Atrium: Issue III

TRUE FLORIDA STORIES

Winter 2023

ATRIUM Welcome to the third annual print issue of Atrium, a narrative nonfiction magazine produced by University of Florida students.

Our mission is simple: to tell true Florida stories. Our focus is on issues important and unique to the Sunshine State. Our hope is that through the prose, photography and poetry on our pages, we are able to share the voices of those who have not always been heard.

In this issue, you will read about a mother’s arduous journey with grief after losing three sons; a reporter who sought to learn more about both sides of the gun debate by shooting a gun herself; and a citrus grower’s battle against a disease that threatens the future of the citrus industry. You will find vulnerable stories of selfdiscovery and courage in the face of adversity. And poetry to reflect on the small treasures that surround us.

Atrium is named after the open space in Weimer Hall, home of the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida. The atrium allows the Florida sun to shine in, bringing light into the heart of our building. Similarly, we hope our namesake magazine will help illuminate the heart of our state.

Happy reading!

The Atrium team

SPECIAL THANKS Atrium would not be possible without the support of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications.

Special thanks to Michael and Linda Connelly for their generous gift that promotes narrative nonfiction at UF; Department of Journalism Chair Ted Spiker, without whom Atrium would be but a dream; CJC Dean Hub Brown; CJC Executive Director of External Relations Randy Bennett; CJC Senior Director of Advancement and Alumni Relations Margaret Gaylord; CJC Senior Graphic Designer Shannon Alexander; and Jamie Greenspan for design consultation.

Funding for Atrium comes from the Michael and Linda Connelly Fund for Narrative Nonfiction; the Harold A. (Hal) Herman Endowment Fund; and the Department of Journalism Magazine Fund.

CONTENTS ESSAYS

lessons from behind the wheel 5 Life Averi Kremposki thoughts 9 Knotted Elise Plunk love letter to odd jobs 11 AMarcus Rojas Valió la peña 13 Melanie Peña Warming up 15 Diego Perdomo Transplant 17 Lindee Walker The problem child 21 Emilia Cardenas-Perez Survivor’s guilt 23 Payton Titus

POETRY

8 booth 22 Kissing Kristine Crane

Florida in the hottest months Caroline Wheeler-Hollis

FEATURES & SPECIAL PROJECTS

Faces 3 Florida Atrium staff Marshall 20 Dear Matthew Cupelli hope in a broken nation 26 Finding Kylie Williams last stand 32 Valencia’s Elise Plunk had never seen a gun before. Days later, I fired one.

40 IHeather Bushman ROMEOs 50 The Kate Becker slowing down 54 No Valentina Sandoval bodies, three graves 60 Two Allessandra Inzinna legacy Plunk 68 AElisemonarch’s In the spotlight 75 Valentina Sarmiento 80 Kathleen Bryce Brown

S T A F F Editor-in-Chief Bryce Brown Managing Editor Elise Plunk Copy Editors Emilia Cardenas-Perez Lindee Walker Design Editor Diego Perdomo Graphic Designers Kate Becker Katherine Batteese Emma Parker Melanie Peña Bombino Multimedia Editor Matthew Cupelli Illustrators Delia Sauer Kris Miron Marketing Director Marcus Rojas Newsletter Editor Anna Edlund Web Designer Miles Haase Event Coordinator Kayla Docteur Marketing Coordinator Ally McCraine Advisers Hope Dean Kristine Crane Ted Spiker Giuliano De Portu

Founder Moni Basu

Florida Faces Florida is full of interesting people.

Florida’s diverse landscape is matched by its equally diverse array of inhabitants. From puppeteers and auctioneers to henna artists and paleontologists, the Sunshine State is teeming with wonderfully unique and curious individuals, each with their own stories and passions. Atrium has sought to highlight the many faces of Florida by telling their stories in their own words.

Inspired by Humans of New York, photos of our subjects are accompanied by quotes and short stories from their lives. Take a peek into the lives of the people in your own backyard, the ones who color our state.

Meet someone new in their own words.

See other Florida Faces

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Kalèo Marshall Compiled by ANNA EDLUND “I DID PAGEANTS when I was a kid.

Love for fashion was always there.

I was with a friend, Jo. I expressed my frustration with a modeling group that I had left months prior and how I kept getting rejected by other modeling agencies. That’s when she told me to start my own, to make it a college club so I don’t have to pay out of pocket for anything.

I started Top Knotch: a safe place for people to express their love for fashion and desire to have a career in it. People can model, do photography, videography, editing or styling.

A lot of kids, especially people of color, in Gainesville don’t really have that positive outlet. It’s always the same view and negative mindset. I, as someone raised in Gainesville, know that there is plenty of people that never leave the city. There’s so

Sun Joo Park Compiled by ELISE PLUNK “WHEN PEOPLE TALK about scissor sharpening, people think it’s not a big deal; it’s just grinding, and that’s it. But it takes at least five years of freehand style sharpening to be good. When you reach a certain point, you need that experience. It’s an art.

We started our business in 1998.

[My husband] studied business in Japan, and the funny thing is he helped some Korean scissor factories to translate because Japan is famous for haircutting scissors. And you know, it led to more and more steps inside the scissor business, and then eventually to starting our own. I was expecting to be a kindergarten teacher or an ESL teacher; I got an ESL certificate before I got married. I was going to teach English to kids. But you know, life doesn’t turn out how you’d expect it, so we’ve ended up doing the business for almost 30 years now.

Each kind of our scissors is different.

They are all manufactured in different atr i u m m ag . o rg

Design by MATTHEW CUPELLI

Founder of student fashion agency Top Knotch much to see and learn elsewhere.

I want to help those people. My parents always told me that there aren’t too many opportunities in here that don’t cost too much money.

Top Knotch doesn’t cost anything.

Financially, my family isn’t doing too well. We’re still paying for stuff from the hospital for my mom’s breast cancer treatment. With some events that I host through Top Knotch, the proceeds go towards my mom’s expenses. If we can have surgeries paid not so much from our pockets, that would be great. I don’t tell my mom, partly because I want it to be a surprise and partly because I don’t want her to say no.

Top Knotch has taught me how to create boundaries while also being open-minded. It has also taught me my worth.

I realized I would create

something of my own instead of joining everyone. Not everyone’s views align with mine, but that’s okay. And once I started, I knew I wasn’t going to be working at Domino’s ever again.”

Co-owner of Scissor Warrior factories and use different metals.

Sometimes it’s really hard because low-end scissors are not meant to be sharpened. They are meant to be used once and then thrown away. My customers don’t know about this, and then they ask us to sharpen them expecting better quality. So we try to explain that, and depending on the condition, he uses different machines and different metals to sharpen.

We try to educate a stylist on what they should check for before they spend lots of money, because it’s not a cheap tool. It’s their main tool, kind of an extension of their hand … Most hair stylists suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome because they use their wrists a lot, a lot of pressure through their thumb using the regular-style scissors, but [our patented design] helped them reduce the pain because it has less movement on them. So that’s why we call it the ‘Painkiller.’ To reduce the pain or prevent carpal tunnel syndrome.

There are lots of conventions and a guild among the scissor sharpeners.

You cannot believe how serious they are! It’s the same as cooking. All of the ingredients can be the same, you know, but not everyone can make a good dish. Sometimes they share their secrets, but not the real secrets.”

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Jordan Borstelmann Owner of Crooked Path Forge Compiled by MATTHEW CUPELLI

“I STARTED with the making of mundane items. I wanted the interaction. I wanted somebody to use it. If you’re interacting with it, you’re thinking about it. You’re touching it.

And in some ways, you’re giving it life.

I really like the problem solving I have to do — the puzzling.

There’s this moment where you go from, ‘Oh, I think this might work. F—k, no, that didn’t work.’ And you do that like ten times before you get it right.

And then there’s the moment when

Ryan Sheppard Compiled by KRISTINE VILLARROEL

“WHEN I WAS 18, after my parents divorced, I totally threw away everything I was given. I was into crazy drugs and insane partying all the time, and I lost my full-ride scholarship at the University of North Florida because of that. I grew up here in Gainesville. I was going to transfer over to UF after I did my first two years there. I was ROTC — my dad was a military guy. I had everything given to me growing up, but I loved the street life, and I wanted to go chase that.

After losing the scholarship, I had to go live in Section 8 housing because I didn’t have the money, and my parents weren’t going to support me as I wasted my life away. I then went from selling drugs for fun and entertainment to having to feed myself. It’s different.

There were cop cars parked outside my house and people breaking in. I had people smashing my windows to try to steal from me.

About five years ago, I got out of all the drugs and started a moving

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you go, ‘It should work this way’ and then it works exactly the way you think it should. And you’re like, ‘Oh s—t! I might be understanding this! I might finally, maybe have this grasp on the medium — and by extension, the world around me. Here, I have understood this one little, tiny part of it.’

And then I really like the idea that people will use the things that I’ve made after I’m gone.

You know, I have family with children, but my wife and I don’t have children, and we won’t. So, it’s neat to think that maybe some of the

things that I’ve made will go on to have a life without me. Like a legacy, maybe. It just seems too cheesy of a word, but I guess it’s the right one.”

Owner of Maverick Moving Company and Brew Bus company. I had a house for the first three years, but when it came time to get a new lease, no one would rent to me because I had such a long criminal history. I also have two dogs — Alpha, a German shepherd pup, and Aria, a rescue animal — so it was hard finding rentals who allowed them.

The moving company was doing well financially, and we had a storage unit for all of our stuff, so I moved into that warehouse. There was no AC or electricity in there, and there were roaches running through. It was disgusting.

I also own a brew bus; it’s not my moneymaker, but it’s had a lot of exposure. I drive people around town in a truck that I repurposed with lights and music. And it’s because of the brew bus that I got a place to stay. I saw a listing for a nice place, and I talked to the owner. He told me he had never rented out a property to someone with a record like mine, but once I mentioned the brew bus, he wanted to hear more. He owned a lot of properties in the city — bars, nightlife businesses aimed at the college student population — and he

wanted to work with me.

So we decided to partner, shook hands, and I signed the lease.”

Life lessons from behind the wheel

Design by LINDEE WALKER

Remembering milestones alongside mile markers Essay by AVERI KREMPOSKY Illustrations by DELIA SAUER

THE MECHANIC from the tire shop down the road who called me last February spoke a memorable, if eerie, line: “Is it possible there’s somebody living around here who hates you?” he said with a raspy voice.

I jerked my shoulders back and sat up an inch straighter.

“I’m sorry?” I asked, trying to remain civil and collected like I’ve seen my mother do on infinite occasions.

“Ex-boyfriends? Jealous peers?

Former friends?” he rattled off matter-of-factly, as if waiting for me to have a sudden epiphany.

I still couldn’t think of any sworn enemies, but I do remember thinking that this guy didn’t need my life story to fix the flat tire I brought to his shop earlier that morning. He continued his tirade before I could answer. Apparently, they found a broad gash across my back tire during the inspection.

“So you’re saying somebody slashed it?” I tried to clarify.

“All I’m saying is a piece of debris would never make a cut this clean,” he said.

So I came back to the shop.

As soon as I walked through the doors, I could feel the weight of stares

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and silence. When I came face-toface with the man from the phone, he looked at me with a contradicting gaze. His lips were pursed in the type of straight line that usually denotes seriousness, but it was balanced by his eyes, which were soft with sympathy. I immediately felt that he probably had daughters of his own, and I relaxed.

I relished in that silent bliss before he announced the price.

“It’s gonna be $200 for the new tire,” he said.

If he really did have any daughters, they’d probably never experienced my level of adversity behind the wheel.

Nearly everything I’ve learned about life I’ve figured out while sitting in the front seat of my light blue 2011 Hyundai Sonata. With every mile burned, the girl with her hands on the ever-peeling wheel became unrecognizable — even to herself. I think the only thing that has fully witnessed my complete stumble into adulthood is the old car that seems to gain a new quirk every day.

At 16, I sat comfortably with the idea that failure can be everything all at once: unavoidable, harrowing, liberating and worthwhile.

I should have known I was doomed to years of car misfortune when the state of Florida tried to keep me off the road in the first place. When I walked back into the DMV after my driving test, my mom’s smile was gleaming brighter than all of the fluorescent lights in the building combined.

“How’d it go?” she mouthed silently, but somehow, still loud and clear. I shrugged — my instructor walked inside without giving me my results. Still, I wore a shrewd grin because I knew I did everything right. I always did everything right.

In the middle of the test, we stopped on a narrow road where the proctor said it would be okay to make a fourpoint turn rather than the standard three-point one. I think I laughed a phony, breathy chuckle — then did the three-point turn anyway.

When the middle-aged woman plodded back to the lobby to escort my mom and me to her desk, I could only think about the first place I would drive to that day. Maybe I’d bring home lunch for everybody or take my brother to soccer practice — not because I was some saint, but just because I could. Completely lost in thought, I didn’t realize the instructor

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must have been droning on for some time now. The way I reentered her orbit at the worst possible moment was cartoon-esque.

“Unfortunately, that is grounds for immediate disqualification,” she tried to say benevolently, even though it came out more deadpan.

I had completely missed what she had said, just like I missed the left turn lane that leads back to the DMV. As my eyes lost focus with tears, I remember feeling my mom’s elbow between my top two ribs, which meant “save it for the car.”

My mom asked me if I wanted to drive home. I gave her the silent treatment for the rest of the day. The narrative where I was imperfect was not a story I wanted to be a part of.

I only stopped crying the next morning when I went to take my second driving test — the one I passed with ease. When I drove my car alone for the first time, the warm air snaking through my open windows and the whipping breeze turning my cheeks pink, the previous day faded silently into my rearview mirror.

At 17, I discovered my ability to be my own worst enemy.

Note to self: In a race against the clock and curfew, never forget to turn your car lights off. You will wake up for school the next morning and your battery will be dead.

At 18, I made a clear-cut distinction between the time to keep it together and the time to break down — both of which are equally important.

When I got into the accident, two things were on the horizon: the brisk air of late October and the outline of downtown Jacksonville. The car one lane over merged into my right side — first subtly, like a child’s finger dragging lightly across my passenger door. Then it was with enough brawn to snap my mirror off.

I’m not sure who turned on my hazard lights and guided me to the

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shoulder of the highway, because it didn’t feel like me. I was too busy contorting my face into something wide-eyed and bewildered. I took that hostile glare and focused it through my window like my anger could condense into a beam that burned a hole in her chest.

“Don’t freak out but…” was what I managed to say to my mom on the phone before I heard a rapid succession of high-pitched knocks on my window.

In my distress, I forgot accidents usually involve more than one person.

As I watched the woman’s hands jump and twirl in a thousand different dances and listened to her slow but ravaged voice force out one insult after the next, all I wanted to do was cry. I wanted to flood the roads with my tears, so she would realize I was too young and too apologetic for her condemnation.

I was on the verge of a Noah’s Ark reenactment when it hit me: I wasn’t the one in the wrong. And also, my mom was still on the phone.

“Really, don’t freak out,” I said. “I’ll call you back.”

I heard the utter of my first and middle name on the other end of the receiver before I hung up.

I spent the next hour putting on the best performance of my life, like I was an actress who’d been studying her lines for months.

I deflected the hurl of offenses with grace and managed to keep my inflection unwavering when I told the police what happened. I carried myself in a way that was perfectly balanced: half polite and half spiteful.

Since nobody could show up for me, I was going to show up for myself.

When I finally sat down alone in my car, I wasn’t even upset anymore.

I was impressed. I had the startling realization that I was aging — that I had lost the toddler-like urge to throw myself on the floor and scream about everything that bothered me. I felt equipped enough to leave my youth in the dust.

When I called my mom back, I started sobbing immediately.

Perhaps I would never cross the threshold of seniority. Maybe life was more like maturity purgatory.

All I knew was that it felt good to smile and it felt good to cry.

At 19, I unearthed my ability to be put first.

The sun was beating through my windshield with such force I thought it was going to cook the groceries I had just put in my passenger seat. My forehead was syrupy with sweat. But every time I pushed my ignition, I was met with a couple of exaggerated gurgles and then ear-splitting silence.

A few hours later, having dropped my car off at the shop, I parked my little brother’s car in the garage connected to my apartment — claiming it as my own only a month after he got his license. That is the kind of guilt that will eat your skin for breakfast, your nerves for lunch and your heart for dinner.

I felt like I was robbing him of his coming-of-age. He was supposed to be ditching school, picking up his friends and leaving his lights on when he nearly missed his curfew.

I must’ve apologized every day. Twice on the weekends.

“It’s okay,” he swore. “Mom lets me pick the music in her car…and I love you.”

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At 20, I saw a perfect image of the type of friend I wanted to be.

There are so many things I could tell you about my best friend. She’s spunky and adventurous and beautifully unruly — but she would never miss class. If the doctors told her she had 24 hours to live, I’m positive she’d be spending some of it on campus.

I called her from the back corner of a minuscule car repair shop, crying because I hadn’t slept the night before and nobody knew how many hours it would take to patch the hole where I’d gotten a nail stuck in my tire.

“I’m not doing anything right now,” she said as I heard her rustling around for her student ID — the one that would let her take the bus from campus back to our apartment. “I’ll pick you up so you can take a nap.”

It was a Monday at 12:36 p.m.

She was supposed to be in class.

At 21, I grabbed optimism by the hand and squeezed it until it was colorless.

When I got into the second accident, at least I was in Orlando.

My back bumper was falling off, but my mom was there with open arms in 20 minutes sharp. I

wouldn’t make it back to Gainesville until 3 a.m., and I had to steal my brother’s car for the second time.

I could smell the sourness of his soccer cleats rotting in the back seat, but I was okay — and that’s all that mattered.

