Slipping Reality

By Emily Beaver

In a time of hardship and heartbreak, sometimes, reality just isnt enough. Slipping Reality is the story of fourteen-year-old Katelyn Emerson, who, when faced with the glaring reality of her brothers illness, rebels against the truth by slipping away into the depths of her own imagination. There, she finds the kind of support and comfort she feels she deserves. There, she does not have to feel so alone. And yet, as Katelyns grasp on reality begins to unravel, so too does the story of a girl who grew up too fast and fell apart too soon.

Emily Beaver's debut novel is a coming of age story that deals with the trials of young grief, insight, and growth where it's least expected.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781463427139

Emily Beaver

Emily Beaver first wrote the title "Slipping Reality" at fourteen years old. A dedicated writer since the age of eight, she had always dreamt of publishing a novel in her teenage years, and it was the death of her brother Matthew that gave her the courage. Emily is currently a senior in high school, and her work can be seen in "Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Cancer Book", various magazines, and thisibelieve.org. She is also a regular contributor on SparkNotes.com. In addition to writing, Emily loves acting, singing, and knowing Disneyland better than her own school campus. She lives in San Diego, California with her parents Ellisa and Steven, and their two German Shepherds, Rocket and Nala. You can follow her on her website at www.emilysreality.com.

Book preview

1

Purgatory

I TAPPED MY PENCIL IMPATIENTLY against the drab, wooden desk. The clicking sound it created when the plastic hit the wood was oddly comforting, my mind moving in synchronization to the strikes. Only fifteen more minutes until I was out of here.

I looked up, and Lauren looked over at me, her wide brown eyes filled to the brink with boredom. I could read the message in them. Get me out of here. I nodded once and rolled my own blue eyes, acknowledging her pain. I looked back over to the teacher, Mrs. Kirk, who was finishing her lecture on Wuthering Heights, a book I had read to the point of memorization. This topic was nothing new to me. Freshman year in high school served as nothing more than a painful reminder of middle school. Pointless, long, and easy. I scribbled the homework assignment into my planner, not at all concerned about having to read Wuthering Heights again. If I were to run into Heathcliff at Starbucks, he and I could have kept up a conversation until the end of time about him and Cathy. I’d like to see Mrs. Kirk do the same.

Alright, I give in. My mind wandered over to Starbucks with Heathcliff as I envisioned him telling me more about how he first fell in love with Cathy—what it was like. Him asking me about my love life, and me telling him that I had none. Me prodding about how much Cathy’s death really affected his perspective and personality, and what I wouldn’t give to hear him say, "I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!"

Katelyn! A ruler slammed down on my desk and I jumped, my fantasy shattered. Did you catch what the assignment was?

"Read the first thirty pages of Wuthering Heights, got it," I mumbled, a wave of disappointment crashing over my fallen daydream.

Mrs. Kirk blinked. Yes, that’s it. She moved on and I exhaled in relief. The bell rang and I gathered my books, shoving them in my bag and walking to the door. Lauren was waiting for me.

"Ugh, just imagine how long it’s going to take to read Wuthering Heights and do all the history homework that Mr. Weber assigned us! I don’t know about you, but Wuthering Heights is the kind of book that I need to read slowly."

I know it well enough that it’s an easy read, I said, But you’re right, the history homework is going to be annoying.

I know! Lauren frowned, How can he expect us to write a six page diary entry about living in the 1800s?

"At least it doesn’t have to be one entire entry, and thank God he let us double-space."

True, Lauren agreed, always eager to consider the brighter side. Especially when it was pointed out to her.

Lauren might have just been the best friend I could have ever asked for. She was a very sweet girl, and pretty too, with short brown hair and fair skin. She contrasted well with me, the typical blonde. Well, technically, blonde with a brown tint, set in waves that ran on their own schedule. My eyes, unlike her chocolate browns, were big and blue, and my skin was whiter than milk with a hint of pink to my cheeks. I wasn’t as pretty as I sounded, but I was comfortable with my looks—average and barely unordinary. If it weren’t for my pale skin, I’d fit in perfectly with California. Lauren, on the other hand, was beautiful.

