I forced myself to sit on the deck and write. Ms. Baker had said that real writers write every day, and I hadn’t written in almost a week. I kept thinking about Natasha and how angry she was, but I didn’t want to write a story about an angry teenage girl. I could just see Ms. Baker or someone reading it and assuming I was writing about myself. I decided to write a story about a teenage boy who had some of Natasha’s qualities, only the boy version of them. He’d be really short and skinny. He’d be scared of everything. I decided his family was going on a camping trip and he was supposed to have his own tent, only he was scared to sleep by himself. He thinks he’s going to be eaten by a bear, but the dad just says, There aren’t any bears where we’re going. Maybe at the end the boy would get eaten by a bear. That seemed too obvious, though. Maybe he’d just see a bear and know his dad had been wrong? When I finished the first scene, I thought it wasn’t too bad. I wished I had someone to show it to.
