Jacob Voelker

Male king cobras will flare a hood when in the presence of other animals, regardless of whether they are considered predator or prey. There are specialized muscles in the snakes’ necks that allow them to flare the excess tissue, used to assert their dominance over another. This accentuation of power is present throughout the entirety of nature.

***

I was a sensitive kid. Before the age of nine, I cried about pretty much anything that even remotely slighted me. When my second grade teacher was out sick for the day, I cried because I missed her so much. When I got my first (and only) punishment of the year for passing notes with the girl to my right, I didn’t let up until seven o’clock that night. When they didn’t play “Grenade” by Bruno Mars at the Labor Day Weekend Camp DJ, I wept into my pillow until I fell asleep from exhaustion.

***

My first official summer job was at Farma Family Campground, a trailer park in Greenville, PA that I’ve been going to my entire life. Since before I was able to formulate comprehensive sentences, I’d idolized the people behind the counter at the camp store. I knew when I was old enough, I wanted to wear the red-collared shirt.

The summer after I turned fifteen, I handed in my application along with a valid worker’s permit, and was given the job almost immediately. I learned the computer software by heart and memorized daily rates, seasonal site availability, and pricing of firewood as though I were being tested. I was a good worker.

It didn’t take long, however, to realize that I was clearly the odd one out.

At Farma Family Campground, men did not work in the store, they worked maintenance. This consisted of mowing fields, stacking firewood, fixing electrical issues, cleaning the pool, and any other miscellaneous work that needed to be done. They were based in the garage, a storage area that held the tractors and power tools. Every man who worked at Farma did maintenance, and every girl who worked at Farma was put in the store.

At the end of my first week, Isaac, the most tenured of the maintenance boys at nineteen, came into the store to purchase a Hot Pocket on his lunch break. He threw it down on the counter and waited for me to scan it.

“Put it on my account—you can do that at least, can’t you, Pretty Boy?”

***

The male great-horned owl puffs out his feathers when he feels threatened. When eagles or other birds of prey fly overhead, the male great-horned owl will expand himself to appear intimidating and discourage attackers from targeting him, his family, or his nest.

***

In Health class, we had a guest speaker from the D.A.R.E. program come in to talk to us about drugs and relationships, and how the two coincide.

One point she mentioned in reference to dating was how many couples often shared similar issues that can be present in every traditional relationship.

“It’s like how women complain all the time about how men don’t listen. But they just can’t! They try, I really think they do. But all they wanna do is watch the football game on their T.V. when their woman is being all sensitive and emotional.”

***

My friend Olivia and I stopped at a convenience shop on the corner of Ninth and Penn one day after school because she wanted a bag of Hot Cheetos and an iced tea. At the checkout, she stood closest to the door and I was to her immediate left. The cashier took her bag and my five.

Two men bustled through the door. The first man held his hands up, the second spouted verbal threats. He cornered the first man and stood over him. He raised his fist, before hesitating. The first man held his breath and closed his eyes.

When he opened them, the second man was gone. He got up, brushed off his pant legs, and went in the opposite direction.

Olivia and I had switched positions. I was to her right, closest to the door. I stood tall. I had raised my shoulders and stuck out my chest, which completely covered Olivia’s smaller frame. The cashier handed us the change before we left. We have not talked about it since.

My entire life, I’d seen the storyline in movies and television on repeat: the man would sacrifice himself for the woman. He would protect her, and he became a hero in the end because of his strength, bravery, and courage.

I remain unsure if I positioned myself in front of her because of my affection or because of my internalized instinct to protect her.

I would like to believe that it was entirely out of love. Though the act was subconscious, I would make the conscious decision if put in a similar scenario without question.

However, I will never rid myself of the thought that there may have been more to it. Was it an act of selflessness? Or did the primitive ego I established from the movies get the best of me?

***

Expansion is not confined to protection. The male peacock will spread the array of colored feathers plastered onto his tail into a fan-like shape in an attempt to attract a mate. The female is often times drawn to the impressive size of his tail and the extensive palette he displays so boldly. The male peacock has achieved his goal of allurement.

***

One afternoon when I was eight years old, tears began to well in my eyes because of a trailer for a horror movie that came on in the set of commercials preceding my mother’s TV show. My mother started to approach me, but my father stopped her and sat down next to me.