And now at 22, I’m basking in every moment, every person and every memory.

The stories and catchy lessons that come with my first and only car come at a price — one that can only be paid with the miles on my odometer.

Every digit closer to 100,000 feels like a sharp reminder that time is finite.

People (and cars) aren’t suited to stay with us forever, and that’s something I’m learning to be okay with. The only thing I can do is be here, right now.

My car’s inevitable expiration can’t stop me from trying to squeeze in a couple more lessons. After all, it’s still running on black electrical tape and a finicky FM transmitter.

On the cusp of change, I will not fret until I’m in the thick of it.

Perhaps the last lesson my 2011 Hyundai Sonata will teach me is how to say goodbye, but I don’t think I’m ready to learn about that just yet.

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Design by KATE BECKER

Essay by ELISE PLUNK Illustrations by KRIS MIRON

SLIP, YARN OVER. Chain 15.

Chain two. Flip the stitch. Skip two. Double crochet into the next 15. Chain two. Flip. Repeat.

The yarn slips through my fingers with a whisper, my hands following the memory of thousands of stitches looped, checked for errors and redone again. Soft cotton or bamboo works best, the gentle tug of string against the crochet hook providing just enough texture to allow a good grip on the task at hand. Ignore the ache of panic behind my eyes; focus on the stitches.

Three more double crochets. Two more.

Now one. Now flip, and do it again.

Most times, the panic starts with a headache.

Not all the time. Sometimes it starts in the chest, a sudden heat blooming out from just below the hollow of my throat. My heart beats faster, tripping over itself to keep up with the rapid pace of my anxious thoughts. But most times, it starts in my head, right behind my eyes. The panic descends like a veil across my face, coarse and suffocating.

What if… But no, that’s irrational, it wouldn’t happen like that… Except for that one time… Oh god, it’s going to happen just like that…

The pain expands into the tips of my fingers, and they start to shake.

My face turns red, the color climbing down my neck. Suddenly, I’m not handling the stress of an upcoming exam. I’m a young rabbit, frantically

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Using psychology and yarn to help cope with anxiety sprinting for my warren, hawk circling overhead. My thoughts turn to TV static, buzzing, blinding, screaming in my ears.

Maybe the scream was me? I don’t really know. What do I know?

I know what science says, I guess. The Anxiety and Depression Association of America reports anxiety disorders as “the most common mental illness in the U.S.” It affects 40 million adults, or just over 19% of the population, every year.

I know that anxiety disorders can arise from a complex set of factors, which include family history, brain chemistry, life events, personality and more.

I know that anxiety is not only complex but also dangerous — people with anxiety disorders are 6 times more likely to be hospitalized based on a psychiatric condition than people without anxiety disorders.

No doubt, things worry me. Small issues like incomplete to-do lists and scheduling mishaps add up in my mind; I make a typo on a work email and fear getting fired. I get angry with myself for getting stressed over simple tasks. My car breaks down, and it’s all too much.

My adrenaline increases, senses flood with cortisol and I’m ready to do what I was made to do — fulfill the primal urge to fight and defend myself or run and hide from the oncoming threat. But

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with nothing to fight and nothing to hide from, my body turns the panic inward, leaving my chest hurting, hands shaking, mind tangling.

What do I do?

Stress can lead to an early death.

Okay, yeah, that thought doesn’t help. It’s true, though. There are studies…

Stop. Not right now. OK, OK, think; my body needs something to fight. Stress, in normal amounts — this is not normal — is supposed to prepare you for action. The American Psychological Association says that “Relaxation techniques and other stress-relieving activities and therapies have been shown to effectively reduce muscle tension, decrease the incidence of certain stress-related disorders, such as headaches, and increase a sense of well-being.” That’s good! I can relax. I can do that.

You’re not answering the “how” right now.

Yes, yes, the how. The how…

My hands continue to shake as black spots creep across my sight, the Swiss cheese of my vision slowly collapsing. I see my phone sitting on the desk, silent black screen beckoning, comforting.

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Chronic anxiety takes a toll on anyone ... but there are ways to manage it, even if it starts with something as simple and soft as a ball of yarn.

No. My head hurts; bright lights and loud sounds are not calming. Think, think.

I clench my hands into fists to stop the shaking, my knuckles white with strain. I see a ball of yellow cotton yarn in the corner. I remember seeing the soft, yellow skein at the craft store warehouse sale, the sweet, lemony brightness peeking out to say hello from the bottom shelf.

I’d used the yarn to guide me out of panics I’d experienced before, using the thought of a sweater, candy pink and soft yellow, with little hints of orange on the sleeves, to lead me out of the labyrinth.

Bilateral stimulation.

Yes. Repetitive movement on the left and right sides of the body. It works with sounds and images too, but with the hook and yarn, both hands moving, mind focused, I could get my brain to calm down.

A study examining the role of bilateral stimulation in EDMR therapy, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, concluded that bilateral stimulation “induces relaxation and comfortable feelings” and could help improve cognitive processing.

I could have relief.

I launch myself across the room toward the ball, skinning my knees on the carpet as I grab at the ground looking for a crochet hook.

I need it, where is it?

Tears spill over my cheeks. It hurts to breathe. I find the purple metal hook hidden under the raw edge of the carpet. I snatch it up and sit cross-legged, twisting my left hand into the soft cotton, pulling out the end of the string and starting.

Slip. Chain 15. Chain two. Flip the stitch. Skip two. Double crochet into the next 15. Chain two. Flip. Repeat.

My breathing slows.

Chain two. The tears stop. Double crochet. The headache, the spots on my vision, the pain ebbs away as I take the tangle of my thoughts and order them in rows of yellow yarn, then pink, then hints of orange.

The moment eases as the crochet hook clicks against my nails. I take a breath in, holding it briefly as I pause, yarn in hand.

My thoughts get tangled up sometimes; chronic anxiety takes a toll on anyone who experiences it, in whatever form it presents itself as. But there are ways to manage it, even if it starts with something as simple and soft as a ball of yarn. There’s hope.

I breathe out. I crochet.

Slip, double crochet, chain two, flip the stitch…

A love letter to odd jobs

Design by MARCUS ROJAS

Essay by MARCUS ROJAS Photos by MATTHEW CUPELLI

Two years and several attempts to find purpose in the real world I ROLLED down the car window and extended my gloved hand.

Another gloved hand gave me a high school diploma, and a muffled voice congratulated me.

My mom drove out of the bus loop where our graduation ceremony was hosted in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. The brown brick buildings that housed the final years of my adolescence shrunk in the rearview mirror for the last time. Ahead of me: the real world.

Now what?

The real world was just a rumor my parents and teachers created to keep me focused in class — up until I worked my first odd job a year before my high school graduation.

The hotel restaurant sat on the eighth floor overlooking the Sarasota downtown bayfront.

I walked through the ivory-white lobby, rode the elevator up and stepped into the dining room to see my hometown from a top-floor view.

The servers, who were much older than my classmates, felt hesitant about working with a high schooler.

But the bar desperately needed a barback for the looming tourist season. I would wipe down tables until a bartender gave me a cue.

Then, I snuck behind the bar to cut limes and switch beer kegs.

I didn’t come home from a hard night’s work with a passing

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test score or a competitive GPA, but with cash tips and a paycheck in my pocket. While I sat in class throughout the week, I daydreamed about the upcoming weekend shifts.

I gradually fell in love with this bar in the sky. But a year later, the pandemic broke the clouds beneath my feet, and I tumbled back down to Earth with no college plans or restaurant jobs in mind for the foreseeable future.

Now what?

It was time to carve my own place in the world. As long as it made me money, it

could be any job for now.

At the start of the silent pandemic summer, I stepped inside the rusty walls of a welding garage dressed in steel-toe boots and cargo pants. At 18 years old, I was again the youngest person on the job, assembling aluminum railings and spiral staircases among older men who’d been in the real world since before I was born.

One day I was welding with Carlos, a man in his 50s with two daughters.

“Do you believe in God?” he asked me in Spanish.

“No, I don’t.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t really care about it.”

“You should. Or else He will send you to Hell.”

During the car rides to construction sites, the men enjoyed giving me advice about mortgages and finding a wife to settle down with. A life of welding didn’t feel quite right, but I had nothing else going for me.

Later that summer, an email told me I received a full-ride scholarship to any public university in Florida.

The real world laid out two paths in front of me. I could keep the security of being a welder or attend community college for two years and find a new career. It was a choice that would change my life’s direction, but the cost of staying here was a free college education, to follow this narrow path or open a dozen new ones. I left the welding job in

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August and started my first classes.

I studied during the week and spent the weekends stocking fruits and vegetables at a Whole Foods a few blocks away from the hotel restaurant I used to work at. On a cold and rainy Valentine’s Day, I was placed in a booth outside the store where I wrapped colorful flower bouquets for the couples and retirement-age customers that made up the majority of my town. I stood there alone in the booth, soaking up the love and petrichor in the air.

pulled my life in different directions, it was up to me to carve my own path and find where I belong.

It was early August when I entered the garage doors of The Overton, an openair restaurant with bare concrete block walls hosting a bar, a coffee station and a cozy lounge. I met the co-owner, Courtney, and had a conversation about the joy of working in restaurants before the pandemic.

“You wanna pick up a couple shifts?” he asked me.

The days moved slowly as I drifted between my job and school in my quiet, lonely hometown. All but one of my friends left to join the military or construction trades. Meanwhile, I was facing a limbo of random jobs until I could transfer to a university. It was hard to make new friends in the real world, let alone find people my age.

Moving between odd jobs, I felt like a ghost.

My seasonal contract ended with Whole Foods and I found myself handling flowers again as a gardener during the summer. With another year of community college ahead of me, an acre of plants was my only company as the daydreams of university lulled me into sleepwalking through the hot months.

I tossed around heavy bags of mulch alongside Russel, a young man who enjoyed sharing his guitar videos.

He said he lived in a halfway house with about a dozen people. The gardening shop helped those who came from a past of criminal activity or drug addiction by bringing them together to care for this acre. Hope for the future was the sole reason why I got out of bed, but for once, I saw it in someone else’s eyes too.

Russel was a reminder that no matter how often the real world

Ainsley, an 18-year-old cashier, worked the register while I ran the espresso station to her left.

Her quiet distance from the staff reminded me too much of the real world’s lonesomeness.

I asked if she wanted to learn how to pour a shot of espresso, and she gradually learned how to make lattes and cappuccinos. Later, she invited her friends to hang out as she made drinks for them and shared laughs. While I didn’t have friends to make coffee for, I found new friends to teach.

The real world gave me a break from constant readjustment, and I spent the next year in one place. With that, I was around people my age for the first time since high school.

Garrett loved cars and Formula One racing. Emily painted landscapes. Mercedes planned to live in Paris as an “au pair,” a foreigner who does housework in exchange for a place to live. Alara remembered me from high school.

Starting in August, they joined the staff as I served food and cocktails once again throughout the Sarasota tourism season, and life felt like it did before the pandemic. We almost made it to the 4th of July, but in late June, our co-owner, Chris, announced he was closing the restaurant.

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When we shut the garage doors for the last time, the owners let us take home the entire liquor supply.

We made cocktails for each other, shared laughs, stuffed the bottles in our car trunks and spent the rest of the afternoon downtown celebrating as if it were the last episode of a brief sitcom show.

And, just like that, the real world took away a place that felt like home. A pattern emerged; I found a comfortable place in life, and the real world rearranged it.

In a month, everything would change again. I received my diploma from community college and was about to move to Gainesville. On Aug. 12, 2022, I shoved all my belongings into my car and drove to the I-75 north ramp as my hometown shrunk in the rearview mirror.

After two years of yearning for purpose and belonging, I found everything I wanted at university: love, friendships, adventures, a couple more odd jobs and a clearer purpose.

A year later, I have two semesters left before graduation. The real world patiently awaits me with each passing day. I have no idea what to expect, but it’s become exciting to wonder.

Those jobs revealed to me a subtle balance between the life crafted by my hands and the unpredictability of the real world.

It took me two years and several odd jobs to embrace it.

Valió la peña

Design by MELANIE PEÑA BOMBINO

Reclaiming the history of my last name Story and illustrations by MELANIE PEÑA BOMBINO I REMEMBER ASKING my mom once, “Why didn’t you put the eñe in my paperwork?”

There was an invisible little squiggle over the “n” in my last name. It signified that the Peña was pronounced pen-ya, not pen-a.

While most of my classmates grew up knowing and never questioning their names, I didn’t fully understand mine until I was 10.

I realized my teachers didn’t know how to pronounce Peña, and that my lifelong friend, the squiggle, was missing from my ID, name tag and report card. When I asked why, my mom said, “Americans don’t know what it is, so there’s no point in using it. It’s just easier.”

Around this time, I also discovered my second last name, “Bombino.”

In Cuba, most people have two last names. My first last name came from my dad, Pedro Peña.

My second last name came from my mom, Mayvelis Bombino.

My family is from a little rural mountain town in Cuba. Before immigrating to the United States, my days were spent dancing in warm summer rain showers, playing

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with my pet chicken Melanie and hosting lizard-catching competitions with abuelito.

My grandpa, Angel Bombino, was my best friend. Everywhere that he went, I would follow. I celebrated my first birthday in a local bar, munching on cheese and crackers while my grandpa got everyone to sing me happy birthday. When I took my first steps, we were at his friend’s house.

He immediately swooped me up and ran home, announcing to every passerby proudly that I could walk.

I was 3 when we left, and my mom told me his heart broke that day.

Almost every year after we left, we would go back to visit. Duffel bag after duffel bag would be filled with a wide range of necessities: soap, medicine, sponges and clothes. I loved going back to see my childhood friends and relatives, but I knew something was wrong. We would go back to visit, but everyone there was trying desperately to leave.

I wasn’t allowed to drink the tap water my friends would drink every day. There were nights when the candles were brought out and my grandpa cooked dinner under

the small twinkle of a taper candle during apagones. My friends would ask me what strawberries tasted like and day dream about flying back to the U.S. with me.

While half of my heart stayed in Cuba each time we left, the other half adjusted to growing up in Cape Coral, a small southwest Florida retirement community.

I never understood why each time I said I was from Cuba, the follow up question was, “Did you come in a boat?”

Or why, when I spoke Spanish in class, my teachers would scold me for not including my nonSpanish speaking classmates.

When I finally learned my full name was Melanie Peña Bombino, I didn’t know what to do with it.

Because in school and everywhere else, I was Melanie Pena.

I had two separate identities. One that I felt could only exist within my family. And one that I had created to make the transition here easier.

Thinking about Cuba was painful.

For most of my years in elementary school, I stayed in aftercare while my mom went to college and my

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dad worked. One afternoon in third grade, I was playing on the swing set with my friend when I confessed that something had been on my mind. As tears formed around my eyes, I told her about my cousin in Cuba, who I had heard was struggling. For lunch every day, her school was feeding her old rice and milk due to food scarcity. I remember the stress and guilt that filled me when I thought about my family in Cuba.

I don’t know when it happened but at some point, I stopped drawing the squiggle over my last name. It was easier to be Melanie Pena and distance myself from my culture, because being Cuban felt too hard sometimes.

To grow up as a Cuban-American in the United States is to feel the constant pressure of knowing you need to make it for everyone who didn’t.

I lost my grandpa to Cuba. He passed away at 53.

The medical infrastructure in the country was too broken to care for him. And every year that passed and we visited, he would be thinner, frailer and sicklier.

In fact, most of the family we visited appeared to age thrice as fast in Cuba than people in the U.S. The distance I had unconsciously been placing between myself and my cultural identity dissipated July 11, 2021.

I heard hope and pride in my mom’s voice

when she told me “Cuba esta despierta.”

Mass protests were taking place all over the island.

People my age were fighting and making noise all in the name of freedom. Hundreds of people in my little hometown gathered in front of a community area to march and protest with the people in Cuba.

The moment was historic, marking the first major protests against the government since 1994. I was reminded of the resilience and power that came with being Cuban.

Thousands of people across the entire world stood in protest to show support for the people risking everything in Cuba.

My name is now a reminder to myself of this history.

Recently, I have been trying to use my full name more and more. And when I see another name with an eñe or special character, I make sure to always write it correctly.

There is no eñe keyboard key, so usually, I’ll go through a bit of extra work to copy the eñe from Google.

I’ve fallen in love with my second last name, knowing that it’s something I share with my grandpa. I try to include the Bombino in more of my official paperwork. When I graduate from the University of Florida, I want Peña Bombino on the diploma. My grandpa was never able to leave Cuba, but I carry him with me now through my name.

Melanie Peña Bombino, 3, with her grandparents and friends in Cuba.

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Warming up

Design by DIEGO PERDOMO

Essay and illustrations by DIEGO PERDOMO

A northerner acclimates to Florida

A GRIZZLED MAN smoking a cigarette in his Confederate flag-adorned pickup truck was the first time I saw a Florida stereotype in the flesh.

It was 2015, and I had only been down I-95 a handful of times to get to Orlando. Florida was never a remarkable part of the drive to me. The Tri-State area and Washington, D.C. had comically aggravating traffic. South Carolina and Georgia had peanuts and peaches.

Florida was just flat and long.

However, in the moment passing the man with his cigarette and flag, the incarnation of everything negative I believed about Florida only furthered my aversion to the South.

As the stereotypical monolith shrunk in the rearview mirror, my family and I only observed in amusement, the only value we derived from Florida as New York tourists.

Two years later, we were on I-95 again. But this time, we weren’t tourists.

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In December 2017, we made the 20-hour road trip down to Florida. Now that we would be here for good, I believed the stereotypes were about to become my reality. Tasked with a new life, all that occupied my mind was going back home.

