“Momy? It’s true that Roger’s going a-prison?” my little brother Charlie blurted out from the top of his baby chair, looking at his mother with huge, blue eyes.
“Is it.” My mom, Lena, corrected him.
“Uh?” Charlie asked. “To ask a question, reverse the sentence: Is it true Roger is going to prison?” She explained. “Okay,” Charlie replied.
“Besides,” my father, Osca,r said, or rather chanted, in a booming voice, “besides, my son is not going to prison at all. He is going to heaven on a staircase of light, and we are all so proud of him.”
A wave of agreement shot throughout the table, as all his friends either said “yes” or nodded their heads, while the orchestra, high on a podium at the center of the restaurant, played a festive melody, as if he had arranged it. Which wouldn’t surprise me; my father loves to arrange things.
“Are you proud too, Rog?” Everybody turned to face me, and I knew exactly what they wanted me to say, what I should expect myself to say. So I say it.
“Oh, yeah! I mean, Wordsworth University! That’s one of the most prestigious colleges in the country! I’m so glad to go there and study… study… well, computer science!” As I spoke, I couldn’t help but notice how husky my voice was, soft as gelato, and for an instant, I feared I may not have convinced them. But then I smile with that smile I practiced so many times, it is almost becoming a mask grafted on my face.
“See? He is happy too! Oh, Rog, you are going to have fun there, just as I was your age. And beyond that, for sure. Wordsworth will draw the best out of you. Which does not mean you are going to get everything right. You see” he started, turning back at his friends, and from the relaxing of his face and the lowering of his voice I realized he was in storytelling mood, “when I first got out of Wordsworth, and I got my first job as a programmer, I actually came late on the first day!” he declared, and I half-listened even though I already knew the happening by heart. But this time, there was something that made me think of when I started journalism this year. It was my mother’s idea. She thought a more humanistic extracurricular would look good on my curriculum, and so I enrolled in that newspaper, the brainchild of a sophomore friend of mine. I had originally set out to write my first article as soon as possible, but then there were so many things, so many other extracurriculars, and those mountains of essays all those days spent finding new words to say the exact same time, constantly cutting up and stitching together… in a nutshell, I promptly forgot about it. And I remember when I was sitting at my desk that day, and my mother came to help me do a new schedule. Together, we found I had missed the deadline. I was desperate, and I wanted to give up, but my mother was firm, reminding me that everybody made mistakes. She encouraged me to keep on. I stitched a quick article on the Academy Awards (nothing great or fancy, just a list of who won or lost what and a few funny things the actors did), but I actually enjoyed searching for information, and then jotting down the paragraphs, bullet point by bullet point, the sound of the keyboard ringing around me.
I was still in this revelry when I realized I had strayed and needed to focus back on my father in case he asked a sudden question. “The only thing I’m a bit worried about,” he was saying, “is that Wordsworth is so competitive, and my Rog, for all his merits, is a little lamb.” Laughter sprouted up around the table. “A little lamb?” a friend of my father (I can never remember his name… maybe Luke?) asked, “you will have to turn into a wolf if you don’t want to be eaten in there.” I laughed, even if I did not find the line funny at all. But I also thought about “turning into a wolf,” and I remembered one of my favorite articles: the one I wrote at Halloween about werewolves in folklore and modern pop culture. For that article, I explored across the Internet and found out stories of werewolves in so many countries, from Canada to China, and I tied all those traditions up to Halloween! I was the only one doing Halloween themed works, which is weird because we at the newspaper are so close in spirit. A series of memories sprang up in my mind, of all the times we played writing games, when we set our group chat together, we discussed ways of enhancing the paper… I was drifting off again.
When I recollected, my father was apparently reassuring his friends about me surviving among “the wolves” at Wordsworth. “Don’t worry about him,” he stated, “he’ll do just fine, he will start small and then take over the world, like the ancient Romans.” The ancient Romans… again, like a horse galloping away to the wild, my mind raced back to when I wrote my article about ancient Roman motifs in sci-fi movies. When I charted the Roman Civil War in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, and when I discussed how close Capitol City in The Hunger Games was to ancient Rome… and I remember when I stumbled upon Oswald Spengler’s theories, and how that gave a twist to the article, and how I related it all together, political philosophers, galactic republics and empires, post-apocalyptic dystopias, and the Roman Empire.
I have drifted again. I looked around, at the massive room we are in, at the white walls stretching up and holding the dome at the center of which hung the chandelier bathing us all in its light. I looked at the people in the tables around us, all laughing and talking… for some reason, my brother’s words floated in my mind, a piece of solid food scraped from a soup’s bottom by a spoon. It’s true that Roger is going a-prison, it is true that Roger is going to prison. I push away the memory of my brother and focus back on Dad. Journalism was a nice chapter, but I will have to close it and plunge into computer science for the next four years. “My boy is riding the wave, too: computer science is spreading like a wildfire these days!” Wildfire… the mere word summoned nightmarish memories: when three huge ones broke out around our home, and I had to do school while the power and the Internet was off, the fear of evacuation always on us… and then the mysterious joy I felt when I took that horror, and turned it into signs on a white screen, how I crafted a memoir for the newspaper out of it.
My father kept talking about civilizations rising from the Middle Ages, which made me think of when I wrote the article on that manuscript I saw when I visited Ireland with my grandparents, The Book of Kells, then he talked about “a treasure”, which made me think of the article I wrote on the sunken treasure ship. And when he mentioned ChatGPT, I couldn’t help but think about the article a friend of mine wrote about using AI honestly. Suddenly, my memories expand, and I remember all the articles my friends wrote: the article on the European Union and world peace, the article on curbing animosity online, the article about the musical Cabaret, all those events, all those stories, worlds apart. We wrote about so many things and people, ages and continents apart! And regardless of what my father is going to say about how many friends he got as a programmer, I made my best friends here at journalism.
Charlie’s words kept banging in my head, like bright red balls trapped in there: Roger is going to prison, Roger is going to prison… Charlie, you might be barely sentient, but you have understood more things than me. Yet, I now know what I have to do before it’s too late.
Without saying a word, I pushed the chair behind me and stood up. My father, my mother, all my father’s friends, even Charlie looked at me. “I don’t want to major in computer science,” I said, and for the first time, my voice didn’t come out husky. It came out as hard as stone. “I want to major in journalism.”
I have never regretted it. Even today, I always remember that day when I stood up for myself.
POST SCRIPTUM
There are many things I would like to say in this text, meant to accompany this not so short story. The first is that this is not an autobiography: I plan to major in English Studies, and both my parents agree with me. Also, I made up “Wordsworth University” (though I can’t rule out that there is a university of this name). Yet, the main point I want to reveal in this accompanying text is that this story is a love letter to the newspaper. At every turn, in each thought of the character Roger, I celebrated an aspect of my experience as a reporter and an editor at The Lion’s Den, from learning to bounce back from setbacks to managing deadlines, to making connections across the most separate things (what connects Oswald Spengler to Star Wars, The Hunger Games, and the Roman Empire?) and achieving such an oceanic breadth of perspectives. I also celebrated the opportunity this club offered me to make wonderful friends. In fact, in this text I will also thank all my fellow editors and journalists; this tale is for all of you
Thank you.