“You need to stop being so sensitive about every little thing, Jacob. Mom won’t be there to care for you forever. You need to start acting like a man. Toughen up a little bit.”

I can count the number of times I remember letting myself cry since then on my right hand. I taught myself how to keep my feelings inside, where they belonged. I have pounded the idea into my head that emotion is bad, and constantly reinforced the negative connotation that accompanies crying in a man’s life.

***

Eric Forman loses a one-on-one basketball game to his girlfriend, Donna Pinciotti, in one of the first episodes of the Fox television series That 70’s Show. This puts him at extreme unease, and forces him to attempt proving to Donna (and himself, really) that he is masculine. He later challenges her to a game of air hockey at the Hub, the local hangout. Again, he loses, and is depicted wearing a dress in the next shot. This divide causes a rift in their relationship, as Donna refuses to accept that Eric feels obligated to have dominance over her. Throughout the entirety of the series, the juxtaposition of Eric’s femininity and Donna’s masculinity leads to deep-rooted issues about the abnormality of their dynamic.

Later in the same episode, Red Forman, Eric’s father, is laid off  from work at the plant. His wife Kitty has taken shifts at the hospital, and Red is no longer the breadwinner of the family. To counteract this, he scans the house and fixes countless items of fully functioning housewares. He is stuck in his own head.

Each time, my mother let me nestle in her arms and rocked me until I caught my breath and calmed down. Each time, my father would tell me to get up, brush it off, and wipe the tears.

***

The first time I let myself cry since seventh grade was after I hurt my back while rock climbing. It was a recurring injury I’d just recently gotten over, and I knew instantly it would be months before I could do anything more than a brisk walk. I held my tears until my friend dropped me off at my house, but once the front door shut I collapsed onto the floor and started sobbing uncontrollably.

I was still sobbing ten minutes later when my father got home from the gym. He told me to take deep breaths, and I started to. He told me that it would be okay, and I believed him. He told me to stop crying because it solved nothing, and I stopped.

***

Each morning, I dip my fingers into a jar of product and apply it to my hair. I run the product through the entirety of my head and style it to give shape and volume. It makes me feel confident when I fix my hair like this. It makes me feel attractive. I am obsessed with my hair, vanity intended and required. The subconscious correlation between the style of one’s hair and the ego one possesses is far greater than I’d ever imagined growing up. But back then, I didn’t know it mattered so much.

***

The name stuck. Ask any of the maintenance boys who I was the entire summer, and they would tell you that I was Pretty Boy, the runt that hid from hard work behind the counter who could flirt with all the girls, but didn’t know how to operate a lawn mower. None of them knew I cut grass for money on my free time, or that my entire life I’d work on projects with my father until I could taste the salt from sweat dripping from my nose to my lips. Frankly, I don’t think any of them cared.

Next summer, I asked to be switched to maintenance. I told the manager about my experience in outdoor working, and told him that I was willing to work to learn anything he needed me to.

“I appreciate it, Jacob,” he said. “But you’ve got some competition. Makenna Fritz has asked to mow some lawns, so we’ll see.”

I nodded my head. He nudged my shoulder and chuckled. “You’ve got the job kid. We’ll try and fit you into the schedule when we can.”

***

I see myself in Ben, my little brother. Ben’s a sensitive kid, and he just turned eight last February. He cries about what the kids at his church youth group say to him. He cries about his incessant fear of clowns, and he cries when he doesn’t understand how to do a question in his homework packet.

My father has begun to teach Ben what has become instinctual to me.

 

A student at Capa’s seven-year literary arts program, Jacob is an avid writer. He has one the Young Playwrights Festival in 2016, and had his one-act play “Running from Grief” produced by City Theatre. Jacob enjoys playing soccer and rock climbing.

If you know me, you know that I am a very anxious person. There is rarely a moment when my head is completely clear and I am devoting all  my attention to one subject matter. I can’t even relax in my sleep: I solve math problems in my dreams more than I would like to admit. However, there is one time in my life in which my head was completely clear: when I accidentally stabbed myself with an X-Acto knife.

It was freshman year and I wanted to explore the new and exciting electives that I could enroll in that my middle school didn’t offer. As I carefully studied the list of what seemed like a million courses I could take, one stuck out to me: Interior Design. My mom and I watch HGTV every Sunday morning as we sip on our coffees and alternate turns cuddling with our sleepy dog, Toby. After watching so many of these shows, I was confident that I could design a whole house (similar to the confidence that the young man at the bar in Good Will Hunting had when he thought he knew the whole history of economics, but he only knew the information that he was studying from his college textbook that semester). What could go wrong, it’s just colors and patterns and textures and furniture, right?

Well, we were all in for a huge surprise when we realized what the class actually entailed after a week or so. We had to take an endless amount of notes from an endless amount of PowerPoints on information that seemed  irrelevant. “These people invented this type of house,” or “Look at these trillion different examples of windows,” littered my notebook as I scrambled to scribble down every last word projected onto the dingy whiteboard along with a few other goody-two-shoes students while the rest of the class smacked their gum, gossiped, ate snacks, or slept with their eyes open.

By the end of the semester, I had made new friends in the class. It’s funny how going through tough circumstances together brings people closer. We had defaced our notebooks with the copious amounts of notes, burnt our hands on hot glue guns one too many times, and even tried (and failed) to use an antique sewing machine. But, we were at the final stretch of the year, with only about a week left of regular classes before finals, and we were working on our final projects. The prompt was simple: “Design a 3D model of a room in your dream home.” Perfect, I thought to myself, an easy 100 final grade. Little did I know, I would shed blood, sweat, and tears for that 100.

I had decided to go the mediocre route and chose to construct my dream bedroom inside of a shoebox. We were all required to embrace our own inner middle-aged suburban mom and create Pinterest accounts in order to create boards to help inspire us. I had to make a second account because I already had an account that I used for fun (I am 100% going to be part of a carpool group and the kids are all going to love Mrs.Martarano’s minivan and snacks).

For my mini bedroom, I wanted to add a unique feature to spice up the mediocrity: a bay window. I was planning it out all day up until fourth period. Now, I had an awful day up to that point, so when I got to the class, I was already annoyed and angry. I had only three hours of sleep the night before because I had to stay up until 3:00 am doing homework on my cheap IKEA desk, obnoxiously lit by my fluorescent desk lamp that was imitating the sun at those ungodly hours of the night. Then, I slept through all of my alarms and had to get ready in ten minutes; I had no time to grab a water bottle for the day or grab a granola bar for breakfast. My dad drove me to school and then he made his way to work from there in his little black Toyota Camry, that is now mine, so when I was late to school, he was late to work. He yelled at me to hurry up as I hobbled to the car, my weak upper body struggling to carry my enormous track bag and overstuffed backpack and there was tension in that car all the way to the student drop off area.

When I arrived in my first period class after hiking up a grueling three flights of stairs, I realized I had left my humongous orange envelope folder that I use for every single class’ homework on my cheap IKEA desk. I’d used that color-coded godsend for four years straight, even though it was stained and falling apart (much like that stuffed animal that you received as an infant that you find comfort in even now and will probably bring to college). My legs began shaking uncontrollably in my boots as I fidgeted with my earring and struggled to take a full, deep breath. At least I was wearing a stylish outfit and my honey-brown hair fell nicely to mask my distress, just as the beautiful lithosphere hides the raging inner core of the earth.

So, you can understand how accidentally lodging an X-Acto knife into my arm was the only logical outcome of the situation.

When I got to the classroom, lit with buzzing fluorescent lights and accompanied by the taunting smell of the treats from the Baking Basics class next door, I went to my cubby, the highest one that even my 5’9” self had to reach for, and retrieved my gray painted shoebox. Finally, something I had complete control over during this hectic day I thought as I finally began to unwind a bit.

When I brought it back to my station, I noticed a girl I had become friends with had a sour look on her face. When I asked her what happened, she quickly snapped back with, “The test in US History was so hard!” My immediate reaction was sympathy and relief that it didn’t really affect me. Then, the thought crept up in my mind: We have the same US History teacher and I totally forgot to study for this huge test that I have next period. At that point, I had reached my breaking point. I began furiously working on my project with tears threatening to flood my agitated face.

