Issue Eighteen

I sink down into murky water. I’m submerged in dirty sea-green. Suddenly, I feel a rush of cold water. I turn my head. Soulless eyes stare back at me, dozens of them. The creatures look human, but they’re not. Red-greenish veins run through their slimy, scaly bodies. I panic, and start to swim. Sharp claws dig into my skin and grasp my right foot, yanking me back. Before I know it, the vampire-like sea monsters rip off my feet and hands. I scream in agony, as they continue to tear me apart. It feels like a thousand needles burrowing into me. 

I’m gone. Dead. 

Until I’m not… 

I’m back in the murky sea-green, back with the monsters, dead again and again. After the tenth, twentieth, fiftieth time, I realize it’s a cycle I will never escape. I cry out, and ask for help. That’s when I see her: Buddha, sitting cross-legged above me.

I wake up.

I was thirteen, living in Taiwan, the land of Buddhist temples, so I decided to visit Lung-shan temple to see what the bi-chio-ni (nuns) and monks had to say about my nightmares.

As my mother and I approached the temple’s opening, I peered up to the golden, slanted roofs and noticed how beautiful the shimmering yellow looked against the blood-red walls. I stepped over the wooden block that separates the outside world from the inner sanctuary with my left foot, as I had been taught to do as a little girl—a sign of respect, showing you understand you are entering a holy space. When we got to the innermost courtyard, I saw hundreds of people praying to statues of Taiwanese deities. Some threw red crescent-shaped wooden blocks on the floor; others prayed towards the sky, upwards, into space, where Buddha and the Gods reside. My mother and I stepped into one of the booths and approached the two nuns.

“I keep getting nightmares,” I said, desperate for them to stop.

“Are you participating in anything involving evil spirits?” one of them asked me, looking deep into my eyes, scanning for the answer.

“Well, I watch a lot of horror movies. Is that what you mean?”

When I thought about it more, I realized the nightmares began shortly after I saw my first horror movie, The Conjuring. I became addicted to the genre. I binge-watched television shows like Supernatural and The Vampire Diaries. I knew I should probably stop watching these terror-inducing shows, but they were so exciting. They made me feel a heightened kind of aliveness, whereas my nightmares just made me feel scared to go to sleep.

“Yes, stop watching all horror films and television shows. Distance yourself from all lower energy forms. And pray to Buddha every night before you go to bed. You can also listen to Miao fa lien hua jin every day to further distance yourself from evil.”

That night, dimming the lights, I bowed down in 90 degrees to the painting of Guan-Shi-yin Buddha, the Goddess of Mercy, portrayed as a young woman dressed in pure white silk laced in gold. On top of her head rested a small crown with a painted image of a bodhisattva sitting peacefully in a lotus position. Remembering what the nuns told me to do, I clasped my hands, stood up, and whispered in Mandarin, “Thank you Guan-shi-yin Buddha for protecting me” before wishing for protection.

Looking down at my hands, I expected to feel magically changed. I’m not sure why. I thought maybe I would see a glow of protection, but there was nothing. I changed into my pajamas and climbed onto my platform bed. I looked at the clock: 9:30 p.m., the same bedtime I had since I was ten. I hesitantly turned off the lights and held my blankets tightly.

I am running as fast as I can through an abandoned hospital. I look to my right and see a younger boy sprinting towards me. He is human, like me, but I don’t know him. Suddenly, a creature jumps out in front of us, baring its long white fangs. The pale concrete hospital walls darken in comparison to the monster’s pale skin. I wonder if this is what the dead returned to life look like. Turning his head from side to side, his dark, red eyes scan the boy, who is shivering in fear beside me. 

“Run!” I shout, grabbing his hand, and pulling him through hallways, as we turn and turn and turn, running as fast as we can. Yet, there it stands, in front of us. The same bloodthirsty eyes—  

I woke up startled, gasping for air. I looked at my alarm clock. It was 2:00 a.m.  I crawled out of bed, and walked towards the praying table.

