Prologue - An American Flavour

Have you ever met someone and just immediately felt connected to them? Like you knew them before you even met them? I mean, like there were instantaneous sparks and you knew, just knew, without saying a word that they were the one for you?
It happened to me when I was a senior, or in Grade 12 as Canadians like to say. But before I tell you all about that, I suppose I should tell you about who I am, where I am come from, and what I was doing in Minnesota at a boarding school.
I like calls me Kally. My Mom was stoned when she named me, I swear, but it seems to have worked out in a weird kind of way. Kallista is Greek for most beautiful and Ashira is Hebrew for rich. Even people who don’t like admit that I am beautiful and I am most definitely rich, thanks in large part to my paternal Grandparents and a trust fund they’ve set up for me.
I grew up with my Mom, who put herself through University and was in Law School when I was born. She successfully finished her law degree and got a great job with a firm in Boston. So we moved from where we’d been living in Connecticut to Massachusetts.
Where was my Dad in all this? Well the truth is, we didn’t know. He’d bailed when Mom got pregnant and, since his family was wealthy, Mom couldn’t find him. I suppose she could have bothered looking up my Grandparents, but Mom believed that since my Dad had decided to bail on her… on us, that no one in his family deserved the opportunity to get to know me.
Life was great though… I mean I thought it was great, just Mom and me. She worked hard, but she loved me too, and I knew it. It wasn’t until Mom met Washington Will (as I took to calling him) that things really started changing.
First, Mom started spending less and less time at home with me. I spent more and more time with the housekeeper, until Verry finally quit, saying her job was to keep house and make meals, not watch me all the time.
See Mom had always been busy. Her career was number one in her life, but I ran a close second, and since that was all I’d ever known, it really didn’t bother me that much. Like most little kids, I liked things the way they were, and Washington Will was the first guy that Mom had dated seriously that I could remember. And I didn’t like him.
Will thought that Mom was wasting her talents in Boston… that she had the talent and the ability to run for office. Will worked for some Senator or Congressman or something in Washington and he thought that Mom could be a judge someday… or even more.
It fed Mom’s ego. She loved to listen to his plans for her future, and in short order, his plans became hers. Unfortunately, Washington Will’s plans didn’t include the angry 11 year old girl who hated him with a passion.
Then, Washington Will asked my Mom to marry him, and they got married in this huge, social wedding, and somehow during this my paternal Grandparents finally got wind that they had a grandchild. Apparently (and this doesn’t really surprise me considering how my Dad is) they didn’t even know that the reason their son had abandoned the United-States was because his girlfriend was pregnant. Personally, I always believe that Washington Will was behind contacting my grandparents, but I couldn’t say for sure.
I went and spent Christmas break with the Grandparents I didn’t even know I had, while Mom and Will went on a honeymoon to Ottawa, Canada for some political conference or something (wildly romantic I know). Actually, my Grandparents were okay. They were an old money New York City family and we spent Christmas in the City.
My Dad however, was still AWAL, and kind of always is. Grandmama and Grandpapa still see me on a regular basis, but I’ve yet to meet my Dad face to face. He’s always off somewhere doing something that doesn’t involve a child. Usually he’s Europe. He likes Monaco a lot I hear.
After Christmas break, I became a “problem” for Washington Will and my Mom to solve again. Will wanted Mom to move to Washington to further her career, but Mom knew that I wanted to stay where I was. I wanted to stay at the school I was at, with the friends I had in Boston, because I’d been so young when we moved from Connecticut that Boston was all I remembered.
That didn’t work for Will though, and the next thing you know, my Mom is looking into boarding schools. Initially, my paternal AND maternal Grandparents freaked out at the idea of me being sent away to school. Until Will graciously told my paternal Grandparents (who admittedly had the edge in the money department) that they could chose the school.
