Disclaimer: I don't own Life With Derek
Casey McDonald
ENG 203 –Introduction to Creative Writing
Assignment #4 – Writing Based on Songs
Option A: "Irony" by Alanis Morissette
Irony is defined as an outcome of events that is contrary to what might have been expected. In other words, irony is the idea that there is a movie playing that you saw in the theaters and at the very end, when the prince is supposed to fall in the love with the princess and the entire kingdom is supposed to rejoice, the prince laughs at the princess's declaration of love and rides off into the sunset with the evil witch. So, based on that definition, irony is constant player in my life.
It was ironic when my father gave me the movies Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and Beauty and the Beast the week before he left my mother for his secretary and destroyed our happy ending. It was ironic when my mom's divorce lawyer became our new stepfather. It was ironic when my new stepbrother, whom I hated, became the one man I could depend on. But perhaps the biggest instance of irony in my life is the one I couldn't see coming until it hit me upside my head.
The summer before I left for college was filled with upheavals and emotions. Both myself and my stepbrother were leaving for college, so our house was frantic with preparations. He was heading towards the University of Alberta with a hockey scholarship and I was heading in the opposite direction to the University of New York. Both of our respective parents were routinely freaking out about losing their oldest children (although I have to admit that my mother went overboard more than a few times, like the time when she threatened to move to New York with me and force George, my stepfather, to move to Alberta with Derek), our respective younger siblings were heady with the privileges and freedom that would soon be theirs, and my youngest stepsister picked that summer to enter her Lilo and Stitch phase. She could routinely be found hiding in the dryer, hammering nails into the doorframe, finding stray dogs and declaring them aliens from another planet and generally trying to shoot all "alien experiments" (meaning anyone who spoke to her) with her squirt gun. Is it any wonder, that in this crazy world, I turned to the only sane person left to occupy my time?
Derek and I grew close, closer than we had ever been. In fact, we grew closer than anyone, including ourselves, had ever thought we would be. We still fought like cats and dogs but there was an unspoken agreement between us that whenever the house became too insane, even if we were fighting, the other would be our excuse to leave. We never went far, most of the time we just ended up walking around the block and talking, but what talks they were. We started talking about our fears of going to college, our dreams for the future, our high school relationships that were ending and the college ones we hoped to shortly begin. Only Derek could have floored me so frequently with his ideas and views on life. I found myself making excuses to spend time with him, purposely annoying my sister or my mom so Derek would come to my rescue and sweep me out of the house.
As the time for us to leave came rushing up, I found myself doing the one thing I had sworn I wouldn't, with the one person I would have sworn it would never have happened with. I started regretting my decision to move so far away, and Derek started showing the same signs. I spent hours, the hours I wasn't with him, analyzing why, but I could never come up with a good answer. I began to dread the day that we would say goodbye. We will still be connected by the same family, but it would be nothing like living in the same house. Our relationship was going to change and I assumed for the worst.
The day came and away we went, new birds that had just learned to fly. My mom and my sister bawled, Marti shot Derek and I with her "ray gun" and said we couldn't leave, and I think I even saw my stepfather and younger stepbrother shed a tear. Derek and I didn't say a word to each other. Neither of us wanted what we had found to end, but both of us knew it had to. So off we went, and that was an end.
It wasn't the end, although I didn't know it at first. I thought I knew what the end would be. I knew Derek would get to university and find more than enough female companionship, and anything I had meant to him would slowly fade out of his mind. I rather hoped the same thing would happen to me. From all accounts, from the conversations with my mother and emails from Derek himself, that's exactly what had happened. Every month there was a new girl, a new project, a new obsession. I tried to feel the same way. I went on dates, I flirted, I went to parties with my friends. It was only in the dark of night that I would allow myself to dream about my errant stepbrother and pretend that he would be mine forever. On Winter Break when we were both home, Derek brought with him the person who would change my life forever.
Her name is Sammi. She was passionate, lively, a grown-up version of my little stepsister, actually. I could tell, at first glance, that Derek felt completely different about her than he had ever felt about any woman. He had the look in his eyes, the one that makes people think falling stars landed in them. She looked at him with love, desire, and something else. I can't describe what it was, I don't know even now. All I remember is that every look they exchanged broke my heart. I went back to school at the end of break dreading the summer more than I would have dreaded my own execution. I knew that if they made it to the summer, they would last forever, and the last vestiges of hope for a relationship between Derek and me would be gone.
I almost didn't go home that summer. I wouldn't have, except my little sister Lizzie got on the phone and spent an hour begging me to save her from the craziness at the house. I could never refuse my sister, so home I went. The minute I stepped over the threshold I knew it had been a mistake because there to greet me was Sammi and her annoyingly cheerful smile, arm around Derek's waist.