Lauren and I had been through it all together—

heartbreak, divorce, parents, disease, shyness, friendship traumas, you name it—but we really came together the year my brother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. A tragedy that shook both our families, we were both laced together in cancer’s complicated unraveling. Our connection was stronger than most teenage girlfriends, because our friendship stood for something deeper and more profound than cat fights and bitch slaps. We had just been through so much.

Lauren’s face was the easiest to read out of anyone else I knew; her eyes especially. We could have the most complex conversations without a single word. Our friendship was not cemented over the usual need for reassurance and security; the reason most teenage girls I knew formed their groups. It was glued together by a common intellect and a shared spirituality, but most of all, by two opposite types of imagination.

Sometimes, when I would daydream, I would watch myself—I almost never had in-body daydreams—tip backward off the cliff of a field and be caught by Lauren. Common as it would seem, I valued so much in Lauren. She was there for me when my family couldn’t be.

Lauren snapped her fingers in front of my eyes, giggling.

Spacing out? she asked. She definitely knows me too well.

The usual, I replied, and we parted ways, each to be picked up by our parents. I slid into the passenger seat of my father’s car, and after exchanging the usual questions and answers—How was your day? Huh? I don’t know… Anything new? No, not really.—I stared out the windows, watching the trees and cars on the road whip past me, their shapes blurring together to create different new colors.

The San Diego Preparatory Academy (SDPA) was only 15 minutes away from my home in San Diego, and its academic excellence made the decision to attend private school over public very easy. It’s not that my former school sucked, I just knew that by attending the SDPA I’d have a better shot at getting into a high-profile college. And with Lauren there as well, I didn’t have much to worry about with making friends.

How’s Matthew? I finally asked, deciding to get it over with.

About the same, my dad replied softly, still recovering from his last treatment, but it’s not so bad. He should be feeling better by tomorrow.

I nodded. Nothing had changed in that area.

People would think that living with a sibling with cancer—let alone, a sibling who is your best friend with cancer—would be tough. Drama at every corner, never getting a break from the constant trauma and stress and overall my-life-sucksitude. But if anyone could believe it, it wasn’t like that at all. Matthew had been battling cancer since I was eleven, so this routine was no news to me. It sounds insensitive, but at this point, what choice did I have? I either suck it up and be strong, or let the demon that is cancer work at me until I’ve collapsed into depression.

I winced as I recalled how exactly I’d come to that lesson. It was seventh grade, and I was losing a fight with my fear of expressing emotions. I was so afraid of people knowing what I was going through, that I bottled my emotions up. It worked well for a while, until one day when they collapsed on me, and the depression was too much. I was lucky to have not been suicidal.

But I could remember the feeling more than anything. That kind of despair, where gradually, everything I’d been fighting against for so long began pressing against the inside of my body. And I tried to ignore the pressing feeling, I tried to get around it and move on, but it never left. And it pushed me and pushed me until finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. And the pressure forced through me, and I collapsed. And all the emotions came flooding out. All the vulnerabilities. All the tears and sorrow and devastation I had over Matthew’s cancer was out there in the open. My strategy to avoid attention to my emotions backfired tragically, more than I could have ever anticipated. Especially, because I never once thought repressing my emotions so deeply would make me even forget what they were. The day they erupted was the day I realized there was a lot more to my tragedy than I was willing to look at. It took a lot of time before I was healed enough to do something productive with my emotions and actually let them out as they came.

But that didn’t work either. It was too much.

