It
was the most interesting existential question I'd ever heard,
at least at seventeen. I gave it exactly as much thought as
it deserved; then I swallowed my bite of tuna sandwich and
said, "Uh, no." I included an eye-roll for effect. Such was
my grasp of philosophy as a high school junior.
As
anyone literate enough to have read the top of this page can
tell, I am not Rae. Nor have I at any time called myself Rae,
Rachel, Raymond, Renee, or any other name thus abbreviated.
Even so, an awful lot of people seem to have the funny idea
that I'm Rae, or possibly that Rae is me. That includes Anna,
the otherwise very pleasant girl who asked me that existential
question with a hungry gleam in her eye. And that's quite
a problem; you see, Rae doesn't exist. She never did, which
contributes to the confusion—for many years, I didn't
think I did, either.
I
was born in Los Angeles, California, which, as anyone will
tell you, is a good place to grow up thinking you don't exist.
Oddly enough, though, I didn't have that particular problem
as a young child; I grew up in a house with two noisy older
brothers and learned to make my presence felt at an early
age. According to my mother, I screamed constantly for the
first five months of my life, stopping only to nurse and sleep.
I had cephalic synistosis, a very fancy way of saying that
my skull was emphatically the wrong shape and that I had a
perpetual migraine. Neurosurgery corrected that, but a minor
glitch in the operation resulted in a plastic spacer being
in the wrong place and me going through the rest of my life
with a hole in my head the size of a coin (either a quarter
or a dime, depending on the doctor). I also had a scar running
down the middle of my scalp which would never heal over and
which would bleed occasionally throughout my childhood. There
are few things so noticeable as a little girl with blood in
her hair, particularly when she ignores it, as I generally
did. It wasn't that I didn't notice; I just found other things
to interest me.
The desire to vanish increases
Our house was full of books, and both my older brothers learned
to read before I did, which seemed horribly unfair. Until I
learned to read at five, I had to make do with my father's bedtime
stories, chapters of his favorite books read aloud each night
for my enjoyment. I didn't realize for years that The Hobbit
was not a book for four-year-olds. Once I did learn to read,
I carried a book with me everywhere I went, and since books
were some of the most fascinating things in my world, I thought
absolutely nothing of learning everything I could from them.
If you think a little girl with a bloody scalp is noticeable,
try ignoring a little girl with a bloody scalp and a vocabulary
five years ahead of her grade level. And that was where my little
nonexistence problem came in.
A few days before
I turned eight, we moved from Hawthorne to Fullerton, in neighboring
Orange County. If you've ever seen George Pal's version of
The Time Machine and the all-blond Eloi picnic scene,
you'll have an idea of what my new school looked like to me.
I had never seen so many yellow heads in one place. Unfortunately,
that contributed to my nonexistence. In the eyes of my fellow
students, it was bad enough that I wore huge glasses and had
an enormous vocabulary; being a brunette was, for some second-grade
reason, inexcusable.
In a small school
with insular students who'd known each other from diapers
forward, I was doomed from the moment I set foot on campus.
Once the shock
of brown hair wore off, I had to open my mouth, and my fate
was sealed. I wasn't just a brunette, a nerd, or even a dork;
I was Smart, which was a thousand times worse. By the time
I reached junior high school, I had stopped existing in any
meaningful sense. I had become a source of amusement for my
classmates and annoyance for the vice principal, nothing more.
I was mocked for answering correctly in class and mimicked
in the hallways, while my few friends put up with teasing,
humiliation, and the occasional set of mysterious bruises.
We spent recess in the school library, talking about books,
trying to build a ham radio out of spare parts, and helping
the librarian out with her computer in exchange for protection.
Most of the library rats dreamed of becoming software billionaires
or of pulping their classmates' faces. I dreamed of disappearing
completely, being a non-target as well as a nonentity, and
I began watching episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to learn
teen English. If all went well, I could vanish into high school
without a trace, and I'd never be singled out again.
An alterego is created on paper
Rae had other ideas.
I chose a high
school twenty-three miles away from home, in Huntington Beach.
The school had lost the lease on its old Cypress campus and
moved suddenly just before my freshman year, so not only had
my junior high classmates never heard of the place, most of
them wouldn't be able to find it if they tried. It was perfect.
The teachers at the school remembered my brothers, but none
of the incoming freshmen knew me, and things were going to
stay that way if I had anything to say about it.
They would have
stayed that way if no one had borrowed my notebook.
Most of the library
rats had also been comic book geeks, and I was no exception.
I had demonstrated a talent for making up endings for irritating
comic book cliffhangers, and my fellow rats had suggested
I think about writing comics for a living. The idea of meeting
deadlines every month was terrifying; I'd been making up stories
for as long as I'd been reading them, but only when the mood
struck. I had decided to test myself in secret, just to see
if I could write a story a month. I set about creating a superhero,
one that could appeal to a largely untapped comics market—preteen
and teen girls. (I reasoned that any demographic that could
see Titanic fifty times had to command a lot of spare time
and disposable income.) I started with a fourteen-year-old
girl and saddled her with a centuries-old heroic tradition
for which she was completely unprepared. I followed her adventures
every month as she learned to drive without a license, lied
about her age, fought villains three times her size who thought
she had superpowers (she had none), saved Los Angeles a few
times, and eventually went from passing as a hero to actually
being one. I named her Rachael, mostly because I had always
liked the name, and eventually shortened it to Rae. I gave
her my brown hair and green eyes, my book addiction, and my
stubborn nature, not to mention a few library rats as superpowered
allies. I also gave her more than a little of my long-simmering
anger, which she turned toward making herself a place in her
fictional world.