“Save us, protect us!” I cried

Lying in bed, thinking about my prayers and what the nuns had said, I wondered if Buddha had tried to save me by providing me company. Usually, I am alone in my nightmares and the cycle never ends until the alarm clock rings. This time, I had a friend, a little boy, and before the monster could kill us, I woke up. I felt comforted, thinking that maybe I was being protected, and that sleep wouldn’t have to terrify me anymore.

Praying to Guan-Shi-yin Buddha quickly became a ritual, and soon my nightmares became more and more infrequent. Every night, I stood at the praying table and reminded myself to “just breathe,” a Buddhist motto I now cleaved to as a way to align with my higher self and energy.

Once I was no longer gripped by sea monsters and zombies, I thought about what my nightmares had taught me. They seemed to reiterate my belief that life and death are an endless cycle of karma and growth. Maybe the nuns were right and the horror movies were to blame, but I wondered if something deeper was going on. Perhaps I had done something horribly sinful in a past life and my dreams were reflecting my punishment. Now, I feel grateful for them. They helped me wake up to this lifetime and made me realize I have the power to improve my karma. If I stay on the right path, I have the chance to ascend higher in my next life.

In the meantime, I will continue to just breathe.

 

Lola Wang is a sophomore at the Taipei American school in Taiwan. She wrote a lot of personal essays but is starting to write some flash fiction and short stories. She loves drawing too, mainly sketching and painting. Golf is another hobby she likes to do. This will be her first publication.

In second grade, a school psychologist diagnosed me with “selective mutism,” which suggested that I decided to be mute. The word seemed accurate to me because, at some point, I thought I couldn’t possibly keep this level of charade going. But after a while, it became easier not to speak than to speak. I didn’t utter a word for two whole years.

It wasn’t until later that I fully recognized my reasoning for choosing silence. During my grade school years, I lived in a town called Newport in Jersey City, New Jersey. There, I attended a mostly Caucasian school where kids stared at my lunch of spicy salmon sushi and asked, “Did you get that seaweed from the ocean?” Or, “Won’t raw fish make you sick?” Or, “Do you ever get tired of eating rice every day?” This was the curse of being the only Chinese-American kid in Newport.

When I stopped talking, my school accepted my silence, except for one counselor who pulled me aside into a blue room and asked, “Why don’t you talk? Why don’t you talk?!” My response was to bite my nails and look at the cartoon stickers on her wall.

I knew they could force me to talk if they really wanted to, but by then I was more scared to talk than not because everyone expected me to be quiet.

My second-grade teacher Mrs. Williams would occasionally decide she was going to give it a try and call on me in class, asking, “Nian, what is two times nine?” All those little faces would turn to me, as if they were waiting for a rare parrot to speak its first words. With hopeful eyes, the whole classroom would wait for a moment, silently willing me to say something. Of course, I got used to those periods of quiet when everyone expected me to talk, but the more time went on, the more pressure I felt to make my first words monumental–like those of Abraham Lincoln: “Four score and seven years ago…” But I never spoke. After Mrs. William’s hope faded, her shoulders would relax and she would move on to the next kid and ask the same question. All the children would turn their attention away from me, somewhat disappointed that I had once again remained silent.

Occasionally, I would have a substitute teacher who would be unaware and would call on me, but a kid would pipe in and say, “She doesn’t speak,” to prevent the class from going through the whole awkward silence again.

Then one day a new kid showed up. She was a tall girl from Puerto Rico. Her name was Ivelisse, and she always wore long sleeves under t-shirts and had dark eyes that didn’t avoid eye contact when telling someone to shut up. When the teachers played music in the background while we would work on our art projects, she sang along in a carefree way as if she were the only person in the room. Looking back now, she was my foil–she was vocal and gregarious, and I was silent and timid.

