2023 National YoungArts Week Anthology + Catalogue

YoungArts

Anthology + Catalogue

Select works by the 2023 Finalists in Design Arts, Photography, Visual Arts and Writing

2

YoungArts

Anthology + Catalogue

Select works by the 2023 Finalists in Design Arts, Photography, Visual Arts and Writing

2023 National YoungArts Week T-Shirt Designed by Kelley Lu (2021 Design Arts)

Acknowledgments We are thrilled to welcome you to this Anthology + Catalogue, comprising works by the 2023 YoungArts finalists in Design Arts, Photography, Visual Arts and Writing. An affirmation of the caliber of their expressions, these editions are often the first opportunity for young artists to see their work published and represent a bold step toward a professional future in the arts.

Our work is a continuous process that depends upon the knowledge and commitment of a vast network of guest artists, teachers and educators.

We are grateful for the many partnerships and artists who have helped inspired this next generation of artists. We extend our gratitude to Anthology Editor, Jordan Levin and Exhibition Guest Curator, Adeze Wilford.

This volume and National YoungArts Week programming is made possible with generous support from Anthropologie; Aon; Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation; City of Miami Beach, Cultural Affairs Program, Cultural Arts Council; Miami City Ballet; the Miami-Dade County Tourist Development Council, Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; Miami Downtown Development Authority; New World Symphony; the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Arts and Culture, the Florida Council on Arts and Culture, and the National Endowment for the Arts; Sidney and Florence Stern Family Foundation; Sandra and Tony Tamer; and Truist Wealth.

Please visit youngarts.org/donor-recognition for a complete list of donors.

Above all, we extend our sincerest gratitude to the artists featured. We dedicate this publication to you, your families, teachers and mentors.

Table of Contents Select Works Catrielle Barnett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Shaliz Bazldjoo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Shanett Berdayes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Helena Brittain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Lucas Buckwell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Richard Cheng . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Merritt Crumpton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Mia Grace Davis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Zoe Dorado . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Kennedy Eagleton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Charles Estess . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Simi Fadel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Yiyang Fei . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Robert Gao . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Madison Girouard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Zakiriya Gladney . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Claire Hahn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Ulysses Hill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Grey Jensen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Elizabeth Keller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Caroline Kim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Sherice Kong . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Django Lewis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Audrey Lim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Daniel Liu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 N.Y. Ling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Miranda Lu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Sam Luo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Khalil Mcknight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Ashley Park . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Emily Pickering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Marlene Schwier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Ethan Shames . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Britney Simbana-J . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Neil Song . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Sara Sonnenblick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Mac Stern . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Gavin Trotmore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Margaret Tsai . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Amy Wang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 Ariana Wang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Ray Wang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Kennedee Woodson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Jacqueline Xiong . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Hans Yang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 Bayan Yunis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

About YoungArts About YoungArts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Notable Winners . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 Guest Artists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Special Thanks to Educators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 National YoungArts Week Supporters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 YoungArts Supporters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 YoungArts Board of Trustees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

YoungArts Anthology + Catalogue

Select Works by the 2023 Finalists in Design Arts, Photography, Visual Arts and Writing

Catrielle Barnett

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Design Arts Perpich Center For Arts Education Golden Valley MN

Fire Starter White recycled polyester, tulle, white thread, needles, invisible zipper, fireplace matches, matches, fire, sewing machine 2021

Shaliz Bazldjoo

Novel Laurel School Shaker Heights, OH

How to Hunt Witches STEP ONE It is ordered, &c. That if any person after legal, or other due conviction, shall worship any other God but the Lord God, he shall be put to death… If any person be a witch, he or she shall be put to death… or if any person, or persons, shall commit any other kind of unnatural and shameful filthiness… they shall be put to death, according to the mind of God revealed in his word require it.

— From Capital Laws in the New Haven penal code of 1656 No one came to America unless they wanted to die.

Clarence came to America to kill.

Most folk blamed the toxicity of the water. The lawlessness of it. And the angry waves, rolls of salt fangs that bit ships in half and dissolved wood before it reached the sea floor.

The storms, too. Storms that didn’t thunder or boom so much as scream. Lightning clawing open the sky. Cyclones rising to meet the crackling energy of clouds too far above them. Black foam clotting the air like smoke in heaven’s lungs. All in the middle of a shoreless expanse where the only escape—and the only prison— was down, down, drowning.

Some of the wealthier passengers bowed out at the last minute. They left promises of the new land for the docks of old England, dull but safe, unadventurous and stable. Clarence stood by the rails with the bravest of the brave and the poorest of the poor. Linen-skirted families looking at the horizon like it was holy.