It’s been almost six years since my family made its pilgrimage to Florida. Moving down for a better — or more accurately described as new — standard of living, I didn’t know if I had the right to complain.

I’d like to believe I adjusted to the climate here. Embodying the veneers of eternal sunshine and homeowners associations, life was condescendingly better. While not walkable, my neighborhood was picturesque with warmer neighbors. While having classes twice as long then the ones I was used to, school had more engaging extracurricular activities.

While I had started to look past the

northern superiority I fostered before moving, I still felt like my upbringing distanced me from my peers.

I can’t remember exactly when or even if the state began feeling like home. While I had lost the kindergarten-to-freshman friendships of my hometown and a seasonal wardrobe, the idyllic flora and the sense of community around football and marching band were things I unexpectedly began to value.

Breaking up the monotony of sunshine, cloudy days helped me remember what my family and I had exchanged. Despite loving the sun, I felt its constant bliss made me complacently comfortable. Without the gray, still, cloudless skies of winter, I would have never learned to appreciate the ephemeral changes in climate, the warm refuge of family

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gatherings and the satisfaction of biking to the top of a hill.

Sometimes I wonder if I was even supposed to end up here.

Before we moved, I never saw myself leaving the Northeast. Being raised in an unincorporated hamlet just outside of Queens, New York, I longed for city life. Personal space and a calm environment were negotiable when considering my future. I could never understand why people enjoyed warm weather.

I preferred defiantly bundling up over letting my body adjust to the elements, because to me, comfort wasn’t something you settled with. It was something you made your own.

I learned these values from my parents. Like my mother, I thought the California heat was hot enough to melt people’s minds. From their relaxed speech to the pace they lived their lives, slowing down was something that agitated me.

After my mother gave birth to me there in the wake of the 2003 San Diego fires, she returned to the cold where people didn’t comment on how she pronounced “coffee.”

Like my father, I believed New York was the premiere melting pot of opportunity and culture.

Building a life in Queens, one of the most ethnically diverse places in the world, he would always tell me of the immigrant enclaves and bodegas he frequented as a salesman.

Hailing from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, he chose the cold over the warmth he had known his whole life.

And even my stepfather, who had always yearned to return to the warmth of Puerto Rico and connect to his Carolinian origin, saw how the cold’s opportunities were enough to pull him away from the sun.

The 2017 drive to Florida was characterized by a two-hour Jersey traffic block-up, an hourlong midnight parking effort in the Virginia cold and an embarrassing

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count of the times our two-car caravan ended up miles apart. As I couldn’t convince my parents to let me stay in New York, I saw these obstacles as the universe’s last stand to keep me where I belonged.

Reflecting my unimpressed demeanor toward the state, I slept most of the way through Florida.

With lapses in my memory between the damp Jacksonville gas station to the swampy air around our house in Pembroke Pines, I missed out on witnessing the cities I would begrudgingly connect with one day.

Orlando was the first city to thaw my aversion to the South. Being the first place I visited in Florida, it served as a place with generally positive, if superficial, memories of visits to amusement parks. While I never felt a deep connection to Florida, there was certainly something inviting about its warm rain.

Further south in Port St. Lucie, I discovered I wasn’t as alone as I assumed, meeting long-lost cousins and going to beaches I was too proud to admit were better than the rocky ones I grew up with.

We finally reached Broward at around 3 in the morning. Barely unpacking our things, it took effort to become comfortable in the house, like hermit crabs nestling into a new shell.

Every morning of the first month in Florida, I woke up in New York.

Refusing to settle in, I would trip over the things I had yet to put away, turning on the lights to see a room that wasn’t mine. This attitude extended to my behavior, as I biked to my new high school and wore T-shirts in 50-degree weather.

When I went back to visit New York two months later, it was easy.

Instead of 20 hours by car, it was three hours by plane. There was no mocking country music played by my family members. There was just my music. On the ride, there were young people and families traveling with me instead of pickup truck drivers proud of a heritage I was fundamentally opposed to as a northerner.

What wasn’t easy was realizing New York didn’t feel like home anymore.

Transplant Design by LINDEE WALKER

A recount of a life spent in hospitals and foreign feelings of grief Essay by LINDEE WALKER Illustrations by MATTHEW CUPELLI

Lindee Walker, recently 3 years old, a few months after the hospitalization of her father in 2007.

IT WAS A SUNNY February day when my family began to open Christmas presents.

The Christmas tree became a plain tree, then became a Valentine’s Day tree. My mom couldn’t stand to take it down before my dad got to see it, so she redecorated as the weeks passed to have something to do with her stricken hands as the months trudged on.

There were flecks of blue and gold tinsel married to our carpet at random intervals and pink, glittery hearts scattered around where the tree stood, a little crooked and strange. She had anxiously shifted the furniture over an inch every day leading up to my dad’s return home.

He would be the only one to notice. When he precariously nudged his wheelchair back into our living room for the first time, he said, “Well, look at all this space!”

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He noticed the small details. In all my 18 years, I had never seen him be anything but attentive. When my boots grew dull, he swooped in at night with a rag and shoe polish. When my sister ran out of almond milk, he replaced it before she could even notice herself. When he noticed my mom’s anxious hovering, he complimented the arrangement of the furniture.

When he crept up to the couch in the unfamiliar wheelchair and hoisted himself up and over the lowered armrests, I understood how parents felt seeing their child take their first steps.

It reminded me of the story my dad told about me for many Thanksgivings.

“When I first took her training wheels off, I looked away for four seconds before she was speeding away from me all by herself !” he would brag.

Back in the present, I pulled the breaks on his wheelchair

before it could skew itself away.

He sunk down onto our corduroy couch. I had never realized how plump and deep the brown cushions were, until I watched him sink deeply into them, inch by inch by inch, until he settled.

When his visit home was over, the sky was a wan shade of bruised blue, and the sun began to look like a stranger in the sky. I began to truly hate hospitals then.

A few days later, my mother finally took down the Christmas tree. It was the last time my dad went home.

I used to collect electrocardiogram stickers. I collected a lot of things, because when you stay in a hospital for months at a time, there is not much else to do but become a collector of things.

A withered and stained shoebox of pinecones, acorns, Disney princess

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Walker sits with her feet up and her shoes off in a hospital chair next to her father. It is Nov. 24, 2022, her birthday.

in any of the sterile corners here, the familiarity of it was something that somehow became a part of me.

My dad never complained about his first transplant, or his second, or the

Photo courtesy of LINDEE WALKER

stickers and numerous stuffed animals from hospital staff kept me busy while I sat in one of the large chairs next to my father’s bed.

I stuck the EKG stickers to my hands so my dad and I would match.

Often, when my mother peeled them off as I slept, curled in a cheap, gray-green chair with more lumps than I could count at 4 years old, I would spirit another one away from somewhere and watch them peel away from my skin for hours.

When he came home for the first time since becoming sick, it had been seven months. He had always been “sick,” but he never seemed to let himself be reduced to that.

By 2021, the University of Florida Shands Transplant Center in Gainesville performed over 8,000 transplant surgeries. Somewhere in that count is my dad, who received his second heart transplant there when I was 3 years old, but this fact was always made distant by the former track runner, SWAT team member and private investigator I told all my friends about.

Whenever I went to visit my dad in the hospital my senior year, I remember my hate for many things in hospitals. The way the ID sticker printer squealed and sputtered at the front desk grated against my ears. The aching rub of wheels on tile, attached to a bed frame, attached to a bed, attached to a person whose eyes I avoided like their illness could sear me where I stood, hunched on the elevator wall.

I slept in one of the beds once, nestled against my dad, when I was too small to do much damage to the yards of tubing and wires connected to his arms and strapped to his chest.

I felt like the young woman from “Princess and the Pea,” settled on top of a tall bed and unable to truly rest.

Some of my earliest memories are of men and women in pale blue masks and dark blue gloves, of tangling my thin wrists up in wires and tubes when my mother looked away, of scratchy beige blankets with no patterns and no scent. Though I couldn’t find comfort

diabetes he developed somewhere along the way, or the kidney transplant he was told he needed but probably would not get because he was “too sick.” He didn’t talk much about the medications he took to keep his heart working and his blood from

Grief was a strange creature to me. It writhed under my skin and became something terrible in that hospital lobby.

An excerpt from a book Walker’s father kept documenting his transplant and life after it.

his first and last day trip home in “good health.” Diseases work in mysterious ways sometimes. Hope became a deceptor. When my mom mentioned the hospital by name, I knew my dad was dying.

I hadn’t been to this wing since I was 3 years old. I was much bigger this time, and still the automatic doors and check in desks towered over me.

Grief was a strange creature to me. It writhed under my skin and became something terrible in that hospital lobby. My bitterness was really grief this whole time, and it turned into frustration and anger and transformed into many things before it finally settled into something superiorly messy.

People with kidney failure usually

Walker, 6, and her father years after her father’s second heart transplant.

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Photo courtesy of LINDEE WALKER

clotting, and he didn’t even talk much about going back and forth to our local hospital every so often.

By the time I was 18, I had visited some hospital room or another more times than I could count, but I couldn’t bring myself to not be a little bitter.

There was something special in the fact that I had watched my dad overcome each trip, yet the bitterness remained.

There was nothing special about the fact that I spent my senior year of high school with half my heart in either a hospital room or a rehabilitation center where my dad was supposed to learn how to walk again.

We ended up back at Shands overnight one day in late March, just a month after my dad had taken

become dialysis patients. For four hours, three times a week, their blood gets filtered out of their bodies by a machine. I could never really understand the trouble of this physically, but these feelings became something my body could not process and could not expel. It was something vile in my blood, and it festered inside me. It felt as if something foreign was taking up my body, slowly replacing each of my organs.

I figure I could reflect on my years spent in dingy hospital chairs and cafeterias and make something profound out of what I learned from my dad’s bedside. I could talk about how I felt a connection to the hospital my dad died in, the one I was partially raised in, and how it drew me to go to college in the same city.

But I didn’t gain anything from hospitals but a truly unfortunate case of mysophobia and a hatred for the rigid sound machinery makes when it beeps. I went to college in Gainesville because I knew my dad would be proud of me no matter what.

In the wake of my grief, there were no fond feelings to be had — though I appreciated the kind doctors and nurses who took care of my dad and alway brought us warm blankets.

Grief has a way of making you feel like you’ve been transplanted. It turns you inside out and upside down. It takes a lot of fortitude to learn to let it live inside you and to learn how to scrub it from your skin when it clings.

I learned nothing about strength or fortitude from my relationship with hospitals, but I learned everything about those two things from my dad.

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The problem child

Design by KATE BECKER

Navigating neurodivergence in girlhood Story by EMILIA CARDENAS-PEREZ Illustrations by DELIA SAUER I LEFT BEHIND a long list of teachers who despised me during my 12 years in the Florida public school system.

Twenty-six kids sit under the fluorescent lights of a classroom, staring down at a sheet of manila paper. The Floridian humidity creeps in through the windows of our portable — a clever euphemism for the mobile homes that served as our cramped classrooms.

The class is silent, except for the tapping of my foot on the floor. I’ve already read the passage and answered all the questions. I don’t want to just sit around while everyone else catches up.

I look down at my three dull Ticonderoga pencils — the perfect excuse to shake off the buzzing in my body. The manual pencil sharpener in the wall often provided relief from an otherwise painful day of sitting still in my wooden desk.

My teacher calls out my name. I already know I’ve done something wrong, but I’m not sure what.

I spent the rest of that day sitting in the back of the classroom, wiping away tears with the rough cotton of my polo uniform. A sunbeam was shining directly on the corner I had been confined to, making the already

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stuffy room even more unbearable.

It would be over 10 years before I would understand why I was labeled the “problem child” and told I was “smart but lazy” or told I was wasting my potential. At 21, I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

Much of the diagnostic criteria for ADHD is catered toward

boys and men. The assessment test for adults is littered with questions on behavior that isn’t socially acceptable for women. Much of it is based in the type of awareness that is ingrained in women from a young age.

My younger brother was diagnosed with ADHD at age 7 after a series of public tantrums, preschool expulsions and physical fights on the playground. His hyperactivity and impulsivity manifest in a different way than mine do; he was external, obvious and visible. The average age for boys to be diagnosed is around 7 years old. For girls, data shows that diagnosis is most often anywhere from age 17 to their late 40s.

I was a high-performing student perfectly capable of making friends. I knew that if I acted on certain impulses, I would get labeled as “weird” and I wouldn’t be able to sit with the girls at lunch.

Unlike many others with neurodivergence, I was never bullied or outcast. My academic achievements overshadowed any issues I had, with my talkativeness and strong emotions chalked up as the quirks of an otherwise bright girl. No one had any reason to suspect anything more, so I assumed what I now recognize as symptoms were character flaws that I alone was responsible for fixing.

Other girls were not loud. Other girls were not messy. Other

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“Other girls were not loud.

Other girls were not messy.” girls were calm. Other girls were quiet. I loved being a girl – my mom always said she prayed for a daughter.

But I envied the freedom and the unattainable liberties of boyhood.

Boys were allowed to be loud and messy. They weren’t constrained by the same rules that I was. The classic symptoms of hyperactivity, impulsivity and disruptiveness earned boys the title of “class clown,” while I would get an asterisk on an otherwise perfect report card for behavioral problems.

Sitting on the squeaky twin XL beds of my freshman year dorm room, my friend suggested it. She spent a lot of time psychoanalyzing herself, considering the possibility of her own diagnosis. I brushed it off at the time, but the thought lingered like a stain that won’t wash out.

For a while, I was stuck in a limbo of wanting to face the issue for the sake of my daily life while also wanting to avoid the definitive and unforgiving mark of a diagnosis. If I did have ADHD, I would have to accept this lifelong condition that burdened my brother for his entire life. If I didn’t have it, it meant I really was the obnoxious little girl that several middle-aged teachers made me out to be.

After months of hesitance, I decided I would finally muster up the courage and spit it out during my next check up with my doctor, who doubled as my psychiatrist.

Sitting on the crinkly paper covering the standard issue medical bed, my heart pounded as I planned out the way I would finally declare it.

My chaotic inner monologue was interrupted by his knock at the door.

The words sat at the front of my mouth, begging to be let out. My jaw was wired shut with shame and fear, with automated answers to his

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routine questions being the only thing that could pass though.

He skimmed through the ordinary questions and wrapped up the appointment in the same way he always does.

“Alright then, anything else?”

I intended to sound as nonchalant as possible, but I tripped over the words like the final stretch of a race. I expected him to ridicule me for even suggesting it, like I was stealing valor by self-diagnosing to excuse my personal shortcomings.

But he didn’t. He looked up at me behind his bushy gray eyebrows and circle lenses with a kind of compassion and understanding that I had never given to myself. He knows things about me that some of my closest friends don’t, but he often forgets what school I go to.

The word “adult” headlined the assessment he gave me. It felt reductive, ignoring everything I endured as a child.

I finished it in less than 10 minutes. I had a clear answer for every question.

The subsequent summer months were filled with distractions that kept me from wondering about my diagnosis. After almost two months of traveling, I was finally on a flight back to my hometown. As the landing wheels dropped

and the tiny outline of my city grew to normal scale, my phone rang with a call from an unknown number. I declined it, assuming it was spam.

When the same number called again, I picked it up to hear my doctor’s New York accent on the other side. In his typical direct style, he casually dropped the diagnosis, unaware of its weight to me.

The boy who sat in the seat next to me during the flight handed me my carry-on. Maybe he could tell the phone call was too important to focus on plane etiquette.

I shuffled through the gate past the chain restaurants and souvenir shops on autopilot. The Palm Beach airport didn’t have any time to spare on a summer Saturday. Yanking my overfilled suitcase with its one broken wheel and pushed forward by retirees, I attempted to process how a 10 minute phone call on a JetBlue flight lifted away the blame and guilt that little girl had carried for so long.

Survivor’s guilt Design by KATE BECKER

A five-year journey of remission and remorse

THE YEAR IS 2018. I’m two months shy of my 17th birthday. And I have cancer.

Stage 2 Hodgkin Lymphoma.

My first cycle of treatment — inpatient chemo, outpatient chemo, rest, repeat — is over.

I’m tired. Time for a shower.

I turn the faucet as far to the right as it goes and sit on the counter in the steam clouds. Watching them float to the ceiling and dissipate, I wish for a moment that I could do the same.

A few minutes pass, and I step into the shower. The water hits the top of my head and drips down my body — distorted by the treatment, anxiety and a subsequent lackluster appetite.

I think about the night my mom got the call with my diagnosis. I was too afraid to fall asleep, worried I would not wake up in the morning. It seems silly now, in the shower a month into this process, knowing my form of cancer’s survival rate hovers between

85% and 90%. But it was visceral then.

I watch as the water spins down the drain, washing away the stressors of the day, and run my hands through my hair.

A mild tug. A quick release.

A twinge of dread.

I look back down at the drain.

The water no longer spins. It sits.

A clump of my hair blocks it.

I’d never really tied too much emotion into my hair and changed it pretty often. But this transformation felt different.

The year is 2023. I just celebrated my 22nd birthday. I’ve been in remission for five years.

The five-year mark is huge. Many doctors say your cancer is likely gone for good if it hasn’t come back by now.

So far, that’s been the case for me.

I wish I could say my dominant emotion at the time of this highly anticipated anniversary is joy. Or relief. Or maybe even gratitude.

I feel slivers of them all.

But the most overwhelming emotion is guilt.

Sometimes it feels like none of it ever happened. Like I never had cancer. Until I catch a glimpse of my port and biopsy scars, or a lingering bruise, or a swollen lymph node.

What a privilege: the ability, even for a moment, to forget.

