Struck by Lightning

Book 0: The Land of Stories

by Chris Colfer

Genres: YA Social Themes

Synopsis

Struck By Lightning: The Carson Phillips Journal follows the story of outcast high school senior Carson Phillips who blackmails the most popular students in his school into contributing to his literary journal to bolster his college application; his goal in life is to get into Northwestern and eventually become the editor of The New Yorker.

At once laugh-out-loud funny, deliciously dark, and remarkably smart, Struck by Lightning unearths the dirt that lies just below the surface of high school.

The film Stuck by Lightning features Colfer's own original screenplay. Colfer also stars in the film alongside Allison Janney, Christina Hendricks, Dermot Mulroney, Sarah Hyland, and Polly Bergen.

A Hachette Audio production.

Release date: November 5, 2013

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 256

Sample

Dear Journal,

One more school year with these shitheads and I’ll be free. It’s taken almost two decades of careful planning, but I’m proud to say my overdue departure from the town of Clover is only days away. Three hundred and forty-five days away, to be exact, but who’s counting?

A year from now I’ll be sitting in my dorm room at Northwestern University taking notes from some overpriced textbook about “the history of…,” you know, something historical. I’ll be living off Top Ramen and gallons of Red Bull. I’ll barely be getting five hours of sleep a night, and that’s only when I don’t have to yell at my roommate to turn down his porn.

I know it doesn’t sound like much to look forward to, but for this college-bound kid, it’s paradise! All the suffering, now and later, is for a much bigger picture.

It’s not much of a secret since I tell anyone who will listen (mostly to get them to stop talking to me), but one day I hope to become the youngest freelance journalist to be published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Boston Globe, eventually making my way to editor of the New Yorker.

Yes, I know that was a lot of information, so take a minute if you need one. If it sounds overwhelming to you, just think about how I feel living up to my future self every day. It’s exhausting!

In a decade, if all goes according to plan, things will be much better for me. I can see it now: I’ll be sitting in my New York City apartment applying final touches to my weekly New York Times column. I’ll be living off Thai food and bottles of the finest red wine. I’ll be sleeping ten hours a night, even when I have to yell at my neighbor to turn down his porn.

Granted, I still have a year to go in high school, and senior year at that. And I do realize I haven’t actually been “accepted” to Northwestern yet, but those are just minor technicalities. Since we’re on the subject, I should also mention that I’m well aware Northwestern doesn’t send out early acceptance letters until December 15, but, fearing that I may apply somewhere else, I’m sure they’ve made an exception for me. I’m positive my acceptance letter is on its way from the admissions office and will soon be in my eager hands as I write this…right?

I wouldn’t be surprised if I was the first applicant. I stayed up half the night to submit my application as soon as the admissions website opened at 6 a.m. Chicago time on the first day. Now it’s just a waiting game…and waiting has never been my forte.

I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t accept me. When they read my transcripts they’ll see I’m a very liberal-minded young man in a very obstinate world begging to be rescued by means of education: a diamond in a pile of cow shit, if you will.

That and the fact that I’m one-sixteenth Native American and one-thirty-second African American (okay, that part I can’t actually prove) should make me an admissions jackpot!

Even if that doesn’t work, my high school career should speak for itself. I’ve kept my grade point average at an impressive 4.2 since freshman year. I’ve single-handedly edited the Clover High Chronicle since sophomore year, and I’ve managed to keep the Writers’ Club alive after school despite its apparent death wish.

Not bad for a kid in a town where the most common intellectual question is, Will he actually eat the green eggs and ham?

I’m kidding (sort of). Look, I don’t mean to constantly harp on my hometown. I suppose Clover has some good qualities too…I just can’t think of any off the top of my head.

Clover is a place where the pockets are small but the minds are even smaller. It’s tiny and conservative, and most of the people are really set on living and dying here. Personally, I’ve never been able to hop on the bandwagon and have been publicly chastised because of it. Having aspirations to leave makes me the black sheep of the community.

I’m sorry; I just can’t muster up pride for a town whose most cosmopolitan area is the Taco Bell parking lot on a Saturday night. And although I’ve never lived anywhere else, I’m pretty sure normal Sweet Sixteens don’t consist of group cow-tipping.

When they built the first movie theater here, people lost their damn minds. I was only three, but I still remember people crying and cartwheeling in the streets. The line to see You’ve Got Mail circled the town.

I pray we never get an airport—who knows what kind of cult-sacrificial suicides might occur?

Yeah, I’m a little bitter because I’m one of those kids: bottom of the food chain, constantly teased, despised, an annoyance to everyone around them, most likely to find a pile of flaming manure on the roof of their car (oh yeah, it happened), but what prevents my life from being a sad after-school special is I don’t give a shiiiit. I can’t reiterate enough, this town is full of morons!

