Word Count: 848

There weren’t many physical activities Paris was good at outside of dancing.

He was far too short to play basketball successfully, and he’d never quite learned how to appropriately dribble a ball. Football was much too barbaric, a mini war in and of itself, with big, beefy players who looked as if they could crush him between the palms of their hands. Hockey wasn’t any better—the fact that there was very often blood on the ice was a complete turn off—and baseball had just as much potential for hazard, what with the balls zooming toward the plate at upwards of ninety miles an hour. Soccer was the only one out of what he considered to be the five most popular sports that Paris thought looked relatively harmless, but he’d never understood the rules well enough to play.

But dancing he could do. He thought himself a sensational dancer—the next Baryshnikov. No, no, even better. The next Nijinsky. Only without the schizophrenia. He had enough going on in his life already without having to deal with that. But he thought he could definitely go places if he wanted to, and have signed posters of himself hanging on the walls of every aspiring danseurs bedroom, and perhaps even have a movie made about himself years down the road, when his career had peaked and he settled into directing and choreographing young men and women with dreams of becoming just like him. The lead actor would naturally be strikingly gorgeous, and the movie itself would be full of all sorts of sordid scandals and tabloid fodder, which would require the release of a memoir to either corroborate or dispel.

The movie would, however, leave out some key facts about his life, namely that with the aid of a magical pen and the invocation of some equally magical words, he transformed into Sailor Ganymede to rid the city of evildoers, and protect the Earth and space or whatever else he was supposed to be doing with his newfound power, getting himself into situations that could easily squash his fame before he even had the chance to achieve it. This particular fact would be left out for one of two reasons—1, because it was far too sensational to believe, and he would rather the movie contain relationship drama with a handsome director and fantastic song and dance numbers instead of battles with ice princesses and hideous monsters and long lost princes and vengeful queens; and 2, because he had absolutely no intention of telling anyone. Ever. Even his aforementioned memoir wouldn’t mention it, as he fully intended to keep it a secret until the moment he died, at which point he might reveal it to those tearful individuals who gathered around his deathbed, but who would no doubt explain it away as the mad ramblings of a senile old man.

Provided he lived that long, which he planned to, though who could say what tragedies would befall him before then?

The other fact that this hypothetical movie would fail to note due to the complete inanity of it would be that at seventeen years of age, Paris LeFay finally found another sport that he fancied himself quite good at: running.

He was a wonderful runner, and even quite dedicated, or at least he thought so, considering he’d been waking up at the crack of dawn each morning for the last week for a spirited jog around the neighborhood—which the movie would make sure looked like an uninhabitable slum in order to highlight the great steps he’d taken by leaving it; everyone loved a good rags to riches story—going around and around the same area until his legs burned and wobbled and he could hardly breathe. It wasn’t exactly healthy, he supposed, to go to that extreme, but he was proud of it nonetheless. After all, it was a better use of his time than the things he got up to at night. Not the Senshi business—he figured there was some good in that when it came to keeping normal people safe—but the clubbing and the drinking and the partying.

He was sure that if he presented two options to an authority figure—one being drinking until he blacked out, and two being running until he dropped—said authority figure would chose option number two.

And so he ran. He ran until sweat dripped down his face, and his vision went fuzzy with fatigue, and his lungs gasped for air, and his entire body felt as if it would collapse with another step. He ran as if his very life depended on it, and when he was done he limped through the squeaky gate in front of his father’s shabby house, and he flung himself onto the cool grass—just as he had the very first day he’d tied up his laces and jogged out the door—and he stared up at the blue sky and the bright sun and the puffy white clouds, and he reminded himself over and over again that he was alive.