it meant. She read through the dialog, through the world, through the story, but she could only hear one thing echoing. It was the kind of thing she would write. “There are a lot of stories about good versus evil.” she said to her friend, and she felt like she was somehow apologising. Her friend shrugged again. “I guess so.” But she said nothing more, could not be more unimpressed. She felt shattered, realizing that she might actually have bored her. That her story had been boring. She wondered if she finished it and put it somewhere for people to see, they would not call it good. They would giggle at it behind her back. Or worse, they would nod and call it the kind of thing she would write. She crumpled the papers and threw them away.