It's early morning on a beautiful, sunny Flibbettsday in a little town that nobody's ever heard of - so telling you the name would probably prove to be quite unnecessary. It's a pleasant twenty-two degrees Celsius, with thick puffs of clouds shaded a striking white drifting in the early autumn sky overhead. Everything is optimistic: the sun is brilliant, the clouds are radiant, the grass waving in the fields just beyond the train station is swaying merrily to the music of the breeze. Even the grey concrete on the platform with it's little bits of quartz sparkling in the cracks looks happy.
   The year is two-thousand-twenty-one, and I am sitting in the Writers' Car of the Train of Opportunity. I'm seventeen and a skeptical male. Bad combination. I'm scowling at the absolute cheesiness of it all. Ours is probably the only country in the world that ships their high-school graduates off to the renowned School of Opportunity in the city of Dynasty (specially constructed just for the purpose of housing the school) instead of ordinary universities like ordinary children, I think miserably.
   I don't know how to write, and I don't particularly enjoy it, probably because all the writing I do is somehow related to academics, but none of the other Opportunity Cars appeal to me. I don't have the mathematical skill to be an engineer, and I'm terrible with computers, so I could never be a technician or software designer. Ecology bores me, history and theory are too much 'then' and not enough 'now', I'm no good at art, I'm not a natural born leader . . . so to me, writing is somewhat of a last resort.
   I look out the window of the train, painted a bright, opportunistic purple, gleaming blinding metallic in the golden sunshine. My mother is standing on the platform with the other mothers, and I could swear that she's the only one there who looks uncertain instead of proud. She's smiling, of course, but that smile is for my older brother, the mathematical genius, who in three and a half hours I am going to join in Dynasty. The white teeth, porcelain-bonded, and 'nude coral' painted, plump lips seem to conceal a desperate plea: 'make me proud!'
   Forget the window. I look away, ignoring the guilt I feel when I see my small, frail, sun-dried mother trying her best to be optimistic for the son who never turned out quite the way she wanted. I focus my attention inside the train instead.
   The table in front of me is more interesting by far. There is a girl my age, perhaps a few months older, sitting across from me, with short-cropped brown hair and gentle green eyes. She holds in her hands a manuscript of some sort which she pores over with an intense fascination that seems to me to be slightly feigned. A true writer.
When she notices me staring, she looks up. Her smile is luminescent.
   "Where's your ticket?" she asks, and blinks. The action does nothing to dispel the glimmer in her eyes.
"Ticket?" I ask, taken aback, and her smile fades just slightly. "I didn't think we needed a ticket."
"Didn't you read the forms?" she asks somewhat condescendingly. Her disbelieving look says, 'Oh my Barker, I can't believe you didn't read the forms.'
   I can already tell she's your classic goody-goody two-shoes, poor little rich girl, wannabe rebel without a cause, socialist socialite with edge (with emphasis on the edge), and an overachiever. Her business card would read, "Independent Teacher's Pet". She was probably the one who was picked on in school but who showed them all somehow (even if it was only an imagined victory), and convinced them of her aptitude and brilliance and genuine
soul.  She knows this, and you can see it in her eyes that she knows. She knows everything. She's in tune, in blissful harmony with the Universe. She's found her calling. She's fully prepared to answer it.
   Her name is probably Agnes or Prudence.
I glance away for a moment, then look back, smiling shyly.
   Her name is probably Sarah or Rachel. Hannah. Something biblical. Nothing as wild and rare as Jezebel or Naomi.
She's got everything under control. She's the designated driver. The pariah. The plain Jane. The geek, freak, loser, spectacle. The green in her eyes is from contact lenses, the teeth are white and picket straight (result of braces, undoubtably), the cheeks are peppered with faint freckles and the skin is faded sunburned. She's the kid with the bucket hat, knee-length shorts, Bugs Bunny beach towel, zinc oxide, and mosquito net that you see on the beach, sitting in the shade and still getting baked. Well done. Flip her over.
