High School Students Write To Me About Zellers

A few weeks ago I wrote something for the Random House magazine Hazlitt in which I created a fictional website called RememberZellers. It was in this forum where I imagined a number of posts that people might have left about the famous Canadian discount chain. As fate would have it, a high school teacher in Toronto came across the piece and decided to use it as the starting point for a writing exercise for her grade eleven English students. Each pupil was to write a short paragraph either based on their experiences at Zellers or to create a fictional one, and then send it off to me.

These are some of the student’s writings:

A.P. 16 years old

Dear Mister Murray:

You must really like Zellers to have started up that website. Man, I don’t know if there’s anything I like as much as you like Zellers. I think you should just get over Zellers. It’s gone. Get a life, dude. Shop online or something.

This is my paragraph:

My name is Michael Murray and I’m really old and I love Zellers.  All I have in my life is Zellers. I eat there every day and I pretend that I’m looking to buy clothes just so I can be around people. Sometimes I go into the change room to imagine all the girls who have been in their underwear there.

J.C. 17 years old

Dear Mister Murray:

We’re getting extra credit for this so please let Mrs. M know that I did this, okay?

This is my paragraph:

My mom made me go to Zellers to pick up a tarp. She wanted the tarp to wrap my father’s body in. She killed him with several forks. He was a bad man, my dad. He used to beat her and me and my little sister Peggy, but one day my mother could take it no longer and she killed him with the forks until he was dead, and that’s how I ended up in Zellers!

A.A. 16 years old

Dear Mister Murray:

Please tell teacher that I completed the project. 🙂

This is my paragraph:

I think Zellers sounds like a candy that grandparents would give out at Halloween. It sounds like something that would taste old and stale, the sort of candy you’d give to your kid sister because you didn’t want it.

F.S. 18 years old

Dear Mister Murray:

Here is my completed assignment, please tell my teacher that I promptly completed the assignment.

This is my paragraph:

I’m not a Muslim, but sometimes I like to wear a Burqa just to see how the world reacts to me. People judge you and think you’re a terrorist even though you’re not. Whenever I went into Zellers people were suspicious of me because of my Burqa. They thought I was dishonest because they couldn’t see my face, but I could see theirs and I could tell what they were thinking. One day a security guard at Zellers accused me of shoplifting and frisked me to make sure I hadn’t taken anything. I didn’t believe him and acted outraged, but the truth was that I was turned on when he put his hands on me, when he touched me. I went back to Zellers every week after that hoping he would do it again, and he did, each time. I will miss Zellers like hell when it goes.