And so I came to the realization that there was middle ground to all of this. There was the deeper side, where everything was constant tragedy and torment and I could have no emotional restraint whatsoever. Then there was the stone-cold side, where I walked through every point without anything more than a second glance. But in the middle, the practical side, I liked to call it, I realized in my little seventh-grade epiphany that the best way to get through any of this… any of this being cancer, school, or life itself, is to just be strong for myself and for others. And gradually, as time passed, my emotions seemed less central to my thought-process. And the routine became normal. The drama of it was over; it was just… my life. Matthew’s life. Our life. A terrible thing to be used to, but as I see it, there really wasn’t much of another choice.

In retrospect, I could really see the whole situation as mental overload. There was so much that had happened in these three short years that at the same time took forever. I couldn’t even chronicle them in one thought process—there was so much that cancer influenced. But treading those waters, I had learned, was a slippery notion, and I tried not to dwell too much in that realm.

Try as I may, though, I had to admit, I was a little more worried this time around. Matthew had relapsed for the second time just a few weeks ago—and that meant this was his third time having cancer. Getting cancer a second time is a scare. Getting cancer for a third time is really bad. I don’t need a doctor to tell me that to know it was true. I tried not to dwell on it too much, though, since my parents along with Matthew and I had become experts at handling this. If anyone could find a cure, it was Mom…

Mom threw her life into researching treatments for Matthew. Her sanity through the situation was one of the few things I allowed myself to hold on to.

I let my mind wander to different and unrealistic ways to cure Matthew’s cancer—such as a magic pill that all he needs to do is swallow and it’s all gone—as my iPod played tunes I was past memorizing—the usual.

When we arrived home, I went straight upstairs to get started on my homework—the usual.

The usual really was my friend in times of stress.

It’s a curious thing, for my supposedly dramatic life, how everything was so routine. I come home, I do my homework, I hang out with Matthew, I watch TV, I shower, and I go to bed. Wake up, get ready, go to school, survive, get home, after school routine, repeat. For a tragedy-stricken life, mine was pretty mellow. No news was good news, as always, but you would have thought that I would have doctors calling the house every five minutes and my mind in constant worry over my brother’s condition.

But it wasn’t. Reality was weird that way, because in reality, things weren’t as bad once someone peers through the looking glass. Take two steps back and yeah, anyone could say my life looks tragic. It looks like a battle that no one should ever endure. This was all true. But when they press their hands up against the window and really get a clear view of my life, they would see very little reason for depression. Very little reason for drama. Very little reason for a twisted reality. Reality that could almost be considered the norm—because nobody would see any emotional wrecks when they looked at my family. Reality had served what it was meant to had served, and we were taking the full buffet.

I doodled at my history worksheet now, thinking of a reality buffet, where instead of the entrees being croissants and crepes, there would be Cancer and Car Crashes and Breakups and Love and Friendship and Family.

Inspired with a drawing, I whipped out my sketchbook and set my pencil to the paper, thinking of a good metaphor for two sides. Deciding on the Phantom’s mask from Phantom of the Opera, I drew him. I had always loved the play and movie Phantom of the Opera, and the Phantom seemed like a good example of a soul that had two sides to it. One side of him that loved Christine Daae, and cared for and taught her, and the other side, the monster, that dealt with his deformity and madness. Once I had the Phantom’s face staring out at me, I scribbled words that described his genius—music of the night, love, opera, architecture, romance, and Christine on the unmasked side, and monster, gargoyle, murderer, and bitterness on his masked side. I wrote the words conjoining together so they would look as though they made up the mask that defined him, but showed inconspicuously on his face. Two sides to him. The supposed monster he thought he was, and yet the musical creative genius who had such a soft and romantic side for Christine. Marking the drawing with the date, I then realized what time I wasted for my history assignment and shoved my sketchbook aside.