As the year went on, Ivelisse and I always ate lunch together. To her, my lack of speaking was an opportunity to have an audience who could listen to her complaints. She would complain about her younger brother who picked his nose and the boy in our class who bit people. She would share her food with me–her homemade lemon bars, avocado quinoa salads, cream-cheese bagels, and spaghetti. During snack time in class, she swapped her granola bars for my Choco pies.

After school, Ivelisse’s mom would pick us up and walk us home. Ivellise and her mom would never pressure me to talk. Instead, they would chat about her braces or her ballet classes. One day, I reached into my bag and realized I forgot my keys. Seeing my troubled face, Ivellise asked, “What’s the matter?” even though she knew I wouldn’t answer.

Knowing I was away from all the mean kids who made fun of my lunch, I no longer felt the need to hide myself. I replied, “I don’t have my keys!”

“Oh my god. She spoke!”

Without keys, I had to spend my afternoon at Ivelisse’s house, which smelled like unfamiliar spices.

From her kitchen window, I could see the cherry tomatoes in the small backyard garden. Her grandmother was sorting the refrigerator, and her kitchen table was piled with newspapers and Strawberry Shortcake comic books.

Spanish TV shows played in the living room as her dad sat there watching. Her brother’s door was half open with a crooked basketball hoop nailed to it. Brooklyn Nets posters covered the wall.

When we got to her bedroom, Ivelisse asked me, “Why don’t you talk?” She looked at me as if she’d been waiting to ask this question all day.

I shrugged my shoulders.

“But you talked today,” she added.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“You’re talking to me now!” she said. She handed me her Nintendo DS to play Cooking Mama and suggested, “I have an idea. How about this? When you want to talk at school, you can just whisper in my ear and I’ll tell people what you have to say.”

“Okay.” The idea thrilled me although it sounded absurd.

The next day at school when Jimmy Miller was aiming spit wads at me, I whispered to Ivellise, “Tell him I hate him and knock it off.”

She paused and gave Jimmy a serious look and then said, “Nian thinks you have a ghost following you and you should watch out.”

Jimmy turned pale and put the spitball in his pocket, and I knew he was never going to aim a spitball at me again. I looked at Ivelisse and we shared a silent understanding that she was going to be my voice. But better. At the same time, I didn’t want her to do this for me forever. It made me feel as if I were a fraud, albeit a happy one.

The next time Ms. Williams called on me to answer a math question, I whispered in Ivellise’s ear, “I don’t know,” and she said to the teacher, “Nian says twelve and you look very nice today.”

Ivelisse began to answer for me all the time, but her answers were always different from my own as if she had created a character that was me but more interesting. One day, a boy made the mistake of making a rude comment to me about my lunch, saying, “Those dumplings smell so bad.” I kept my mouth shut, but Ivellise yelled across the table, “Nian says you smell bad!”

She gave me a smiling glance, and my face burned with a mix of shame and vindication. Around us, kids subtly began avoiding us. They would give us a wide path as we walked by and avoid eye contact. We were like the British monarchy of the past—capable of wielding frightening powers.

That following summer, Ivellise moved back to Puerto Rico. Before she left, I cried all night. I thought I would be losing the best friend I would ever have. She spoke for me, she accepted me, she invited me into her home, and she fed me empanadas. When I stopped crying, I knew I felt partly relieved. I no longer had to rely on her. I would have to rely on myself, but I hoped she had left part of her toughness with me. I hoped she would write me letters from Puerto Rico telling me how I should act without her. I wanted her to ask me how I was doing, and possibly send me pictures of her fifth-grade graduation, but for some reason, I never heard from her again. I imagined that the culture of Puerto Rico swallowed her up into a world full of delicious sofrito and fried plantains and happy Puerto Rican music, a world full of new friends, and she had forgotten her life in Jersey City and me.

At the start of third grade, as I sat in a classroom without Ivelisse by my side. The room was full of noisy third graders, and the teacher called on me to come up to the front. When I got to her desk, she asked, “How many textbooks are at your table?” I could tell from the look on her face that she was just testing me, like they always did, and she didn’t expect a response.

