By: Dex Keizers
“I will myself to talk, to beg him not to tell anyone, but I can’t. So my eyes say what my mouth can’t.
Please.
There is understanding on his face and he loosens his grip. He points to his wrist and I see the faint outlines of faded scars. I gasp and look up to him with tears in my eyes. This boy, the boy I wanted to disappear, knows my pain.”
“Do You See Me Now?”
The book “Do you see me now?” written by Abby Fortune, a CGHS junior, is the story about a teenage girl named Dakota Jackson. The book is a first-person perspective on Dakota’s life and how she deals with her problems.
“Dakota lost everything when she was 14,” Fortune said. “She is now 16, and her life is beginning to change. While carrying the burden of two dark secrets, she struggles to live as normal as a life as possible. One day, she meets the person that will help her become herself again. James. She discovers that he shares one of her secrets, and together they face the terror that is always behind her.”
Fortune wrote the book because of her love for reading. She has always had a passion for writing and decided to start writing this book in the eighth-grade.
“I have personal experience with depression and problems that can come out of it, so I used that as inspiration,” Fortune said. “Mental illness is often overlooked in society and not taken seriously, so I wanted to write something that actually shows how it works and how it can eat away at a person, and I feel that since I have experience with it and know how it feels that my book is more accurate in how depression actually is and that it can be deadly to whoever has it.”
Despite Fortune’s decision to go to college and major in English and minor in teaching, she plans to continue her progress and aspirations as a writer.
“I have a second book already written that is the same story but from a different point of view,” Fortune said. “I also plan to write a small novella that contains a scene in which we don’t really know what happens because Dakota wasn’t there, only James was. So that will be my third to write, and I plan on writing more after that and I have a notebook full of ideas.”
Fortune’s book can be purchased online as an eBook for $5.99 at http://www.amazon.com/Do-You-See-Me-Now-ebook/dp/B01B2A67KI/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1453822437&sr=1-1&keywords=do+you+see+me+now#productDescription_secondary_view_div_1455726582762.