Drawing has always been a passion for me, ever since I was six years old. When I was little, all my homework assignments would always be covered with doodles of puppies and unicorns and all the wonderful figments of my overactive mind. When cancer came to play a role in my life—especially around the time of seventh grade, after my emotional epiphany—it became substantial to my existence. Since I couldn’t express my emotions without falling to pieces, I worked them into my drawings. Every stroke of the pencil lined an emotion I could feel flowing through the curve of my fingers to the tip of my pencil. It used to be something I needed everyday, but as time passed and my coping emotions fell back in favor of an adjusted routine, I only turned to my sketchbook for inspiring moments like these and the very rare need for an emotional outlet. Regardless of what the occasion was, though, I still maintain covering all homework assignments and notes with whatever doodle is on my mind.

Sitting down in front of my computer, I began writing a diary entry about what life was like to live in the year 1870, based, of course, on the time when the Phantom’s story took place, much thanks to my drawing. I wrote about what the dresses were like in their design with the hoop skirts and corsets, and how popular theater was. How in America they had just passed the fifteenth amendment, allowing African-Americans to vote…

I began focusing more and more on the arts and how my character writing the diary entry indulged them, imagining what it would be like to star in an opera or some sort of play. I sighed dreamily as I continued grazing my fingers across the keys. How wonderful it would be to live in a time like that…

I finished the six page requirement with ease, hitting the print button with a smug sense of accomplishment. I pretty much had Wuthering Heights memorized, so I just skipped ahead to page thirty to make sure I wouldn’t bring up one too many plot points in class tomorrow. My other homework done for the night, I took my shower, letting the water run down my back as I thought about today. Coming up with absolutely nothing interesting, as usual, I shut off the water and got ready for bed.

I ran to the balcony above the first floor of my house and leaned my head over.

Goodnight, everybody! I called, I’m going to bed.

Wait, Emzees! Matthew’s familiar voice shouted from the guest room. Ever since he had his leg amputated—that was sixth grade for me, ninth grade for him—our family decided that anytime he goes through any form of cancer treatment he’s better off in the downstairs room than his upstairs one. Can you come down a moment? I want to see you.

Yeah, sure! I hollered back, and padded down the stairs and into his room.

I was greeted with a DVD case to the face.

Nice reflexes, Matthew commented in a blasé tone, leaning against the headboard of his bed and staring at the TV.

I picked up the DVD. "You stole my copy of 3:10 to Yuma," I accused.

You left it in here, good sir.

Oh. Whoops. Well maybe it’s because I want you to watch it.

"You want me to revel in the awesomeness of Ben Wade again?" Matthew grinned, referring to the main character.

Well you always wanted to be a cowboy…

Matthew laughed and flicked my arm. We watched it on Sunday. Anyway, how was your day?

I looked at Matthew curiously. There was something different about him. He looked thinner, which can’t be good; Matthew’s always been on the skinny side.

Fine, I said slowly, kind of boring, but fine. Are you alright? You look…

I cut myself off. I remembered that Matthew doesn’t really like to discuss his illness.

Matthew’s coping mechanism through his cancer was both similar and different to mine. He didn’t run away from what he had, but at the same time, he didn’t like to acknowledge it either. He figured that the best way of treating it was looking at cancer like it was an extremely bad cold and nothing more than that. On some aspects, it worked, because Matthew gets through things with an extremely positive attitude that works wonders on people who don’t cope as well as he does. On the other hand, it makes me anxious about what I can and can not bring up around him. I know Matthew well enough to get a pretty good idea, but at the same time, I’m ashamed to admit I’ve been influenced by his tactic as well. Addressing certain things make me uncomfortable, because I become afraid the answer is worse than my current position of stagnant emotions can handle. I don’t want that to change.

Sexy? Matthew finished for me, looking at me with raised eyebrows.

I snorted. My brother is such a dork.

Always, I replied, I think you should work on it, because it makes managing your fan club a huge issue.

I like maintaining my playa lifestyle.

At that point we were both laughing hysterically. Matthew, the pimp.

