— Pride and Prejudice

I always thought Homer painted his character Odysseus as a real slow learner with that whole twenty-year-journey thing. I mean, what kind of an idiot needs two decades to understand a simple lesson like “Don’t be arrogant in the eyes of the gods”? Pretty basic, once you take out all the hard-to-pronounce Greek names, the weird epic-poem structure and everything that smacks of immortals playing with magic.

But who am I to talk? For so many years, I, too, thought I was clever. I, too, thought I was courageous. I, too, thought I’d figured out all my lessons but, as Jane would say, “I fear this is not so.”

See, until this moment, at my wise old age of thirty-four, I had a long-held theory about my own personal power. An erroneous belief that I had more control over my destiny than I actually have.

But, to prove my point, I can’t start explaining from where I am now. It wouldn’t make sense.

Journeys begin where journeys begin…and mine began with big hair, leg warmers and the musty smell of Mrs. Leverson’s English class, way back in the mid-1980s when I was all of fifteen.

I was in sophomore lit then — midweek, early November, daydreaming of life after high school — when Sam Blaine made his first move and Jane Austen made her first comment.

“Ellieeee,” the sinfully cute but annoying-as-hell Sam Blaine chanted softly from his seat behind me. “Ellllieee.” He walked two of his fingers up the imaginary ladder between my shoulder blades until I shivered.

“Stop it,” I hissed. “You’re going to get us in trouble.”

I scooched forward, trying to focus on Mrs. Leverson’s nasal-toned wrap-up lecture of the novel we’d just finished, Childhood’s End. Although I was pretty sure my childhood had long ended, I resigned myself to acting polite and studious in class if it killed me. I had a reputation to uphold.