Word of
Rae spreads like wildfire
Rae lived in the notebook
where I wrote her first-person stories, and I didn't share them
with anyone until freshman year, when a sophomore badgered me
into lending the notebook to her. She returned it quickly, demanding
that I finish the half-completed story at the end. I lent it
out again after I had filled all the pages. She demanded more.
Other freshmen began borrowing the notebook. They demanded more.
Soon there were too many to pass around the notebook. I began
typing the stories and passing copies. The copies were passed
along through families and among friends. The series went biweekly.
A library rat passed copies around the local public high school,
and I began hearing about friends of friends who wanted their
own copies. I developed an e-mail distribution system. Meanwhile
Rae grew along with me, and readers began to notice how much
we looked alike even as our personalities diverged. They read
my half-joking hyperbole in the Next Issue boxes, signed "Semper
Ubi Sub Ubi," a nod to comics legend Stan Lee's "Excelsior!"
signoff . And they began to write in.
I got my first
fan letter when I was fifteen years old, and I almost died
laughing. Then more letters arrived, in ones and twos. After
I revamped and relaunched the series at the beginning of my
junior year, the readership expanded and I got more mail.
I'd print and answer letters occasionally, and more would
trickle in. The dam burst on one story where Rae, in a fit
of depression, complained to a friend, "I'm much too cynical,
to say nothing of my personal appearance, to believe in Prince
Charming." My small mailbag howled with indignation at the
idea that Rae was ugly, or thought of herself that way, and
at the idea that how she looked should matter at all.
Interestingly enough,
the letters began with "How dare you . . ." and "How can you
say . . ." Curious, and not for the last time. I wrote a story
or two about my hellish junior high experience, and got more
letters and hallway comments, most to the effect of "That
happened to you, too?"
It wasn't just
Rae, either. When another character was in mortal danger,
I actually received a death threat from a reader who assured
me that I wouldn't long outlive my creation. Then there was
Anna's question, of course, shortly after she began reading
the revamped series, Masks. People wanted to know if
my marketing experiment was an extension of my obviously active
fantasy life, if my characters were all caricatures of people
I knew, if I could write them in, like the library rats. Rae
was making her presence felt, and my chances of disappearing
were next to nil.
No
more need to disappear
When I got to college,
I was told I would have a chance to reinvent myself yet again,
in a new environment, surrounded by people with diverse interests.
Yet the more people I met from my first tumultuous year forward,
the more I found myself mentioning my writing, handing out business
cards with the web address on them, even giving a couple of
special CD-ROMs to people without Internet access so they could
read the stories, too. I ended Masks in the fall of my freshman
year, hoping to move on to new projects, but I realized before
the ink had dried on my last words that I would miss my characters
too much to leave them forever. Rae and all of her friends and
enemies—the migraine-ridden telekinetic, the mutant dog,
the concentration camp survivor, the cowboy, the man who wasn't
Moriarty—were too much a part of me. They had been grown from
pieces of me, and now I was borrowing their developing courage
and confidence and humor to face my own life .
I had started out
trying to disappear, to submerge myself in writing that no one
would read. When people began to read it, I had thought I could
let my pen do all the talking, letting me stay invisible.
Then they began assigning Rae's characteristics to me, and vice
versa, picking out little bits of text and declaring them my
"voice." Whenever I wasn't Rae (which was as often as possible),
I was Rae's creator, an enigma named Author issuing cryptic
bits of timeless wisdom and black irony whenever the mood struck.
I had created Rae and her world to escape the identity forced
upon me by my vocabulary and my schoolmates' intolerance, and
had forged myself a new identity completely by accident. In
trying to be no one at all, I had become someone new, someone
tough and smart and more than a little screwball and very, very
hard to ignore. Someone I was starting to like.
I had failed utterly
to disappear, and I couldn't be happier.
Rae's
adventure continues…
Several people have
remarked how odd it is to find a self-proclaimed science fiction
writer in journalism school. Rae is not one of them; in fact,
now that she's a senior in high school, she's leaning toward
that major herself. Journalists have been giving voice to the
voiceless for a long time, and Rae has a little experience in
that area. Besides, she already knows a thing or two about carving
out a place in a strange field, and between the two of us we
just might make it. Every once in a while, a few readers bring
up the idea of collecting the stories into a book—a real
book, the kind that sits on a shelf and doesn't come some-assembly-required
out of the printer. It's a tantalizing idea, and I could certainly
use the money, but I think I'll wait just a little while longer.
They grow up so fast, after all. I wouldn't want to miss the
best years of the best friend I never had.
Rebekah Hendershot
has her first rejection slip framed above her first writing
prize check, and both date from before she entered high school.
She is a print journalism major at USC. In her copious spare
time, she's working on a science fiction novel, fighting to
keep her ratty garden alive, and she enjoys anime, kung fu
movies, and reading comic books until her brain turns to mushy
banana and dribbles out of her ears. She reads grown-up books,
too, but nobody ever wants to hear about them. Oh, and she
hopes to begin seriously studying martial arts next year,
if God and her class schedule permit.