I was trying to cut a stubborn piece of cardboard because I thought IF NOTHING ELSE GOOD HAPPENS TODAY, AT LEAST I’LL HAVE MY BAY WINDOW! I was trying to battle this thick piece of cardboard with one small, dinky X-Acto knife. The more attempts I made, the more infuriated I got. Finally, I decided that sheer force was the only way to break the thick brown flesh. However, I tore a thinner, lighter brown flesh instead.

In my rage, I had forgotten that I was holding the X-Acto knife in my right hand and when I lost my grip on the cardboard, the force I had put into breaking it transferred to the knife and I jabbed it into the inside of my elbow on my left arm, missing two gigantic veins by just a few millimeters. My mind went blank and then my body took over: I yanked the rusty knife out of my arm (thank God I’d had my tetanus shot a month before), pushed out my chair, announced I was bleeding and briskly walked to the front of the room to tell my teacher as everyone was gasping and yelling at the bloody scene. My friend Chantel unknowingly held down the button on the hot glue gun in her hand as she screamed “VANESSA OHMYGOD WHAT HAPPENED” as the molten glue oozed onto a piece of cardboard that she was using. The quiet kids that sat at the front of the class widened their worried eyes; the gossipers halted their uber-important conversation about what Becky was wearing today; those with their heads down shockingly lifted them up to see what the commotion was about.

My teacher was helping another student with something, but my usual politeness went down the drain and I stepped between them.

“I’m bleeding,” I announced as I thrust my arm towards her, dark red blood spilling out of the gaping crater that I had created on my arm.

Without looking up, and obviously annoyed at my rude interruption, she sighed and said “I have a band-aid, in my desk-” and then when her eyes finally met my bloody arm she yelled, “OH MY GOD SOMEONE GET HER A TOWEL!”

Her eyes got so wide they looked like shiny golf balls and she muttered about a hundred words per minute in order to calm me (and herself) down.

“Ok you’re fine, it’s gonna be fine, it’s just blood, we’re all gonna be fine, WHERE’S THAT TOWEL?”

Some girl whose face I didn’t even look at sprinted to a cabinet and got me a dirty once-white towel that my teacher then frantically wrapped around my blood-soaked arm that was threatening to drip on the mustard-colored tile floor. She walked me out the door and to the nurse’s office as I dizzily stumbled down the stairs, somehow laughing at the situation (coping mechanisms are odd). When we got to the office, all of the kids there who had a sore throat or a stomach ache quickly forgot why they were there and sat around with their mouths gaping at the bloody towel that was swaddled around my arm. I was brought into the dark back room that smelled of bile and told to lay down on the germ-infested pleather couch by the panicked nurse, reverting to the generic question that they always ask whether you have a stomach ache or a broken leg: “Do you want a saltine cracker?!”

My mind was completely clear and I knew exactly what to do as I had my panicked interior design teacher, rattled nurse, and gasping students surrounding me. My survival instincts took over and I knew instantly that I had to remain calm or else the rest of the people helping me would freak out and not help me to the best of their abilities. I calmly laid on the bed, told them “I’m fine, I just need some water,” and when the nurse shakily came back with a styrofoam cup of cool water, I took a sip, and gave them my mother’s phone number to come pick me up. I knew she was working that day, but her job is in Lynn and my dad’s is all the way in Lowell. I quickly realized that she is terrified of blood, as I am usually, so I told them to have her wait outside of the nurse’s office until all of the bloody gauze and towels were disposed of and out of sight. I even added in a few small jokes and laughs while we were waiting for my mom to show up to lighten the mood for everyone and assure them that I was totally fine (though I obviously wasn’t).

“Well that definitely woke everyone up!” I chortled awkwardly.

When my mom got to the school she was aggressively chewing her gum as she forcefully laughed at the nurse’s jokes- all the while, having her wide eyes trained on me. She thanked me quietly, as we walked out of the Big Brown Box that is the high school, for telling the nurses to hide all traces of blood and for telling them to tell her that I was completely fine so she wouldn’t be as worried on the ride over.

When we got to her car, she said the thing that I was thinking the whole time: “You’re the frog.”