For a month I spent as little time in the house as possible, always finding some excuse to skip family dinners or family game nights. My mother got so frustrated that she threatened to send me back to New York on the first flight if I didn't make some time for the family in my schedule. I longed to push her to do exactly that, but I had nowhere to stay in New York and Lizzie almost started crying at the thought, so I sighed and gave in, promising to eat dinner with the family at least once a week.
It was the night of the Fourth of July that my life became a true study in the ironic. Sammi was American, so the rest of my family thought it would be fun to drive across the border and watch the fireworks. Derek was planning to ask Sammi to marry him that night-I had gotten into the bad habit of eavesdropping on any conversation he had, and the one with his best friend, Sam, the week before clued me in to this plan. It was enough to make me plead a party with one of my friends and spend the night at a bar in town, getting smashingly drunk. By midnight, I had moved on to the third bar of the night and I didn't remember my own name, but was unfortunately unable to drown his name from my memory.
I don't remember anything else about that night, but I do remember the next morning. I woke up to the most horrific screeching in my ear. It was a cell phone, but it wasn't mine. I was in a fog of pain from the hangover and ended up throwing the phone at the wall to make it stop. Not the most rational action to take, but at that time I wasn't thinking rationally. That was when I had the second biggest shock of my life (it was the biggest at the time, but the one to follow surpassed it by about a million points). The man in bed next to me groaned, flung his arm around my waist, and pulled me into his chest. "Stop the ringing, babe!"
My incoherent brain refused to grasp the fact that I was in bed with someone and merely had me snuggle deeper into his chest. It wasn't until I awoke some time later that the true situation hit me head on. I was in a bed, obviously not my own, snuggled into the naked chest of a man that I had no recollection of, with the only hangover I had ever had. After realizing this, I kept my eyes tightly closed for a little while longer, not wanting to see who my deranged brain had decided to sleep with the night before. Finally, I gathered enough courage to lift my head, but there wasn't enough light in the room to make out who it was I was currently sleeping on. Cautiously, I got up and tiptoed over to the light switch, noticing that it had to be a hotel room we were sleeping in, and a nice one at that.
Taking a deep breath, I flipped on the light and was momentarily blinded by the brilliance of the halogen bulbs and the pain they invoked in my skull. I wasn't deafened, unfortunately, and the shout that came from the no-so-asleep man on my bed was terrifyingly familiar to me. As the light spots faded from my vision I stared into the unbelieving face of my stepbrother, Derek.
Within ten minutes the two of us had stripped the hotel room of all our belongings, jetted to the car and were on our way back to our parents' house, all the while totally ignoring each other. Some part of me still wishes that we had talked on the way back from the hotel, because it would have made the scene at our parents' house somewhat bearable and maybe not completely confusing to me.
As I learned after a few screaming matches later, Derek had asked Sammi to marry him in front of everyone and she, amazingly, had refused. Derek was hurt and walked away, and Sammi followed him and had the conversation with him that ended up changing my life. She basically told him that he was an idiot who was in love with someone else, and that someone else was in love with him. Derek got so mad about this that he drove off, leaving Sammi and my family to make their way home alone while Derek managed to make it to the exact bar where I was drowning my sorrows in alcohol and, because I was drunk, had no willpower to resist when he pulled me in his arms (after he had quite a few drinks) and took me to the hotel room that he had reserved for himself and Sammi.
The rest is history. Derek and I ignored each other until the next Winter Break, where he barged into my room while I was changing and we ended up in a similar situation to summer, except this time neither of us was drunk, and we were in our parents' house. As we lay in bed afterwards, I blurted out how I felt about him, and then turned red, grabbed my robe and bolted out of the room. I only remember grabbing my robe because I was still in it when Derek found me an hour later, huddled on my mom's bed, crying my eyes out.
Apparently Sammi had decided to clear some issues up with Derek, and at the beginning of the semester told him flat out who he was in love with. It's trite, but it wasn't until I admitted it that Derek could admit it to himself, and then to me.
And that's how I came to be here, at the University of Alberta, finishing my degree while my husband plays hockey and works on getting recruited by the NHL. I tried to find Sammi after I moved here, to thank her and to apologize for hating her guts the entire time she spent in my house. I never managed to track her down, and Derek wouldn't help me, but I'll never forget, how, in a stroke of irony, the woman who was supposed to destroy my life ended up saving it.
A/N: I'm not sure how I feel about this...I think if I had ever written an essay like this for any of my classes, my professors would have thrown up before giving me a failing grade, but who knows?
And for those of you that read my other stories, I promise updates are on the way! By the end of the week at least!