~from Ami
"Real Friendship" is the name of the first book I wrote when I was nine years old. My creative writing buddy, Stacy Pershall, co-wrote it with me during slow times in Mrs. Silva's class. It's a grade-school-length work about a girl named Allison who moves to a new school.

I finally unearthed the key to my hope chest and dug through the Baptist church camp brochures, playbills, stuffed animals, and diaries until I found the manuscript. It's handwritten and complete with illustrations. After Stacy and I finished it, I gave it to my dad to send to New York and awaited word. As you might have guessed, no word ever came. I found it in with the stuff my dad left behind when he moved out a couple years later.

"Real Friendship" is not so bad for a nine year-old writer. Allison is ugly and wears glasses. The kids at her new school hate her for her ugliness and she locks herself in the janitor's closet, drawing attention from the entire school. Her only hope is two girls named Leia and Kelly (Leia named for our current obsession with Star Wars, Kelly for the cool name I wished I'd been given at birth), who are gifted with fashion-know how and see true beauty behind those coke-bottle lenses of Allison's glasses. Stacy and I were banking on the novelty of two third-graders writing a book for grade-schoolers. Alas, if New York ever saw it, they did not share the opinion. Maybe the notebook paper turned them off.

I pulled it from my hope chest, smoothed it out and laid it alongside my real book, Next of Kin, and thought about my journey from third grade to where I am now. How it feels like my whole life I wanted to have a book published more than anything.

My publicist told me to be at Tulsa's KOTV Channel Six on Monday morning first thing. They want to talk to me about Next of Kin on the morning program. I said, "They think I'm a real writer?" She said, "Yep, you fooled them!" Since my bio and press kit inserts say ..."She penned her first book in third grade..." will they be asking me about it?

I've folded the entire manuscript twice, it fits snugly inside Next of Kin's front flap. The pages are so old they're soft. The illustrations, colored in eye-popping magic marker hues of green and red and blue, bleed through the paper. I see myself pulling it from the book, holding it up in front of the cameras while the morning hosts and I banter about the writing life. My third-grade self, taking a break from scribbling in a notebook on the outskirts of the playground, nods in approval.