Ratty-haired girls wringing thin wrists, as if already seeing the ropes binding them. Men whose shirt buttons gave out to reveal pale, concave chests. All wide-eyed and dreaming.

Soon they would be too dead for it to matter.

To banish his guilt, Clarence looked down at the mark on his palm, an arrangement of white scar tissue. It made him a good man. It was the only thing that made him a good man.

The ship, christened Amnesty, took off to the sound of murmured hallelujahs. Gossip rolled through the bolder passengers: about how they would make another scratch mark in history, another round of immigrants to the New World. They were already imagining the destination: a warm welcome from a colony full of flourishing Protestants, or the innocent eyes of natives bearing baskets of fruit. Maybe they would get knocked off course and discover their own territory, name it after the prettiest of them, and one day form the greatest empire in the globe. The New World was made for that sort of thing, after all. It was where the sun’s glory went to rest every night.

But there was still a two-month journey to tolerate.

Nothing but the undulating sea and all the sickness that came with it. And each other.

Clarence spent every day of the first week on the deck, his hands draped over the rail without fear. Salt ruffled his hair.

He paid attention to the sounds behind him, to the conversations passing between cupped hands, the voyagers coming and going and occasionally retching their rations overboard. They were all crammed down in cabins, getting sicker by the day, so they poked their heads out for fresh air when they could. The old ones and the young ones, the men and the women alike. They rarely noticed Clarence. His silhouette was so blurred by the light.

He picked up secrets. One of the best-dressed men was the runaway son of a noble. Another was trying desperately to hide some rancid, sore-filled disease. A woman had run off without her husband or kids, stealing their valuables and changing her name.

A man in a tall black hat had killed a Catholic. The sky turned pink and blue and pink and black and pink again.

None of the passengers’ secrets mattered. None of them were witchcraft. None of them were her.

11

He got more bored in the second week. There were storms, but not the kind that made one rethink fate. There were drizzles.

A greasiness growing in his hair. Sweat in his clothes. More people retching. And the same prayers as always, the deliver us from evil, the God is good. Clarence made sure to whisper, quietly but surely, along with every cross raised. To feel pride in their piety. To feel like he, too, was being worshiped, because he almost sort of was.

At the dawn of the third week, they threw their first body overboard. Smallpox. Couldn’t be helped.

More vomiting. Clarence started to tap his fingers against the railing incessantly, and now there were scars in the wood. All this travel for one person. A woman who, Lord forbid, might not even be on the ship. His sympathy for the cowards back home increased, but what could he do now? Amnesty was in the middle of the sea, and it was faster to sail than to swim. He had no choice but to wait.

Here was the thing about witches: they couldn’t drown. It was a well-known fact that they floated instead of sinking, that the Devil’s magic made them lightweight. It did other things, too. It made them beautiful or ugly, with skin like the thinnest parchment or the thickest orange rind. It made them seductive, corrosive, deadly to good women and good men alike.

Clarence was a good man. The mark on his palm told him so.

A pair of hands slapped down on the railing next to him. He started. It was dark out, and moonlight colored the slender fingers, the form of a body. The passengers rarely came above decks at night. And they never came near him.

His soul started hammering in his chest. He didn’t turn to look, though. He liked being a ghost on this voyage and he didn’t want to spoil it.

But the stranger spoke first. “Do you like the stars, too?”

It was a feminine voice, but a coarse one, like thorny flowers whispering. Clarence kept his eyes down. At most, he saw her arms, the way the back of her hands crossed over one another.

The way the waves crashed against the ship’s hull and she didn’t even tense up.

He continued not to spare her a glance. The world was quiet and simple. And then her hand tore through the simplicity, reaching for his chin and tilting it up.

The noise her touch provoked was embarrassing. A small gasp of surprise. Her finger wasn’t cold from the wind, but hot, scalding hot. She jerked his head toward the sky.

As she said: stars. So, so, so many stars, marring the simplicity of nighttime, poking holes through the gates of Heaven so humanity could breathe. Around them, the sky was tinted black and purple and black again. Her touch continued to burn.

Tears prickled in his eyes. The Lord is with me. The Lord is with me. The Lord is with me.

He realized then that she’d let go of his chin.

Clarence’s gaze plummeted. Tearing away from the stars was like tearing his hair out, but he bore it with gritted teeth. The view meant nothing. Just heavenly bodies. Just empty, soulless beauty, too far away to ever touch.

