Title: Heroes
Author: Claddagh Ring
Disclaimer: I own everything in this story that you don't recognize; which is, unfortunately, not much.
Feedback: Please? Anything and everything, flames included. I love you!
Spoilers: Pretty much the entire Scott/Shelby cannon.
AN: This is my first Higher Ground piece and I don't have plans for any others. But still, as you know, what a writer thinks, a writer must write. And this was just an idea I wrote during my Chemistry class. Flying fumes and everything so... It's kind of different since it's in the form of an essay, but hopefully you guys will like it. I do anyway.
My Hero
by Savannah Barringer
My paper is different than yours. I know it is even now as I write it because I know the way most of you think. Some of you will go out of your way to pick a 'hero' that is different from everyone else's for the sake of originality, but it'll just end up sounding just like the others… dull and false. I'm not blaming you because that's how the world thinks. That's how the world works and that's how the world is. That's just it. The people in my paper, they knew that. They fought the world head-on when they were 16 and lost.
In the year 2000, Shelby Merrick was sent to the Mt. Horizon School for Troubled Teens after her mother found her living on the streets three months after Shelby had run away. It wasn't the first time Shelby had done this, but it was the last time her mother was willing to deal with it. No one knew then, but Shelby had been forced to resort to extreme measures to stay alive while living in the streets. These measures included prostitution. Can you imagine selling yourself out for a piece of bread to eat later? Kind of pathetic, you're thinking? Well we'll see what you think when I've finished telling her pre-story. Because you see, no one bothered to ask why Shelby ran in the first place. If they had, maybe, just maybe, Shelby would have told them that the exact moment she started running was the same moment her stepfather Walt became sexually abusive. But no one ever asked and she never told. And we all know that the longer something isn't told, the harder the words become to say.
Of course, 8 weeks later, someone came along by the name of Scott Barringer who knew that better than anyone did. Scott was admitted to the school by his father who, as far as his clue went, Scott's drug usage was out of control. Again, he never bothered to ask why Scott, the all-state football player, began lighting up in the first place. And as the tale goes for every student at Horizon, there was another pain, a deeper pain just waiting to be discovered. Personally, I'd prefer getting high over even thinking about what Scott had to live with every day. You see, similar to Shelby's situation, his father had gotten remarried to a woman who took the cliché 'evil stepmother' to a whole new level; because Elaine was just that.
Whenever her older husband wasn't satisfying her sexual needs, Elaine would slip into Scott's bed and forcibly rape her 16 year old stepson. Now that's a pretty family portrait, don't you think? To this day, Scott can't tell you quite how it started, but once it did, he couldn't stop Elaine's abusive choices. Another person would call it an 'abusive nature' so that it was more comfortable for the audience to hear but I think that's bullshit. What she did was a choice and that's what I'm going to call it.
So, two kids that were given up on by their parents ended up on the same spot of the same mountain, in the same school and in the same group called the Cliffhangers… coming for pretty much the same reasons. You'd think that the two blonde-haired, blue-eyed, sexually-abused misfits of the world would have something to say to each other; I mean, other than "skank" and "you don't know anything". For the longest time, before either knew anything about why the other was there, they regarded each other as the worst kind of human being imaginable. It all changed during Scott's first storm at Horizon.
Years later, Scott still hates storms. I'm not clear on why but I know it has to do with Elaine. Maybe it was storming the first time she raped him or it was storming the worst time. Maybe it was symbolic towards the storm Scott was feeling inside himself, I told you I don't know. Either way you want to spin it, the memory was still fresh in Scott's mind that night at Horizon. He turned to Shelby for physical comfort but instead, he ended up telling his darkest secret to her and earned her respect and he found respect for her as a person. After that, the magnetic attraction between the two of them became more like an unbreakable bond.
When Scott lost his case with CPS, Shelby was there. When Scott tried to run from the school, Shelby was there when he got dragged back in. If you've noticed, this seems like a one-track relationship but before you go accusing Scott of being totally self-absorbed, let me tell you that Shelby was not the most open person in the world. Years of concrete wall were starting to crack but she wasn't ready to write a novel over her feelings. So when her mother came to take her back home to take care of her sick stepfather Walt, Shelby couldn't even say goodbye to her boyfriend Scott because that meant she had gotten close enough to say goodbye too. It makes a certain kind of sense. She knew that she wouldn't be able to go if she used her strength to say goodbye to Scott. But maybe, she needed his strength. Scott said that the first time in his life he'd ever prayed, he prayed for her, asking God to make her strong. And of course, I don't know what happened, but Shelby thinks it might have worked because she picked up the phone and called CPS. She never told me what happened after that but she did tell me that as Walt was being loaded into the police car, she looked back at her sister and said "Remember this; remember everything." It's just one of those things that stuck with me and it's worth remembering. But before I end up reciting every detail of their life story, I'm just going to say that Shelby went back to the school and eventually Scott and Shelby got back to being… well, Scott and Shelby.