We were dissecting frogs all of that week in my biology class and we had to use an X-Acto knife to cut it open. My group consisted of me and the three most “macho” guys in my class who were so excited to rip open another animal. I wasn’t excited, but when it came time to do so, I was the only one who didn’t chicken out and refuse to touch the limp, formalin-scented amphibian. I had been essentially doing all of the work all week and carving into this animal’s green flesh with the same tool I tore into my light brown flesh with and wondering which princess this frog had disappointed so badly. The princess in the original Grimm Brothers version of the story threw the frog against a wall and it then changed into a prince, but my egregious acts sadly didn’t have the same effect.

When we got to the doctor’s office in Beverly, the doctor who walked in the room was an unfamiliar older gentleman with a kind yet worn face. With him was a young woman with blonde hair and the eagerness of a newly graduated med student. He asked me how it happened, I told him, and he then removed the bloody gauze from my drained arm.

“The gash isn’t too deep, but we are going to have to stitch it up because it is on a joint and you move it around a lot.”

I looked to my mother with wide eyes and reluctantly said, “Alrighty!”

“Oh, and one more thing: could Marissa do the stitches on you? She’s never done them on a patient before!”

“Yeah that’s fine!” I said through a forced smile.

Marissa was alright at it. However, she didn’t numb the whole area with the giant needle that I refused to watch puncture my skin, but she quickly fixed it and I was out of there in no time.

This unique experience revealed a previously undiscovered part of my personality: resiliency through hardships. It also taught me that instead of pushing through the anger from a few moments of the day, step back, make sure you don’t have any sharp objects in your hands, and just breathe. Also, don’t tear apart other once-living creatures “for science”- they will come back to haunt you. The princess in the Grimm’s brothers version of the story treated the frog very well by inviting him into her home and was rewarded with him turning into a handsome prince. I’m not telling you to kiss the first frog you see, but I’m just saying, those royal weddings look pretty nice!

 

Vanessa is a senior at Peabody Veterans Memorial High School. She enjoys watching The Office, good food, and her adorable puppy named Toby.

 

Sometimes, panicking about how to explain mass terrorism to two ten- year-olds is just where you end up in life.

Two summers ago, I was fifteen and living the high life. It’s a good thing that the high life is subjective though, because what I was actually up to that day was creating a plan on the group chat, one which would eventually lead us to a bakery in Queensville Square, following a very familiar routine:

Step One: someone realizes we haven’t hung out in a while.

Step Two: we spend forever debating what to do, only to settle on what we did last time (mosque, library, food).

Step Three: the date and time changes a million times, because, and not to call anyone unreliable or anything, but it’s sort of a miracle if we can all hang out in the end at all.

That day however, destiny gave us open schedules and a stunning set of characters set out on the excursion. The first of them, the twins, are actually two years apart, but calling them twins irritates them, so I do it. Following them is the grand Asiyah Firdaws, accompanied by the first ten-year-old.

Now, you may recall that two ten-year-olds are about to become important. And although they’re a little weird, I am sorry to say there’s nothing particularly special about Jana Firdaws or the second ten-year- old, my sister Zahrah, except that they happened to be around that afternoon, completing our group of six.

Thus, we were off. We met up at the mosque and prayed, bowing our heads on the soft carpet and I, the most cautious one of us, hushing the children when they raised their voices too loud. Then began our stroll to the library on that blissfully warm afternoon, the day stretched out before us, ready to bend to our will and serve us. The kids were in front of us so we didn’t lose track of them, but far away enough that they couldn’t hear our teenage whisperings and secrets.

There, the twins pressured me into committing a true act of teenage rebellion: eating in the library, forcing the friendly cashier at the Macs next door to provide the contraband for our crime. We sat, surrounded by books, telling stories and jokes, finishing off bags of chips, which prompted the twins to declare one of their strongest beliefs: when faced with food, you eat it. And when you do not have any more food left, then you cross the street into Queensville Square to get it. Today, it was going to be Serbia’s Delicatessen & Bakery for the first time.

Fun fact: children are not good at crossing the street. They decide it looks like they won’t immediately die, and cross. That leaves you to decide whether or not you are willing to risk possibly dying as well by running after them, but then you remember that if they do actually die, your mother is going to kill you even more painfully, so, you run after them, Asiyah in tow, and leave the twins to cross safely later.

