Growing up in the 1980s, I was a quirky combination of being both gifted and at-risk.
Nobody tells you about the latter. Teachers don’t harp at you to reach your full potential in that area, so I didn’t know even know until my 20s, when I saw a checklist of risk factors in a Department of Education study.
I didn’t consider our circumstances when
I was a kid, but it feels good now to have some excuse for what I did when I was nine years old.
My parents were divorced, and Mom and I lived in the second-floor apartment of an old Victorian house in Dallastown. She worked two jobs, so I was a latchkey kid from about age seven. I was dependable because Mom depended on me.
But she thought I was brighter than I was, because she was always feeling for the boundaries of my adulting capabilities. She finally found them when she got me my first York Dispatch paper route.
She thought I could earn money and learn responsibility, but I was nine, which might’ve been illegal and was definitely against the company policy that you had to be 12.
I felt guilty about breaking rules, but mostly I was scared.
Not of rational dangers, like a kidnapper grabbing me as I walked alone. I feared a lady who lived on a hill on Maple Street. She had hair down to her feet, and she’ d stand up on her porch in her nightgown, brushing all that hair and staring down at me as I delivered papers.
I was certain she was a witch.
Hurrying past her house just meant I encountered her angry neighbor sooner. He’ d always scream random things at me, like, “Hey, paper girl. Ya look like a boy!"
It was an odd preoccupation for someone to have when they were about 50 and I was nine.
My instinct was to run, but I could barely move with two heavy carrier bags criss-crossing my chest. I had one bag choking me from each side of my neck.
I was a suffocating, androgynous Weeble. Flight was not an option.
When I told Mom I wanted to quit, she acted like I was the crazy one and said she wasn’t raising me to be a quitter.
I could tell from her face that something unusual was about to happen…again. Mom was only 25, and she wasn’t fettered by the conventions that stop other parents.
She kept me up late that night and drove to the parking lot at D&K Surplus Grocery. Then we drove back up 74 with a stolen shopping cart hanging out the trunk of her car.
So then, I was doing my illegal paper route with a stolen shopping cart that, just like everything you buy or apparently steal from D&K, was slightly imperfect and had a loud, wobbly wheel.
It was so embarrassing.
Thankfully, my friend Bridgette lived in the first-floor apartment below us, and she was a year younger and would do whatever I asked. She limped me through another couple weeks of that paper route, until the Sunday morning when neither of us was into it.
Then as now, I do try. I’m not a quitter. But when a situation reaches absurdity, I’m just done. Then I respond in epic ways.
In this case, I hope it falls short of the legal definition of arson.
I sent Bridgette to her apartment to bring me the lighter her brother had used earlier that week to show me how to make an Aquanet torch.
I dragged the papers into the breezeway between our apartment house and the next-door neighbors, the Scotts.
It was not discreet, those 43 editions of the York Sunday News, set ablaze. Sheets of ignited coupons were soaring through the air like flaming ash birds and landing all over the backyard.
I was satisfied, though, and we went back inside to sleep. But I could have no peace because people kept calling to complain.
They wanted their coupons.
When Mom asked why they’d be calling when I had already delivered their papers, I said something like, "Oh, Mom, who am I to say why people do the things they do in this world?"
She trusted me, so that might've worked—if I hadn’t caught the side of our building on fire.
The Scotts were concerned about the flames outside their window and called our landlord. Our landlord, my mom later explained in a not-calm voice, was the fire chief of Dallastown.
I don't know why he didn't evict us, but I feel like I won the long game on this one.
About 15 years after torching my papers, I started my career as a reporter at the York Dispatch.
That might not have happened without free, early access to newspapers.
Christina would like to dedicate this story to her mom, Robin, “who didn’t raise a quitter.”
See more stories like this live in person at Lancaster Story Slam the fourth Tuesday of each month at Zoetropolis. In York, Story Slam takes place third Tuesdays at Holy Hound Taproom. Visit lancasterstoryslam.com or yorkstoryslam.com for more info.