There was a point not too long afterwards when Scott considered leaving school, but when he realized that his dad blamed him for what Elaine did, Scott high-tailed it back up Mt. Horizon. Scott never fully salvaged his relationship with his dad, but not for lack of trying. Seriously, how do you trust someone who thinks you lied about something as big as being raped by your stepmother?
The next few years were difficult for the couple and you can bet that the special guest star appearances by Elaine and Walt didn't make it any easier. But Scott and Shelby kept working at breaking down their walls that blocked them from full trust and understanding. The hardest one for both of them was kicking down the sexual barriers that had been implanted in their hearts for different and similar reasons. But somehow, maybe because they're both so stubborn, they managed to get through all of it and graduate from Mt. Horizon. And most important to them, they did it side-by-side. Not long after, the got married and both of them are clearly over any sexual hesitation they ever had. Except of course, on stormy nights.
Now, three pages was a little more back-story than I was intending to spill, but looking at it now, I know it's purely necessary to explain my point to you mindless people. Wait, I'm sorry, that was probably rude. Most people in the world will close any book as soon as the come across the words 'addict' or 'prostitute' or 'troubled' or something along those lines. Most of your attention I've lost because of words like that. Now you feel guilty. Good, because you're the ones I'm talking to. That, in my opinion, is what makes you mindless. But hey, I'm way off topic now.
What was the topic again? When I got to this point, I'd forgotten and I had to call my friend Tara Tait to find out. She told me that it was 'My Hero' and I thought, "Now that's a totally second grade topic! I'm a junior in high school… in AP English no less!" But obviously, I wrote it. And I can say, I wrote it honestly. Because a hero isn't make believe. A hero isn't a celebrity who spouts overly sugary lines when the cameras are around and a hero is definitely not some generalization of a live-saving profession, however admirable they can be. And the people I'm writing about are without a doubt none of those things. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to degrade what you think; that isn't the point. The point is a hero should be normal. A person who's been dragged through all of life's shit over and over again before being set up on their feet, only to be knocked down again so they can climb yet another mountain and still push through and beat that mountain down. That is what make a hero… the rest are mere idols.
Augusto 'Auggie' Ciceros- don't worry, he's not a universal scholar you should know for a test- said it best when he said, "My tag is my name." The 16 year old girl that lost her innocence and her way on the streets was called Shelby Merrick. The 16 year old boy that lost is naive outlook on life to a bedroom monster was called Scott Barringer. Their labels were 'troubled, addict, whore, useless, liar…' the list goes on forever. But I've got news for you. They don't exist. They're dead. They died on Mt. Horizon because the Scott Barringer and Shelby Merrick that walked off that mountain years ago weren't the same people that went up. They had no people-given tags sewn onto their names anymore, as far as they were concerned. And that was all that mattered to them.
For the sake of sticking to the 'My Hero' part of the assignment, Shelby and Scott are my heroes. Actually, let's keep it real. They're not mine. But so what? Maybe they're not mine, but they are someone's. They are someone out there's nameless, faceless hero because you don't have to have a name for your hero. They could be, for all I know, someone in the very classroom's hero because that person knows that they are this generation's Scott and Shelby. That's right, this generation has them too. As much as I'd like to say Scott and Shelby changed the world and rid it of the bad guys, they didn't. Because there is still a Mt. Horizon and there is still a new generation there. There'll be another in a few years and another after that. There always will be. They just changed themselves and sometimes that's all you can do.
There names today are Scott and Shelby Barringer. And despite the old tags that people manage to dig up and the fucked up way said people spit on their past, Barringer is the name I can't see myself ever living without and I refuse to even try. I won't. Because I am a better person simply because my name was given to me by Scott, my dad, and Shelby, my mom. And that name is Savannah Barringer. Deal with it.
.
.
.
Peter smiled to himself as he finished reading the insightful, motivating, and somewhat colorfully worded essay and stuck a tack through the wrinkled piece of copy paper. He'd have to call Savannah and ask if it was alright with her for him to take the profanity out of her paper before he tacked it up in the dining hall and the dorms, but for now, he smiled at the thought of the vibrant, stubborn, opinionated young woman whom he'd had the pleasure of meeting. Of course, he'd expected nothing less to come from Scott and Shelby Barringer. Nothing less.
As Peter picked up the phone, he couldn't help but think, "Maybe one of 'this generation's Scott and Shelby' would find a hero on paper, even for a moment."
AN2: So, I hope I didn't bore you repeating all the stuff you knew from the show. I tried to add in little asides from Savannah to keep you interested. I tried to write Savannah as a mix of Scott and Shelby and I think I pulled it off, but as I said, it was done during Chemistry so you guys are really the only ones that would know. Let me know okay!
I write, you read, you review.