“Five,” I answered confidently.

When I turned around, all the kids were staring at me, and one kid whispered, “Oh my god, she speaks!”

And that was when the mystery that surrounded me was broken.

From then on, there were no more awkward silences when the world waited for me to talk. Nobody ever needed to say, “Nian says.” I spoke for myself.

 

 

Carly Fan is a junior who attends Great Neck North High School. She attended the Iowa Young Writers Studio the summer of 2019, and is also a past winner of the Walt Whitman Poetry Contest. During her free time she loves swimming and going on runs.

You can never go home again.

The words to a story I never finished. I was not sure that they applied to my current situation. But they kept swirling in my mind. I was not going anywhere. My brother, however, was. Which meant that home would not be the same.

We were on a seven-hour car trip to his new home, a university dorm. My father kept saying that the next four years would be an amazing journey. Mother was quizzing him on the steps to do laundry.

“I’ll just mail you my dirty clothes,” he joked.

Mother could not be deterred from her mission to teach him how to solve every possible life obstacle. My brother only wanted to get to his dorm and start his awesome adventure.

I was mainly dreading the return trip with one-fourth of my family missing.

The worst thing about my feelings surrounding his departure was not knowing how I should feel.

“I will, finally, go through your closet and take several sweatshirts that I’ve had my eyes on for months,” I kept teasing him.

“They are still mine. I am not giving you permission to go to my closet.”

“Send me a complaint letter.”

That was how most of our conversations went this last year since I started high school. Once, we had been each other’s best friend. Now, we rarely had a conversation that lasted longer than thirty seconds. My friends used to comment that they envied our relationship. No one had said that for a while. There had not been a specific life-altering event in our sibling tie. Our shared path slowly started diverging as our lives moved on.

“Why can’t you two still be friends?” my parents would ask. Because we couldn’t. Sometimes though, there were moments. Like when I was forced to endure our parents’ unrequested advice, he would meet my eye for a quick second. A shared understanding. That is what I will miss most about my brother. What will I do now? Share the knowing glances with my own reflection? Or say sarcastic things to myself? I would probably not realize what I missed until I felt the void. His absence. Our absence.

My brother was rifling through a stack of gift certificates received at his grad party. One of them was from me. We had not exchanged actual gifts in years. Only cash and certificates. The last time was three years ago. He had been infatuated with martial arts then. I had made him a ceramic bowl and painted it with karate figures. The paint had run while heating in a kiln so that the fighting figures looked more like angry smurfs. My brother had thanked me, but there was no concealing the joy when he opened an envelope stuffed with cash from our uncle.

Father pulled off the road onto a scenic outlook. Both parents exited the car to stretch their legs. Or to stall.

“Do you want to come?”

“No, we are good,” we replied in unison.

My brother turned to me, “I guess, you’ll finally be the smartest kid in the house…”

“I always was.”

He paused before continuing, “you know if you need any help, several of my friends…”

“I’ll be fine,” I replied more curtly than I had intended. I knew that he had told a few of his senior classmates to keep an eye out for me.

We sat in silence for a while before I added, “If you need help with your newfound nerd status…”

“I’ll ask your friends how they put up with you.”

And then we reached our destination. Moving into his room went surprisingly fast. Mother quickly went into “mother mode” and started rearranging the pieces of furniture. My brother left to examine the rest of the dormitory. I was asked to unpack one of the boxes. On top were several cans of shaving supplies. Those should last him until he dropped his future son off to college. Next, a lifetime supply of face towels. I would have commented that he didn’t know what those were, but my brother was not in the room. Under one of the towels, I spied a familiar object. It was the ceramic bowl I had made him. I slowly placed it on his shelf.

Before long it was time to go home.

“I can’t believe today came so soon,” my father remarked. Both parents fought back tears and had a brief private talk with my brother. Then it was my turn. The conversation that played in my mind was, “I know, I always said I wanted a better brother. The truth is they don’t come any better. I will miss you”

The conversation that I had was, “See you soon.”

As I left his room, my feet felt like they were drudging through deep water. Each step was taking me away from the person who knew me best. You can never go home again. At least not to the same home. As I left the building, the front door clanged shut behind me giving a fatality to the moment. Our comfortable family chain was now missing one link. Ahead of me stood my parents next to our car. Father stared at his shoes. Mother was struggling to hold back the tears. What will it be like for them when I leave in a few years? I wondered why anyone would choose to have a family. Someone was always moving on, leaving sadness behind. Was life a series of separations from everything and everybody one cared about? Then I remembered the ceramic bowl. That insignificant, wonderful tender mercy. Surely, life was also a series of unexpected joys. I walked towards my family. Exhaling, I waited for the next merciful grace.

 

Sonia Mehta is an emerging writer and a high school sophomore in Central Ohio. Sonia submitted several of her works to the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. They won a gold and two silver keys. Her story “Porch” went on to win a National Gold Medal.

 

1. I met you three years ago in math class. The mole above your lip wasn’t even dark then, barely visible, perfectly forgettable. I don’t even think I noticed it until a week or two later, when I saw you laugh for the first time.
2. You didn’t like me at first, but we became friends somehow, roommates the next year, and best friends the third. Neither of us remembered how. I guess it happened the way new moles appear, forgettable outside of a resounding feeling of novelty, the hey-look-I’ve-got-a-new-one-ness of it. By this, I mean to say that our friendship was careless and ordinary the way that moles are. By this, I mean to say that we stared at chipped corners of paint on the walls of our dorm rooms and talked about all the ways our parents had fucked us up. By this, I mean to say that we sprawled on the common room beanbag and complained about stupid, mundane things like mandatory meetings or the weather or the way your boyfriend loved you too much or the way you loved him too little.
3. A year after I met you, I realized that I wanted to touch you all the time, and not just in the romantic places either. Soft across the mole on your cheeks, high on your sweaty forehead after squash, low on the intersection where your arms joined your shoulders. Sometimes, I would confuse wanting you with wanting to be like you, as if our matching moles could be the matching friendship bracelets in a pre-adolescent fever dream. On the Sundays when time would feel just as elastic as the hair ties on top of your chipped dresser, we studied together. I dedicated myself to memorizing the way your moles settled onto the planes of your body in between memorizing dates and places for APUSH. I became very good at multitasking. Jamestown 1607. The mole trapped between your lips and the slope of your nose. New Amsterdam 1625. The mole just below your shoulder, splattered onto your bicep like a mini Pollock. San Francisco 1849. The mole, barely a dot, imprinted atop your jutted shoulder blades that looked like broken angel wings.
4. You hated your body. I am so fat, you once said, hair pulled up and squinting at yourself in the mirror as if your body was not really yours. I said no, we wear the same size and you call me skinny all the time. No, you would say, it’s not like that. We share some of the same moles on our upper arms, you said, but we’re different. Fundamental differences, you said. And I thought: differences like the way I take myself seriously when I say I love girls but you don’t and kiss them anyway. But I didn’t say anything. You said that your shoulders were too broad and muscle-bound. Said you wish you had my body, all lithe and skinny like a real girl’s. I hated you for that, thinking you didn’t really want my body, not in the way I wanted you to. Thinking I didn’t really feel like a real girl either because of the way I loved other girls. Thinking that maybe then, if I didn’t count as being a real girl, you could love me.
5. Two years after I met you, I was relatively sure that I loved you, but it didn’t make sense to me. On Sundays, I thought of all the concrete reasons I loved you, and I couldn’t come up with any except for the way your moles looked like small, dusty little sprinkles in the sun. Sometimes, I wouldn’t be very sure of how much I really loved you because being your best friend meant that I was also privy to all the cruel and selfish and terrible things you had done to other people like me. But none of those things had been done to me, so why did it even matter?
6. You were surprised when I told you I was queer. I thought that I was attempting, for the first time, to be honest with myself. You thought that I just hadn’t talked enough to boys yet.
7. Three years after I met you, we ran to the library during detention, hid our footsteps as we tiptoed upstairs, and talked about our families in the dark. My dad used to work a lot, you said. I didn’t see him much as a kid, you said. By the time I woke up for school in the mornings, you said, he would be gone, and he wouldn’t be back until eight. Sometimes, you said, when he collapsed to sleep after he came back from work, I would wonder if he could even wake up again. We hugged and I felt as your nails pressed pale crescents onto my arms, and my nails onto yours. The warmth seeped through us where the marks stood out white and ghostly next to our moles.
8. Hey, we match now, I said. Oh wow, you said. I didn’t even notice.

