Irvine Valley College

Online Creative Writing Workshop

Writing 10 - Introduction to Creative Writing

Spring 2012 - Ticket # 64580

Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink, MFA, Instructor

Weekly Exercises

Week 8 - Point of View II.


Marjorie Luesebrink

note from Margie:  this exercise asks you to construct a First Person, naive, unreliable, or otherwise limited character.  I chose a young girl going on her first date, almost.  At least I was naive!!!

I hardly have time to take a bath, try on seven outfits, do my nails, fool with my hair, and dress in the best of the seven really lousy outfits before 8.  Terrence Gordon!  I can hardly wait - I've been hoping to go out with him since the start of school!  He sits next to me in Algebra.  Knows all the answers.  But that is no guarantee of anything - haha.   the teacher calls him Terry but he likes to be called Terrence.  

I am hopeless in Algebra, tho, so he had my attention right away - maybe to get help from him.  But I really *am* shy - at the beginning I thought I would ask him to study together.  But as soon as I really looked at his deep, brown eyes, the way his shoulders move, I couldn't have asked him a single thing.  So I just sat in class for weeks, my heart pounding every time he looked over at me or said hello or anything.  Then, just yesterday, Friday, he trailed behind me after class.  I kind of slowed up in the hallway, just in case.  And sure enough!  He came up and started talking.  At first, he just offered to help me with my homework - but by the end we had real plans!  The movies!  So I'm ready, almost, changing shoes one last time because I realize that Terrence is tall, and I don't want to look like I am standing in a hole.  Thinking that the heels on my black boots are just about right.  The phone rings.  It is Terrence!  But his voice is strange, kind of muffled.  

"I can't go tonight,"  he says.  Can't go, why not???

"Oh, that's too bad, what happened?"

"My parents have some relatives in town and I have to stay here tonight," he says, not very convincingly, IMHO.

"That's too bad."

"Maybe some other time," he says, just as lame.

"Ok, well, thanks for calling."

My Mother comes walking by the door to my room just as I burst into tears.  

"Did he stand you up?"

I guess that is what it was called in the old daysAnd so it is.  A strange feeling to be stood up. 

 

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Enjoy the Magic!

Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink, MFA, your Instructor, is a Professor of English in the School of Humanities and Languages, Irvine Valley College, Irvine, California.

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