Writing About Cindi Sunshine

I am on the autism “spectrum” and I taught creative writing to gifted high school students. The administration banished me and my eccentric classroom to the legendary third floor where “special ed” classes had once been housed.. This third floor looked like a rocket ship, perched on top of the red brick school. It contained only five rooms. Every year my classes and I became more and more of a fragmented fairy tale. One English teacher told me that when her students heard strange sounds emanating from above, she told them,“That’s just the “crazy lady” on the third floor.” I never turned on the overhead lights in my creative writing room. It was a place where kids could sit in relative darkness and dream on the page. That is the way we liked it.

I brought snacks to school every Friday even though the principal had forbidden food in the classroom. Kids wore hats in my room although hats were officially banned.

Each year, my 9th grade class wrote a “group novel”creating characters, world and plot. Writing with them, I introduced my own character, “Cindy Sunshine.” I pretended to mock an idealistic social worker so no one would know that Cindi sunshine was really a younger version of me. I made her a ditzy blonde. No one would ever guess I could be lurking inside that shell. Cindi liked to wear pink sweat suits and green glittery Chuck Taylor shoes. The glitter should have given me away. This Cindi Sunshine drove a green VW bug and wrote with pink gel pens.
I secretly called this class the “Sharks.”

I told them I would enjoy ridiculing this naive ingénue who had no chance of relating to the surly teens in the anger management group she led. How transparent was that? Unconsciously, they knew that I was Cindi. She spoke like an innocent who wanted nothing more than to save these poor darlings from themselves. She was tenacious in helping them “address their inner orphans.” “Inner orphan” was one of Cindi’s favorite clichés.

After failing to gain their trust at the bi-weekly meetings of the anger management group, Cindi planned a field trip to a “Trust Carnival,” but the teens kicked her off the bus. Determined to rescue her orphans from their demons, she followed the bus in her VW, at 90 mph, into a forest. Unfortunately, the kids burned the bus driver alive and when Cindi caught up with them they were already settled down around a campfire. The next day, they killed her.

This group novel turned into a barely subliminal allegory of the struggle between teachers and teens. A teacher should never be as vulnerable as Cindi Sunshine especially when the kids are as arrogant and mean as the “Sharks.”

I did enjoy reading to them about Cindi. It was a joke we all shared around the table in my unconventional classroom. If I got a laugh from teens who were oppositional, cliquish, and brilliant, I felt validated as a writer. If their faces wrinkled up or they said, “Wow, that was cool,” I was a success because they were so difficult to impress. I had to out-write them to achieve “street cred” in their world. So I objectified my inner core of being. I pretend I loathed Cindi, made her speak like an imbecile and look like Barbie on acid but Cindi loved her band of teen rebels. She would do anything to lead them to the land of “TRUST’ but she failed and they killed her off with glee.

So this story may be about me and Cindi and a bunch of orphans in “anger management” but maybe this story is about me being abandoned by my administrator who was supposed to care about me.

I see a pattern. Maybe Cindi’s not the only alter ego working here. Maybe I identify with the rascal teens and I would really like to write a novel in which the principal is kidnapped by a bunch of kids in the woods. Maybe I would like to chain him to a roller coaster. That’s what they finally did to poor Cindi. They took her to the top of the “Trust Roller Coaster” and dumped her off. She crashed through a glass ceiling.

 

Carole Johnston is a poet and novelist who taught creative writing in a high school arts program. As an adult, she realized that she is on the autism “spectrum,” and now everything makes sense.
Carole Has published poems and stories in various journals and has published five books of poetry.