Like the empty, soulless beauty of the voice right next to him. “Aren’t they pretty?” the woman asked. Her voice still had that gentle roughness. This time he pinpointed it as rosewater mixed with brine.

“I do not know,” he replied. And then, “What are you doing here, so late? A girl ought to rest.”

“A girl has five more weeks to rest.”

He chuckled. He loathed himself for chuckling. He said, too honestly, “No one else has talked to me on this voyage.”

“No one?” He felt a flick of her hair as her head turned.

“At all?”

World.”

“I do not go seeking it,” he said.

“Oh, you should! These are your companions to the New

It was becoming increasingly difficult not to look at her. “Is that why you speak to me?”

She sighed. Clarence noticed for the first time that she was breathing heavily, the sound drowned out by waves. That must have been the coarseness in her voice.

“I just wanted fresh air,” she said. “I saw you. You seemed lonely.”

“I am not lonely. The Lord is with me wherever I go.”

She scoffed.

Her noise, quiet as it was, beat loud in Clarence’s head.

The derisiveness towards religion. She may as well have spat over the rail. The sound burrowed itself into his heart like a stake. Holy crosses cracking in his mind’s eye. He knew, in that crystallizing moment, who she was.

His shyness shattered. His good manners, too, and the nervous feeling of being watched by so many stars. Finally, he whirled to look at her.

The ocean wind pulled at her clothes. And at her hair, which was as pale as her shift, and not nearly as pinned back as it ought to be; there was a braid somewhere in it, swathed in loose blond tangles, like she’d tossed and turned all night before coming here. This was the second pinch of realization, the wilderness of her. Even her dress had an unkempt nature to it.

She was slender, and the moon left slanting blue beams under her collarbones and cheekbones. Bluer still were her eyes.

When she met his gaze, he could swear that one was even bluer than the other, a cobalt against an azure. Her full lips had a gash at the bottom, but were smooth nonetheless.

She smiled. All perfect teeth.

“Is something wrong?” he asked her, aware that his voice sharpened at the end.

“What could be wrong?”

“You scoffed at me.”

“Well, you said something amusing.” Her blue eyes left his to look at the stars again. Moonlight filled in the length of her neck, the taper of her chin. “Forgive me, friend. I am only human.”

You are not human, he thought. But he only smiled back.

She patted the railing and took a step away from it. “Good night, then. I never caught your name.”

If she found out too much about him, she could curse him.

“I never caught yours,” he said. “Shall we leave it that way?”

“If you wish.”

And then she was gone, skirts swishing behind her, leaving Clarence to the clamor of the ocean and the sky and the things trapped in between. There was satisfaction in his chest, and a strange, overwhelming dissatisfaction at the same time—not a lack of satisfaction, but an antithesis to it, like something wasn’t supposed to unfold this way.

No matter.

You are not human, he repeated, watching the girl disappear through a hatch door. At last, he’d found the witch. # He’d never been talkative before, but now he needed to uncover information on that woman. He finally ventured into the cramped underbelly of the ship, to converse with the people still willing to converse. This time, he learned about futures, not pasts; he’d found the witch. No other past mattered.

He learned that Samuel wanted to join the Puritans up north. Mary hoped to find a rich man and wed him. Felicity hoped to find a rich man and be his indentured servant. Tommy wanted to start a farm. Another Mary was going to become a seamstress. John had a brother waiting for him in Boston. A third Mary, this one Samuel’s daughter, wanted to see the wild turkeys. A second John wanted to wed the third Mary. On and on it went.

Clarence listened, but only faintly. It was difficult when he knew that none of them would make it there—knew for certain, now that he was sure of the witch onboard.

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But it was all for the better. They would accomplish their dreams in Heaven, rather than have them dashed when they reached the New World’s shore.

The mark on Clarence’s left palm made him a good person.

He recited that fact to himself over and over until it became a prayer in its own right.

With every passenger he talked to, he asked them what they knew of a pretty woman with pale hair. Their responses were general, unhelpful. Until Tommy.

“You mean Dorothy Law? The blue-eyed one?”

“Yes!” Clarence resisted grasping the boy’s hands. “Have you met her?”

“Briefly.”

“What do you know of her?”

He shrugged. He was more interested in playing with his spinning top than in Clarence. “She hails from Ireland. Or maybe it was Wales. Or maybe London. And…” A suspicious redness bloomed on the boy’s face.

“Anything else? I’ll give you my biscuits if you tell me.”

