Issue 24

One Thousand Points

By Aly Rusciano

The anxious chatter of the crowd fills the small, dimly lit space of my dorm room. My laptop is open in front of me, the flickering image illuminating the fluffy corners of the blanket I’m clutching to my chest.

My heart pounds and my hands shake as I stare at the screen.

This is it. At seventeen my brother is only ten points away from making one thousand points in his high school basketball career. Players don’t usually make it to that milestone point, and if they do, they don’t even make that one-thousandth point until their senior year. But here my brother was in his junior year, once again, defeating the odds and breaking records one shot at a time.

Being two hours away from home, I don’t get the latest basketball news from my brother every night. When I talk to my mom on the phone, I get a summary of the latest, but it’s never the same as hearing my brother relay the details through excited or disappointed retellings. When it comes to his own game, my brother has always been humble. The one-thousandth point had been mentioned a few times, but I hadn’t realized how close he was until my mother texted me the night before: “Fyi, I saw on fb that the game will be live streamed tomorrow night. He needs 23 points.” My brother’s average was around twenty-five points a game. This was it.

With each basket he makes, the crowd goes wild, causing the speakers of my laptop to screech with an electronic buzz.

Every dribble, pass, and basket feels like an eternity, the clock ticking down slower and slower with each second. I frantically text my mother to make sure I’ve counted correctly.

Six points.

I keep my eyes on number thirty-five, the red and white uniform blurring in a clump of pixels.

I double and triple check my WiFi connection.

Four points.

The blanket I had been clutching to my chest falls away as I lean closer to the screen. My legs have fallen asleep, protesting against the criss-cross position I had been sitting in for the past thirty minutes, but I don’t risk moving.

White and black uniforms run down the court, the camera failing to fluidly follow the players’ movements.

Two points.

Through the pixelations, I see he’s standing tall, moving freely with his teammates. No sign of stress or anxiety. His shot has been perfect the entire game. Whenever he gets the ball, it soars through the air in a perfect arch, swishing into the basket. My brother had the weight of the school and game on his shoulders, yet he held it with grace. He runs down the court as if this is just another game, as if nothing extraordinary is about to happen.

My heart stops as my brother is intentionally fouled at 998 points.

He moves to the free-throw line, arms swaying casually at his sides, as the other players take their positions in the paint, forming a pattern of white, black, white, black on either side of the basket.

My brother wipes the soles of his red shoes with his palm as the referee dribbles the ball.

Each thud of leather against wood sparks the thought of a different shoe.

My brother is suddenly six-years-old wearing black, bulky hip-hop shoes hopping across the stage. Another year goes by and his foot is slightly larger as he kicks a soccer ball with neon green cleats across the grass. The next year rushes by with a thud. He’s eight-years-old bringing up dust as he steps up to the plate with mud-stained baseball cleats. The mud and dust wash away as his cleats become shiny, black dress shoes. He’s nine-years-old balancing a double bass between his feet, delicately swinging the bow across the large instrument’s strings.

Over the years, he had tried on many shoes, but he had only ever asked for new basketball shoes.

A silent murmuring settles over the crowd, and suddenly I’m sitting in the bleachers. “Come on, bud,” I whisper as gossip-like mutterings wisp around me.

He kicks the floor, getting his feet into position, and practices his form.

My heart races as I watch his chest rise and fall. He’s calm and collected as his eyes move away from the basket and to the referee still dribbling the ball. My brother nods and the ball bounces across the paint into his hands.

He licks his lips and dribbles the ball at his side, taking in the basket before him.

Suddenly, he’s three-years-old and his little hands are now dribbling the tiny rubber basketball on the carpet as he licks his lips in concentration. He dips and dives in his dinosaur pajamas toward the blue and yellow Fisher-Price basketball hoop. He dunks the ball, standing on his tiptoes, pretending to hold onto the rim. “Beat that!” he says with a beaming smile and a gusto other three-year-olds could only wish for.

