"Perfect in Color" by Daisy

I was digging through my closet when I came across it. Under the pile of dusty notebooks and old diaries it sat, the cheeky monkey on the front still smiling. And just like that, all of the memories came flooding back to me. The poorly rounded characters, the impossible plot lines, the countless pens running out of ink. The black and white. The perfect.

            The character was Rudy Ryland. She was nine years old, and lived on 1 Main Street. Her father was the mayor; her mother the president of the PSA. I remember writing story number one in an iHop with my parents. At the time, the plot seemed completely logical: Rudy’s uber-rich parents buy a sailboat to sail from Virginia to Hawaii in time for Christmas. They leave on the 24th. Rudy’s parents realize they have no idea how to find the coast of Hawaii in the dark. Rudy sees a neon sign reading “Aloha!” on the beach. She points it out to her parents. The family safely docks in Hawaii and Christmas is saved. I called it Aloha Saved the Day, but to me, Rudy was the savior. I was so proud of producing such a perfect character that I proceeded to write fifteen more in the next month. In one, Rudy’s younger cousin opens her Christmas presents before anyone else wakes up and, when he begins crying when his parents attempt to take them away, Rudy modestly agrees to let him keep all of the gifts. In another, Rudy plays detective in order to figure out who’s been writing mean notes to students in her class. After some “skilled” detective work, including asking classmates if they had written the notes and figuring out that the perpetrator had green eyes (due to a helpful P.S. note at the bottom of one of the notes stating that they did), Rudy finds the culprit to be Kathstein. Yes, that way my attempt to cleverly mix the names Cathy and Frankenstein, as Frankie-stein would have been way too obvious.

One story that I was particularly proud of included a demerit system that was extremely complicated, not to mention intense, for an elementary school like Rudy’s. If a student received ten demerits within a day, they would be sent to the principal’s office. Teachers could give a student as many demerits as they considered fair for the student’s bad behavior or actions. As what was, at the time, a clever way of foreshadowing, the story was aptly titled “Rudy in the Principal’s Office.” In first period, Joe stole Bob’s pencil and blamed in on Rudy so as not to get into trouble. One demerit. In second period, Jane snickered at a teacher during class and blamed it on Rudy so as not to get into trouble. Two demerits. During recess, Alex broke Anne’s toy and blamed it on Rudy so as not to get into trouble. Three demerits. By the time recess came along, Danny full on punched Andy. Danny, not having seen who had hit him, believed Andy when he said that it had been our misunderstood hero. Four demerits from the gym teacher and to the principal’s office it was. The principal, having never met Rudy in her life, immediately declares her innocent after seeing that she had a straight A record. The story finished with all of the students who had done Rudy wrong throughout the day coming to the principal’s office and apologizing. They closed with the line: “And the words Rudy in the Principal’s Office will never be heard again!”

It was just a few weeks after my masterpiece had been finished and my Girl Scout Troop’s talent show was approaching. Act after act, the little girls belted out pop hits from a karaoke machine or yanked the bow against the strings of their beginner violins. My pink polka-dotted notebook with the smiling monkey on the front felt heavy in my lap. I was the only one with a book. Finally, after one of my troop members completed her stunning rendition of hot cross buns on a viola, I was called up to perform. I approached the stool provided for me with my head held high, knowing that what I was about to read was going to blow the audience away. I cleared my throat.

“Rudy in the Principal’s Office,” I began, holding the picture up for the audience as my classroom teachers had done so many times before.

“Well, spoilers!”

Shocked, I snapped my head towards the audience to see who had said that. It was the hot cross buns girl. I shook my head to ignore what she had just said and continued on. Within minutes, the girls were yawning, putting their heads down on the table, or talking amongst themselves. I attempted to read louder, to hold up the pictures more clearly, to talk less monotone. Still, by the time I had finished, only a few of the parents even noticed and even fewer clapped. I was appalled. The story that I had been so proud of couldn't even keep an audience of 20 captivated. Maybe my perfect world wasn't so perfect after all. I closed my notebook and sulked back to my seat. After the presentations were all finished, we excitedly gathered to discuss each other's performances. After the initial “I loved the song you sang” and “My sister plays that instrument too,” the focus fell on me.

“Your story was, uh, interesting,” one of the girls said. She was honestly trying to be nice. One of the others laughed.

“Why would all those people just happen to blame the same person? Did they have a secret meeting beforehand?”

The girl was genuinely curious, but it didn't make me feel any less terrible.

“And why didn’t the kids who had gotten stolen from just tell the teacher who the person actually was?”

Some of the other girls nodded.

“Why would the principal excuse Rudy simply for getting good grades? That doesn't mean anything about her personality.”

I had never even thought about these questions, but hearing them out loud made me rethink everything. Then the biggest statement of all:

“Rudy is so annoying. Sure, she didn't do anything wrong, but that's what makes her so unlikeable.”

What did she mean? Rudy was the ultimate character! If you had good grades you must have good friends, good style, good character… right? The truth was that Rudy Ryland was a Mary Sue character: perfect grades, perfect friends, and a perfect family. Rudy Ryland was the epitome of what I wanted to be. The realization that I had created a perfect character whom nobody liked flooded my mind. What was so fun, then, about wanting to be flawless when flaws were the only thing that made you interesting? That day, I decided that I wanted to be nothing like Rudy. I loved Rudy, not for being the goody two-shoes that I had created her as, but because she had taught me what not to create. I thanked her and placed the notebook on top of a pile of similar journals and diaries in my closet and closed the door on the cheeky monkey, still smiling at me.

The truth I learned from Rudy was that nothing is black and white. As a writer, I had the power to create anything, so why not create something perfectly imperfect? There are no perfect heroes or perfectly evil villains; rather, there is the hero that only wants fame, the villain that steals to help their family, the Rudy who maybe only gets all A’s because they have no friends and spend all their time studying. After all, she was so perfect that she was unlikeable. People are not ideas, and ideas cannot be people.

After all, why write in black and white when you can write in color?