That was all the convincing it took. The boy leaned in, checking to make sure no one else in the crowded gun deck paid them mind. “It’s just a rumor, but they say Miss Dorothy has… well… depraved Miss Anne.”

Anne was the woman who had abandoned her husband and children. A familiar dread knotted in Clarence’s gut. “Tell me more.”

“They go together to the cargo hold at night. My mum says unsavory things about it. That’s all I know, sir.”

He nodded and kissed Tommy’s forehead, letting him get back to playing. This was only confirmation. Devil women seduced, and darkened, and corrupted. Sins of the flesh. Lust. Nothing new.

He’d known this when he accepted the mission. This witch’s favorite spell was dragging other women down, debauching them into perversion. Men, too, of course. Remembering her wild beauty, he didn’t doubt it.

Weeks passed in a blur. Eventually, a shout ran over the deck, followed by thundering footsteps. Clarence stood slowly, joints burning. He thanked the Lord for safe travel. He prayed for strength. Deliver us from evil. He made his way upstairs through a rush of bodies.

There was land. It was a pinprick in the distance, but it was there. People shouted through scurvied teeth. They cried, embraced one another, embraced Clarence like he was one of them. America, there it was. America, America! They had reached the future, green and gold and shimmering with afternoon light. Shoes and bonnets tumbled off, hands reaching past the rails if they were courageous enough. They could almost touch the New World. They could feel it in their tired bones.

Clarence saw a flash of pale hair among them, and he knew Dorothy was there. Somewhere. Smiling with those perfect teeth, ready to spread her influence. She’d never get the chance.

Here was the thing about witches: they couldn’t drown, but there were plenty of other ways to lose yourself to the sea.

The wind pulled at him. It always did. It wanted to take him away. # Night hit with a storm so black it blotted out the shoreline.

People still knew land was there, so they whispered, got their spirits up, ate their stores. Even the groaning of the ship against the waves did not deter them. Thunder crashed, and only little Tommy and one of the Marys shrieked.

Dorothy was nowhere to be found. Maybe she needed to prepare her spells for when she reached land. Maybe she was with that other woman again. Clarence had no reason to wonder about these things. He only had to do his duty.

As he ascended the swaying steps, past heaps of passengers sitting on the floor and bundling up their clothes, he muttered his first prayer, one for absolution. His father had taught it to him a hundred years ago: When we were overwhelmed by sins, you forgave them.

Blessed are those you choose that may dwell in your courts. We

shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house, of your holy temple.

He stepped into the loud, open air. Crewmen shouted, and thunder shouted over them, crackling and screeching and teaching those Englishmen what it really meant to cross the sea. Waves stretched up to the railing. He smelled the salt, the sourness of the water below, the sweetness of the water above. Clean rain and brine, like the witch’s voice.

That must have been his sign, if anything was.

Clarence reached the mast. He knew he shouldn’t rely on it to stabilize him, but it was important that he didn’t panic. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

Lightning turned the sky white. For a moment, the flash stunned him, but then he saw the outline of land in its afterglow— they were getting closer to shore, much closer. It had to be now.

No one came to America unless they wanted to die. This was an ending they would agree to.

And the Lord shall guide you continually, and satisfy your soul in drought, and strengthen your bones: and you shall be like a watered garden and a spring that never runs dry.

He thought about Tommy and his brother squabbling over the spinning top. About second John showing third Mary how to trap a rat. About the seamstresses and the farmers and the passengers so starved that the only fat thing about them were their eyes, big and hopeful.

The familiarity was why he usually disliked talking to people. It made them harder to condemn.

But they had signed up for this. He was doing a good thing.

He had a mark on his hand to prove it.

My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is my strength and my portion forever.

More flashes of lightning. In them, he saw the departure from London, hands waving, children giggling. In them, he saw his father giving him instructions and wishing him well. In them, he saw chapped lips moving, commanding, ordering, and he saw Dorothy’s lips, with the blood down the middle, otherwise smooth as low-tide waves. Kill the witch for me. For England. For the Lord. I will show you how over and over again.

As the sky rumbled, Clarence reached his left hand up to meet it, palm facing the thunderclouds. Wrathful wind traced the mark. Rain and sea salt dappling his face, he closed his eyes.

Grant me this miracle.

Somewhere below his feet, passengers tried to sleep.

Some were laughing.

Grant me this miracle.

His skin flexed, the mark on his palm tingling.

Grant me this miracle.

He could feel the clouds above him go deathly silent, waiting to burst apart.

Grant me this miracle.