The small ball rolls across the carpet and hits my knees. I pick up the ball, which fits perfectly in my palm, and say, “Bet I can!” I toss the ball between my hands as I ponder my next trick shot.

I blink.

He bends his knees and lifts the ball up in the air.

A perfect arch.

One point.

I can imagine the bleachers vibrating under my feet as the crowd hollers, the electronic buzz of the crowd from my laptop’s speaker filling my ears.

My brother puts down his arms and shakes them out at his sides. His teammates step over to give him high-fives of encouragement.

Because my brother was fouled intentionally, the referees move the other players to the half-court line, leaving him alone with the basket.

A hush settles over the crowd as the ball is tossed across the paint to him again, the echo surging through us all.

The ball bounces next to his red basketball shoes as he dribbles.

I hold my shaking hands to my pounding chest. “You can do it, bud,” I whisper into the two-hour distance between us.

Everything goes quiet as my brother bends his knees and lifts the large, leather ball into the air. The ball lands into the net with a swish. He pumps the air victoriously with his fist.

Robbie Rusciano has made one thousand points.

A sob escapes my lips as I watch the crowd stand and cheer. I scream and clap, disrupting the dark quiet of my dorm room.

Robbie jogs to his coaches and teammates, doing a different personalized handshake with each of them.

The pixels of the livestream and my tears blend together as a warmth spreads across my chest.

Robbie’s beaming smile reaches me from ninety miles away, and for a brief moment, he’s three-years-old again shooting a rubber ball through a plastic hoop in dinosaur pajamas.

Aly Rusciano is a twenty-two-year-old recent graduate of The University of Tennessee at Martin, where she majored in English while focusing in Creative Writing and minoring in Theatre. Aly can often be found reading outside or typing away at her computer. She has been writing ever since she could hold a pencil. Aly’s love of books and passion for writing continues to positively affect her life as she pursues a career in the publishing industry while simultaneously chasing her dream of being a published author.

Meaning & Mortality: A Review of When Breath Becomes Air

By Abigail Blessing

It is a strange experience to pick up a book imbued with death. On lifting When Breath Becomes Air from the library shelf and reading the summary, I sensed a subtle shift in the air — or perhaps within me. I stood beneath the artificial lights, surrounded by the sounds and movements of life, grasping death in my fingers.

Unsettled but deeply intrigued, I leafed through the memoir, feeling the fragments of shattered dreams, relationships, and life permeate the pages. I paused as my eyes fell across a poem, Caelica 83 by Baron Brooke Fulke Greville, inscribed in the opening pages:

You that seek what life is in death,

Now find it air that once was breath.

New names unknown, old names gone:

Till time end bodies, but souls none.

Reader! then make time, will you be,

But steps to your eternity.

The lines beckoned to me like a sliver of light beneath a closed door. Breathless, I turned the knob, descending into the depths of meaning and mortality. Fear, sorrow, joy, confusion, peace enveloped me in waves. Can the presence of death cause such a contrast of emotions? It can, it seems. Dr. Paul Kalanithi’s life, the epitome of juxtaposition, pulled me from the heights of occupational utopia to the depths of mortal uncertainty. Yet, his words dispelled the silence of death, filling it with moving anecdotes from his personal and medical experience.

When I picked up this book, I expected a compelling but technical lecture on dying from a clinical viewpoint. But what I found transcended this presumption. I found compassion where I thought only mechanism occurred. I found hope where I thought only shadows reigned. I found a soul struggling to make sense of life’s meaning in the face of death. And is not that the story of humanity?

