Writing Club: First Line

All of our stories had to begin with the phrase "It was the worst day of..."


It was the worst day of band camp in the history of all band camps that ever were. I don’t even have to do any research to know this, I am so certain that it is a fact that I don’t need to. The sun baked the world in a sweltering, sticky 104 degrees, and if it hadn’t been so humid I’m pretty sure we all would have caught fire with the trees around us and gone up in a putrid blaze of prepubescent body odor, Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers, and burning wood on melting brass. Our fingerprints disappeared against the scorch of the metal most of us held, and some had been drinking so many fluids and sweating so profusely that they wet their pants and didn’t even notice, just welcomed the ensuing chill of it. But the heat? That was nothing. What’s a little heat stroke, a bit of sun poisoning? Get a hat and a nice spritzer-fan, and if you didn’t end up in the nurse’s office lying down on rice-paper-and-vinyl by the end of the day then you were fine enough.

It was Porky McPherson that clinched it. Hovering a good head over us at a whopping 5 feet 8 inches, Porky was not at all fat. She was just mean, tough, hard, spiky inside and out, like a porcupine. She dished out a hearty helping of helplessness and then scooped out a spoonful of anger and sprinkled on a bit of good old-fashioned fear for good measure. Her knuckles were forever scarred with a series of crescent moons sprawled out across them, “flesh wounds,” she called them—“and you should’ve seen the other guy.” Her black-as-tar hair was pulled back into a straight and spiky (as all good porcupines ought to have) mass of destruction. I’m not kidding. Brittany Sarver had to go to the nurse last week because Porky’s hair poked her eye until it bled. Porky’s pockets were always full of other kids’ lunch money—half of them kids who didn’t go to our school. Even her parents were afraid of her, which is why they left her alone and never helped her with her homework. But all those failing grades only made Porky angrier...which only made US more black and blue and broke.

For all of her foibles, Porky had one passion—she loved the trombone. And not just because she could slide the end of it into the head of the kids in front of her. That was only a perk. Porky just loved the sound of it. She loved spitting through the vibrations her mouth had to make to get the trombone to play. She loved knowing just where to slide the brass to in order to hit not only kids but notes. She loved the look of the long, slender, hard thing—I think if trombones could have spiky hair and stash lunch money away, then Porky would BE a trombone, but with skin.

Don’t start to like her. There’s no point. The trombone doesn’t save her, because it doesn’t save US. She empties the spit valve on the heads of the clarinet section, she purposefully steps on our toes as we try to march in formation (11-year-olds and big instruments just don’t mix well), she makes fun of everyone else as they try to play their parts, and when band practice is over she’s still Porky, but with some catching up in evilness to do.

Porky made EVERY day the worst day of ANYTHING in the history of ANYTHING.

But YESTERDAY was the worst day of band camp in the history of all band camps that ever were, because yesterday I chose to fight back.

I blame the heat. All that blood boiling just below my temples started my stomach to feeling queasy, and then my knees started to shake and my sunburned feet started to swell and before you knew it I was one sweaty and angry devil of a 13-year-old with mad delusions of power. I made my fatal mistake when Porky swung her long arm around to point to another kid and knocked me upside the head “on accident.” I’m pretty sure a blood vessel in my brain exploded, for nothing else could possibly explain my reaction:

I hit her back!

And now, dear reader, I am destined to die.