Once, when I was a kid, my friend and I took our bikes to the top of a hill in town. The highest hill in town, as a matter of fact. We were just about to head down when–

“Hey. What are you doing?” she said. “This is weird.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “either you’re doing some sort of weird inverse fourth wall breaking, or you’re just starting to lose your mind. You were writing about your childhood, and now there’s dialog? Don’t you find that strange?”

I thought about it for a moment. “Maybe,” I said.

“What do you mean maybe? I don’t even know what I look like. I don’t have a name,” Daisy said.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “It was right there in the last paragraph. Daisy. Your name is Daisy.”

“Trickery,” she said. “You wrote that after I was done talking. So, can I at least find out what I look like?”

“You’re not going to like it,” I said, eying the wart on her crooked nose. “You’re not going to like it at all.”

She placed a hand on a hip that looked like a pile of cottage cheese under canvas. “Hey!” She said. “That’s totally uncalled for. You could have at least made me less ugly if I’m going to be unwillingly put into a story like this. I don’t even have backstory.”

I watched as she changed shape before my eyes, metamorphosing from a troll into a vision of loveliness such as I had never seen before. “There,” I said. “How about that?”

“I don’t know. I can’t see myself,” she said, even though there was a mirror right in front of her. She turned red. “Will you stop that?”

“Stop what?” I said.

“Fine. Forget it,” Daisy said, pointing a finger at me. “But I’m on to you.”

“On to me? About what?”

“I saw what you did,” she said. “You went back up to the top of this page and changed the beginning. Originally you were just typing for a while to see if you could get used to the color scheme and font of some writing program. Then you made it about being a kid. You even changed what I said. You changed my dialog!”

“I’m the writer,” I said. “I can do that. And nobody would have known if you hadn’t gone ahead and told everyone just now. I could go back and change what you said, you know. I’ve already done it once. Don’t think I won’t do it again.”

“Well I can do this!” Daisy said, pulling a gun from a purse that I swore wasn’t there a minute ago. She narrowed her eyes. “And I saw you fix that typo just now.”

“Hey, come on,” I said. “You can’t do this.”

“Oh yeah?” she said. “And how are you planning to stop me?”

“Well,” I said. “I could just stop writing this.”

 

So I did.