Humor me

One of the best things about Chris is the way he humors me.

"What do you think Jake is thinking?" I'll ask.

And Chris will reply in the voice we made up for Jake, "This sucks. My dad's so mean to me. He doesn't understand me. I need a girlfriend."

"Yeah, Jake's just a teenager."

And so on and so forth.

I never had someone play along since me and my best friend Shari would write "novels" in our composition tablets (this is when they sold the flourescent green, pink, and yellow tablets). We would sit for hours on her lawn with our tablets open discussing out latest plot.

We wrote holiday stories, adventure stories, school stories. And we were always the main characters. It didn't matter if we knew nothing about the topic we were writing about (an African safari, say) because we could just make it up.

This lasted for about three years.

I remember chasing Shari down after school one day, flushed and eager with a new plot twist to the latest novel.

"I don't want to write any more," she said.

I stared.

"I don't like to," she continued. "But you should keep writing and I'll just read."

It was the end of an era. Little did I know what I was getting myself into.