I close my eyes and see the faces of children I met through the pediatric cancer community back home in Jacksonville who are no longer alive. My nose begins to itch. My throat

Story by PAYTON TITUS Illustration by DIEGO PERDOMO

constricts. My eyes well up with tears.

Why am I still here? Why did I get to live? Why did they not?

These questions sit like an elephant on my chest.

Reporting a story keeps me up at night. A busy-work assignment elicits an eye roll. A traffic jam prompts an expletive-fueled rant at the cars in front of and behind me.

But every so often I remember that these are all things those children will never be able to experience. And with that thought, the elephant grows.

What do I have to show for this life I was given? What have I contributed that no one else could have? What am I here for?

I try to recognize that my existence does have purpose. Being a sister. A partner. A friend.

It’s easier to remember on some days than others.

The year is still 2023. I’m a month away from graduation. I’ll be awarded a bachelor’s degree in journalism with a specialization in sports and media and a minor in women’s studies.

The job market isn’t looking too good. I’m afraid of what the future holds.

I’m feeling like I did that day in 2018. A twinge of dread.

And these feelings of anxiety spawn feelings of shame.

At least you are alive and healthy enough to be looking for a job.

I haven’t figured out how to reconcile all these swirling soppy storylines. And as much as I hate leaving things unresolved, I fear that’s my only option here.

Figuring out how to sit with uncertainty.

Figuring out how to keep going.

During chemotherapy, Payton was given a stuffed lion to keep her company by a fellow patient’s mother.

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I eat banana cream pie piled with Nilla wafers, washed down with hot coffee in hundred-degree heat, at a café on Lucky Street in Micanopy, a landlocked antiques town.

My head hurts from seeing the birdcage tagged “so very old” next to the rusted bones of a baby crib, and a white suitcase with dirt etching a map of the world. The store owner sells spiced pickled bologna and tickets to Café Risqué up the road. He points me toward a poster of “booby” birds, sandpipers, wandering tattlers; the crack of light in my reflection a sieve of acceptance for not, this morning, getting the pixie I thought would turn me back into me, and I don’t mean the me who wore one years ago in Rome, when all roads that led to Rome led me back to my dying mother — The me today stopped by yellow stickseed and purple showers, the shop with World Trade Center and Bambi tapes crammed into a Nutter Butter box, where my daughter’s orange gumball falls to the ground, and the twenty-five-cent kissing booth beckons me home. I could go on like this forever, scavenging for stories in the backroads, balancing this timeworn globe in my hand.

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Finding hope in a

broken

nation

A Haitian immigrant reflects on memories of a damaged homeland but envisions a restored future Story by KYLIE WILLIAMS

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T

he day Guy Francois’ sister was kidnapped dawned hot, humid and deceptively ordinary. It was the summer of 2007, and Francois was in his Palmetto coaching office. Halfway through the workday, he got a phone call from his half sister, Luce. Francois picked it up and warmly greeted her.

“Hi, Guy,” she responded.

Luce’s voice sounded alarmingly off. Immediately, Francois knew something was wrong. Before she could say anything else, another voice came through the phone.

Male, speaking in Haitian Creole: “Don’t worry, your sister is fine.

We have her in our custody.”

“What do you mean?” Francois’ confusion turned to horror.

“She’s been kidnapped. If you want her to be released, you’ll meet our ransom. We want $150,000.”

“But we don’t have that kind of money!”

“We know you have that kind of money. That’s what we want.

If you want your sister alive, you will send us the money.”

Francois recalls this memory in a smooth, calm voice, as if he were talking about a baseball game rather than his sister’s terrifying abduction.

He sits in a tattered green armchair in my grandfather’s Bradenton home, telling his story to a rapt audience of three: myself, my mother and my grandfather. While we may be listening from the safety of a cozy living room 15 years later, a heavy feeling of danger seems to leak through the curtains with the sun.

Francois was born and raised in Haiti, a small island nation less than 1,000 miles southeast of Miami. He and my mother, Bonnie Williams, grew up in its capital, Port-auPhoto courtesy of BONNIE WILLIAMS Haitians roam a city of tents set up insde Port-au-Prince. Thousands of people were left innjured or homeless after the earthquake.

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Design by KATHERINE BATTEESE

Prince. My mother was an American missionary kid, called blan ayisyen — white Haitian — by native Haitians.

She grew up scaling waterfalls and fidgeting in wooden pews, with many afternoons spent watching black and white television with Francois.

The two now banter back and forth, slipping between English and Creole at a dizzying pace. Childhood friends reunited 40 years later.

Memories are passed around the room like dishes at a dinner table.

Morsels of happiness, now out of place among Haiti’s current chaos. Inevitably, talk turns to those still within the country’s borders. Francois and my mother use apps like Facebook as a lifeline, communicating with friends who chose to stay. The messages tell a story of an apocalyptic state.

Port-au-Prince, a city whose streets once bustled with the sound of honking horns, is eerily empty.

Ships carrying desperately needed supplies are stopped at the docks.

Food sits rotting and stagnant in crates, while a nation starves. Citizens refuse to leave their homes, terrified of the gangs that roam the city.

While Haiti has been struggling for decades, its current crisis stems from events that happened two years ago. In 2021, the nation suffered both a 7.2 magnitude earthquake and a presidential assassination.

President Jovenel Moïse’s murder created a power vacuum, allowing gangs to take control of the country.

These gangs have wrapped around Haiti like a tourniquet, cutting off the lifeblood of food and supplies.

Those who have the means to flee, do. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians have chosen to immigrate to America, almost half of whom now live in

Florida. Francois himself arrived as a young adult in 1990, before Haiti’s situation became as dire as it is today.

Francois feels lucky to be here.

The blessings come in small things, like reliable electricity and roads free of potholes. They shine in big things as well: food on the table, raising children in safety. Francois has never taken a bit of it for granted.

But he still has a strong love and appreciation for his home country.

Francois has experienced the good that Haiti has to offer, the light from his childhood that still shines through the cracks of present darkness.

Playing outside with one of his 14 siblings. Plucking ripe mangoes from trees, fingers sticky with juice. Creole gospel songs reverberating through tiny churches. Francois’ childhood memories of Haiti are brimming with strong community and vibrant culture.

These are the moments that Francois still keeps close to his heart, at a time when happy memories can easily get lost in his nation’s current suffering.

Haiti used to be different, Francois says. His childhood memories are relatively peaceful and pleasant.

Francois was born in Les Irois, a rural community on Haiti’s western tip. His family lived simply; instead of running water, they had a well. Rather than owning a car, they rode horses. There were no electric lamps or alarm clocks.

“You go to sleep early; you rise with the rooster,” as Francois puts it.

Yet as Francois grew, so did civil unrest. Haiti had been under the rule of the authoritarian Duvalier dynasty since the 1950s. François Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude kept control of the nation using the brutal paramilitary force Tonton

“Those who have the means to flee, do."

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“I don’t care how I live my life, but I want you to have a good life coming to the United States,” he would often tell them.

Luc immigrated alone to the United States soon after the events of 1986. In Palmetto, he worked grueling days in produce fields picking apples, tomatoes and oranges in the endless Florida heat. He sent nearly every penny he earned back to Haiti.

The others went toward a fund that would support his family when they joined him in the United States.

It was Oct. 14, 1990, when that day finally arrived. It was a jubilant day for Francois and his family, a day that felt like leaving all of Haiti’s turmoil behind.

The first thing they did in their new country?

“I went to KFC,” Francois said.

In the beginning, Francois missed his home. America was unfamiliar, nothing like the Hollywood movies.

For a while, Francois debated moving back to Haiti. It only took a short trip back to Port-au-Prince for him to realize that was a mistake.

Francois was 22, able bodied and well educated — but he didn’t even think of getting a job in Haiti. There was no opportunity for him, he said.

After the chaos of Haiti, America was like the promised land for Francois’ family. Yet for many Haitian migrants, that promised land is nothing but a mirage.

The number of Haitian migrants has surged since the turmoil of 2021. Tens of thousands of Haitians gathered near the U.S.-Mexico border in September 2021, desperate to find security in the United States. The U.S. government

Haitian children test out a new playground post-earthquake. The author’s mother, Bonnie Williams, worked with volunteers from the organization Kids Around the World to build the playground in 2010.

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Photo courtesy of BONNIE WILLIAMS

Macoute. In 1986, when Jean-Claude still held power, the nation revolted.

At the time of the coup, Francois was only 18, focused on school and friends rather than political revolutions. He had moved to Portau-Prince at age 6, and his family had made the city their home. But Portau-Prince had become an epicenter of madness. The city writhed with unrest and anger, overwhelmed with protests and cries for change. Francois frequently fell asleep to gunfire. Not a night passed without incident.

The coup made Francois’ father, Luc, realize it was time to flee Haiti.

Luc was originally from Cuba, and he escaped the flames of its revolution in 1959. Now, the same fire was burning across Haiti. Luc was a visionary and knew he wanted his children to have more in life than he did.

Photo courtesy of BONNIE WILLIAMS Buildings in Port-au-Prince were left destroyed after the 2010 earthquake.

forced thousands of these people back to Haiti.

While Francois might have been safer in America, he could never fully escape the struggles of his nation.

The summer of 2007 was a clear reminder of that.

While Francois’ half sister Luce had been driving to work that morning in Haiti, an unknown gang had stopped her car and taken her hostage.

For Francois, the next few days became a desperate flurry of phone calls, bank trips and prayers. He called his father, the chief of the

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local police station and even the FBI. Francois can still recall the paralyzing panic from those days.

“They know what they’re doing,” Francois said.

“They put this pressure on you, and you feel like, ‘I don’t want this person to die.’ And so we had to scramble … everywhere, call friends, call family.”

Francois focused on what he could do, working tirelessly with the FBI. At the FBI’s direction, he complied with the kidnappers, wiring thousands of dollars to

Luce’s account. The gang sent Luce into the bank to withdraw the money while they waited outside.

“But usually when they do that, they collect the money, and they end up killing the person,” Francois said.

An employee at the bank realized Luce was in danger and brought her to a safe room.

Luce was free, and her kidnappers were arrested.

Francois brought Luce back to the United States, where she still lives. For a long time afterward, she refused to leave the house,

the trauma overshadowing her safe reality. But she was able to raise her children in peace.

Others are not always so lucky. Haiti has the world’s most kidnappings per capita. People are often taken in broad daylight and killed when their families are unable to meet steep ransoms.

Yet while he might now be free of Haiti’s danger and struggles, Francois has never once forgotten his home country. Even 30 years after immigrating, he is still connected to Haiti. When

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“Others are not always so lucky.”

Luce was kidnapped, that connection was used as a weapon. Like Francois, many Haitian Americans have felt the pain of watching the home they grew up in fall to chaos, every headline spelling out a new heartbreak.

But Francois’ connection to his home country has also inspired him to make a positive change. Francois created Project Light International in 2007, a nonprofit dedicated to helping those who remain in Haiti. Even after Luce narrowly survived, Francois continued to return to Haiti every year before the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Only three years after its founding, Francois would use Project Light to help rebuild his nation after a devastating blow. Haiti had

weathered revolutions and chaos, but now the Earth itself seemed to want to destroy his home country.

In 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake shattered Haiti. The death toll numbered over 200,000, the U.N. estimates; over a million people were left injured or homeless. The epicenter was right outside Port-au-Prince.

Upon hearing the news in America, Francois was horrified. He immediately called Haitian friends to see what could be done. They gathered a team of workers, nurses and volunteers with Project Light.

By working with other organizations, such as the local chapter of the Rotary Club, Francois secured a plane to take his team to Port-au-Prince When he landed, Francois was greeted with a nightmare. Multistory buildings were reduced to bricks and dust. Dead bodies still lay mangled in the street.

The stench of rotting flesh hung over the city in an inescapable haze.

Francois and the Project Light volunteers numbered among thousands of people aiding Haiti.

They attempted to transport supplies to the rural parts of Haiti — parts of the country so remote that ambulances couldn’t reach them.

“There are some people who were kind of abandoned,” Francois said. “Not deliberately, but because there was not enough people to go to those places.”

Francois recalls several faces that he can’t forget years later: a mother who gave birth the day after the earthquake, laboring amid the wreckage of her city. Two young girls, unable to find their parents, sat injured with no one to attend to them.

Then there was Phillip, whose sister and wife attended Francois’ church.

During the earthquake, Phillip’s wife and every one of his children died.

“That was very close to home, when we lost people that were very close to us,” Francois said. Francois was able to bring Phillip back to the United States, though he couldn’t heal his loss.

In Creole, there is a common phrase: dégajé. In English, it essentially means to make do with what you have. Haiti has been battered and beaten, time after time. Many of its citizens wake each day devastated and terrified. When my mother talks of her childhood home, it is with a voice saturated in grief. She hasn’t been back to Port-au-Prince since the earthquake; her birthplace is no longer safe. She laments never

Photo by KYLIE WILLIAMS Three wooden sculptures of Haitian figures; the figure on the right was gifted to the author by Francois.

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having shown her children her house or her high school, immersing them in the culture she loves so dearly.

“I wish I could bring you to Haiti,” she has often said.

It is a difficult thing to watch a nation bleed, to see a people suffer so profoundly. Francois shares this grief — but for him, it’s braided with hope.

He believes the nation he loves can heal, that Haiti can become a miracle.

“I think it just takes someone who is conscientious of Haiti and would decide to stand alone or to make the difference,” he said.

Francois is one of these people.

In my grandfather’s living room, he presents me with a gift: a dark wooden figurine. A symbol of Haiti’s independence in 1804.

Haiti was the first Black nation to gain their freedom, the world’s only successful slave uprising.

The statue lunges forward, blowing a conch shell like a trumpet, celebrating victory after oppression.

Francois is determined for Haiti to find its own modern victory.

Currently, Project Light International is working on raising funds to establish an emergency first responder management system in Haiti. The nonprofit also continues to sponsor an orphanage in the city of Saint-Marc.

Years ago, Francois’ father would sit him and his siblings down in their living room in Haiti. Every day, he would say: “I see far for you guys.”

Francois and his siblings would laugh and say to each other, “What is he talking about?” What future existed for them in Haiti? Now when

he and his siblings gather, they say: “This is what he saw.” One sister is an attorney, another a teacher. Francois has a Ph.D. with a concentration in counseling. He balances being the senior pastor of the First Biblical Baptist Church of Palmetto with his full-time job as a career coach.

Now, Francois sits in another living room, far from that of his childhood memories, singing a Creole hymn with my family.

What though the way be weary And dark the shadows fall.

I know the way He leads me My Father planned it all.

Their voices blend together in a warm harmony, enough to elicit tears. It is a reminder of home, a nod to current struggles. It is a vow of resilience. Dégajé.

Francois sings the hymn “My Father Planned it All” in Creole with the author’s mother and grandfather.

Scan the QR code to listen.

Photo by KYLIE WILLIAMS Guy Francois poses next to one of his favorite mementos of Haiti — a painting of the Citadelle Laferrière. The fortress is a famed icon of Haiti’s independence and revolutionary power.

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Valencia’s last stand A Volusia County citrus grower fights against a disease that threatens the future of Florida’s citrus industry Photo essay by ELISE PLUNK

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Design by EMMA PARKER and KATE BECKER

The Crump family named their farm after their old home, LaSalle, Illinois, and their new home, Volusia County, after they moved in the 1880s. “I probably would have named it LaVolusia, but VoLaSalle is the name I inherited,” said Crump.

E

ven though the weather was hot and the land swampy, promoters advertised Florida as a paradise on Earth. Citrus was sold as ambrosia.

The sun was always shining, a cureall for human ailments; the soil was almost magical, able to grow any seed as if blessed by God. Gleaming smiles of pinup girls on billboards holding pitchers of orange juice shined into the cars of the tourists driving along the state’s highways.

Steve Crump, owner of VoLaSalle Farms in De Leon Springs, said he and his family have been growing citrus in the area since the orange fever of the 1880s. Some of his current groves were established as far back as the 1920s, generation upon generation of orange trees taking root in the rich, dark soil.

Green often symbolizes life.

It is not an uncommon association for the tart, vibrant color to signify new beginnings. Green is the color of nature, little bits of life that burst up from the soil or leaves that collect the sun and reach up towards the sky. atr i u m m ag . o rg

Sugars regulate growth from one stage of life to another and can be stored as starch, an energy source for the plant to use when there is no sunlight.

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Crump remembers growing up in the groves, climbing the trees and throwing green, unripe oranges back and forth with his siblings. But with the farm’s citrus production down over 75% from what it was 20 years ago, he isn’t so sure about its future.

But for Florida’s oranges, green can mean disease. Green can mean disaster.

Citrus greening is a disease caused by a bacterium known as Huanglongbing, otherwise known as HLB, and translated in English to yellow dragon sickness. HLB is spread by a disease-carrying insect, the Asian citrus psyllid, and prevents the sweet, sunshine-loving fruit from getting the sugar it needs to ripen.

“Once the tree recognizes there’s a foreign particle inside of it, it tries to stop it from spreading,” said Tripti Vashisth, associate professor of horticultural sciences and citrus extension specialist at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

But in order to stop the bacteria from spreading, the tree plugs its phloem, the vascular system in plants that transports sugars from the leaves.

The cheerful, fragrant harvest warps into a mass of green, bitter oranges falling off the branch. Whatever fruit does ripen is of much lesser quality.

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Young entrepreneurs caught “orange fever” and sought out the Sunshine State as the place to make their millions.

Too weak to fight, the tree dies.

Heartier hybrids like Sugarbell oranges and structures like greenhouses and screen bags help curb the spread of the disease but aren’t perfect. Screen bags blow off easily in storms, and greenhouse structures cost about $1 per square foot, making even a single acre (about 43,000 square feet) an expensive undertaking Green death sweeps across Crump’s orange groves, the yellow dragon burrowing deep into the heart of old Florida and its exemplary industry.

