#chapter 00

Chapter 0: The Fool

I’ve always envied those with normal lives. I don’t think I’ve ever even had a normal month, a plain week, or an average day.

You know, considering that 1.29 star review on Goodreads (review bombing non-withstanding), I'm going to predict that the book will open on this, and then spend the next 261 pages explaining how ordinary and boring that the main character is. The author's really bad attempt to be “edgy”.

I won’t cover everything that has been crazy or unusual in my life. If I did, this would end up being a much larger book and would take entirely too long to read. Instead, I’ll start on the day I left home. It marked a turning point—a fork in the road, if you will. I knew I was choosing a path, and hoped it was the right one. Either way, I knew that once I made my choice that was it. I couldn’t double back and try again. It was to be how it was to be.

So I know that this is “chapter 0”, but at the same time... This isn't off to a great start. We're just having a bizarre “flow of consciousness” writing that doesn't seem intent on getting to any sort of point, literally at all.

….the wind that blew swiftly through my blonde hair. It also spun about the chunky pieces on the lower half of my long hair, which I had dyed to be a multitude of fun colors. Today they were pink, purple, blue, and a turquoise green, but I have a habit of changing the colors frequently. My perfectly cut bangs stayed mostly unaffected by the wind except for a few squirrelly pieces.

Holy fucking shit, can we not?

My mother is the area tarot card reader and spell caster.

It took most of two pages just to establish what goddamned genre that this book is.

Not like I'm against taking some time to establish the world and everything. But when those two pages consisted of 100% “flow of consciousness” writing that gave us “dramatic hair blowing” for a fucking paragraph... This is just goddamned maddening.

My well-worn and once brightly colored (but now badly faded with dirt spackle) Converse high-top sneakers made a quick tapping noise on each step. I had just replaced the laces on them so at least they looked somewhat decent. My favorite high-waisted Levi’s dark denim skinny jeans—ripped in all the right places—made the swishing noise as I lifted my legs and my perfect flowy Lucky’s top that I wear far too often billowed around me.

I'm having some super intense flashbacks to reading bad Harry Potter fanfics riddled with bad self-insert Mary Sues from when I was 12.

“But, Zade, I thought you liked reading cards.”

So I wanted to make fun of this name, but wanted to make sure that it wasn't an actual name before I did this.

From wikipedia: Zade is both a surname, derived from Persian, meaning "son of" and a given name.

What the fuck.

It's not so much that I'm making fun of the name, since it does appear to be an actual name, and a cultural one at that. But I'm making fun of the fact that the author picked what's obviously a cultural, MASCULINE, name and gave it to a girl. One who is obviously quite white.

She had often quoted me one of Dr. Seuss’s famous sayings—so many times I had lost count. “Why try to fit in, when you were born to stand out?” I always retorted with, “Why would I want to stand out? People who stand out get things thrown at them. People who stand out get called names and shoved into lockers. If the people who don’t stand out are too cowardly to do any of the previously mentioned options then they just awkwardly whisper about you— the people who do stand out—as you walk by.”

I don't know. Zade kind of has a point. It's easy for the parent to say “It's okay to be you”. But the parent isn't the one getting bullied in school and shunned by her peers.

It's a lot easier for an adult to shrug off people who are mean to you, because they have a lifetime of perspective, and can understand things like “It's their problem, not yours”. It's a lot harder for a 17 year old who is currently being bullied.

It was the opening lyrics to the Dixie Chicks’s song “Wide Open Spaces.” I couldn’t help but laugh at how truly that was my anthem at the moment. I took it as a sign I was doing the right thing, as I drove away, I sang along to the song.

Who doesn’t know what I’m talking about

Who’s never left home, who’s never struck out

To find a dream and a life of their own

A place in the clouds, a foundation of stone

And now we're literally quoting actual song lyrics.

I can't. This is literally just somebody's bad fanfiction that somehow, for some reason, got published.

I had a long road ahead of me—and an even longer road when I got there—but it was what I knew that I needed to do, without any doubt.

Chapter 0 summary: This chapter was eight pages long, but most of it was just useless filler that literally any sort of editor would have told her to cut. Long descriptions of things like what she was wearing, and mostly just bullshit “streams of consciousness” that had nothing to do with anything.

But the actual meat of the chapter revolves around ~17 year old Zade packing up to leave home. Her mother is a literal witch, who is shunned by most of the highly conservative, highly Christian town. And as such, Zade is shunned by proxy. She's trying to leave, but her mom doesn't want her to go. Says that she's just trying to protect her daughter from “making the same stupid mistakes”. Which is fair, but Zade throws everything that her mom has ever done for her daughter back into her mom's face. Which as you can imagine, makes her come off as shitty and ungrateful.