Taming the Author

27: Sort Out your Feelings

Loramina was slumped unconscious on the chair when I walked into the room.

Her hair trailed down her back and shoulder, and it didn't seem like it had been combed. Her faded blue shirt and worn Capri pants told me she just ran out of her apartment like Calum. I wanted to hate her - glare at her, despite the fact that she wouldn't see or feel my anger; but I couldn't.

I just couldn't hate her enough.

As I took a seat on the vacant chair next to her, I wondered if it was because of what Calum told me back in the cafeteria - if it was learning about a possible reason behind her betrayal that kept me from feeling extremely bitter about what happened.

Loramina wanted to be a writer, but her father dissuaded her from doing so. Calum said she lived in a totally different world and her father thought it was some form of birth defect.

When people around her saw morning traffic and pollution, she saw the beauty of the rising sun. When people around her frowned and complained about their nasty day at work, Loramina found joy in the setting sun. When people saw cloudy skies, she saw realms beyond the clouds.

Writing gave her the chance to express herself - share the worlds she saw to people without frightening them or disturbing them. But being too "up there" wasn't good for a future lawyer. She was too open - too imaginative, too kind. Being the eldest child in the family, her father relied on her to continue what he left off. But her creativity was starting to get in the way of the path he wanted her to take.

So he groomed her to be someone he wanted - a tough, straightforward, intelligent, cunning child - a son that could have inherited his brutal traits and name. He wanted her to act like a man, whose heart was slipped inside his pocket. He wanted her to act as decisive and as confident as a man. He quietly groomed her to be his incarnation.

Failures were not an option for Loramina. Calum told me how one mistake in a short quiz back in her primary school earned her more than just a scolding, and how it continued until their high school years. She became rigid, devoted to her father's cause, and trapped in a sickening box.

Calum was just starting to acknowledge his homosexuality when they met. He wanted to court her to keep himself from actualizing his homosexual urges when she told him there was nothing wrong with being true to his identity. He told her that she had no right to tell him what to do when she couldn't even be true to herself.

And a dare that would start their friendship was born.

If Calum told his parents about his sexual affiliation, Loramina would tell her family that she wanted to be a writer. In a typical coming of age story, things would go well in the dare. Calum's family ended up accepting him, but since this was real life, Loramina's family was a different story. Her mother understood her and urged her to write. Her father, controlling the household, told her to get some sense into her head.

So she wrote stories in her spare time, but she remained in her tormenting box. Calum read her books and urged her to submit it for publication. Publishing a book under her name would tell her father she was doing things against his will, so she shrugged Calum's ideas off.

When she found out that she couldn't do what her father expected of her, she fell into a depression. She stopped going to school and locked herself up in her dorm room. Calum, in an attempt to cheer her up, submitted one of her books to various agents and publications.

No one wanted the book. They just didn't think it would be successful in a world that appreciated romance flicks and high school love stories.

Desperate to help his friend, Calum went door to door in the publication world. He sought for book editors, telling them that Loramina's manuscript would change the world. Then one of them dared him to submit the book to one of the most brutal editors in the business - Rupert Warren.