Week 3 Story: Where It All Started

Taylor Randel. I don't completely know what it is about that name, but all the boys come running when she's around. As head cheerleader, I guess it makes sense that all the boys want to date her. From an outsider's perspective, it seems to be all the football coaches can do to keep their players focused on the task at hand at practice and not on Taylor jumping and flipping around in her short cheer skirt. Taylor, however, never seemed interested in any of them.

The most popular, well liked girl in the school, Taylor, 

was a member of the cheer squad. Source: Pixabay

Then one day, much to everyone's surprise, Taylor actually seemed to be flirting with Carter James. Carter, of course, was the star quarterback of the team and never had problems getting a girls attention, but no one was ever able to get Taylor's attention. This was something completely new and foreign to everyone at the high school. It was such a big deal when the two started dating that I remember hearing the head coach of the football team give a big spiel about how this was not something that he was going to allow to interfere with his football team's success. They were, after all, the reigning state champs of Georgia. All of the boys on the team shouted in agreement that they were going to still have each others backs and come back once again to dominate every team they were scheduled to play that season.

And it worked, at least for a while. Then, almost as if something changed immediately overnight, there seemed to be a growing divide between a large majority of the team members. They seemed to bicker and quarrel more than they practiced efficiently. Everyone noticed and couldn’t help but assume that it was because of some kind of budding jealousy among the team members. Was Carter bragging about landing the best girlfriend in school? Were the others refusing to work with him out of pure spite? No one knew what exactly was going on, but they did know that they needed to figure it out because in small town Georgia, there was going to be a riot if the school didn’t bring home the championship in football again.

Author's Note

For my story this week, I chose to retell the opening section of Homer's The Iliad, entitled "How the War with Troy Began." This first segment of the classical story in mythology was used to set the stage for things to come through countless acts of battle and searches for revenge. In my rewrite, I chose to set it in a modern high school setting because I felt that there were already hints of drama coming through so I figured, what better setting for something like that than a high school? I then ran with the idea and changed the gods and goddesses in the original to popular students in the high school and scaled everything to modern day proportions, creating my own rendition of this well known classic story.

Bibliography

"How the War with Troy Began" from The Iliad by Homer