His last thought was of Dorothy; well, not quite Dorothy, but clearer skies, a darkness that shimmered rather than growled.

A witch’s crooked nails polluting his chin with a touch. Asking him about beauty. It gave him hatred. Hatred gave him strength.

Grant me this miracle.

The good man’s mark on his palm flared to life. He could feel his flesh undo itself, searing red, then silver, and channeling the silence of the storm into one fine point. A jagged bolt reached down to meet him, blue as the moon, white as death. He pushed his hand higher, into the channeling, the epicenter.

Touched.

The clouds opened their mouths and roared. Lightning dove through Clarence and into the wooden boards of the ship.

The world fractured, fragmented, tore completely apart.

And then the storm wasn’t the only thing screaming.

The lightning struck deep. Wood flew out in shards, all the way from the cargo hold, exploding outwards in a dazzling display of destruction. Light eclipsed life. It sheared cloth, oil, metal, limbs, the horrified faces of Robert and Mary and second Mary, and when

13

it reached the bottom of the boat it opened that, too. Water rose but no one cared when the world was breaking in half. Still so much light, too much to see, too much to feel, a clogging of blood and electricity and fire.

It lasted forever—that is to say, it lasted half a second, and then the ship was no longer a ship. The first half of the explosion razed the masts, and smeared the crewmen across the deck. The second half crushed everything left behind. Like an egg, wooden shells strewn about the ocean, yolks spattered and lost.

Clarence was in pain, for a moment. But he did not need to worry about things like pain. A final blade of lightning drove what was left of the ship into the waves, and he felt himself falling, still satisfied, still dissatisfied, into a shock of water neither warm nor cold. The world turned black and blue and white and blue and black again.

STEP TWO If any man lyeth with mankind, as a man lyeth with a woman, both of them have committed abomination… And if any woman change the natural use into that which is against nature… going after strange flesh, or other flesh than God alloweth… every such person shall be put to death.

— From Capital Laws in the New Haven penal code of 1656 No one came to America unless they wanted to die.

Dorothy came to America to live.

Gasping for air just off the coast of the Atlantic, she was starting to regret that decision.

The water was warm and cold at the same time. Her eyes stung, something in her body felt broken, and her throat was sticky with salt. Thunder rang bells in her ears. There was too much distortion to assess what had happened. Too much of everything, really: noise, sensation, light, even smell—a burning smell. Charred wood. Dorothy remembered things burning, just as she remembered the wails around her. She remembered her wrists straining against rope and skin unforming and reforming and smoke from long, long ago…

Focus. She was in the ocean. She’d been on a ship, and then the ship was gone in a flash, and now she was in the water.

Her hands held onto wood. Her blurry vision turned the wood into an empty barrel from the cargo hold. That made sense. She’d been in the cargo hold.

Her hands were slippery, too. Maybe from blood. She was bleeding. And she couldn’t recall why.

Retrace your steps, she thought, but it was a dangerous idea. Her memories came to her like the waves crashing down on her head. Each time they dipped her underwater and flooded her brain, she lost the reality of the moment.

It was decades ago, and she walked through a forest, whistling to birds. It was years ago, and she ate stolen bread behind a baker’s shop, with mud and gore from her fingernails crusting each leavened chunk. Her hands were dirty. Maybe that was why they bled.

Except it wasn’t. She wasn’t in England anymore, she was in the ocean. And she wasn’t in 1690, either. Ten years had gone by.

New century. New Dorothy. New World.

The next wave bore down on her so hard she let go of the barrel. Her body plunged. All noise and color finally cut out. She swore she could feel the sand at the bottom of the sea, and then she felt nothing at all. # And she was running, so fast, to the boarding dock. The ground was solid beneath her feet, the bonnet whipping off her hair. England’s coast smelled like fish and tea leaves. The crewmen were still packing for the voyage, so she had time to get on board.

If barely. And without payment. And without being noticed.

There was a stack of crates on the ship’s east side. Dorothy climbed them without hesitation. Sure, someone on the street might stop and stare, with her skirts hitching up as they were, but what did it matter? Soon, she would be free of them and their stuffiness.

She reached the top of the stack and breathed in higher, freer air, less polluted by dirt and slag. From here, she could see the whole town. Horses weighed down by carts, boys idly swinging hoops. People going about their bland days, occasionally in wealthy coats and gowns, more frequently in leather blankets and beggars’ empty smiles. Endless stone streets and endless square buildings as far as the eye could see. Eternal conformity. Though she was in haste, Dorothy took the time to give them a bras d’honneur. