The Story of Awkward Read online

The Story of Awkward

  By R.K. Ryals

  Copyright © 2014 Regina K. Ryals

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  To anyone who has ever felt awkward, this is for you. Embrace what makes you unique.

  ~R.K. Ryals~

  Acknowledgements

  I have an entire cast of awkward people to thank for this book. This project was a special one for me, a book about discovering yourself and learning to be happy the way you are. A book, like many things in life, takes an entire team.

  Thank you to my husband, who spent many nights listening to awkward stories about my youth while I wrote this. He might be a little awkward, too, though he may not admit it. To my children, who truly inspired this story. To my oldest daughter who came home with tears in her eyes because someone made a comment about her glasses. You are unique and beautiful and the reason this story came to life. To my best friend, Audrey Welch who is one of my staunchest supporters. You are beautiful and amazing, and inspire me every day. To my sisters, I love you. We had many awkward and wonderful moments growing up. To my personal assistant, Christina Silcox, because together we are awkward and fun and full of laughter. You are an amazing friend and one of the hardest workers I know. There is never a shortage of laughter between us. To my editor, Melissa Ringsted. You are one of the strongest people I know and certainly one of the most caring and meticulous. To Regina Wamba, because you are one of the most brilliant and talented people I know. You gave the cover of this book life, and for that, I will always be grateful. To Melissa Wright, because you sent me an awkward book full of curse words so we could email them to each other. You are a light, and such a talented woman. To Whitney Deboe, because you are more than just a friend and a fellow writer, you have become a partner in this crazy literary world. To Bree High, because you inspire me; every day your strength, your love, and your friendship inspire me to the fullest. To Elizabeth Kirke, because you have left the most amazing messages for me. They make my day and warm my heart. To everyone who supports me every day: you are all brilliant. To Jessica Johnson, Lisa Markson, Nanette Bradford, Katherine Eccleston, Ashley Ubinger, Beth Maddox, Vicky Walters, Katy Austin, Amy McCool, Julia Roop, Pyxi Rose, A.J. O’Shell, Anne Nelson, Jessie de Schepper, Derinda Love, Jodi O’Brien, Merisha Abbott, Tina Donnelly, Jesse Daniels, and so many, many more. All of you truly inspire me! And to the fans: you make every day worth it. Your words and your kindness mean so much. I can’t thank you enough for reading. It truly means the world. Sharing the love of reading one book at a time! From my heart to yours! Embrace your awkward.

  “Great endowments often announce themselves in youth in the form of singularity and awkwardness.”

  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe~

  Prologue

  If you are looking for a happy book about beautiful people, this is the wrong story.

  If you are looking for a narrative without emotion, without regrets, and without mistakes, this is definitely the wrong story.

  This is by no means an uncomplicated tale about uncomplicated people. It is by no means sweet or light.

  This story is ugly.

  This story is complicated.

  This story is emotional.

  This story is tragic.

  This story is about discovery. It is about hope. It is about one girl’s perception of reality. It is about me, a girl named Peregrine Storke. A girl thought to be named after a bird, but really I’m not. Peregrine means “traveler” or “pilgrim”. I’ve always liked that idea. That I was meant to go abroad. That I was meant to see great things. Instead, I am as awkward as my surname, Storke. It would be better if I were named after a bird. A bird with clipped wings.

  In short, this story is about being awkward.

  When I was a child, I had an imaginary world I used to escape to in my head. If the fighting in my house was too much or the sound of my mother's frustrated yells too overwhelming, I went there. I carried a notebook full of pictures; some I'd drawn, and others I'd clipped out of storybooks or magazines. My book was full of pretty faces, fancy clothes, and fantastical creatures. All of it belonged inside of my fantasy world. And yet, despite the beauty inside of my world, there was also awkwardness. Always awkwardness.

  "Watch it, Perri! You good for nothing, half-wit!"

  I was a clumsy child, and my father forever despaired of it. Dad had an imaginary world, too. It was alcohol and sin; cup after cup of forgetfulness and too many nights spent with women who smelled like cheap perfume. It was why my mother turned to other things for comfort.

  “Dammit, Perri! Can you do nothing right?"

  My father was a master of verbal tongue lashing. It was a weapon, and he used it well. I'd heard it all before I'd even started school. For a long time, I thought my full name was Dammit Damn Perri. I'd even introduced myself that way once, to my mother's horror.

  I was five when it was discovered I needed glasses. My glasses were magic, beautiful windows into a clear world. I drew spectacles onto the pretty princess in my book full of pictures. Her name was Princess Elspeth. She was clumsy, too. She was tall, lean, and strong—despite her clumsiness—with wild, uncontrollable honey-colored hair and turquoise eyes. Across the bridge of her nose, she wore thin, golden spectacles, and she had an obsession with birds. All kinds of birds: colorful ones, plain ones, loud ones, quiet ones, and strange ones. She had little gold cages full of song birds that flew free most of the time, but always returned to their perches to sleep. Elspeth had a turret bedroom because even princesses with happy families should have a tower.

  "Dammit, Perri! What kind of mess is this? Clean it now! Fix it before I tan your hide!"

  Dad's voice was a constant reminder of how wrong I was. I couldn’t do anything right.

  In my fantasy book, I drew a short queen with stubby fingers, a rotund body, and a pleasant voice. She squinted a lot and was always misplacing everything. Beside her stood a tall, noble king who forever despaired of his wife's ability to lose things and his daughter's bird fascination. He was perfect, except for his nose. His nose was large with a freckle right at the end because imperfections often hide true beauty. They were Queen Norma and King Happenstance. In my story, I was Elspeth, and I wasn't the daughter of a man lost in alcohol and a mother who was too afraid to interfere.

  "Dammit, Perri! Quit eating! You eat all the damn time! Look at yourself!"

  I was twelve when I started gaining weight. It wasn't that I ate too much. I just liked sugar … a lot. By the time I was thirteen, I was really overweight, my cheeks puffy, my glasses a size too large because anything smaller wouldn’t fit on my face.

  In my fantasy world, I drew a troll. He was a fat troll with green, leathery skin and lots of pock marks. He was Elspeth's truest friend, and he loved candy. His name was Weasel.

  At fourteen, I found a friend at school. Her name was Camilla. She was as thin as a reed with knobby elbows and knees, curly red hair, braces, and a ton of freckles. We were both shy, and a lot awkward. In the end, we were snidely dubbed by the kids in our grade, Connect the Dots and Chub-a-Lub.

  Camilla had an older brother, Foster. He was everything Camilla wasn't. Like his sister, he had auburn hair, but it wasn't curly. He had no freckles, and he was athletic. I hated him. Camilla and I were reading The Secret Garden when Foster came up with the rhyme, "Perri, Perri, quite contrary, my how your stomach grows." The rhyme stuck, spread, and followed me through my freshmen year in high school. I hated Foster.

  In my fantasy world, I drew a villai
n. He was a tall villain, gangly and hawkish. He had bright scarlet hair and black eyes. He wasn't entirely human. He was a bullygog, a monster who spoke in hideous rhymes and had rotten teeth with breath that reeked of smelly cheese. His name was Reemis.

  I was fifteen when I started throwing up. It seemed the right thing to do at the time. I'm not sure what made me do it. The ridicule maybe. The stupid rhyme, the nicknames whispered behind my back. While Camilla started scrubbing her cheeks with lemons and pressing her tight curls between flat irons, I vomited. There was nothing pretty about it, just toilet bowls and cold linoleum floors. And yet, I'd found peace. Bathrooms were a haven. They were places I could purge everything awful I put inside my body. They were my salvation. Bathrooms taught me the agony of rising bile. They taught me about the warm rush of adrenaline that dulled all pain. Bathrooms were my happy place. It was the one place I controlled what I did while everything else in my world spiraled.

  In my fantasy world, I drew a well. It was your typical fairytale well, a stone circle built around a hole with a pole-lifted wooden roof and a pail hanging from a rope. However, this was no normal well. The waters within twirled, loud and tumultuously. No one drank from this well. No one pulled water from its depths. Only those in desperate emotional pain came to the well. Only those in desperate need drank the water. It was the Well of Forgetfulness.

  By the time I was sixteen, I was too thin and throwing up blood. My chest and throat were constantly sore. I wasn’t chubby anymore, but what I had become was worse. Now I was something different. I was the walking dead, and it scared me. It scared me enough to get help. My parents were divorced by then, but they confronted me together. Mom sulked and Dad yelled.

  “Dammit, Perri! How stupid can you be?”

  I started seeing a counselor, someone who understood the depths I’d fallen into. The man I saw was a sweet man. He wore grey suits, glasses, and black shoes that always looked freshly shined. He smelled like peppermint and cigars. His name was Jack. He’d just started wearing bifocals when I met him, and he was always walking into walls.

  In my fantasy world, I drew a fairy. She was a petite, pretty fairy with sparkling violet wings, but she couldn’t fly straight. She flew at an angle because her wings were somewhat disproportionate, so that she was always flying into things. Her name was Nimble, because anyone who isn’t naturally graceful should be given a graceful name. Nimble had a pet bookworm, an honest to goodness bookworm with eyes too big for his small green body and glasses that made them even larger. He ate paper and memorized facts. His name was Herman.

  When I was seventeen, I went on my first date. It was an awkward affair. He wasn’t an ugly boy, although he suffered from acne and had a thing for drinking lime sodas. He was taller than me and fairly handsome. I had gained enough weight back, I didn’t look sick anymore, and I’d grown more confident. I’d begun to shirk my awkwardness, and it was being noticed. Andrew Lieberman became my first steady boyfriend. It was a yearlong relationship that ended when he went off to college.

  In my fantasy world, I drew a prince. He was a handsome prince, charming and debonair. He had beautiful brown hair and blue eyes. Everything about him was perfect, except for a small scar on his cheek because all women know there is nothing sexier than a scar. His name was Prince Dash. He was a master swordsman and rode a beautiful black stallion he called Shadow. Prince Dash fell in love with Princess Elspeth despite her obsession with birds. He gifted Elspeth a beautiful white unicorn because all princesses should ride unicorns rather than horses. Elspeth named her Glory. The only fault Glory had was that she had two horns instead of one.

  By the time I was eighteen and graduating high school, I’d created an entire world of characters. All of them mine, all of them awkward. Even their world was awkward. It snowed during the summer and was hot during the winter. Rivers flowed backward and the clouds in Awkward were always shaped like roses. The trees had leaves that could wrap an entire person inside of them, and the rain always tasted like caramel-flavored coffee. No one yelled in Awkward. No one was stupid in Awkward. No one was ever lost.

  At nineteen, I packed my bags to head for my first year away at college. Camilla and I were both attending an art school in New York City. Camilla had a passion for pottery and sculptures, and I had a passion for drawing and painting. Neither of us were awkward anymore. Camilla’s braces were gone, and her red curls suited her peaches and cream skin. She had a lithe figure, and the freckles she’d once tried to hide made her look charming. I wasn’t as tall as Camilla, or as lithe, but I was lean, fit, and confident. I’d turned my obsession with throwing up into exercise and wise choices. I was leaving the world of awkward behind.

  The old, faded sketch book full of pasted photos, scraps of memories, and drawings of specific characters stared up at me from my desk as I zipped my suitcase. I gazed at it, at the curling pages and crude childish drawings on the cover. Inside of those pages, Elspeth was playing with her songbirds and being courted by Dash. Herman was following the fairy, Nimble, dutifully as she flew into trees. The king was forever despairing over his absentminded wife, and Weasel was eating candy and sharing confidences with the princess. Dash’s horse, Shadow, was chasing Elspeth’s unicorn across fields of wildflowers, and the villain, Reemis, was hiding amongst the trees and spouting horrid poetry. There were tiny dragons the size of butterflies and neon flowers in Awkward. I’d miss it all. I’d miss them.

  Instead of packing the notebook, I simply patted the cover, flipping through the pages one final time. I thought I saw movement within the illustrations, but when I squinted, it was gone. I wore contacts that helped control my astigmatism, so I chalked the movement up to my eyes. Closing the book, I ran my fingers down the cracked cover. This was a hard departure. It was a new beginning. Turning, I walked away from the world of Awkward.

  Chapter 1

  “That awkward moment when you realize you’ve lived your entire life inside of a picture.”