Many of Crump’s once-thriving groves have become “ghost groves.”

Decades-old trees dripped heavily with Spanish moss, a sign of a tree’s failing health. Crump walked through the ailing groves, pinching a yellowing leaf between his fingers. He stared vacantly down as the leaf crumbled in his hands.

“They look horrible,” he said. “They’re dying.”

Screen bags blow off easily in storms, and greenhouse structures cost about $1 per square foot, making even a single acre cost about $43,000.

One Valencia orange tree dubbed by Crump as the “survivor tree” weathered both great freezes of 1983 and 1985 but succumbed to the effects of greening.

Now shrouded in moss and yellowing leaves, it sits in a “ghost grove.”

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Green often symbolizes life.

But, for Florida’s oranges, green can mean disease.

Green can mean disaster.

But not all hope is lost for Florida citrus.

Scientists and industry professionals studying the progression of citrus greening across the state are working to create treatments for infected trees. Lisa Jensen, the director of the Fruit and Vegetables Division for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, described the recent studies treating infected trees with oxy-tetracycline injections.

While the studies are still in their beginning stages, she says the treatments offer “more than just a ray of hope” for the future of citrus in Florida.

No longer able to fully support his farm off of citrus sales alone, Crump has taken on parttime work away from his groves and turned to vegetable growing as a way to stay afloat.

“I could turn them into cow pastures,” he said about his groves as he discussed ways to diversify his income. “But cows give me no joy. Citrus gives me joy.”

Crump hopes to keep his groves alive long enough to pass on the citrus tradition to his children.

“I want to give them the choice to continue,” he said.

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What’s

Keeping the past in my pocket

TikTok, a book and a promise

Essay by HEATHER BUSHMAN

Story by ELISE PLUNK

Atrium staff writer Heather Bushman doesn’t like change, whether it’s big or small — even as tiny as an iPhone 6S. When her trusty phone of six years finally broke, Bushman was forced to confront her penchant for nostalgia. And forced to get a new phone, of course.

Lou-Andreá Callewaert, also known by the pseudonym Lancali, is a renowned author of young adult fiction. But her rise to fame wasn’t traditional. The University of Florida student defied publishers’ expectations by finding a dedicated audience on TikTok, who connected to her story of love, loss and hope.

Illustration: DELIA SAUER

@ATRIUMMAGAZINE

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Graphic: MATTHEW CUPELLI

@ATRIUM_MAGAZINE

online?

Moving forward through the rubble

Idol lost

Story by LUCILLE LANNIGAN

Essay by ALLESANDRA INZINNA

When Hurricane Ian swept through Fort Myers, countless people with disabilities were left without mobility aids or medications.

That’s why Travis Taylor, who is physically disabled himself, worked with the Center for Independent Living to help those who the storm left behind.

Atrium staff writer Allessandra Inzinna admired her sister’s friend, Kayla. She wanted her confidence, her surety. But Kayla’s unexpected death forces her to revisit their diverging paths, adolescence and the disease of addiction. She finds the choices we make as children can haunt us as adults.

Photo: LUCILLE LANNIGAN

Illustration: DELIA SAUER

COMPANY/ATRIUM-MAGAZINE

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I’d never seen a gun before.

Story by HEATHER BUSHMAN Photos by CARLY BLUM 40

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Days later, I fired one.

Design by DIEGO PERDOMO

nly four days after meeting Maggie Martin, I find myself strapped to the passenger’s side of her Ford F-150, barreling toward what I think is probably a bad decision.

We’re headed for Martin’s family farm in Bronson, a small town of 1,200 people on the edge of Levy County. Light conversation fills the car as Martin makes her way down increasingly dusty roads, but the closer we draw to our destination, the more nerves reverberate around my chest.

I’m off to do something I’ve never done before and, for a long time, swore I’d never do. A mix of fear, guilt and hesitant excitement finds a home in the pit of my stomach, but I try to push it aside.

It’s not hard with Martin, 36, in the car. She’s kind, open, bubbly and vivacious. She’s classically pretty, with long, shiny brown hair and a face usually accentuated with aviator glasses or large diamond earrings. A bright smile and pleasant laugh light up her features.

Martin’s a talker, so distraction comes easily at first. We start by discussing her truck — the door of which sports bruises and craters following a recent hit-and-run — and move to pleasantries until the elephant in the vehicle becomes unavoidable.

Excitement starts to slip through the cracks in Martin’s collected demeanor, like she’s about to let me in on a huge secret.

“Are you excited? Are you nervous?” she asks.

Yes, definitely. More than I’d like to admit.

“Did you tell your parents?”

I grow a little pale.

I’m going to shoot a gun for the first time. Martin, a licensed gun instructor, will give me a brief lesson on safely wielding and using a firearm on her private range.

My household was never firearm friendly, so the prospect is alien and, frankly, frightening.

Despite my St. Johns County roots — where more than 36,000 residents have a concealed weapon license, according to the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services — I didn’t grow up around guns. Some friends’ parents owned them, but they were tucked away on high closet shelves, concealed from conversation and our curious young eyes. I have no knowledge of them aside from the flashes of devastation I’ve seen them create and the disappointed shake of my mother’s head that always follows.

So no, I have most definitely not told my parents.

I laugh that question off instead of giving Martin a straight answer. To my relief, she lets it slide. We continue the drive down County Road 337, commercial centers bleeding into quiet suburbs and eventually giving way to a sprawling countryside. The fields seem to stretch forever. Rustic farmhouses dot every property. We’re only about 20 minutes from town, but I feel as if I’ve entered a separate civilization.

The Martin family farm finally comes into view through the truck’s windows. The vision is breathtaking. A late-

"Are you excited?

Are you nervous?"

Martin corrects Bushman’s grip as she prepares to fire a few rounds.

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Martin’s shirt bears the logo of the Red Letter Project: a group that combines the gun community and the Christian faith. The Red Letter project offers group retreats and training sessions on gun safety — something Martin’s particularly passionate about.

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afternoon sun hits the plains just right, painting the green grass with an intense orange hue and casting all 220 acres in a golden glow. In the distance sits a white manor atop a grassy peak — a literal house on the hill.

Martin reserved a corner of the property for her humble range, which consists of a small shed, an awning and a dirt mound about 15 yards away. She recruited friends and family to help her build it, and she spent her 20s shooting away stressors and breakups.

Truck in park, Martin asks if I’m ready to start.

Truthfully, I’m not sure, but I say yes anyway.

It echoes when she asked me if I wanted to do the lesson at all four days ago — and how I ventured into this story in the first place.

I had a basketball coach whose catchphrase has never left me: “Be comfortable being uncomfortable.” He probably meant it for the court, but I took it as a challenge in all areas of my life, especially in journalism.

The topic of guns isn’t even in the same area code as my comfort zone, but with such salience in national headlines, I knew I had to give this story a shot. Pun intended.

Discourse on gun reform still dominates the news, and pleas for tightened restrictions resurface after every all-too-common mass tragedy. Gun opponents dispute the humanity of supporters, wondering how they sleep at night knowing they keep close the capacity to kill.

I heard my mother ask that same question so many times.

“I just don’t understand,” she lamented.

“Why would someone own a gun?”

That question, I decided, was worth an answer. I researched Alachua County’s gun landscape, hoping to immerse myself in some aspect of the culture and community. A few Google searches led me to A Girl and A Gun, a women’s shooting group with a chapter in Gainesville.

One Facebook message prompted a phone call early on a Wednesday afternoon The woman said her name was Maggie Martin, and she’d love to be part of the story. We arranged to meet at a Starbucks on 43rd Street that Friday.

I ran late that morning by two or three minutes, but when I entered, Martin was already settled with a cup of coffee. Obligatory hellos exchanged, we dove right in.

My guard was up immediately. All I knew of girls with guns was a readiness to shoot at a

I wasn’t speaking with a camo-clad country product. moment’s notice and a take-no-crap attitude advertised by sassy stickers decorating the backs of big trucks and intimidating Instagram posts.

Open dialogue with a gun owner was new to me, so I expected a strong Southern accent and even stronger opinions. I was half ready for Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman” to play through the Starbucks speakers.

Martin squashed my misconceptions fast. I wasn’t speaking with a camoclad country product; in front of me was a former cheerleader, the prom queen, the person “most likely to brighten your day” among Oak Hall’s class of 2005. This wasn’t a trigger-happy tough girl with a chip on her shoulder — just someone who obsessed over the Prince Harry and Meghan Markle docuseries like everyone else.

In fact, the two of us had a lot in common: Martin graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in public relations, which is in the same college as my journalism degree. We bonded over shared

classes and swapped stories about the grammar lessons that never left us.

Much like me, Martin didn’t grow up loving guns. Her dad taught her to skeet shoot at her family’s farm, but Martin looked at guns as weapons meant to kill, as agents of chaos.

She didn’t start to see guns differently until she turned 30 and a former boyfriend gave her a handgun as a gift. That relationship ended, and finding herself living alone for the first time, Martin signed up for private lessons to learn how to use her new gun. First, it was only a hobby, but a bad online dating experience upped the ante, ending in a police report and Martin fearing for her life.

He was everywhere, a looming threat that chained Martin to constant fear. She avoided the side of town where he lived and kept an eye over her shoulder. Eventually, even home started to feel unsafe.

This is how I die, she thought.

News stories and statistics screamed at her to do something about it.

Headlines flashed with horrific tales

of women dying helplessly, violently taken by men they trusted. Almost 1,100 women and girls in the U.S. are killed by an intimate partner each year, according to a study from the Violence Policy Center. Martin didn’t want to be part of that number.

The story of a girl whose mother had to listen to her die at the hands of her boyfriend stuck, spurring Martin to take ownership of her safety. So she stepped up, devouring any selfdefense expertise she could find.

First it was concealed weapons, but Martin dabbled in jiu-jitsu, mixed martial arts, knife fighting and more.

Now, Martin is a shooter — a great one, she says, with unapologetic confidence that took years to earn.

She’s a licensed gun owner, and Florida concealed carry laws allow her to keep a weapon with her everywhere she goes. She spends her free time at the range refining her skills or mentoring other shooters, mostly women, to create a community of queens who straighten each other’s crowns.

Martin is a teacher as much as she is a student, a combination of extroversion and an entrepreneurial spirit lending her to leadership. She operates her own handgun instruction enterprise under MDM Tactical and will soon take over Gainesville’s chapter of A Girl and A Gun. As she recounted her knowledge

Martin’s bag is emblazoned with decorative patches. The slogans and sayings speak as much to her tough demeanor as they do her sarcastic, playful side.

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on the Starbucks patio, I wasn’t sure whether to feel completely safe or scared out of my mind. Across from me was a highly skilled, highly capable self-defense expert who could probably pin me to the ground in five seconds. But Martin could also take down someone who threatened us, and for some reason, that was pretty comforting.

That’s the point, Martin told me.

The Glock 19 she keeps secured around her waist and the years of training is a security blanket, a tool. If, God forbid, something were to happen, she’d be ready.

She identified all the possible attack points from where we sat like Genie pointed to the exits on the magic carpet in “Aladdin.” Suddenly, I was all too aware of our surroundings.

Is this the burden of knowledge Martin carries? I wondered if Martin’s preparedness ever bleeds into paranoia, if she lives with the fear of imminent danger looming and a tendency to always watch her back. Is she ready to pull the trigger at the first sign of a fight?

Martin answered my question before I could ask it. If someone were to try to rob the Starbucks where we sit, Martin wouldn’t stop them.

“Really?” I said.

“Yep, unless somebody has pointed a gun and is about to mow down all of these people,” she answered.

It clicked then: Martin’s no Batman.

There is no gun-owner code that obligates them to jump into action at the first sign of danger, no law that states they have to beat up the bad guys like the caped crusader would.

She’s more like Spider-Man, or at least Uncle Ben: With great power, Martin knows, comes great responsibility.

As I spent more time with her, I

one: Always assume the gun is loaded.

Two: Never point the gun at anything you don’t intend to shoot, including parts of your body. That leads to three: Place your finger on the trigger only when you’ve located a target and fully intend to fire. And four: Always be aware of your foreground and background, lest your bullet flies somewhere it isn’t supposed to.

She walked me through the gun rules on multiple occasions, repeating them like a sacred script. realized she shares several attributes with the Glock 19 she keeps concealed in her waistband. They’re powerful, quick, decisive. They’re both small in stature but not to be underestimated, both capable of doing some serious damage. The Glock 19 is only 7.36 inches in length, and Martin stands at just 5-foot-2.

One key takeaway stands out among their similarities. There are rules — lots of them.

She walked me through the gun rules on multiple occasions, repeating them like a sacred script. Number

The personal rules appear more discreetly, in little sayings she drops in our conversations. Give it to God (He will never take something away without replacing it with something greater). Buy local produce if you can.

Make sure your friends get home after a night out. Never leave your safety up to anyone but yourself.

Martin is regimented above all. She can’t say the same for everyone else.

She learned that lesson the hard way when her quest for instructor certification sent her to Mayo, a no-man’s-land 90 minutes east

Martin’s grip on her gun never falters — even as the press of a trigger creates a kickback effect.

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of Tallahassee. Here, Martin spent two days with a group of instructor hopefuls just like her, eager to prove their skills through a series of drills and assessments.

The class’s final test required the participants to shoot 16 rounds within a 12-inch target from 15 yards away. Except it didn’t.

The instructor allowed the class

her tactical approach is a bit of a rarity in the gun world. If gun ownership exists on a spectrum, Martin lies on the extreme end of safety.

A study from the University of Washington’s School of Medicine estimated only 61% of gun owners nationwide receive any formal training. Martin’s trying to change that, starting with her students.

It dawned on Martin then that her peers there didn’t have the same regard for rules that she does. to stand only five yards back. He addressed his students conspiratorially.

“Everyone saw everyone shoot at 15 yards, right?”

No, Martin thought.

He repeated himself: “Everyone saw everyone shoot at 15 yards, right?”

It dawned on Martin then that her peers there didn’t have the same regard for rules that she does. The class was an exercise in cutting corners, culminating in certifications tossed like confetti.

OK, Martin thought. I guess that’s how we’re playing this.

The rude awakening told Martin

Her passion and persistence are enough to convince me I should be one of them. When Martin offered me a private lesson at the end of our first meeting, I couldn’t say no.

Four days of clueless preparation — including a few unfortunate Google searches of “what to wear to a gun range” and “does shooting a gun hurt” — did little to quell my anxiety, but Martin’s patient explanations on the way to the range helped a little.

She’s coached me all the way there, explaining the anatomy of the gun in detail and walking me

through how the lesson will look.

By the time we step outside the truck, I almost feel comfortable.

Martin switches into teacher mode immediately — collected, patient, confident. I see her bubbly energy level out under the mask of professionalism, no less kind but all the more serious as she unloads her equipment and begins our lesson.

Her bag, emblazoned with stickers declaring “don’t call me sweetheart” and “BAMF,” may as well be a bomb with how meticulous Martin is in unpacking it. She treats the objects like a game of operation, like if she puts them in the wrong place a bright red buzzer will blare around us. If we’re following the first of Martin’s four commandments, the one about the loaded gun, this may as well be true.

Those sacred rules come soon after Martin’s assembled her equipment. I’ve heard them so often in our short time together I can almost repeat them myself.

Then it’s time. We gear up — noise-canceling headphones fastened, eyes protected, hair tied back — and trek to the dirt mound that will see the business end of our bullets. Martin sets the target, which is nothing more than a piece of paper stapled against a cardboard square, in front of the mound. She counts five paces backward.

First, we dry fire, where I am to draw

Martin assesses Bushman’s performance on the paper target. Not bad for a rookie.

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”You can do this.”

Martin keeps Bushman at ease as she gears up. The gun expert is cool under pressure.

and fire the gun unloaded to get a feel for the motion.

As expected, it’s a process with protocol: grip, trigger press, sight and stance.

Martin demonstrates with practiced ease — unholstering the gun, cocking it back and aiming it arrow-straight at the target in one fluid motion.

She cuts through the air with such poise that I let myself believe maybe it won’t be so hard.

Then she hands her trusty companion to me.

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Oh, how wrong I was.

If Martin is the Michelle Kwan of dry firing, I’m that scene in “Bambi” where the poor calf stumbles and fumbles around the frozen pond. The second the gun settles in my hands, it feels awkward, unnatural.

The size and shape are all wrong, and I can feel my body rejecting it.

I yank the stubborn slide back for that satisfying click and spend too long lining the elusive red dot with my target. Finally, my

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finger presses back on the trigger, but it doesn’t take an expert to determine that my first try was sloppy.

The second attempt goes better than the first, the third better than the second, and the fourth is the best yet. Martin decides I’ve done well enough to move on to the real deal. She loads the gun in preparation.

I’m fine until I’m not.

Loud noises, I remember, are not my strong suit — a fact that had conveniently

slipped my mind until Martin pressed the trigger.

If I was nervous before, that’s nothing compared to the paralysis that takes over my body at the sound of that first shot.

A fun fact about the sound of a gun going off: It’s not a bang. It’s a crack — crisp, narrow, resolute. The explosion is over before it starts, but the split second is enough for my breath to catch.

The remnants of it ring through the range, echoing

I raise the gun.

like falling fireworks before fading into nothing. I’m still ringing too, the sound of my heart pounding in my ears like Martin’s shot on repeat. The noisecanceling headphones do nothing to help. If anything, they amplify the nerves.

Martin fires a few more times. Concentration etches her face as she zeroes in on her target, and a barelythere tinge of satisfaction crosses her features as she hits the mark every time.