Pre-cancer, Matthew was about as genetically gifted as they came. Dark brown hair with tousled black specks, emerald green eyes, and a winning smile, I always found great entertainment in the gaggle of admirers he’d racked up over the years. Matthew had always been socially accepted among his peers, but he was never much for popularity. If it weren’t for his stunning good looks and social skills, Matthew would have been the most typical computer nerd. But the thing I always admired most about him was that he was anyway. In my experience, I’d seen a lot of people who may have naturally been more bookish and closed off, but were good looking enough to abandon that side of their personality for popularity instead. It never ended well for them, and Matthew never cared enough to try. He was never part of the crowd. He did whatever he wanted to do and whatever interested him most, and people adored him anyway. It made sense; Matthew turned away no one. When I was little, and in the phase where I copied everything Matthew did with his life, we would repeat to each other Shakespeare’s infamous phrase days through and through: This above all, to thine own self be true.

Sounds ironic since I was copying everything he did with his life, but back then, being true to myself was being true to Matthew. In some aspects, it remains the truth today.

For Matthew, though, that quote very well defined his entire existence. He was so utterly oblivious to the regular pressures of the social world that he was free to be himself and still be adored for it. It was no wonder I ached so badly to be just like him when I was little; I used to be such an incredibly shy kid, who never said no and always did the right thing. My only friends were Lauren and Matthew, and maybe a couple others who were only my friends because I didn’t know how to tell them not to be. It wasn’t until the summer before sixth grade—and Matthew’s first diagnosis, oddly enough—that I decided I was through with keeping my silence and stepped out of my shell.

I like to believe I have Matthew to thank for that.

‘They see me mowing, my front lawn,’ I muttered to myself and Matthew laughed harder. White & Nerdy, Matthew’s personal anthem.

‘I know they’re all thinking I’m so White and Nerdy,’ Matthew continued.

I smiled. Alright, Matty Fresh, I’ve really got to get to sleep.

"No problem. See you

Reviews for Slipping Reality

[jeninicole83 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book was first written by the author when she was 14 years old. For the age the book was pretty good. I was over half the book before I actually got into it. It was lacking creativity in the beginning. I would recommend this for pre-teens/early teens. Especially if they are dealing with a similar situation.

[roses7184_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm going to ramble a bit in this review, mainly because I'm so torn on how exactly to share with you my feelings about this book. Reading Slipping Reality really makes you think about how to fairly judge a book written by a young author. Should I take her 14 year old age at the time into account? Is that fair? So I'm going to try to be as succinct and fair as possible in explaining my rating for this book.

First off I have to say that I loved the concept of Slipping Reality. In it we meet Katelyn, whose brother is on his third round of battling cancer. Although she tells people that she's handling it, and looks on the outside like she is, inside her mind is a whirlwind of feelings. Katelyn is a character who is trying so hard to hold it all together that you don't notice the cracks in the exterior until much later. What finally happens is that her mind helps her deal by allowing her to escape inside her own head. Katelyn's "daydreams" become her reality.

What lost me a little bit was the writing style in this book. At first, diving into Katelyn's world was pretty easy. The beginning was really well written and introspective. However the further that I got into the book, the more I saw the teenage side of the writer. There are a lot of pop-culture references in here. There are also a lot of references to mundane day to day activities. I don't have a problem with a little bit of these two things. They actually make reading really fun. In this case though, it was bordered on distracting.

My other issue was that I never really connected with Katelyn on a deeper level. The love she has for her brother definitely comes through in the story. You can see how much she is hurting inside as she struggles to deal with his illness. However that's really all we get on the emotional level. I knew other more superficial things about Katelyn, like her love of reading and drawing. It was just that I never really felt attached to her character. Even when her daydreams started impeding her real life, I was just a spectator.

In a nutshell, Slipping Reality reeled me in with its original concept but lost me soon after. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy the book. I honestly did. It was just tough to get immersed in. For writing this at such a young age, and doing it so well, I applaud Emily Beaver. If this is just a glimpse at her talent then I'm keeping her on my radar! Who knows what is yet to come.