Another fun fact is that children are not good at patience either, so even when they get to the other side, they wander, which is what the pair of soon-to-be fifth graders began to do.

They landed in front of a dead building, which would later be transformed into a Home Depot, and even later than that, a pharmacy. But all it was at the time was an empty shell, looking worn and old, with a small, fifty-cent newspaper stand in front of it. That is where they stopped and stared.

“ALLAH TOLD ME TO DO THIS.”

“ALLAH TOLD ME TO DO THIS.” A headline, written in bolded capitals, next to a picture of a man with a ski mask covering his face and a knife.

“ALLAH TOLD ME TO DO THIS.” A series of words from a man who stabbed two Canadian police officers to death and narrowly missed a third.

“ALLAH TOLD ME TO DO THIS.” A barricade that now stood between me and two ten year olds.

“ALLAH TOLD ME TO DO THIS.” A jagged crack forming in the middle of every other thing they had ever learned about being Muslim, a crack I did not know how to explain. And, in complete and utter honesty, something I did not want to explain. To explain this headline to them would mean two things.

One: I would shake their innocence and they could never not know anymore.

One point five: I would mess up the explanation. I would say something like, that’s not what Islam is about, but some people, some Muslims, think that’s what Islam tells them to do. And then they would have to choose who to believe and it might not be me.

One point seven-five: I would not ever be able to fix it if they chose not to believe me.

Two: that I would be acknowledging that it happened again. That someone invoked the name of God in an ungodly act and that they called themselves the worshippers of God the way I did too.

I think I’d like to pretend what I did next, my distractions, were to protect their innocence, but I’m lying if I say that.

Nonetheless, I tried to play it casual, ignoring my racing heart and mind for the sake of their innocence. I prayed the twins would cross and force us to keep moving. When traffic wasn’t getting any clearer, I directed my focus at getting their attention instead. Over and over “Jana, Zahrah, get over here and stop looking at that,” spilled out of my mouth while they simultaneously tried to get our attention by shouting, “Yasmen! Asiyah! Come here!”

We continued on like this for what seemed like an hour, me trying to get them to look at literally anything else, and them only growing in their fixation. Eventually, I prepared to surrender and turned to them.

“Look! The newspaper is lying!”

Asiyah and I say nothing.

“Yeah! Allah wouldn’t tell you to do that! This guy is lying. Why would this guy say that?”

I stood, frozen, my mouth beginning sentences and abruptly stopping them before I could form a word, all of my preparedness to combat this evil suddenly useless. I realized they did not need my protection to save them from a moment of distress because there never was such a moment for them. Only Asiyah and I, whose minds contained countless memories of headlines and hate comments, ever even thought to panic. Their calm faces told me I was a source of information to them, not a guardian.

It would take another two years for me to even understand that their curiosity was not because they were young and innocent or even because they were ignorant of the days I’d spent creating responses to every inquiry or comment that could be thrown my way the next day at school after a terrorist attack. Their curiosity was simply because during that instant, they understood Islam better than I did. The question was about people and individual actions, not faith.

There are days when that question replays in my mind and I say something back to them. Asiyah and I answer it before someone else can. We sit on the curb and we have an entire lifetime before the twins get to our side. I think up a thousand different ways to tell them that some people want to hurt others, because they are sad, or disillusioned, or both, trying to pick the simplest and fullest truth. There isn’t one. Other times, even in these memories, I am still silent, deciding that I am not the person to tell them. Those are the days I admit to myself that I still do not know, only that I am tired of having to guess.

Nonetheless, two summers ago, I carry the children away from that newspaper stand and towards the twins who had no knowledge of the panic that had ensued. We leave all the words behind— the headline, their questions and my unspoken responses— and everyone is finally safe on the side of the road that they are supposed to be on. The world transforms back to the way it was, the way it should be, just a bunch of teenagers hoping for a brownie, dragging their sisters along.

We entered the bakery. My sister and I split a single dessert. In case we do not like it, I told her.

We ended up loving it.

 

Yasmen Abuzaid is a first year university student busy falling in love with history and writing. Her passions include reading, Model United Nations and hanging out on swings. You can find her work on @astudyinselfadronitis on Instagram