An Excerpt From BROKEN HEARTS AND BAYSIDE: A YOUNG ADULT NOVEL

Chapter 1

She road into town on her motorcycle. New school, new kids, new pressures. Tori Scott was a loner, used to packing up shop and moving around the country. By now all these places she once called home looked the same. This type of lifestyle didn’t lend itself well to making friends, let alone finding teenage love. On her first day of class, Tori met a boy who saw through her tough guy strut, her devil may care attitude, even the black leather jacket that she wore like a protective shell around her vulnerable heart. This boy was different from all the rest. This boy was special. From the moment they locked eyes she could see their future: sharing a mod in a college with their other high school friends, while gaining guidance from a former pro athlete, probably one who played for the San Francisco 49ers. After college she saw a wedding, somewhere tropical like Hawaii, where all their friends would be united one last time to celebrate their blessed union. In the halls of her new high school, Tori was sure, no positive, that she had met her soul mate. The boy she’d spend the rest of her life with. The boy noticed her staring at him. He lowered his giant cell phone and extended his hand. “Hey you must be new. I’m Zack Morris, welcome to Bayside.”

Saved By The Bell was no stranger to bending the rules of metaphysics. One day the show was set in Indianapolis, Indiana, the next it was suddenly in the fictional Palisades, California, completely Miss Bliss-less. Even our rascally protagonist, Zack Morris, who could barely get to school on time, had the omnipotent demigod-like abilities to bend time and space, crashing through the fourth wall to address us personally. Though most of the characters benefited from the lax reality that surrounded Bayside, one suffered a fate even worse than a cheaply orchestrated sweeps-week death: the complete and utter removal of her existence from the show’s continuity. That character was Tori Scott.

During the final half of their senior year, show staples Kelly Kapowski and Jessie Spano mysteriously disappeared (in my mind a semester abroad in Paris where they experimented with Parisian cuisine, fine wines and each other). Enter Tori Scott, bad ass biker babe and newly christened romantic foil to Zack Morris. Unlike previous girlfriends Kelly, and dare I say it, Stacey Carosi, Morris found a real challenge in Tori. She was a mystery: beautiful yet coarse, her testosterone rivaling both Zack’s and Slater’s combined. Tori was a rebel but refused to drink, a self proclaimed tomboy mechanic, standoffish in nature but secretly wanting love. She was complex, layered (possibly a lesbian) and in my opinion the one Zack should have ended up with. Unfortunately for Tori, Kelly and Jessie returned just in time to graduate, throw their caps into the air in a freeze frame and later return for spinoffs and TV movies. Tori was then wiped from existence, never to be mentioned again. This was nicknamed the Tori Paradox, as coined by Chuck Klosterman in his book, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa-Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. This paradox is a popular debate amongst bored/stoned college students and continues to baffle TV historians to this day. I for one have always wondered, what really happened to Tori?

Chapter 32

Tori’s motorcycle cruised down the Pacific Coast Highway. It was only a few miles now until she would reach Cal-U.  It had been one year since Tori had last seen Zack Morris in the once bright halls of Bayside High School, and what a year it had been. First, the positive pregnancy test, then having to drop out right before graduation, finally, the decision to keep the baby, a decision that would destroy her dreams of an engineering degree. As Tori sped down the PCH, she thought back to the day she almost told Zack about the baby. She had seen him enter the Max and built up just enough courage to finally reveal to him the truth about her sudden disappearance. She took a deep breath, walked through the doors only to find him in the arms of his newly returned ex, Kelly Kapowski. Tori felt herself get sick as she watched the two of them engage in a loving embrace, quickly fleeing before they ever noticed her presence, or the bump that was just starting to show.

“No. Don’t think about that,” she said to herself, as she crossed through the college gates. “This time it’s going to be different.” It was true, she had gotten word that Kelly had been accepted at a different school and the two had parted ways. Tori parked her bike in front of the dorm, the child strapped to her in a black leather baby bjorn. She could make out people moving about inside the windows. She peered in to get a better look. There was Zack, the father of her child, the only man she would ever love, helping Kelly Kapowski unpack! It had happened again, Kelly had transferred, now living the life Tori always pictured for herself. Tori got on her bike, she gave Zack one last teary glance as she tore off into the sunset never to be seen again.