   She's focused. She's determined, persistent. She's organized. Three-ring zip-up binder. She's old-fashioned. She's blueberry muffins and oatmeal cookies and corn bran cereal and Phil Collins and Eric Clapton. She's sweet, a daddy's girl and a mother's helper. She's babysat for younger sister and mail-order neighbours. She's never kicked her dog.
   She filled out all her forms on time. She read the brochures and pamphlets and letters and applications six times over without even being asked by mother, just to make sure she got it all. She's got the world in the palm of her hand. She wants this school, and wants it badly. She loves reading and writing and school and church and is agreeable and friendly and optimistic and open-minded and trustworthy and honest, so very painfully honest.
She's absolutely nothing like me.
   "My mother filled them out," I explain. I wasn't as dutiful with the application as she. "She only let me pick my Opportunity."
"You can't be a writer without a ticket!" she gasps, halfway between laughter and scorn. Her name is definitely Prudence, I think, and scowl internally.
"What ticket?" I ask again, beginning to feel a bit exasperated. That's not the first time I've put the accent on the wrong syllable.
"Your sample story," she says, and waves that thick manuscript she clutches at me. The sunlight dances on the bare white backs of the cleanly printed pages, and I am dazzled, blinded. "The guard's going to come around and check them, you know. Punch a hole in the corner so your teachers in Dynasty know you did your entrance work."
   Now I can't decide whether or not I'm blushing an embarrassed crimson at making such an obvious mistake, or if the colour's draining from my face in absolute panic. In a flash of random thought just like something my stupid old brain would do in the midst of an educational crisis, I think, now she's acting more like a Hannah. Oh angel of mercy. The sarcasm and utter ignorance in my own inner monologue tears at my self-worth.
Something told me a while back that I should've read the forms, but up until now, that's always been my mother's job.
   A little naggling voice reminds me that I'm almost eighteen. This sort of forgetfulness (ignorance, stupidity) is completely unacceptable.
   The girl rolls her eyes at me, smirking now and not beaming in her intimidating way.
"Here," she sighs, and tears a stapled sheet off the back of her own manuscript to hand to me. "Just whip out a short little piece, and problem solved. You can always add more later, and the guards never read the whole thing anyway. Solid proof is all they're interested in."
   I turn the sheet over to examine her words. They're elegant, they're inspiring, they're absolutely riveting. They could probably move me to tears if I had any idea of the plot. They move me to tears anyway, because I know that I'm nowhere near that good. Hannah, I think. It's definitely Hannah.
On the sensible train of thought: Just whip out a short piece, she says. Ha. That'll be the day.
   "Hey," the girl hisses, bringing me back to life with an urgent glance thrown over her shoulder, "the guard's coming. Down in the first-class section. Better get to work."
"Right," I say, and pull a pen from my pocket. I thank the big guy up there for making me somewhat organized.
On the back of the tragic, poetic, beautiful,Kafka-esque-with-a-little-bit-of-Lucy-Maud-
Montgomery-meets-Gunther-Grass-with-a-little-Lois-Lowry-and-Stephen-King-thrown-in-
for-good-measure ending to the girl's story, I scrawl four little words in my neatest longhand: Once upon a time. The basis of all written word and stirring thought, with no punctuation. I'm tempted to put a comma, but I realize that sometimes in on-the-fly pieces, quirkiness and being able to fake a hidden, deeply psychological meaning are essential. This is ambiguous. It's dark, and it's edgy, and I know it's completely ridiculous compared to what my young friend across the table has going.
   Suddenly, she is beside me as if she'd read my thought, and peering over my shoulder with that same invented interest that I first observed in her as she read over her own story. I want to comment bluntly on it, dreaming up a creative way to phrase it (like 'Uninvolved involvement') but hold my tongue. She could turn out to be my only ally, for all I know.
