There is this one Christmas Eve memory that I have that is engraved into my mind and I think about it every year. We were at Grandma Carol and Grandpa Jack’s house back when we lived in NW Indiana. I would say I was in 6th grade at the time and I was sitting in their front living room where the tree was in one of their fancy chairs. Curled up with Nickelback streaming through my headphones and reading one of my favorite books in the Fearless series by Francine Pascal. In the book, Mary and Gaia were running around the balloons that were half inflated and sliding down them. They were the balloons for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade because they lived in New York and teenagers getting away with late-night teenage stuff. This was during the time where she was wanting to have sex with Sam or Ed, it was a weird situation. Ed was her best guy friend and Sam, the supermodel type who her frenemy Heather was not okay with.

Gaia Moore was exactly who I wanted to be growing up through my youth and so I started to turn into her more and more. I was always a tomboy, but still pretty. I just never saw it. So was she. She was smart and advanced in school but didn’t show it, just slumped through it. She got to come and go as she pleased because she lived with her Uncle in a brownstone and he was always working. She didn’t have many friends but it wasn’t an issue. Her ability was obvious that she was “Fearless”, as the series suggests. Born without the “fear gene.” Is that even a thing? Haha… Anything was possible in my mind at the time. Part of me wonders if I turned off my fears because a year later we moved to Florida and nothing mattered anymore. I truly became her.

It was a strange time in my life. I never really sat and realized how much those books influenced me. I was still reading them through High School. Every book report would be on the next one… I mean, there were 36 of them and then they tried to make a spinoff book series of her as an FBI agent like her father Tom was. They only made it through 4 books. Unfortunately, I can see why. You don’t fix what ain’t broken in the first place. If I could obtain all those books again, I would be in Heaven. They were all left at the hell house and it is very upsetting. Those books were there for me through my tough and weird teenage years, it’s literally what I turned to so I could “get away” for a while.

When I think of that memory, my mind floods and it reminds me of a simpler (or not so) life. Those characters were my friends for so long. I never felt like I quite fit in. Still don’t. This world isn’t for me and I know that now. It was so soothing, snow falling, and in the world of Gaia Moore…