Did someone say “Preteen Pirate Fan Fiction?”

First of all: word.

Next order of business: today, while Erin and I were in the car, paused in a sunny patch and listening it Skee-lo, I suddenly felt the urge to share with her my darkest secret:

“One time, way before my first kiss, I filled an entire notebook with pirate love stories. Featuring me. And Christian Bale.”

She seemed receptive, so I continued:

“I had seen some TV version of Treasure Island starring Christian Bale, who I’d been hot for ever since Empire of the Sun, and I was twelve and bored, and at my grandma’s all weekend, and… it’s still buried under my bed at my parents’ house. I found it again when I was sixteen, and was so simultaneously mortified and amused that I had to grab a pen and Mystery Science Theater my own story. The only way you knew there were pirates was that they prefaced every sentence with ‘aye.’ It was so, so bad. So bad that I would still be embarrassed to even let my dearest friends, the ones who’ve seen my naked and snotty and unwashed, see it. In fact, if I suddenly die, Josh has instructions to go find the yellow notebook and burn it, sight unseen.”

Long pause. And then:

I have never seen anyone so overjoyed to admit that they understood, because they totally wrote Dead Poets’ Society fan fiction at that same age, wherein (natch) their father was the new headmaster, making them the only girl at the boys’ school.

I love my friends.