Whenever my pen pals from the online Northwestern chat rooms and forums ask me, “Where is Clover?” I’m usually forced to say, “It’s where The Grapes of Wrath ended up.” And that’s putting it nicely.

Let’s be honest: Go to the corner of Nothing and Nowhere, make a left, and you’ll find Clover. It’s one of those cities you pass along the side of a freeway, home to barely ten thousand citizens, that makes you ask yourself, “Who the fuck would live there?” Well, if you’ve recently asked yourself this in a car, the answer is, This fucker. Hi, I’m Carson Phillips, if I haven’t introduced myself formally.

I read once that all great writers have issues with their hometowns; guess I’m no exception. You can’t let your origins bring you down, though. You don’t get to pick where you’re from, but you always have control of where you’re going. (That’s a good quote; I’ll have to remember to say that if I’m ever receiving an honorary doctorate one day.)

But this all just fuels my fire even more. Ever since I was eight years old and got asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and replied, “The editor of the New Yorker,” the looks I’d receive after the declaration—as if I had said “dragon slayer” or “transvestite golfer”—always pushed me a little closer to a metaphoric exit sign.

Perhaps that’s why my issues with Clover started at such a young age. I was constantly shot down by nitwits who couldn’t think outside the box—especially in elementary school, aka the first place they try to brainwash you in a small town.

I remember my first-grade teacher was giving a lesson on subtraction.

“When one thing takes another away, what do we call that?” she asked my class.

“Homicide!” I called out, so proud of myself. I wasn’t technically wrong, but the look she gave me for the following three minutes made it appear that way.

The same year we had Founding Fathers’ Day, and I remember it like it was yesterday. I walked to the front of the classroom, clutching the report I had spent hours on, and told the class everything I had learned.

“Most of the founding fathers were closeted homosexuals and slave owners,” I said. Needless to say, I wasn’t allowed to finish the report.

That day after school was the first day my parents were called in for a “meeting.” It was the beginning of the complex relationship I have with the public education system.

“He’s eccentric, so what?” my mom told the teacher.

“Mrs. Phillips, your six-year-old son told his class the presidents who founded this nation were homosexual slave owners,” the teacher said. “I’d say that’s more than eccentric behavior.”

“That might have been my fault,” my dad said. “He asked me for a funny fact about the founding fathers, so I gave him one.”

“He was asking for a fun fact, you dipshit!” Mom scolded him. “I told him to ask you! No wonder he’s having trouble in school—his father is a moron!”

“Actually, Mrs. Phillips,” the teacher said, “on the first day of school he introduced himself and told the class you had told him he was named Carson because Johnny Carson was on television while he was…conceived.”

To this date, I’ve never seen my mother gulp so hard.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, I take responsibility for that one.”

That was the last time my parents were seen together in public. As you may have guessed, I’m one of those cynical kids from a broken home, too.

Until I was ten and saw a friend’s parents interact, I never realized that people got married because they wanted to, because they loved each other. I had always thought it was more like jury duty: You got an envelope in the mail telling you when, where, and who you were required to reproduce with.

There was about as much love between Neal and Sheryl Phillips as there was between the squid and the whale. At least they had an ocean to share and not a three-bedroom, two-bathroom suburban home.

I’m pretty sure their wedding vows went something like this:

“Neal and Sheryl, do you take each other as your awfully selected spouse; to reprimand and scold from this day forward; for better but mostly worse, in counseling and in therapy, in anger and in frustration, to hate and then resent; from this day forward until death that you cause?”

Maybe at one point they loved each other, or thought they loved each other. But once you reach a certain age in Clover all that’s left to do is get married and have kids. It may not have been the best idea, but it was what was expected of them, and they were victims of the pressure.

My mom was definitely in it for the long haul, always trying to make things work between them. Their marriage was a constant pattern: My dad was unhappy, my mom tried to fix it, my dad was still unhappy, my mom resented trying to fix it, there would be a massive argument, and the cycle would repeat.

Unfortunately my dad didn’t want it to work; he had wanted out as soon as he got in.

At one point my mother quit her job as a receptionist at a doctor’s office because my dad was, and I quote, “tired of picking Carson up from that fucking school.” Not that his job as a real estate agent kept him working late; he just tried avoiding as much fatherly responsibility as a priest in a whorehouse. (I’m sorry, super proud of myself for that reference.)

Sometimes I swear I can still hear them yelling in the kitchen. Whether it was over a missing fifty bucks in their checking account or just a dish left in the sink, from nine to ten o’clock every night they were sure to be arguing. At least something was consistent in my childhood.

Our next-door neighbors used to watch from over the fence every night. I tried selling them popcorn one time but they didn’t go for it.

Our Titanic of a family sank deeper and deeper as time went on. But in a sick way, I’m almost glad it did. In my desperate attempt to escape it, I was led to the greatest discovery ever: words. I was fascinated by them. There were so many! I could tell a story, I could write about my day, I could write about the day I wished I had had instead.…It was . . .