When Breath Becomes Air opens a window into the life of Dr. Paul Kalanithi. The son of first-generation immigrants, Kalanithi grew up in Kingman, Arizona. From an early age, his life was cluttered with nature, literature, and a burning ache for knowledge. Kalanithi’s mother, dissatisfied with the curriculum at his public high school, helped ameliorate the syllabus, a factor that aided in Kalanithi’s Stanford acceptance letter. After earning a B.A. and M.A. in English literature and a B.A. in human biology from Stanford, Kalanithi received an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University. At this time, Kalanithi realized that he desired “direct experience”; “it was only in practicing medicine,” he writes, “that I could pursue a serious biological philosophy.” By pursuing a path in medicine, Kalanithi hoped to answer “the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.”

After attending Yale School of Medicine, Kalanithi entered a residency program at Stanford. During his internship, he encountered suffering and death — things he had only read about in books — first-hand. In his observations, Kalanithi guides readers through the waiting rooms and the sterilized offices, unveiling scenes of profound loss and quiet hope. Through these raw accounts, Kalanithi sets the stage for his own tragedy. He prepares readers in part one of the memoir for his wrestle with death in part two. When the results arrive, a glaring image of stage IV lung cancer, Kalanithi is under death’s shadow, grappling with his mortality through the words he weaves.

What struck me most about Kalanithi’s writing is the degree of empathy with which he conveys not only his anguish, but that of his patients. In one poignant scene, Kalanithi describes relating the option of brain surgery to a terrified patient. He acknowledges that he could have listed to her “all the risks and possible complications… [documented] her refusal in the chart,” and departed. However, in line with the resolve he made to treat his “paperwork as patients, and not vice versa,” Kalanithi gathers her and her family together, and they discuss the options. In doing this, Kalanithi writes that he “had met her in a space where she was a person, instead of a problem to be solved.”

Conversely, while in the trenches of death, he cautions readers of the “inurement” and objectivity that can arise through this persistent confrontation. Kalanithi entered the field with noble intentions, yet, he admits, he felt at one point that he was “on the way to becoming Tolstoy’s stereotype of a doctor… focused on the rote treatment of disease — and utterly missing the larger human significance.” In the end, technical excellence is not enough. Mechanical words and statistics cannot balm the wound of fearful uncertainty; true healing lies in the relationship between doctor and patient. “Before operating on a patient’s brain, I must first understand his mind,” Kalanithi explains. By separating the physical from the mental, the tangible from the intangible, Kalanithi can recognize the patient not as an object, but as a soul, a being in possession of an “identity,” “values,” and knowledge of “what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end.” At heart, technical excellence without relationality is like a stained glass window without light. In a society that too often reduces human beings to numbers — the effect of a worldwide prosopagnosia — Kalanithi urges readers to view humanity as a group of individual beings, not a mere collection of data.

Once Kalanithi was diagnosed with cancer, his perspective on death changed. Kalanithi writes:

I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely.

Previously, as a doctor, Kalanithi saw death as the force he grappled with to attain several more grains of time. In relation to himself, like many human beings, he viewed death as inevitable but not imminent. Death’s shadow was omnipresent, but it was forgotten amidst achievement, distraction, and the sense of immortality that accompanies the two. But now, as a patient encountering the fatal presence in his own body, he felt it. He tasted it. At the pinnacle of his career, Kalanithi was greeted with his finitude.

And his response?

Finding meaning in the life that remained. To acknowledge one’s mortality is to acknowledge time’s transience. In the face of these two giants, Kalanithi searches for what is significant and what makes his life meaningful. This search results in two significant decisions: the decision to have a child and the decision to write this book.

Kalanithi explains, “If human relationality formed the bedrock of meaning, it seemed to us [he and his wife] that rearing children added another dimension to that meaning.” At heart, this line confirms one of the memoir’s underlying messages: life’s meaning is rooted in relationality. Kalanithi found value in his relationships with his patients, his family, his friends, the world, and God.

