Hannibal: The School Years

(I am a freshman in high school. I’ve just received an assignment in my English class that really excites me; we have to write a story. I wind up writing a very gory and horrific story about a cannibalistic serial killer, so I put a disclaimer at the top. After we turn them in, the teacher has the class critique excerpts from everyone’s papers and asks the class how we could have written the work better. Mine comes up, and it just so happens to be the worst/best scene with lots of bad mental images.)

Teacher: “All right, you have one minute to point out everything wrong with this paragraph.”

(About five seconds go by before hands start to shoot up, one kid looks green.)

Teacher: “Yes, [Student #1]?”

Student #1: “Can we go on to the next one?”

Student #2: “Yeah, this is gross.”

Student #3: “Who wrote this? Whoever did has a really twisted sense of humor.”

(The teacher then decides to read the paragraph she chose, and only gets about a fourth of the way through before she goes pale and drags me outside. What happened after that was pretty amusing, because both my parents and I were interrogated to make sure I was psychologically stable. All my mother had to say was:)

Mom: “Stephen King had to start somewhere.”