Everybody has told me since the time I was really little that I was special. Many people are told they are special. Sometimes special means...well... "special". Or sometimes it means you're really not good for anything but the family still loves you most of the time. So I took special with a grain of salt.

As I got older special changed to smart and suddenly people were thinking I was some genius or something. I went to a school where they did these tests called Iowa Basic Skills tests every year. From the beginning I was testing with an IQ that was consistantly 2 to 4 grades above my actual level. Needless to say I never skipped a grade (my school didn't believe in that nor did my parents). My brains embarassed me and I contrived a way to play stupid and nobody really knew the difference.

The problem with being smart is that you're expected to stay in certain groups. So in the transition from elementary to highschool when everyone was splitting into cliques and stuff I was kind of left in the dark. Not only I had I moved to a whole new city when I was 12 but none of the groups seemed to fit me wholly.

With in a year or two I was starting to get comfortable with my brains but all the time of playing stupid left me with a dumbed down mentality. The clique idea still wasn't going alright with me but there was a breakthrough in my personality. I was able to fit in anywhere. If I had to be I could be jock or stoner and since the stoners were also the smartest people I spent a lot of time with them. There was still that group of school smart type people that got straight A's. Never skipped class... stuff like that but they lacked any comprehension of the real world and the big answers. My best friend and I were considered the male and female guru's of the school.

I became uncomfortable with my brains again and stupified myself all over. Flunking math, never talking, occasionally making it to class. But most of my time was spent writing stories. Secretly mailing them off to magazines. Nobody local ever read my stories and I was fiercely protective of them. But sometimes my notebooks would disappear from my desks or locker and I would disappear from school for a few days while everything cooled off.

I found a local who was equally protective of his work and hung out with the stoner and car groups like I did. He drew pictures. Comics. Real life. Anything. But he rarly let his work be seen by the world. So we decided to swap ideas one day and we created an illustrated story that was hidden from everybody until his dad picked it up one day and commented how us kids were on to something near brilliant and that we should take it all the way. We couldn't. Our fear brought us down and we parted ways continueing the story in our own ways but not mixing the ideas.

I was left without a base again. Finally out of school, away from home, 7 tattoos later I realized that everyone thinks or have been told that they are creative or good. That they have something special or are genius. At my gas station there are three of us that are "semi-famous". A poet, a writer and an artist. The artist is headed to Paris in a couple years. The poet has been published and bowed out of a huge contest and I just got picked up by Scholastic Publishing for a short story I wrote for them specifically.

The difference is that I know I'm different. I know something big is going to happen in my life. I feel the fame buzzing around me and it scares me but at the same time excites me. I mean I didn't get all these tattoos for nothing. I have become something of a local hero for my writing and my outspoken ways against the school. And people talk to me from all over. People have heard of me from all over and once in awhile I sign an autograph or two but I'm still living normally. But something will happen... I can feel it.