I’d be content to stand

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back and watch her assault the X in the middle all day, but suddenly, it’s my turn. My breaths grow shallow and uncertain.

I can’t fire a gun, not with the risk of recoil or a rogue bullet. Not with my shaky hands that will surely drop it when it goes off. Not with the ear-splitting crack.

I’ve never even held a gun before, much less shot one.

What was I thinking?

Martin’s assured me time and again that the choice to shoot is mine, that I can

always say no, but I feel I’ve backed myself into a corner I can’t escape from.

Martin notices.

“Do you want to take a break?” she asks.

Yes, please. But no. Or not quite. I’m stuck.

I want to abandon the idea altogether. Because I’m holding a gun, because I’m scared and because, on some subconscious level, I feel like a monster.

Guns have brought worlds of grief, loss and destruction. They’ve been

at the heart of some of the greatest national tragedies — Aurora, Charleston, Pittsburgh and Uvalde. In Florida, remnants of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting still linger, a traumatized community in its wake.

Almost 3,000 Floridians die each year from gun violence, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, and Florida only sits at No. 29 on the list of gun deaths by state.

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But I want to do this. Because I’ve come all the way out to the range to chase the other side of the story, because it would be embarrassing to duck out now, because I want to feel what Martin feels — the adrenaline, the assurance, the pride.

Guns have yielded a sense of self for women like Martin and her students. They’ve inspired a personal responsibility and done wonders for her self-esteem. Through shooting, Martin has found a strong system of support and mentorship that’s carried her into independence. Guns, apparently, can create as much as they can destroy.

I decide that’s too intriguing of an idea to pass up, and if pursuing it means trusting a mechanism of plastic and metal and a pinch of gunpowder for a few seconds, then so be it. I decline the break.

The rules set in. Take up as much “real estate” — or space — on the gun as possible. Grip it so tightly your hands almost shake. Locate the red dot in the sight of the gun on the target. Point it only toward your intended target. Press — don’t pull — the trigger.

“You can do this,” Martin assures me.

I want so badly to believe her.

I follow Martin’s detailed instructions to the word. I take up the real estate. I grip the gun until my hands shake. I locate the red dot and line it up with the target. I raise the gun.

I breathe.

I press the trigger.

It’s only a split second, but in the moment where the bullet flies toward the target, a spark of accomplishment emerges. I’ve chipped away at a longstanding hesitation, and though part of it remains, there is satisfaction in knowing I’ve conquered a fraction of the fear. I’m not sure I’ll ever touch a gun again, but I’m proud to say I’ve done it at all.

It fades as quickly as it flashed, sheer relief replacing it as I take my trembling finger off the trigger and lower the gun with unsure arms.

“Take a deep breath,” Martin instructs gently.

We assess my first shot together. Martin smiles at me, and I can’t help but let the ghost of a grin slip through.

Bull’s-eye.

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Bull’s-eye.

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Thomas Green and Matt Peltz sit together chatting about the latest news of their lives.

The ROMEOs

Story and photos by KATE BECKER

Wherefore art thou?

At breakfast. t’s 6:50 a.m. in a nondescript Dunnellon shopping center.

Street lights and neon store signs cast a dim glow over the dark lot, and Publix won’t open for another ten minutes.

The parking lot is almost empty, except for the scattering of cars belonging to the members of the Workout Anytime gym and those of a group of 14 old men sitting along the benches outside of the Breakfast Station restaurant.

Like Publix, the breakfast spot is closed until 7 a.m. But that doesn’t stop the religiously punctual

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old men from beginning the morning conversations they would soon have over coffee inside.

“Good morning, ” one man says. “How are ‘ya?”

“Good, good,” the other replies.

“You look like you’ve been beat up,” another chimes in.

“I’ve been married for 53 years, what do you expect?” the man jokes.

It’s only 6:58 a.m. when a waitress pokes her head out with a familiar “alrighty guys,” letting them know their usual table is set up and ready for them to come inside.

The smell of fresh coffee brewing fills the small restaurant. An oddly long table runs through the center of the room. The men sit down and over the next hour, the table fills seat by seat, coffee cups emptying almost

as quickly as they are poured.

After an hour of chatting, the men finally decide what they’d like to eat. A waitress tackles taking their breakfast orders, almost all of whom ask her to speak up or repeat herself at one point.

Over the next hour, the men will receive their food and continue discussing various topics or “solving all the problems in the world.”

These men are those of the ROMEOs, otherwise known as Retired Old Men Eating Out. Almost six years ago, in the small Rainbow Springs community of Dunellon, the ROMEOs emerged.

This group is exactly what it sounds like: a pack of 12 to 15 men who meet weekly for breakfast. Since the closure of Citrus Grove, the original ROMEO breakfast spot,

Design by KATE BECKER

“I look forward to going. I can’t wait to get there Tuesday morning.” the men have been meeting every Tuesday at 7 a.m. at the Breakfast Station for about four weeks.

Discussion topics range from how their last doctor’s visit went to the newest gossip of the Property Owners Association, the conversations layering over each other across the table like red strings on a detective board; all connected but with no clear train of thought.

“I just got a brain scan last week” says 72-year-old retiree Tom Wood.

“I didn’t know you actually had a brain,” 59-year-old Bill Dexter teases. At 59, he’s considered a “young member.”

Dexter moved to Florida in April 2023 and worked as a general contractor. Now he serves as a member of the Architectural Review Committee of Rainbow Springs.

Joining the ROMEOs is a good way for him to talk to fellow members of other boards or those who live in the community about current events.

Empty sugar packets and creamer cups litter the table, and by 8:30 a.m., breakfast is served. After a chorus of “pass the Crystal hot sauce” rings out, the group quiets down as they

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eat their food, doused in red.

Beside aids in their ears or walkers leaned against their chairs, a few wear T-shirts displaying the state they resided in before retiring here in Florida. Others sport various shirts representing the branch of the military they served in.

74-year-old Thomas Green is one of several in the group who served in the Marine Corps. Through his 23 years of service, he worked as a testing officer, brig chaser and reserve billet among other positions.

“I didn’t do anything special, just two tours in Vietnam,” Green says. He speaks as if it were just another desk job. “Not nearly as exciting as [Micheal], didn’t have to blow stuff up.”

70-year-old Micheal Lutz worked in the Air Force Ordnance Disposal division for 11 years as a master technician, taking bombs apart before they explode. He recalls his career-ending story about taking a piece of

scrap metal to his left temple.

“Now I stutter and hang out with guys like this,” Lutz jokes.

After working across Florida Air Force bases throughout his career, Lutz decided to retire in Dunnellon.

After retiring, Lutz “got bored” and opened a Crave Hot Dogs & BBQ chain. Almost all of Crave chains are owned by fellow veterans.

During the soft launch of his restaurant in June, Lutz’s fellow ROMEOs all attended in support.

It was at this gathering that the spouses of the ROMEOs officially met one another and decided they should get together as well. Now, every Thursday morning the ROMETs meet at the Breakfast Station.

While the conversations may be vast and difficult to follow for an outsider, one major theme is consistent: If a person has a question,

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A member sports his ROMEO Club shirt to breakfast.

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someone else at the table has an answer.

“We are experts at everything. There is nothing that we don’t know at this table,” 77-year-old Richard Peterson says. “You build a relationship with all these people. It’s good to socialize. If you don’t get out and socialize as you get older, you get stale and the dementia sets in.”

Many members recall getting references to help with something that “needs fixin’.”

“You got a problem with your roof, you come in here and you go, ‘Hey, who here was a roofer?’ And someone at the table has used a roofer in the near future who can recommend them to you,” 61-year-old retired firefighter of 32 years Paul Ross says.

Others get support with their various hobbies.

“I am a model railroader … some [members] have helped me load [the materials] into my car and helped me set up and break down,” Dave Kasheiner says.

Kasheiner wanted to retire to Florida from Illinois since Disney World

opened in 1971. He is the unofficial records keeper of the group; he has a log with everyones name, phone number and email to send out important announcements.

“I think these guys are part of my family,” Kashiner says.

“I worry about them when I leave here. I am glad to see them all still sitting here when I walk in on Tuesday.”

Kashiener’s role varies widely, from joyful moments, and most importantly to the men, collecting two dollars from each ROMEO a week for their Powerball lottery to more somber responsibilities, such as letting the group know when someone has passed away.

Over the last year, the ROMEOs lost three of their members.

“One fellow passed away and he thought so much of the ROMEOs that his sons came down from somewhere up north to go to a ROMEO breakfast to tell us how much he appreciated [the group],” 82-year-old David St. Clair recalls.

St. Clair is my grandfather.

He joined the ROMEOs about a year ago after Lutz invited him. Other than my grandmother’s water

St. Clair sits with his fellow ROMEO members, finishing up their last cups of coffee and waiting for the waitresses to take their bills. By 9 a.m., most of the ROMEOs have finished their breakfasts and left.

aerobics and their trips to the dump and grocery store, my grandparents live a quiet life in Dunnellon.

Their hopes of road tripping across the U.S. in their RV was cut short three years ago when COVID-19 hit.

Not being able to travel left them both connecting to their neighbors and community locally. My grandmother was able to take morning walks with neighbors safely outside— and thanks to the ROMEOs, my grandfather now has a reason to go out.

“It should be called the BROMEOs, bored retired old me,” St. Clair jokes.

My grandfather is considered now a frequent member who has grown close in comradeship with the men.

“I am a regular member that if a Tuesday passed where I wasn’t there, at least one guy would reach out to check on me,” St. Clair says. “I look forward to going. I can’t wait to get there on Tuesday morning.”

The group looks out for each other. As the members age and have growing health issues, it is

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increasingly important to have people to call or check on you. “[Micheal] won’t be here next week, he is going up to Michigan to check out the property damage on his house from a tornado,” St. Clair recalls, comforting any worries next week that would arise with Lutz’s absence.

When the St. Clairs first moved to Dunellon, they joined the Rainbow Springs Resident Organization.

One member started Volunteers in Daily Action, a certified county program where residents could help other older residents with living at home — instead of going to an assisted living facility.

However, the patient themselves had to call for help; certified residents could not be contacted by a patient’s family. While my grandparents have me close by if anything went wrong, other ROMEOs don’t have a guaranteed support system.

“When you ask us older people to do that, they’re too independent and won’t call,” Janet St. Clair says.

And as we get older, it seems our social circle shrinks, meaning less friends who can look out for you as well. But for many of the old men of the ROMEOs, their circle is only growing.

“I have Tom over for coffee on other mornings of the week besides Tuesday and we talk for hours,” St. Clair recalls.

While any of them could easily get a cup of coffee at home, the outing every Tuesday gives them something to look forward to and a group who truly cares about one another.

As the men staggeringly pay their tabs and finish their last cups of coffee, the table starts to empty around 9 a.m.

“Alright, I’m heading out guys,” 69-year-old Gus Hantis says.

“Nice to meet you, good luck with your article,” Hantis says to me, glancing back before heading out the door with a chime of the bell overhead. “I hope we said some interesting things.”

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No slowing No slowing

down down

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Story and photos by VALENTINA SANDOVAL

B

Jordan Ortiz and Dayanna Peek stood out from the crowd in their matching outfits as they danced to the various performers playing at “JORDAY.”

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asketball goes quickly when you are playing with new people.

Movements are sudden and mistakes are made. The mix of sweat and tennis shoes squeaking overwhelms your senses. But as you get used to it, the game slows down and everything gets closer.

Jordan Ortiz feels the same way when he works on a DJ set. From his years of playing the sport, he has come to realize that every song he chooses is another play in the game.

The people and sounds get louder by the second as he stands before his setup. The songs go five times faster, and they leave behind a buzz from the climax of their beat.

But when people start to sit and the hype dies down, Jordie reminds himself to bring the rhythm back up; the set is not over.

Ortiz had to wake up earlier than usual on the morning of his first event. He had played at many bazaars, markets and parties, but tonight was the first one with his name on it: JORDAY. He organized the nighttime party along with his friend, Dayanna Peek, and they coordinated to wear matching denim outfits and red hats.

Ortiz describes himself as “captivating,” not only because of his looks or his street-style fashion, but also because he enjoys himself and his craft — and people notice that.

“I think I’m eye-catching behind the DJ booth,” said Ortiz. “You make who you are, you know.”

Dayanna Peek, who goes by Day and uses they/them pronouns, is a local artist, photographer and event planner who often works with Jordie.

They said his style and personality are often reflected in the music he plays.

“He’s very outgoing but calm, and I feel like his DJ style can emulate that,” said Peek. “He has a really good match of really cutesy pop music and hardcore rap and trap music.”

Peek said their constant involvement in the creative scene, as well as their respective journeys to becoming

Design by DIEGO PERDOMO

recognizable by the Gainesville arts and music communities, brought them together at the perfect time to create their own unique event.

Ortiz spent the entire week before JORDAY promoting the event.

The morning of the event was no exception; Ortiz spent it editing a radio show for promotion and had to run to make it on time to DJ for an international food festival.

Ortiz’s days can be hectic, but he doesn’t let the pressure or stress overshadow the music. Between a mix of R&B, rap, trap and reggaeton, he doesn’t just play the music — he feels it. The setlist is spontaneous; he freestyles and dances along with the rhythm booming out of oversized speakers.

Music is what Ortiz enjoys the most; it helps him get through a long day of work. While he works regular jobs at Olive Garden and Germain’s Chicken Sandwiches, he also spends time preparing for future events. He works hard to hype himself up and let the right tunes guide him into the right mood.

Choosing a setlist is not a complex process. It comes organically while messing around with his friend, Angel, and his cousins. After trying out different options and playing the same two songs over and over for an hour, he finally decided to stick to reggaeton that night.

The genre was led by his favorite Bad Bunny beats and his Puerto Rican and Colombian heritage. Ortiz feels like he takes that heritage for granted, but he is trying to better his Spanish and learn the slang and traditions he has strayed from.

The epicenter of his Latin American connections was in his hometown in Deltona, Florida.

Deltona was filled with Puerto Ricans; it was filled with bodega-like stores and people who pronounce their Rs like Ls when speaking their native tongue. “Delrico,” people call it.

Ortiz spent his childhood observing his grandparents’ hard work and

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spending time in their Deltona home. They were diligent with everything they did. Now in their late 80s, his grandmother spends her time working at home, cooking and cleaning while his grandfather works on crafts and on his crops. The word used in Puerto Rico would be “jibaro,” or someone who farms the land, and Ortiz remembers it because of a recent Bad Bunny interview he watched.

Watching interviews has always been a crucial part of his learning. There were never any tutorials or “how-to’s” explaining to him how to use a camera or a mixing board, but instead

a set of interviews, videos and movies that he used to observe people’s behavior.

From Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande and Camila Cabello to ASAP Rocky, Steve Lacy and Tyler the Creator, he spent hours on end watching their mannerisms and behaviors to understand how to work on his own performance.

Analyzing every movement and action they made helped him build the brand he presents today.

Ortiz got into modeling to generate more selfconfidence, and just like with music, he never sticks to a single style.

“I’m trying new things and mixing up styles,”

The How Bazar was packed with people enjoying JORDAY. Many attendees stayed in the outside area of the venue while they waited for the show to start.

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said Ortiz. “I want to be half Pharrell, half ASAP Rocky, half streetwear, half high fashion.”

He implemented this mixing idea for a How Bazar gala when he wore a fancy two-piece dress and his pair of Nike Air Force 1s. This was the first event where he infused feminine elements into his style.

He felt hyperaware of his exposed, hairy legs and the eyes on him, but he likes experimenting, and despite the looks, he felt confident.

While playing at JORDAY and at every set, Jordie also makes sure to wear his necklaces. Three of them are from his grandparents and one from

a childhood best friend; they are his good luck charms. Before putting on any performance he gives the chains a blessing and gets ready to give his best.

After finding some pictures of his dad with stylish outfits, he believes that he might get his sense of fashion from his dad, despite the fact their relationship has never been close.

He doesn’t know much about his dad’s life, and that is one thing he wants to do differently; he wants to leave a digital footprint as a trace to follow for his future kids and whoever looks up to him. He wants to bring people with him along his

journey and help them understand why he does the things he does.

Throughout the entirety of JORDAY, the venue was filled with people taking pictures and videos.

Ortiz played one of the last sets of the night, but as he played a mix of famous rap and his original songs, the crowd surrounded him with phones, professional cameras and lights, keeping a record of every second.

That is also why he is working on a documentary where he will film himself going to therapy for the first time, as a way to eliminate the stigma around it and to be vulnerable and authentic in front of the camera.

“I think people that go to

therapy are brave,” Ortiz said. “I’ve never given it a chance so I want to show my first time to people, to keep the transparency.”

Mental health has always been an obstacle in his life. He’s always had a lot of insecurity surrounding his looks, and he tends to be his own biggest critic, but the music, the fashion and the art help him gain the confidence to cope with his dark thoughts.

He found out about the importance of finding these therapeutic outlets the hard way after he tried to end his life when he was younger.

He failed, because of what he believes was an act of God. “I have more faith now because

of that,” Ortiz said. “I got another chance, so I really wanna use it better.”

Now he lives with this second chance and tries to make the most out of it, to hold on to those creative coping mechanisms and help those who need them to survive, too.

Ortiz’s best friend Angel often reminds him to not be so hard on himself. He tells Jordie to get out of the mode where he shuts down the moment he makes a mistake, to accept the slow along with the fast.

In the same way they’ve helped him be kinder to himself, Jordie helps his friends discover their callings. He is currently guiding Angel to find his artistic passion,

"I want want to to be be half half Pharrell, Pharrell, half half ASAP ASAP Rocky, Rocky, "I half streetwear, streetwear, half half high high fashion." fashion." half

Ortiz sang some of his original songs for the first time to close the night. His friends encouraged him and chanted along.