Now all of that sounded good in theory. I was even looking forward to it, since I thought that Grandmama would insist on a school somewhere on the East Coast, being a snooty WASP and all (that’s a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant for those of you who don’t know). But then my Grandmama learned that I hovered around genius and she wanted me to attend a school with an excellent arts program, and she thought that a religious school wouldn’t hurt me either, especially since Mom wasn’t really religious.
Personally, I wanted a school with a good sports program, and one that was preferably not too far away. In a sense, we compromised. Grandmama got a school with an excellent arts program (she didn’t want me to be bookish and unaccomplished), that was founded by an Episcopalian minister and I got a school with a great sports program.
The problem was, Shattuck St. Mary’s is in Minnesota. The other problem? Tuition for boarding is 30,000$ a year. More when Will told me he wanted me to spend my summers there as well. Will did not want to pay for it and he didn’t want Mom to pay for it either (probably because it would impact what they had to live on).
Of course, Dad’s parents stepped up and paid (considering that there were 11 years in which their son hadn’t paid any kind of child support it was probably the right thing to do). But that made me hate Washington Willy even more then I already did. I may have only been 11 years old, but if he wanted to get rid of me (and he clearly did) he could at least have paid for it himself.
Either way, when I met him, I’d been at Shattuck St. Mary’s (a boarding school in Minnesota for the rich and intelligent – no future Paris Hilton’s or Nicole Ritchie’s here) since the middle of the 6th Grade. I played on the soccer team, play the harp (Grandmama’s idea of course) and the piano, and had a GPA of 3.8.
In spite of all that though, I hadn’t really been happy at Shattuck’s. I’d spent most of my time there trying to get kicked out. I threw wild dorm parties… especially in the summer. I got drunk and high and stoned and disobeyed authority at every possible turn. But for some reason (probably Grandmama and Grandpapa’s generous “donations”), they never kicked me out.
I did a lot of other things to though. I had sex in the dorms with the hockey players, and earned a reputation as a puck, particularly since a guy on the Senior Varsity Team took my virginity in the dorms when I was in the 8th Grade (I was only just 13, it was New Year’s Eve).
This seems pretty wild to most people, but the fact of the matter was, I wasn’t happy. I didn’t like myself and I didn’t like my life, money or no. I was hurting. As a result of all that, I’d been around the block a few times to say the least when Sidney showed up at Shattuck’s.
I knew it the second that I saw him, Sidney was him. He was that guy. He was the one my heart and soul connected with on sight. The guy I felt like I’d known my entire life without speaking to him once. He was, well, he was special and I knew it on sight.
There were a few problems with that though. See Sidney Crosby was a Canadian, he was a sophomore (in Grade 10), and he was a phenom. He was an incredible hockey player. He’d been sent here since he was just too good for the team and the league in which he was playing.And he was coming to a whole different world. Sidney (I quickly gathered) was from an upper middle class family in Nova Scotia, Canada. In the United-States, the East Coast is where all of the old money is from. In Canada, there is NO money on the East Coast. True, he was coming to the Mid-West, but the fact remained, he was coming to a school full of spoiled rich brats (myself included).
You knew immediately that he was a nice guy though. Talented and smart too, but he wasn’t like some of the other guys at Shattuck’s. He was actually a nice guy. And I knew it the minute I saw him, I knew that he was a nice guy and I knew that more then anything, I wanted to get to know him. I knew that I wanted to be with him… I wanted to be HIS.
To top it off, he wasn’t like the other hockey players… the guys who ignored me by day and tried to get in my pants by night. He was actually nice to me. He actually spoke to me during the day at school, instead of ignoring me the way most of the guys at school did.
See when you’re considered a slut, only other sluts will talk to you during the day. At least typically. Guys ignore you during the day and then at night, they come hang out and try to get in your pants when the "good” girls aren’t around.
It’s hypocritical and cruel, but that was my life at Shattuck’s. That was my world. That is, until I met him. Until my eyes met those of a boy named Sidney Crosby came to Shattuck St. Mary’s and my life changed forever.