Ross Ramirez — Project 2
“The rain is really pouring now isn’t it?” says Grace.
“Yes it is. Drive slow, hun,” I say to Tom, who responds with a hand wave. Mr. Van Meter and him are too busy listening to the game. We’re just coming back from the steakhouse, the rain, of course, starting as soon as we paid the check.
“Thanks again for dinner, June.”
“It’s our pleasure,” Ben and her son Ryan are in the back of the car, I can hear them chatting quietly. “They’ve become real good friends it seems. It’s good,” I say, “Ben needs a friend.”
“I just hope they don’t get in any trouble,” Grace says, looking at me.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t want them to see something on TV and get any bad ideas is all,” She turns her head away towards the window.
“Yea, right,” I reply, now turning as well, watching the droplets fall down against the glass. It’s been hard for Ben to fit in with the other boys at school, but since the Van Meter’s moved in next door, Ryan and him have really clicked.
We came to a stop at a traffic light.
“Will you marry me?”
Grace whips her head around over the back seat. “What did you just say?”
“I asked Ben to marry me,” Ryan said, innocently. A smile crossed my face. How sweet. If only kids could grow up in a world that would let them explore themselves freely.
Grace stared a Ryan for a long while, until she said to him, “You shouldn’t have said that. Boys don’t marry other boys. Only boys and girls get married to each other. Did you hear me?”
I kept my gaze forward, my eyes locked on the headrest in front of me. I wish I could say something. To her. To the rest of the world. I wish we could mean it when we say to our kids, “Be yourself, do what you want to do.” I wish that I didn’t have to be scared to teach Ben he doesn’t have to listen to society’s rules, but it’s just not that easy. We drove on in silence. After arriving on our street, we each got out of the car, stepping into the rain.
“See you,” Grace says.
“Yea,” I say. I grab Ben’s hand and walk up the driveway, Tom holding the umbrella. I step into the house, and gently close the door behind us.
I chose to emulate this piece first and foremost because I liked it. Initially I just thought the story of the boys was really cute, and so I was drawn to it. Then I got disappointed by the turn of the story, but it still left me invested, which I think is part of what good writing should do. And honestly I also chose it because it had clear perspectives that I thought I could play off of, with a nice scene to recreate. One challenge I found in this project was trying to retell the same story, without retreading exactly what was in the story, such as the descriptions of things. I decided to follow the track of dialogue, but lay out the visualization of the scene in a different way. In the original story, he describes small details in the car, starting from back to front, details only a child would care about. I wrote Ben’s mom’s perspective to be a bit more broad, she doesn’t as much describe the scene as let the reader build it through the progression of the dialogue. Another challenge was trying to give Ben’s mom an interesting character, not just one dimensional. I’m not sure how well that came through, but I tried to make her a bit more than just the opposite of Ryan’s mom. Instead of being an avid supporter of LGBT rights, she is a quiet supporter, still being suppressed by the society she lives in. Even if she believes it in herself, she is unable to voice that opinion and teach it to her child. While working on this project, I learned how many different ways that you look at a certain story. I could have told this scene from Ben’s POV, or the mom’s POV, or the dad’s. And they would all tell the same story in a different way. I learned how much ‘story’ you can get out of one short scene. While it was also hard to stay motivated to work on this project during this year, I did enjoy the exercise. It was fun to look at a story from different sides, expanding the narrative.