From close friends to new acquaintances, Ortiz made sure to greet and thank everyone for coming to the event.

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his energy and passion fill up the room

and Day credits him for convincing them to get their first Sony camera, sparking their love for photography.

When the sets get slower and quieter, he begins to quiet down. too. In these softer moments, doubt begins to creep in. But then his friends are there to cheer him on.

“You’re killing it! You’re killing it!” one of his friends exclaims.

After the set and the party are over, he lets himself celebrate. He tends to be the first to beat himself up and call out any mistake he makes, but with time, he has learned to celebrate his wins before falling into self-criticism.

As a people-watcher who learns by seeing others work their craft, Ortiz feeds off the energy from

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the crowd he plays to. It has taken him some time, but he is finally learning to let go of his doubts.

It’s exactly when you start getting used to the rhythm that he gets to change it up, put on a song you never expected or wear an outfit that might shock the crowds.

It is when the party starts dying down that he brings it back up, as his energy and passion fill up the room once more and make the game pick up the pace.

“I’m not done yet,” he said to me about his future in the arts and the creative scene of Gainesville.

You can tell by the way his words hang in the air that it’s not just an aspiration — it’s a promise.

Complete with DJ equipment, neon lights and a disco ball, Ortiz and his team made sure the How Bazar was decked out for the event.

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Two bodies, three graves A mother grieves, searches, lives on

A childhood photo of William “Billy” Call.

H

azel Powell stands before her youngest son’s headstone at a cemetery in a small West Virginia town. The granite marker sits beside the graves of two of Powell’s other sons. Yet, there is no date of death engraved on it.

Danny Randall Jackson was only 12 when he vanished 34 years ago in Gainesville, Florida. No one knows what happened to Randy; only that his mother has never seen him again.

All these years later, Powell holds on to hope that her youngest son will come back home one day. All these years later, she’s been forced to live without knowing what happened. Is he alive and well somewhere? What would he look like as a grown man?

Will he show up one day at her doorstep? Or is he gone forever?

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Story by ALLESSANDRA INZINNA Photos courtesy of HAZEL POWELL Contributions from ISABELLA DOUGLAS

A childhood photo of Brian “Bo” Vargo.

These are questions that keep her awake at night. Questions she knows she may never find the answers to.

And what if she did? Would knowing hurt more than wondering?

But now, at 67, Powell wants to make sure her son will one day rest in peace. That if anyone ever finds him, he will be buried here, along with his brothers. And one day, his mother.

The gravestone came in early September, and she planted it in the family plot, uncertain whether she would even live to etch on a date of death.

The living world Five minutes away from the cemetery, Powell’s burnt-orange mobile home sits on a narrow road at the bottom of a hill. It is rigged with motion sensor alarms and a security camera that streams continuously, even though Kenova

A school photo of Danny Randall “Randy” Jackson showcases lopsided bangs that the 12-year-old had cut them himself. This is the last school photo Randy ever took.

is a sleepy town with a declining population of only 3,000 people.

Powell grew up in Kenova. She raised her six children here. She goes to a local warehouse to play Bingo and savors the ice cream at a town square shop, which she insists is the best she’s ever tasted.

Powell wallpapered her home with some of the thousands of photographs of her children and grandchildren. Others, she tucked into a Bible that sits prominently on a coffee table. Still others remain in their original envelopes, stuffed in desk drawers and a large gift box.

Her kids scolded her about the shrine. Pictures everywhere document the dead or the otherwise gone. She took some down, but not many. They bring her comfort.

Powell filled her dining room with delicately placed china, flutes,

Design by MATTHEW CUPELLI and DIEGO PERDOMO

wine glasses and cake trays sitting in armoires and atop tablecloths.

The living room exists for the TV, a flat screen behemoth purchased at a pawn shop for $250.

Powell’s a small woman, just scratching 5 feet tall. Gary Marshall, her partner since 1995, towers above her. Both nurse a mug of coffee while the pot faithfully brews a second batch.

Their Saturdays are boring, they admit. Sometimes, Powell manages to sleep past 8 a.m. and it takes her a few hours of lying there to get moving. And then she’s up. Smoking Tourney Slims, shooing the dog off her lap, laughing at the one-liners her partner slings. Eventually, they migrate to the kitchen counter and sit at their assigned spots. Powell on the right, Marshall on the left.

Then, like on most days, Powell can’t sit still. She gets an itch. One that’s nearly 35 years old. She imagines a suspect and a shovel. A foggy clue, buried somewhere under the decades. She pulls out her phone, digs into research. She flips through the notes she has, the police report.

And stares at a 5th grade school photo of Randy; his bangs lopsided because he cut his hair himself.

By now, it has become a familiar cycle for Powell.

A school photo of Brian, known as “Bo.” Bo had a sarcastic sense of humor, a trait he and his brothers shared.

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She has endured an endless barrage of grief in her life. She lost three sons: Brian “Bo” Vargo, William “Billy” Call and Randy. No one could understand her pain, she says, unless they’ve lost three sons themselves. And even then, they might be hard-pressed.

Billy and Bo’s deaths devastated Powell. Her grief is deep and unending. But she knows the cruel circumstances of their deaths. She knows where to place her grief.

Randy is different. She might have bought a headstone for her little boy, but the harsh reality is that she has no idea what happened to him.

He was nowhere, but everywhere.

Powell used to scan the crowds of neighborhood children when her son first disappeared. She’d pull over and pick through their faces. She remained cordial with the top suspects in her son’s disappearance, hoping to earn pieces of information on where he went.

For a while, she thought her exhusband Danny Jackson, Randy’s father, might have played a role in Randy’s disappearance. Many years later, he showed up one day at Powell’s house, belligerently drunk, and stabbed Marshall in the thigh.

The knife sank about three inches deep. Powell called the police, but

Marshall declined to press charges.

They wanted her ex-husband to keep coming back. Just in case he knew something she didn’t. He did come back, but he never said anything new about Randy’s disappearance.

She still searches for Randy on social media. She thought she found him once on Facebook after she came upon a man with a similar name. But after messaging and Facetiming with him, her hopes plummeted. Again.

She talks out her theories. She fears others might think her crazy, muddling over decades-old clues and possibilities and suspects. Marshall always listens. He’s always at the ready with a warm and firm, “No, you’re not.”

Powell met Marshall after she moved back to Kenova, following a three-year detour in Gainesville, Florida, where she lost Randy. She sought safety in her hometown and did not receive it, so she built it. Here, in the home her remaining children visit often.

The world I can’t bring back Randy Jackson was not unlike other 12-year-old boys.

He had trouble sitting still. Powell spent weeks teaching him the letters of the alphabet. He was blond and

Marshall (left) and Powell (right) have known each other for decades and even attended school together. They reconnected in 1995 and have stayed together ever since.

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A childhood photo of Randy shows off his golden locks. Randy was a small child. His mother notes that all her children inherited her short stature.

blue-eyed, content with a mulletbowl haircut hybrid. He loved learning in school and hanging out with his friends in the hallways.

But only cartoons and reruns of “Let’s Make a Deal” captured his undivided attention. Once in church, while the congregation was deciding what hymns to sing, Randy shouted, “Let’s sing rock ‘n’ roll!”

In 1986, Powell married her fourth husband, Steven Powell.

He wanted to begin a new life in Florida, so the family moved into a yellow house in northeast Gainesville. The boys shared rooms, and although Powell laments there was no extra money lying around, everyone had what they needed.

Northeast 11th Terrace was a quiet street. Young families allowed their kids to roam, ride their bikes and walk to school. Powell and

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a neighbor occasionally sipped beer in the driveway. Powell had a job she somewhat liked, enough money to feed her family, and although the kids got into trouble here and there, she felt content.

The night of Aug. 24, 1989, was like any other for the family. At 8:30 p.m., Powell wished Randy goodnight and went to sleep herself a little while later.

The next morning was anything but sound.

I don’t think Randy’s in the house, Steven Powell told his wife.

Hazel Powell thought nothing of

it. Randy was always around. She was late for her job at Gulf Life Insurance and rushed out of the house.

Of course, he is. I gotta go!

At the office, she had barely settled in when she got another call.

It was her 16-year-old son Bo. He was frantic with worry. Randy was definitely not at home.

Powell hurried back, a little panicked but nothing more.

She, Steve and Bo searched the neighborhood, talked to neighbors and friends. They didn’t find him.

One neighbor, James Welsh, told Powell that Randy had sat in his driveway the night before. Welsh was hosting a “movie night” at his house and Randy, Bo and another neighbor waited to be let inside. Welsh let the other boys in but turned Randy away. He was too young. But as a consolation prize, Welsh handed him his car keys and allowed him to listen to the radio, he said.

When Bo and his friend left Welsh’s house sometime before 10 p.m., Randy was no longer in the car.

They assumed he had gone home.

Welsh seemed to beat himself up when he spoke with Powell that morning.

If I had let him inside, maybe he wouldn’t be missing.

That Friday afternoon, when Randy still did not come home, Powell called the police.

Detective William Halvosa was one of the detectives that took on Randy’s case. He had spent the previous four years in law enforcement, solving homicides and convenience store robberies.

He wrote down Randy’s height and weight, which Powell miscalculated.

The missing person poster said he weighed 45 pounds, when in reality

She might have bought a headstone for her little boy, but the harsh reality is that she has no idea what happened to him.

He was nowhere, but everywhere.

he might have weighed about 70.

Randy’s case was not a priority at first, Halvosa admitted in a 2022 interview. The kid had just run away, he thought. If he had not come home by Monday, then something must have happened.

Monday came and Randy was still gone.

Halvosa turned his attention to Welsh, Powell’s 41-year-old neighbor with a sordid record. In 1975, he was charged with assault with intent to murder. Then in 1984, a 14-yearold boy accused Welsh of sexual assault in a Kmart bathroom. Years after Randy’s disappearance, Welsh would continue to rack up charges of battery and lewd and lascivious acts on a minor, among others.

Welsh raised alarm bells right away, Halvosa said.

The boys who were at his house that night told police that before the movie had ended, Welsh had shut his bedroom door and gone to bed.

A little while later, the boys heard a thump, as though a body fell on the floor.

What was that? one of the boys asked.

Welsh’s brother Jeff, who lived with Welsh, had an explanation ready.

Oh, he said. Jim is just dancing.

A few weeks after his little brother’s disappearance, Billy sat shaking at the kitchen counter. He had something urgent to tell his mom.

Do you remember the letter? he asked.

She did.

Billy was in a detention center when Randy went missing and Welsh had approached Powell with a letter for Billy. He allegedly had some lawn work for him when he got back and wanted her to pass it on. But that was not what he wrote in the letter, Billy said.

Billy never stuttered, but that day at the kitchen counter,

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he did. He was terrified by what he was about to tell his mother; that Welsh had sexually abused him a few months earlier and the letter he wrote contained a threat so he would remain quiet. Powell, realizing how difficult this was to say, asked her son if he would be more comfortable speaking with Halvosa. He said yes.

Billy told Halvosa, and Welsh was eventually charged for his crimes against the 14-year-old.

Billy testified at his 1991 trial, two years after his little brother went missing, though the jury did not believe it. Welsh was acquitted.

The leads immediately following Randy’s disappearance poured in fast enough to give Powell whiplash.

A girl said she saw Powell’s exhusband and Randy’s father, Danny Jackson, at a convenience store in Gainesville the day after Randy went missing. Police struggled for a month to find Jackson before locating him in Powell’s home state of West Virginia. Police there patrolled Jackson’s area and found nothing.

Powell also suspected her brother

Jack, who lived in Gainesville.

His children told surreal stories of Jack walking Randy into the woods and abandoning him there.

Police ruled him out quickly, but Powell wasn’t convinced.

She got a call from a customer at Gulf Life Insurance who said she’d heard Randy ran away and was living with ruffians in some Florida city.

Police went down that rabbit hole and came up, again, with nothing.

The leads continued like this for months.

Someone saw Randy eating breakfast at a nearby elementary school. A resident spotted him at a post office, and another saw him attending classes across town. Randy allegedly rode on the handlebars of another kid’s bike outside a market.

A woman called Powell and insisted she rode with him in the backseat of a serial killer’s truck. Powell called the Gainesville Police Department with every inkling, every whiff of suspicion.

Still, they came up with nothing.

Nothing after year one. Or two or three. Nothing after year 34.

Powell poses with her sons Bo (left) and Michael (right) behind her father’s home in Kenova, West Virginia.

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Powell's black van parked in front of her Gainesville house in the late 1980s. Her coworkers often teased that they could always tell when she was coming down the road based on her car.

The case remains an open investigation; the Gainesville Police Department has not eliminated Welsh as a suspect.

Back home With no leads in Randy’s disappearance, Powell could barely function. She found it hard to focus on work. She was distracted at home. She could never rest easy.

Then in the summer of 1990, about a year after Randy went missing, a serial killer murdered five college students in their apartments. The grisly deaths left Gainesville reeling in shock and fear. Powell’s family, like many others in the city, took turns sleeping at night to keep watch for intruders. The Gainesville Ripper, Danny Rolling, was eventually caught and sentenced to death, but the events of that summer rattled the Powells. Soon after, they

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decided to move back to Kenova.

After so much tragedy, Powell craved the solace of home. She needed a place to rest. She thought she might find a semblance of peace there.

In Kenova, Powell leaned on her family. Her father rented Powell a beat-up house. The massive undertaking of fixing it up would take effort from the whole family. Powell’s children groaned, but she didn’t mind. It was a welcome distraction.

Her father came over often. But the veneer would not last long.

Her son Billy, then 16, struck up a friendship with a cousin, Gilbert “Byrd” Cremeans. The 18-year-old was disconcertingly polite and did not have a stable relationship with his family. Billy felt sorry for his older cousin and took him under his wing. The two became friendly.

Then one evening, Powell was in the kitchen making fudge, one of Billy’s favorite desserts. Byrd

knocked on the door and asked for Billy. As Billy left, Powell told him she loved him and that he better be home soon if she was going through the trouble of making him a treat.

But Billy never made it back home.

Byrd lured Billy out of his home and stabbed him 29 times before molesting him. Nine days after Billy was killed, police arrested and charged Byrd with first-degree murder. He was convicted and sentenced to life with mercy, meaning he would have the option of parole after a few decades.

Once again, safety proved itself a frail, elusive concept.

Her life unraveled.

In her house in Kenova, Powell keeps some of her many photographs stuffed into a cardboard gift box.

Several are of her with Marshall, her partner; one shows a sacred moment when she sat on Marshall’s lap, both smiling softly at each other, like high school kids in love. Bo and

Detective Will Halvosa and Powell became so close in his tireless search for Randy that Powell keeps photos of him and his family in her collection.

The pair do not communicate regularly anymore, but Powell maintains that he is a man of great integrity.

Michael teased them relentlessly.

Powell met Marshall in 1995, when they lived next door to each other.

Powell awoke one morning, already irritated by a malfunctioning airconditioner and a killer hangover, to the sound of Marshall relentlessly hammering his fence next door. She stomped outside and demanded he stop. Marshall politely declined and hammered with more force.

Louder. Almost as if he wanted her to come out and yell at him again.

After a minute or so, Powell regretted her temper.

She walked outside.

“Would you like some iced tea?” she said.

He did. They got to talking and haven’t stopped talking since.

Powell’s cardboard box also holds photos of Bo at his older brother’s wedding. He appears suave, with neat dark hair and a trimmed mustache, posing for the camera.

Bo and his mother had a close relationship; Powell often waited for him to stop by for iced tea.

Powell was wrecked when she found out that Bo was abusing drugs. He had become an opioid addict, like millions of other Americans. She

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supported him through his rehab and relapse cycle, did what she could to stand by him. Bo died of an overdose in 2006. She buried another son.

For weeks after Bo died, Powell waited on her front porch around the time he would have gotten out of work. Chain smoking, she pretended he was coming home.

Her grief turned to rage. Evil came with so many faces. This time, it came with no face at all.

Spurred by frustration, Powell decided to land a blow of her own.

Byrd, the man who killed Billy, became eligible for parole in 2002.

Powell and her family found themselves in court every year pleading with the parole board to keep him in prison. She was forced to relive her son’s murder. Every time the letter came in the mail, informing her of an upcoming hearing, Powell struggled to function.

She decided no one else ought to suffer the way she had. In 2010, she wrote her own letters.

Rick Thompson, a Democratic delegate, took Powell’s concerns seriously. Local and national newspapers picked up on Powell’s plight. She went on radio stations and

lobbied in support of amending the parole board requirements, and she succeeded. The amendment passed in early 2011. Instead of inmates sentenced to life with mercy receiving a parole hearing once a year, the parole board could grant the hearing any time within a three-year period. This further spaced out the hearings, and dwindled Byrd’s chances of release.

When the amendment passed in the capital of West Virginia, Powell smiled. A rare, genuine smile.

Powell hears rumors that Byrd hates her because of all she has done to keep him in prison. She considers it a point of pride.

Coexistence Powell has learned to take comfort in the life she has. Her three remaining children — Michael, 51, and two younger daughters — live nearby and visit often. She turns childlike when her grandson comes over and hides under the dining table as the 3-year-old toddler stalks her with a toy gun. He reminds her of Billy and Bo. Of Randy.

She is here while three of her sons are not. So she takes advantage of

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Powell in her Kenova home, adorned with decorations denoting the importance of family, china and baking trays.

every day with her loved ones. Still, not a day goes by that she doesn’t wonder about Randy. In her dreams, he built a good life somewhere. In her dreams, he tells her he can take care of himself and she’s been silly to worry for so long.