When Breath Becomes Air is both practical and deeply personal. It reads as both a guide to living well and a love letter to Kalanithi’s daughter. Death is integral to the memoir, laced between the lines and stamped in the cover Kalanithi never held. Like his life, the book was half-finished; his wife and a team of editors worked to publish it posthumously in 2016. Even so, the memoir radiates with life — as Kalanithi quotes Samuel Beckett, “birth astride of a grave.” In Kalanithi’s poignant reflections and in the promise of his child’s life, death and life compose the pages of the memoir.

When Breath Becomes Air offers readers a new perspective on mortality, an echo of memento mori, and reveals, through Kalanithi’s life experience, how to live and find meaning when breath is still breath.

Although of American descent, Abigail Blessing was born in Pakistan and has lived nearly all fifteen years of her life in Malaysia. From an early age, she has been intrigued by the dark and the deep dimensions of life, prompting her to take an interest in topics of art, death, isolation, and morality. When Abigail is not penning stories or essays, she takes pleasure in reading classic literature, wading through nature, playing the violin, and blogging at abigailblessing.com.

Eighteen Year Old Never Mother

By Kathryn Lee

I am 18 years old, and I am sure of one thing: I never want to be a mother.

90% sure.

80% sure.

75% sure with a 10% surcharge fee for overthinking.

Maybe it’s silly to say something so concrete at eighteen years old. At seven years old, I accidentally ate part of a rubber band and thought I would die two months later. (Two months came and went, and I amended my death sentence to three months, and then four, and then five. For all I know, the rubber band is just waiting for me to let my guard down.)

At twelve years old, I thought “depraved” and “deprived” were synonyms. (I proudly said “I’m just depraved like that!” in front of several of my favorite teachers during the crowded rush between fifth and sixth period.)

At sixteen, I thought my biggest point of pride was being able to differentiate between Jacobins and Jacobites. (And I’ll still pretentiously lecture about both to anyone who will ask; you, dear reader, could be the inaugural requester.)

But I make do with what I have, and what I have is the experience of an eighteen-year-old who knows that children feature nowhere in her five—or her ten—or her forever plan.

I like children. I like them in an abstract they are our future”way, in a No Child Left Behind idealistic way. But raising them myself is a completely different discussion. Involving myself in a lifetime of whining and pooping and screaming doesn’t appeal to me. I’m eighteen—teetering on the slim picket fence between adolescence and adulthood—I remember my whining and pooping and screaming.

I look to my elders, the Millennials, for justifications. Climate change—imagine raising a kid in the era of fiery hurricanes and melting icebergs. Economic inequality—imagine raising a kid in an era where Jeff Bezos owns more wealth than he’ll ever use while college graduates get turned down for McDonald’s positions. Racial discrimination—imagine raising a kid in an era where if they look different, if they love different, they’ll be targeted. I don’t want to raise a child in these situations. I’ll live through them myself, and they’re experience enough without forcing someone else to share them with me.

But I don’t pretend that my desire to avoid motherhood is wholly rooted in a concern for the future. I’m selfish by nature—everyone says so—and so are my decisions. If I become a mother, I’ll be a Pygmalion. Of course, there’s philosophical debates that could be had about whether children’s minds are truly tabula rasa or if they’re born with predetermined traits. But children, in my own child experience, are deeply influenced by their parents and the situations they live in. Mothers and fathers take chisels to their pristine block of marble and chip away.

Sometimes parents have discerning eyes and gentle hands, and the sculpture wins awards. Sometimes parents chip too much, and the sculpture cracks on the inside and crumbles.

Sometimes parents chip just enough to avoid the crumbling but not the cracking.

I feel the smooth handle of the chisel in my hands every time I think about children, feel the coldness of the metal against the ridges of my soft palm. The last time I had a callus was six years ago, the last time I dangled from the monkey bars near my home. I am not built for holding tools, for hard labor, for sculpting, for motherhood.

At least when you seek a partner, when you swipe right on Tinder, or maybe when you give someone attractive at your local coffeeshop the ol’ up-down, you rest safe in the knowledge that you will meet someone fully formed. Someone whose qualities will little budge with your influence, and someone who will little budge your qualities. The two of you will complement each other.