 

Rachel Liu is a writer from Beijing, China, and Paramus, New Jersey. A current student at the University of Chicago, she has been recognized in the Scholastic Art and Writing awards and The New York Times in various student contests. Her work appears in or is forthcoming from Polyphony Lit and Blue Marble Review.

I was two when it happened. There was a volcano, the rain came, and the mudslide. Destroying everything in its path, my family included. Who knew everything could be taken away from you at such a young age; I never got to know my parents. I don’t even know if I had siblings. I don’t know anything about my family, but they did leave their mark on me. As for how I survived, well, it was a miracle.

My name is Julia Peterson. Or at least, that’s my adopted name. My real name is Julia Maria. Well, Maria is my middle name. I have a hard time saying my true last name. I’m from a small village in Guatemala. Well, I assume it was small, the mudslide wiped out such a large part of the country, and I don’t actually know where exactly I’m from. I’ve struggled with my adoption all my life and now I’m finally ready to talk about it.

I was four when I was adopted, —into a family that already had four biological girls. My father always wanted a boy, but I guess I was too cute to pass up. My earliest memory was when I was six. I asked my mom “Why do I look different than you?” Then she explained it. At first my little mind thought, “Why didn’t my real mommy and daddy want me?”

They didn’t fully explain what happened to my parents until I was eight. I was sitting on my couch, and I asked my mother. “Will I ever get to meet my real mom and dad?” With tears in her eyes, she explained. “Your mom and dad died when you were two. That’s why you were put up for adoption.” I was heartbroken. I would never truly find out who I was.

When I was ten I started imagining what my real parents would look like. Did I have my mom’s black hair? Does my dad have soft dark eyes? What about my birthmark, this mark they gave me? Did my mom or dad have one too? Something that sets us apart, proves that I am their daughter?

People act like I don’t see it. Their glares, and how they stare at me as I walk past. They don’t look at me, but at the birthmark on my forehead. I get lots of questions, “what’s that? How did you get that? Is it a bruise?” I kindly explained at first, but soon I just walked away. This part of me, my family, my culture, was suddenly looked at as a flaw. Even my adoptive family commented about it, at first I thought it was a joke until it suddenly started tearing me apart from the inside out. These people that I trusted and loved for so long had turned into everyone else.

I was thirteen when I started to cover up my birthmark. My parents didn’t agree with it, but they drove me to get make up. I had to pay for it. I thought I would escape the glares, and the teasing, but running from it only made it worse. By covering it up, people saw that their words were getting to me. I was letting them win, and their words escalated to pushing me in the hallway, and throwing water at me to wash off my makeup.

Now I know what you’re thinking, “she should’ve told someone. That’s what adults are for, to talk to about the bullying.” But that never actually works. You see, it fixes it for the rest of the day. But by the next day, they’ve already thought of new nicknames and insults to spit at me. Of course, thirteen-year-old me thought they were right. Thought that if I never told anyone, no one would see me as less.

I struggled for a long time. It wasn’t until I found a good group of friends that I started to feel accepted for me rather than pitied because I was different. I finally had people I could talk to, who would help me through all of my struggles and be true friends to me. I finally had a family. I’ve opened up to them a lot about being afraid of people looking at me differently. Seeing me as weak. But, I realize now, that standing up for myself, shows I am strong.

