I am six years old. I am leaving my last day of class. I am in kindergarten. I am leaving kindergarten. I am becoming older, but I don’t want to. Walking down the hallway at Brown’s Point Elementary near the first grade wing of the school I see my friend Nate walking in his class line opposite mine. We always leave school in our class lines and separate once we get out to the parking lot. I look at Nate’s first grade class and how cool and tall they look and wonder how tall I will be when I’m a first grader. I take the blue school bus home most days. The bus isn’t actually blue but has a laminated paper with the word BLUE on it in blue print. I always wanted to take the orange bus home because that was my favorite color but that would take me up the hill towards Federal Way and the Aquatic center where I took swimming lessons. So I took the Blue School bus with my friend Matt. He lives several houses down from mine in Brown’s Point, WA. Matt is my best friend and, in the sport of being six, I often tell him fables (lies) about my life before coming to kindergarten, somehow convince that I anyone that the five years of my life prior to kindergarten are the most eventful years anyone has ever experienced.

I was born in Hawaii and lived there until I was four years old. I use this to tell all the kids in my class (mostly Matt) that I am interesting and that they should be my friends. I tell them that I am thousands of years old and am a pirate who washed up on the shore of Brown’s Point. I use a fake shipwreck sculpture that a house down the road from my parent’s house has in their front yard to solidify my story. To everybody I meet, that boat is what I took to get to Washington in August of 1998. To me at times, that boat is what I took to get to Washington in August of 1998.

I get off of the school bus at the bus stop in front of my house and walk with Matt up to the front door. He stays for dinner but only eats part of the bun of his hamburger and barely touches his corn. We play Bomberman 2 on the Super Nintendo that my father had hooked up in my room earlier that year. We jump up and down in frantic spurts, unaware of how to play this video game but loving it all the same. Matt walks down the street to his house and I eat his leftover hamburger (without the top bun with a bit mark in it of course).

My mom asks me how my last day of school was. I enjoyed it even though the other kid named Matt in my class kicked the teacher for some unknown reason and had to go to the principal’s office. I tell my mom that I don’t want to be in first grade in the fall and that I would rather stay in Ms. Nelson’s kindergarten class forever. I tell her that I want to be six years old forever. I tell her that I want to be a 3000-year-old pirate from Hawaii that sailed here on the boat at that house by the park. I cry and my mother is quiet. She tells me of a time when I was two, when she was putting away laundry and watching the old black and white version of the movie titanic on silent. She tells me of how I cry out when the men on the titanic begin to jump into the water. I yell, “Don’t jump in the water! It’s too cold! The daddies are jumping in the water and it’s too cold!”

My mother tells me about how she believes that I might have been one of those men on the titanic before I was born as Austin. At the start of first grade, I begin to tell my friends that before I was Austin, I was a 3000-year-old pirate who sailed around the Pacific Ocean, eventually landing in Brown’s Point and founding the town. The kids that I tell my story to are not like Matt. They don’t play games like Bomberman 2 or like The Land Before Time (The Land Before Time is a great film and I cannot believe that any child did not love it as much as I did it is ridiculous). The kids that I tell my story to don’t know how to react so they laugh. Not at me I think but at my story, as though I was telling a funny joke. For the rest of first grade I pretend to be the class clown. For the rest of first grade the kids keep telling me to stop making sound effect noises and star wars jokes.