   "You're going to have to do better than that if you want to go anywhere. . . "
She trails off, and I dare to cast a look (skeptical of course), at her face to see if it shows any trace of her motive for stumbling - after all, I was able to dissect her entire past, present, and future just by one gaze aimed moderately deep into her eyes, I should be able to read her emotions too - but that's when it dawns on me: She's just as uncertain about her future as I am.
   Turning over the paper again and hiding my blue-inked, meaningless dime-store prose from the outside world, I read over her final paragraph. It speaks to me of helplessness behind the glitter and gloss of academic vocabulary, and I know that she started out like me at one point - green and young and hopeless. Proseless. Thoughtless.
Thoughtless of me to think her an academic gem in a sea of dull pebbles and to imagine her life, perfect in every way.
The Mary Poppins of modern times. I've known her for but ten minutes, and already, I feel like my views are shifting, sliding away to another plain of existence, perhaps the one from whence she came. It's a feeling that's frightening, yet strangely pleasurable; I already feel less ignorant, and the train hasn't even begun to move yet.
I offer her a faint smile of support, and she understands that I understand.
   "I need ideas," I say in a tiny voice.
She pretends to think for a moment, but I can see that behind those eyes, those eager, hungry, trusting eyes, there is an entire world of ideas just begging to be written down.
"We live in an interesting time, you know. You could write about a number of things."
"Like what?" I ask dumbly. A little ignorance attempts to creep into my attitude again, but I try my best to shove it down.
"Well I don't want to give too much away," the girl replies (Hannah! my brain cries), "but haven't you ever wondered about anything?"
"Yes," I reply, and back that up with a vigorous nod. I'm telling her the truth, a fact that both shocks and amazes me."Absolutely everything. I wonder why it is that in the past, all the statisticians predicted that things would change by the year two-thousand and twenty, but never two-thousand and twenty-one, and I wonder why they changed Monday to Flibbettsday, and I wonder why they made. . . " I lower my voice, ". . . God a swear word and made us say 'Barker' instead. I wonder most of all why this stuff only happened in our country."
   The girl stands up (she's tall and thin) and drifts back to her own seat, rubbing her chin thoughtfully. After a moment of dull silence which I want to spend looking out the window all of a sudden but hold back, she shrugs and says, "so make up the answers. It wouldn't be that hard. Everything in this age is so deranged, so upside-down and twisted and futuristic but not in the way that everybody dreamed it would be, and as a blossoming writer, you've got to exploit that."
"But how?"
It makes sense to her, just like everything always made sense somehow, and how everything happens for a reason and how I finally realize that I do believe in fate.
   My friend of the invented name Hannah cocks her head to the side, and she's suddenly got it figured out - the reason mortals love to compose - words, music, life.
"We love to show off, us humans," she says. It's funny, because that's what I thought too. "We write because that is the perfect medium for us to show off in. If you have no voice, write it down. Explain your twisted understanding to the rest of us ignorant dolts. Take something you've always wondered about and assume everyone else has always wondered about it too. You take that idea and you explain it to them. If it's love you've wondered about, explain it to them. Paint them a picture. Make it have a happy ending. If it's death you've wondered about, theorize. Create a life after death. You can do it with anything - the ocean, outer space, the desert, mechanics, people, life. We eat it up, because it's the very things around us that we fail most to understand. We know things. But we do not
understand. Our job, as writers, is to make them understand. That is the fundamental purpose of writing, and its eventual manifestation is that people understand the purpose and get inspired to do the same."
   She leans back, satisfied. She knows she's made a valid point, the mark of a deep thinker. And boy, has she given me a lot to think about.
   So I sit there, and she's silent, letting me think with the muffled voices of the other future teachers and weavers of fantastic dreams behind me, and I write about everything I don't understand, and I explain it.
   I write about how Monday became Flibbettsday because people didn't like Mondays and they thought that people would like Mondays more if they went by a different name. I write about how they came up with the new name by taking a five-month-old into a secluded room with nothing but a jar of applesauce, a spoon, and tape-recording video cameras and said 'go to it'. I write about how the first 'word' out of the child's mouth was 'Flibbetts.' Everyone loves a baby's innocence, so they would definitely love Flibbettsday.
   I write about how God became Barker because there were too many different opinions of who God was and what God was and where God was, and that caused fighting. So they changed it to make peace among the people. No one had to argue and theorize about Barker. It was just self-explanatory, because it was fabricated by the people themselves for themselves, and everyone could understand something man-made.
   I write about how things in the year two-thousand twenty-one got mixed up and messed around and went topsy-turvy because the statisticians predicted so much for the year before that absolutely everything on earth went perfectly to plan. I write about how by the time New Year's Eve two-thousand and twenty rolled around there was nothing left to predict, because everything in the galaxy had reached a state of odd perfection. A plateau of sorts. I knew that if one climbs a hill, and it plateaus, the only way to go from there is down. No way out. And that's where things went.
   I write in metaphor, in lyrical prose. The ideas flow from my brain to my fingertips, from there to the page. My hand aches, but I barely notice. Hannah watches, full of silent, unspoken pride. The train starts to move and I don't even realize it. I only know that I'm glad to be aboard. I write that, too.
   I write all that and more, but when the guard finally comes around to our table at the very back of the train, I still don't have more than a page down. I am embarrassed and now afraid. My resolve is dissolved, my english extinguished.
   The guard checks the girl's manuscript and nods, knocking a small circle of emptiness in the top right-hand corner with his silver hole-punch and then turns to me.
   Feeling my stomach sink just a little with disappointment and an almost-certainty that I'm going to be thrown off the train at the next station and Opportunity is going to leave me behind, I hand over my messy paper. I think only of its appearance - the untidy, jagged longhand, the scratch marks over spelling mistakes, the countless more mistakes I probably didn't catch - and not the indelible quality of the thoughts poured upon it.
It seems, I notice, so does the guard.
"Do you know how to write?" he asks, frowning deeply beneath a grey, bushy, furrowed brow.
   I don't catch his meaning even as he indicates my 'p' that looks more like a 'z' and my 'k' that is something completely indistinguishable altogether, but rather look at Hannah for help (she nods. Oh Hannah. . . ), and then look in shame at the table.
"I'm here to learn," I mumble, and my mouth feels filled with a dark horror as I turn this time to the window. Where has my confidence gone, my wonder, my belief, my understanding?
   It won't always be easy, says Hannah's sympathetic look. There will always be people who just won't understand. They will look at conventions and voice and grammar and meter, and they will fill your head with judgements, judgements that are completely undeserved. There will always be the one who misses the point.
   I look out the window at the fields whizzing past with disorienting speed, and I imagine my mother is still there on an imaginary platform, her eyes darting nervously around the platform, peering in the windows from a distance, searching for my face. I feel that her gaze catches mine and holds it there for a moment. Redemption. I don't even need to
look back to know that the guard has punched a hole in my singular sheet, and pushed it back to me in digust. He's moved on by the time I turn around to grin at my Hannah.
  "That wasn't so bad," I say, and lean back in my seat. My smile, I know, is unbelievably, disgustingly cocky."You looked like you were going to drop dead for a moment there."
"Because you did," she says, and that's all. She returns the smile, and takes up her manuscript again, settling in to read for the long train ride ahead to Dynasty.
   I look down at my own manuscript, proud again of the somewhat undeserved hole in the corner. I pass my fingertips over my clumsy, unnatural words, words that seem to radiate with an inner beauty and life all their own and speak of the promise that lies ahead in my future, stretched out there in a patch of early morning Flibbettsday sunlight. I settle in, there in the sunlight with the warmth on my face and the cool glass of the window on my cheek and the smile of Hannah in my eyes and my ears and my mouth (it resonates. . . ), and I sit there and I pore over the darkness in my mind.