Ready, Aim, Fire

Chapter 1: That Time I Cancelled My Date With Netflix

Sometimes I like to think that my life is an action movie. I close my bedroom door, leap from my bunk-bed to the floor and pretend like I'm in a criminal that's just robbed the Louvre or an assassin running from the cops. The funny thing is that I never expected that my life would turn into something so wild.

I was never the athlete of my senior class. I did theatre and sang and had practically no social life or boyfriend. The odds of my life turning into something magical and adventurous were slim to none. In my life, the most action I had was when I went to the archery range with my sister every Saturday morning.

I wasn't the best archer there but I could hold my own without a sight or any fancy equipment. I did bare bow shooting and that's how I liked it. The people that shot compound bows were practically buying points with their fancy sights and letoffs. The Olympic recurve people could only shoot from one place at a set distance because of their sights. The traditional shooters were just plain weird in my eyes. They canted their bows and thought they were better than everyone else. But me? I was quite content with my 22 pound Inferno that could only hit things from less than 35 yards away. I wanted to upgrade to a higher poundage bow, but it was too expensive and my priorities were set on graduating high school and going to college.

I would always watch those action movies where the hero can shoot a bow, wield a weapon or shoot lasers from their eyes and wonder when my big adventure was going to happen. The fake stories I came up with my room would never happen in the real world. I couldn't bend the elements like in Avatar: The Last Airbender. The Hunger Games didn't exist. The faction system was a lie and the USS Enterprise was so many light years in the future. So as of now, my action movie consisted of fake car chases I made up while I drove on the freeway and imagined bow shootouts at the range.

That was about as close as I was ever gonna get and that's what sucked about my life. I had always felt like I was destined for something bigger and better than what I was doing. Anytime I expressed that to someone they would say something about how one day I would win a Tony or be in a Broadway show, but that wasn't big enough for me. Don't get me wrong. Acting was a huge passion of mine, but I didn't think I was that good at it. I was no Idina Menzel, that's for sure.

I had a convoluted idea of what I wanted to be when I got out of college. I would go to school, graduate and then try to star in an action movie or join the police department. I needed to do something with my life other than stay indoors, watch Netflix and then pretend I was jumping from buildings.

God, if my friends ever found out that I did that then I'd be so embarrassed. A grown seventeen year old girl leaping across the room...Ugh. That's the thing. People assume that by the time you hit fifteen or so, you can't play around anymore. You're in high school and suddenly there is no such thing as childhood. Suddenly, Disney Channel is a complete joke and people become so judgmental.

So until the day I was free to do as I pleased with my life, I kept doing whatever I could to make my dull, white suburban life interesting. I broke little laws to make me feel like I was living on the edge-not wearing my seatbelt or driving someone in the car with me, even though I only had my license for 8 months. That's really all you could do when you grew up with parents whose expectations of you were high. I had never disappointed them or done anything wrong. Yes, I was the goody-two-shoes but I just didn't want to disappoint them. So, I participated in little acts of rebellion that I thought they would never find out about such as having maybe a sip of beer at a Friday night party or staying out after my curfew, but only for a few minutes. Wasn't my life a riot?

I craved adventure and action so much and when I had time to think, I was coming up with wild story plots that I could pretend to be a part of. Some of these were wild and some of them came from stories I read online or the books piled up on my bookshelves. I knew that it was too good to be true and that it was pointless to even think about some of them happening to me. After all, fiction novels are works of art created to give humans a feeling of excitement in their lives. I needed some adventure in my boring life.