But children come to you just-formed. And when you stroke your rough human finger—because even my bourgeois hands are too rough for those just-formed children—against their cheek, you will give them their first touch. Now your touch is theirs—your touch is their first definition of so many things.

Your touch is human.

Your touch is skin.

Your touch is mother.

Or your touch could be disgust, could be bitterness, could be scorn, could be regret.

Forgive me for dating myself, but there was a popular TikTok trend circulating a few months ago: “I love being your mom,” the women in the videos said, “but I miss her.” “Her” being the women before they were mothers, the women who dressed up and went to clubs, and saw their friends and thought of their children as abstract little twinkles in their eyes, not seven-pound babies in their arms in a sterile hospital bed lit by fluorescent lights demanding to see every little flaw.

I love my child enough never to have them.

Kathryn Lee is a freshman at Binghamton University. Her work has been previously published in Binsey Poplar Press, Paper Crane Journal, The Augment Review, and Halfway Down the Stairs. Along with writing fiction, she also runs her own book review blog, le livre en rose (lelivreenrose.weebly.com).

Dorm Room Fridge

By Kelsey Day

She wanted to buy the fridge freshmen year, just in case we ended up hating each other. She didn’t want us to have to bicker about who got to keep it. We laughed about that in the first dizzy April, then again in the fleeing November sleet – we laughed about it as we barreled toward one another at the airport, against each other’s lips, we were always laughing, we laughed at everything but most of all at her foolish attempt at safety before she knew me and realized we would share a fridge forever. We laughed about it during the months we spent apart, me getting high in the Netherlands and her working at Jersey Mikes, we laughed about it in the greedy mountain river, swimming naked and freezing and unashamed, and we laughed about it when she moved in with me, a shitty one bedroom apartment in Colorado, where she stayed for three days and kissed me blind and said she liked men, not women, and boarded a plane the next morning, and I was laughing as I carried her suitcase down the stairs, laughing as I crammed her clothes in a box, laughing as I stood barefoot in the dorm again and saw the same fridge pushed against the wall, kept there just in case.

Kelsey Day is a poet and novelist from southern Appalachia. Her work is urgent, timely, and relentlessly vulnerable, and has been published in literary journals such as Reservoir Road Literary Review, Storm Cellar Literary Magazine, Brave Voices Magazine, and Our Shared Memory Collective. She is a recipient of the University of Chicago’s Young Memory Fellowship and is an honors student at Emerson College. She works with women from across the globe with the International Women’s Writing Guild, is a staff writer for Two Story Melody, and serves as the Head Poetry Editor for the Emerson Review.

Go Ahead, Open up the Wrapper

By Sophene Avedissian

Trying to keep it in, I bite my lip. I try taking some deep breaths to shake it off, but it does not work. My shoulders start shaking, and I burst out laughing. My small giggle quickly becomes hysterical. The word “tampon” would not get out of my head, and this was the cause of the commotion. As my loud, infectious giggles fill up the whole room, others join me.

I, along with the rest of the girls in fifth grade, was in a human development class learning about puberty, specifically menstruation. As an eleven-year-old, the words “tampon” and “period” were hilarious, but that is exactly the problem. Why do periods spark incessant laughter? Why is “menstruation” seen as a dirty word? Well, it is simple. We are all taught at a young age to feel this way about periods.

Children are not the only ones who feel uncomfortable when talking about menstruation; adults are too. In 2017, WaterAid surveyed over 2,000 women, 18 and older, about how they feel towards menstruation. The survey found that two-thirds of the women felt “uncomfortable openly carrying their sanitary products to the toilet in public, and around half wouldn’t feel confident to tell their dad or male boss about period pain or PMT.” (1) Most menstruators are ashamed about their periods and are afraid to talk about it openly. A study carried out by Clue in association with The International Women’s Health Coalition in 2016 reported that there are about 5,000 slang words for menstruation. (2) Do we really need 5000 different ways of trying to avoid referencing a totally normal biological process?