But then, the dream twists. She sees a boy floating face down in a swimming pool. Powell jolts awake, shaking.

Grief and hope live side by side within Powell’s

heart. But after four decades of uncertainty, deep down somewhere, she knows she will probably never see her youngest son again.

So she bought a gravestone for him and had it planted in the family plot at the cemetery. There, where the living converge with the dead, she finds solace.

There, she can be with her boys.

Editor’s note: If you have information about the case, you are encouraged to call the Gainesville Police Department’s non-emergency cold cases number at (352) 393-7710.

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There, she can be with her boys.

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a monarch’s

LEGACY Celebrating resilience in the face of destruction

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Story and photos by ELISE PLUNK

A

s autumn stretches into the icy grip of winter, a curious change occurs in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida.

The sky, usually a deep, endless blue, turns orange.

The color comes slowly at first, a hint of warmth scattered among the evergreen pines and palmettos, then it descends all at once, painted on the backs of small, fragile wings that have traveled thousands of miles. In early November, the orange drifts across the coastal town to the steady beat of thousands of Eastern monarch butterflies passing through on their migration south.

Their arrival, the last call for autumn’s warmth as cold fronts arrive and sneak a chill into the seaside breeze of the Emerald Coast, is a cause for celebration. The Flutterby Arts Festival, hosted annually by the

Design by LINDEE WALKER

as the main location for the festival to mark the butterflies’ passage.

Children painted cardboard wings at the craft tent and learned about the monarchs’ life cycle and favorite plants at the education stall. They beamed at their parents with freshly painted flowers on their cheeks, parading around little pots with milkweed clippings they could take home and plant in their gardens, hoping a traveling monarch would find rest and respite in its nectar.

But the joy of the festival fell under the shadow of a dark realization: The monarch butterfly could be dying.

This delicate orange insect, a migratory subspecies of monarch known by its scientific name Danaus plexippus ssp. plexippus, is already a fleeting creature. Its life cycle lasts only about 24 days in the summer months, when the weather is mild, the food is plentiful and the living is good. Three

miles of North and Central America seem virtually impossible. Wings that tear at the slightest provocation and tender bodies so easily squashed under a careless shoe don’t help the butterfly, not to mention highways, semi-trucks and curious housecats.

Climate change and pesticide use complicate the matter even more.

“Its biggest threat is habitat destruction,” said Sarah Steel Cabrera, a University of Florida Ph.D. student and graduate research assistant in the Daniels Lab at the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity.

Bigger and harsher storms are destroying Eastern monarch hibernation grounds longer into the hurricane season. In 2002, a storm of epic proportions killed “almost 80 percent of the overwintering population,” according to the UN Conservation Convention. And storms like this

The joy of the festival fell under the shadow of a dark realization: The monarch butterfly could be dying.

Cultural Arts Alliance of Walton County, commemorates the monarch’s resilience and memorializes the wonder it brings to the natural world on its epic journey home.

“It’s something that all humans can watch and relate to, you know, being cocooned and in the darkness before finding your wings, the cycle of life,” said Alyson Longshore, a business owner and vendor at the festival. “It’s really therapeutic to watch that process.”

2022 marked the 30th year of the Flutterby Arts Festival. Families, community members, artists and vendors gathered at Watersound Origins, a residential community in Walton County, Florida, to celebrate.

The newly constructed outdoor event space, with wide lawns and a large, wood-trussed pavilion, served

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generations have this short life cycle of two to five weeks, leaving just enough time to mate and lay eggs before they die. The fourth generation carries the hope of the subspecies’ survival.

This winter generation, commonly called the “overwintering” generation, is built to last with a months-long lifespan. But this gift of extra time comes with responsibilities — the fourth generation must travel south, thousands of miles across North America, to regions in California and Mexico for warmer temperatures during the winter months. The hearty winter group hibernates until the warmth of spring and summer seeps back into the north, when they travel once again and lay their eggs along the route back, chasing perfect temperatures.

The odds of survival across 2,000

are becoming even more frequent.

Alongside threats to their hibernation grounds, milkweed plants and shifting ranges could directly affect the monarch and its ability to thrive.

“Its host plants are much more scarce than before due to changes in how we manage agricultural lands in particular,” said Cabrera. Monarch caterpillars feed on milkweed almost exclusively, and adult butterflies lay their eggs on the leaves to give their offspring the best chance at survival.

But milkweed ranges are predicted to shift toward the poles in search of better growing conditions, making the monarchs’ journey even longer and more arduous. Alongside the shifting milkweed ranges, habitat destruction from climate change as well as human agricultural practices and pesticide use on milkweed plants

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threaten the monarchs’ survival.

At the Flutterby Festival in 2022, children ran around with painted wings, doing cartwheels on the grass lawn and chasing bubbles from colorful wands. In 2021, the Cultural Arts Association installed a more permanent display of sculptures to honor the monarchs’ migration, all themed around the main character of mid-November.

The butterfly had more accolades than ever before, but this time, I could count on two hands the number of monarchs I saw pass through the festival named in their honor.

The craft tent felt lonely without them. The education stall and milkweed sprouts seemed arbitrary.

The statues erected in their honor felt more like gravestones instead of a celebration of their arrival.

I started to panic, anxiety creeping into my chest as I frantically walked around the festival, searching for more than just a glance of orange. I found nothing on the wind or in the foliage surrounding the event space, but I spotted a booth with flowers, little caterpillars munching on leaves and a chrysalis hanging from a branch.

I walked over to get a closer look and met Alyson Longshore running her booth. Her business, Metamorph Blooms, works to raise monarch caterpillars and reintroduce larger

Children who attend the Flutterby Festival can decorate cardboard wings at the craft tent with paint and glitter. These colorful cardboard wings lay temporarily discarded while their owners practiced cartwheels in the grass.

numbers of butterflies back into the wild. Attached to plant arrangements, the chrysalis of the butterfly awaits the day it will open, when the fresh monarch will dry its wings on the leaves before beginning its flight.

“We donate a portion of our proceeds to SaveOurMonarchs. org; we use farm-grown milkweed as our host plant,” she said. “It’s to promote the beauty that they have, but also preserving and protecting.”

Efforts like Metamorph Blooms are plentiful, with the monarch’s beauty a high selling point, but they feel small when placed against the backdrop of larger catastrophe. The ebb and flow of the volatile creature’s numbers in the wild may well turn into a legacy of their mythical good

Monarch caterpillars depend on their host plant, milkweed, for proper nourishment as they grow and prepare for their transformation into butterflies.

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looks, the value of life’s diversity lost in the efforts of too little too late.

The Eastern monarch was listed as an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in July 2022 and is scheduled to be assessed for federally endangered status in the United States in 2024.

In the face of all we stand to lose, how do we celebrate?

I grew up in Santa Rosa Beach.

At the first Flutterby Festival I ever attended, I sat at a face painting booth getting a bright red flower painted on my cheek, cardboard wings in hand, eyes pointed forward as I focused on staying still. Something soft brushed against my cheek, and I felt a gentle presence. A butterfly had landed on my head, causing small strands of my hair to fall out of my ponytail and tickle my face.

The woman painting my face smiled and calmly continued her work.

“That’s good luck, you know,” she told me. “They like you.”

Since then, the monarchs have found me. On my way home for Thanksgiving in 2021, I found one crushed behind the pump at a gas station. It was still alive, but one wing was shredded. It would never fly again, and to a butterfly, stillness is death. I sat and stared for a moment, watching the delicate insect limbs scramble to find a grip on the cold, rusted metal of the gas pump.

I saw the rest of my day planned

Paintings of monarchs decorated these girls’ cheeks as they showed off their butterfly kite.

in my mind: I would drive home, unpack my things, say hello to my family and go to the store to shop for our Thanksgiving feast. I would forget about this unfortunate insect and carry on with my tasks, enjoying time with family and away from responsibilities.

But still, I stared at this butterfly, orange wings bright despite everything it had been through, and I put the gas pump into my tank. I reached for the butterfly and gently shifted its legs onto my hand, cupping my other palm to keep the wind from blowing the frail little thing away.

I set the creature on the passenger seat of my car and drove home, where I searched for what a butterfly could eat. I found a wide hibiscus leaf under pink flowering stems in my yard and set my injured companion there while I went to make sugar water.

Why was I doing this? I knew it was going to die. Even the overwintering generation doesn’t live for very long, and this one was broken beyond repair. I was behind

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schedule for Thanksgiving shopping.

I had things I desperately needed to do. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I owed this short life something.

It had known such hardship in its pursuit of finding its way home to rest, and now it never would.

I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t turn the temperature back from the heights it was reaching, fend off the monstrous hurricanes. I couldn’t make the milkweed stay where the butterflies’ children could find it. I couldn’t forget the reality that every year at the Flutterby Festival, I saw less and less orange in the sky and on the leaves.

I was scared that little girls who got red flowers painted on their cheeks would never again be blessed by the soft wings of a monarch. I feared losing the luck and life of the butterfly to a demise both of our own making and completely out of my control.

I could make sugar water, but a gentle death, a wide green hibiscus leaf and a final meal is ultimately all I could offer.

I came back to the leaf when I was done, setting a shallow dish of sugar water in front of the small, dying creature. Its wings looked like panes of stained glass in a cathedral lost to time, shattered and torn yet beautiful in its reminder of glory. The monarch made no motion toward the dish, and I feared it had already died.

I placed the tip of my finger near its legs, trying for the second time that day to offer all I could to help this creature die softly. A twitch, the smallest motion. Its leg extended to my hand, and I helped it toward the edge of the dish. It tasted the sugar and unfurled its proboscis — a tube often thought of as the butterfly’s tongue — to take a sip.

I smiled. I didn’t cry, though I probably should’ve. I had done what I could do at that moment.

All that remained was the joy of knowing that this little life had responded to an outstretched hand and that reaching out again wasn’t as impossible as I had thought.

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Caterpillars create a protective husk called a chrysalis as they transition from one phase of life to another. The flecks of gold on the monarch’s chrysalis is derived from milkweed, the plant they eat as caterpillars.

At the 31st anniversary of the Flutterby Arts Festival in November 2023, I walked through the artists’ stalls again. Children still ran by with their glittery wings, butterflies painted on their cheeks. The air still smelled like pine needles and grilled cheese; snow-cones still dripped from the hands of those walking by the displays of butterfly-themed paintings, sculptures and ornaments.

But a new kind of joy wove its way throughout the small arts festival this year. The IUCN moved the monarch down from endangered to vulnerable on their extinction risk-rating system in September 2023, citing new predictive models that show the monarch’s population is declining slower than they thought.

While a clear scientific consensus has yet to be settled, and the scientific community generally urges caution

A painting displayed at the Flutterby Festival speaks to the long-held tradition of celebrating the monarch’s journey through Santa Rosa Beach, Florida

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about accepting the results of the new study, the stabilizing population numbers signal hope for the migratory monarch, just as the attitudes at the festival did.

Scientists from the University of Florida IFAS gardening booth taught kids how to plant their own milkweed, guiding their hands as they pressed the seeds down into the damp soil. A butterfly garden nearby hosted a handful of monarchs, their wings spread wide as the sun danced across the patchwork of orange and black on their backs.

A tenuous dream crept its way into my mind, a dream of orange wings and blue skies and human beings helping to usher in a different kind of future than the one of heat and loss we had been promised. We could take advantage of the chance to ensure the monarch’s legacy lives on in the creatures themselves rather than just the stories we tell.

With uninjured wings, this monarch can take flight and continue its long journey.

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Design by MARCUS ROJAS

Tell true Florida stories

ABOVE | From left to right: Design Editor DIEGO PERDOMO, Editor-in-Chief BRYCE BROWN, Multimedia Editor MATTHEW CUPELLI, Managing Editor ELISE PLUNK and Marketing Director MARCUS ROJAS.

Now it’s time to tell our story.

In 2020, former UF professor Moni Basu began recruiting students for a new magazine.

The goal was to host a space in UF’s journalism school where deep reporting and artful storytelling converged under the genre of “narrative non-fiction.”

Atrium Magazine, named after the open space in Weimer Hall, published its first story, “God’s Garden,” in April 2021.

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Since then, the magazine has released a print issue every year in December, and we’re thrilled to see the third issue in your hands.

It’s not the magazine that wins awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, Florida Magazine Association and other institutions.

It’s narrative nonfiction that wins awards.

Now it’s time for you to tell a true Florida story. We publish stories,

essays, poems and photo galleries all year round on our website, print and social platforms.

We bring in designers, illustrators, editors, photographers and marketers that take the skills learned with Atrium into their careers.

But that’s enough of us.

atriummagazineuf@gmail.com

atriummag.org

Enjoy reading the magazine!

Design by BRYCE BROWN and DIEGO PERDOMO

in the Photo essay by VALENTINA SARMIENTO

CJ believes there are many different ways to think about drag because the art form is so intersectional. “At the end of the day, it’s something that just makes me happy,” he says.

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The metamorphosis begins with a glue stick tube straight to the eyebrows. Then, three shades of foundation are painted over every pore.

“Drag, to me, is being able to express the femininity that I was abused for when I was younger,” CJ says.

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The rest is a frenzy of exaggerated eye makeup, human hair wigs and an authentic ostrich feather boa that is worth one month’s rent.

“It’s really important to acknowledge where we came from and still use drag as a form of resistance,” CJ says.

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A spotlight follows Whorealis as she makes her entrance.

“I step foot on stage, and just being able to see peoples’ faces, having the light hit my face and really being in the moment — it feels like pure euphoria,” CJ says.

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Finally, after four hours of preparation, Aurora Whorealis emerges.

More than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced nationwide in 2023. Christian Acevedo, a 24-year-old drag queen from Florida who goes

by CJ and uses he/they pronouns, performs in spite of them all. “If you don’t like the performance that I’m putting on, that’s all on you,” he says.

CJ is a frequent performer at University Club, Gainesville’s first and only gay bar. Through the artistry of drag, he and other performers are able to build and strengthen shared communal bonds, demanding visibility and asserting their presence.

CJ’s craft is controversial. There have always been people who hate drag queens. “But to see the magnitude that it’s at and to see elected officials pushing this hatred towards our community is mortifying,” they say.

To fend off prejudice, CJ surrounds himself with other queer folks who understand the narratives and obstacles intrinsic to queerness.

People who can share in both his pain and joy.

“We’re not going anywhere,” they say.

“We’ve been here since the beginning, and we’re gonna continue to be here.”

Whorealis throws her tips in the air dramatically mid-performance during her lip-synced ballad of “Love” by Keyshia Cole.

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M E M O I R

Kathleen

Photo courtesy of BRYCE BROWN

by BRYCE BROWN

How a decision to leave home exemplified one woman’s courage.

Kathleen Pelkey is known to make kids cry. Grown men, too.

Some would consider it unbecoming. Others, endearing.

It all depends on how you look at it — or rather, her.

Kathleen is as puzzling as her history. A series of instances touched by chance, a lick of courage and luck — only, she’d credit her luck to God. She found Him in a little Methodist church as a young girl. As she recalls it, the minister’s sermon, which reverberated among packed pews, was interrupted by a strange light, a providential beam shining down on her. It was just she and the light in that church for all she was concerned, and she laid down her heart at the foot of the pulpit.

“He’s here,” she’d often say, pressing her finger to her chest. “Always.”

This light guided her as she migrated from place to place; it was a lifestyle she was used to. Passed from hand to hand like the offertory baskets at church, she and her sister Janet sought a stable home as children.

After resigning themselves to an orphanage for a period of time, they found lodging at their Aunt Treva’s, where they toiled on the family’s farm for long hours and ate olives until they were sick.

Having not lived with her own mother for years, Kathleen was startled to see her on Aunt Treva’s front stoop one afternoon. She dropped off a few obligatory words and some coins from the bottom of her purse, then turned her back and left again.

Kathleen got to work. Quickly, she wrote a letter dedicated to her mother, expunging her anger by vomiting it onto paper. After signing and sealing it, she placed it in the mailbox and entrusted her sister with this coveted information, already feeling victorious.

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hands of Aunt Treva, who found the derisive message.

Shattered on the floor, Kathleen gathered her pieces and brought herself to her feet.

“I’m leaving,” she told Janet that night.

“Well, I’m going with you,” Janet responded. “I have to.”

Janet wouldn’t confess she had shown Aunt Treva the letter until years later.

The two of them trudged along dark gravel roads with only paper sacks to carry their belongings. Kathleen heaved herself over a fallen log, and with the weight of her body came the heavy weight of panic as the reality of her actions began to register. Then the light came.

You can leave now. Go. She paused.

Then, without looking over her shoulder, she continued moving forward.

The two girls eventually reached Uncle George and Aunt Mable’s home several miles down the road, where they would stay for a few days before moving to Miami.

Years later, Kathleen would see her mother again to hold her hands while she lay dying in bed.

Today, Kathleen is a woman who doesn’t bow under pressure. She is steadfast — a trait that suited her when she began working for the FBI in 1952, and one which still vindicates her claim that she doesn’t wear a wig and, instead, gets her hair styled at a salon (one she won’t name).

She is a woman who knows when she is lost but never loses direction. A woman disarmed by family but who protects her family against all odds. A woman of strict law but ever-flowing forgiveness.

And, perhaps, a woman of oxymorons.

History etches itself into her square glasses and stiff blouses; the future forever bound in her Bible and family photographs. Kathleen is a woman constructed of hard lines, which fold softly into their center.

Design by MELANIE PEÑA BOMBINO

Tell me a story — Illuminate, speak the truth.

And I will be strong

Haiku by MONI BASU | Illustration by MATTHEW CUPELLI

TRUE FLORIDA STORIES