I am sixteen now. I am open to sharing my story. I am adopted. I have an adoptive mom, and father, and I have four loving sisters. As you may have noticed, I have a piece of my biological parents and my background with me always, —reminding me that I am strong. I no longer see it as a flaw, but rather, natural beauty gifted to me from my past. I am not ashamed anymore. My name is Julia Maria. I am from Guatemala, I was adopted when I was four. And because of this I am who I am today.

 

 

Julia lives in a small town in the Midwest, but once lived in Guatemala.  “Being adopted was one of the best things that could happen to me, although there were times in my life where I really just wanted to live in my home country. My parents died when I was two, and it’s been a very huge obstacle I’ve been working through for many years. I write to get my feelings out. I write because I can get so lost into the words. It’s the best feeling. It’s what I call home.”

We are in tenth grade and she cannot be older than thirty. She is new to our school as we are new to womanhood and when boys in class cut us off, she does not even glance their way. Her eyes remain fixed on us, even as our voices dwindle, and she doesn’t tear her gaze away until we finish our thoughts with a period. When our voices dance into octaves, concluding our thoughts with question marks or apologies, she lifts a manicured eyebrow and shakes her head to coax us onwards to a resounding conclusion.

Her personal life is infinitely interesting to us. She does not wear a ring, but we think she is too pretty to not be married. We also know she would find deep flaws in that line of thinking, but we can’t bring ourselves to care too much; outside her class, we learn quickly that pretty is the best thing we could hope to be. We wonder if, when she looks in the mirror, she is happy with what she sees. We wonder if the men in her life treat her well. We wonder how she comforts her friends when the men in their lives don’t treat them well. We wonder if she thinks about us when we are not at school. She assigns exuberant amounts of weekend homework, and though we never discuss it, we think that is deliberate. We think and hope that she wants us safe in our rooms on a Saturday night, kneeling over a textbook instead of some boy.

She assigns more homework than any other teacher, and though we text each other nightly complaints — how much time does she think we have to spend on her class? — assignments are always finished in cherubic yearnings of “good job!” scribbled across the top in red ink. We exist in a constant state of anticipating praise, of batting our eyes and shrugging down our shirts and hoping to be good enough. In her class, praise does not come with soreness and pain. In her class, we do not ice our throbbing knees with praise, but paste it in our notebooks as a reminder that she cares.

The boys in our class do not like her much. They say that she is a bitch, and though we can’t quite articulate it, we know that they cannot think of any other words to insult her. Once, when she raised her arm to write on the whiteboard, she revealed a small stain of dampness under her arm and the boys snickered. She did not notice, or if she did, she didn’t react, and we stared at her, wondering how she was able to be so unabashedly human.

She does not say anything when one of us leaves the classroom with crinkling plastic up our sleeve, or comes in ten minutes late with red-rimmed eyes. She does not hide her horror when we recount what the old math teacher whispered as we left the room. She does not apologize for cursing, does not apologize for anything.

Imagine Jennifer… we start our sentences, draped over each other in the library or on the bus. The latter half usually involves something sexual or banal — as we learned quickly, some things were both — and it is unclear which is more exciting. Does she have three emergency Midol, two tampons, and a Hershey’s Kiss tucked in the front pocket of her bag? Does she refuse to go down on boyish men, ask them why they want her mouth for their pleasure and not her words?

We wonder what she was like in tenth grade. We wonder if she looked down at her thighs and wanted to disappear, if she cried while getting her bikini line waxed, if she drank too much and did homework on Sunday with a hangover. We wonder if she was always the way she is now, and deep down, we hope not. We hope she found it somewhere, and we hope that it’s out there for us too.

 

Jordan Ferdman is a junior in high school. She is passionate about the usage of the word “girl.”

*At the author’s  request, payment for publication was donated to the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund : https://brooklynbailfund.org/donation-form