There is a familiar situation that almost every menstruator has experienced: using menstrual care products in a public bathroom. You are at work or at school and need to change your menstrual care product. You open the stall door, and you take a few moments to get situated. As you are searching your bag for a pad or tampon, you hear the stall door next to you open and close. There is someone right next to you and if you open up the wrapper of your period product, they will know you have your period. It’s an awkward moment. In this instance, the menstruator does not want anyone to think they have their period, but why is this the case?

With that same mindset, why are people comfortable saying “I have to use the restroom” or even “I need to go pee?” Utilizing the bathroom and having your period are similar in many ways. They are both necessary bodily functions that no one has any control over, but there is a stigma around only one of them.

The shame around menstruation is dangerous because it results in a lack of health education. This ignorance is exactly what fuels myths about periods. In 2017, Betty for Schools found that 44% of girls do not know what is happening when they get their first period. To make matters worse, their research also found that 60% of women feel scared and 58% feel embarrassed about their first periods. (3) Many menstruators around the globe are not given proper education about menstruation. Unicef in 2018 explains, “Many girls do not have a complete and accurate understanding of menstruation as a normal biological process. Educating girls before their first period — and, importantly, boys — on menstruation, builds their confidence, contributes to social solidarity and encourages healthy habits. Such information should be provided at home and at school.” (4)

However, the root of the stigma around periods is from society. Society has ingrained the idea that periods are absolutely disgusting, and like many other issues, we fall into the trap of believing it; all of it. The stigma around menstruation has created a situation where menstruators actually contemplate the idea of wanting care products where the wrapper does not make any sound when unwrapped.

If people are not comfortable talking about periods, then when there is a prominent issue around menstruation, it will not be discussed. There is a crisis that is being ignored: period poverty. Period poverty, simply put, is not having access to period products. Period poverty, in other words, is when menstruators do not have tampons, pads, or menstrual cups to manage their periods. Many menstruators who experience period poverty use alternatives, such as socks, garbage, cardboard, plastic bags, rags, and anything else available. These so-called alternatives can lead to horrible health consequences, including infections. Imagine that you are an impoverished woman who has her period. You look around and you have six dollars. What do you spend this limited money on? Do you buy a tampon or get yourself something to eat?

Unfortunately, this is a situation that many women face around the globe.

Period poverty leads to girls staying home from school and women staying home from work. According to BBC News in 2019, it is estimated that 1 in 10 girls in Africa will miss school when they have their periods. (5) When this happens, girls and women are potentially missing crucial opportunities that could greatly alter their future. This causes the gender gap to expand, making advancing gender equality more difficult.

I often hear the phrase “It’s a problem over there” said by people who do not live in developing countries, but this is inaccurate. Period poverty is a problem that affects everyone everywhere. Global Citizen in 2019 states, “In the US, nearly 20% of girls have missed school because they could not afford period products. Yet, due largely to social stigma around menstruation, period poverty isn’t often discussed and hasn’t received the attention it deserves.”

Excuses for not discussing this issue need to stop Remember, there is a woman right now using a sock as a pad. How would you feel? Change will only occur if people stop denying the severity of the issue around period stigma.

The taboo around periods is the reason for many large issues today. Gender equality cannot be attained without first eradicating period poverty and the negative stigma regarding menstruation. It is an issue that needs to be solved, as it impacts so many lives.

There is one main solution that we can easily do: start thinking about periods normally. “Ew” or “gross” should no longer be words associated with menstruation. Instead, we should all have positive or neutral feelings towards menstruation.

Most of the world sees periods as dirty, but this can change. I, as a fifth-grader, thought periods were funny, but now, as an eighth-grader, see it as something natural. Change is difficult, but it is certainly possible. No menstruator should ever feel embarrassed to say “period” out loud, and we need to start normalizing the normal. We do not need menstrual care products where the wrapper does not make any sound, but we instead need to eradicate the stigma around periods.

This is not just an issue for menstruators. Activist and founder of Free Periods, a non-profit organization that is working towards ending period stigma and period poverty, explains about involving boys and men in education regarding menstruation, “Indirectly, periods will affect them too, and, for too long they’ve been left out of the conversation.” (7) Everyone is part of this conversation, regardless of their gender and background.

Open up that wrapper in the restroom. Do it. Loudly.

Sophene Avedissian expresses her thoughts and opinions through her writing. To draw attention to important issues in the world, Sophene wrote a book, Stand Tall, at the age of twelve. Stand Tall consists of many short stories that all relate to problems that must be combated in order to advance gender equality. Sophene has written for her school’s newspaper for the past two years, and will be the Middle School Managing Editor next year in ninth grade, where she will oversee the work of middle schoolers. Sophene is also a LA Times High School Insider, where she writes a wide range of articles.

https://www.wateraid.org/au/articles/new-survey-reveals-awkwardness-around-periods-in

-lead-up-to-menstrual-hygiene-day#:~:text=Two%2Dthirds%20of%20women%20feel,ne w%20research%20released%20by%20WaterAid.

Smoke in the Air

By Florianne Che

The scent that permeates the air in my home has a hard edge to it; on it, a name teeters dangerously. It swings back and forth, threading between two truths, and threatens to tip over into an endless abyss. This is where tears go when we swallow them behind our lids, and where my mom goes when I refuse to say I love you. Match in hand, cylinder mistress in the other, she seals her fate in the shapes of gray clouds; a pill, a Bible, a man. This is what love is, and she exhales. The smoke obscures her face and sinks into the walls. At night, when I sleep, the scent slips into my pores, nestles beneath my skin, and follows me outside.

The day after is a battle against my body. My words are delivered with the smell of tobacco. When I touch, discolored fingertips pinch skin like a freshly lit cigarette butt. Crooked, my stance is a matchstick burnt too long, and where I walk, a trail of ashes follows. Just as I cannot hide my disjointed origins, I struggle to rid myself of this acrid aroma.

In the stillness of the school bathroom, where the air is crisp and sterile, I rush to clean myself. Tucking toilet paper beneath my leaking arms, I count: One. Perfume, deodorant, and antiperspirant to get rid of that disgusting odor. Two. I drown my tongue in white mints until it bleeds crimson. Three. Scented wipes are tucked into the extra space in my shoes, numbing my toes. Four. I pull my hair back into something gentle, unassuming. Five. It smells awful.

When I’m finished, I can barely breathe, barely feel, barely smile; I am hardly alive. Still, it is better than the alternative — knees out and neck exposed like a big, red sign pointing to a stinky girl who smells like midnight arguments and disappearing dads; who smells like her life is defined by the gap between her parents’ hands and half a presence. Staring in the mirror, I practice my laughter. If I cannot hide the scent, I can at least conceal the stain of an imperfect family.

In my reflection, there is a dark divide between my lips. It’s a thin line — an edge — that’s broken open only by the name of the past; I let it grow ever older, sharper until its corners bite my tongue. If I forget the way my dad held me, I won’t need to remember the days he’s left me. On this dangerous boundary, the name sways through two realities. My mom has fallen into one, and I am tipping into the other, where plastic hips and empty promises frolic in fields of syringes.

The bell rings and the name falls. The moment comes to put my methods to the test. When I step into the hallway, the crowd scrunches their noses.

Florianne Che is a high school Junior located in the Chicago area. Each day she is moved by the articulate and impactful words of the novels she reads, and through constant trial and error, she hopes to one day write in a way that moves her audience to the same extent. For now, she settles for half-baked thoughts in the margins of her notebooks and whispered rhymes when no one is listening.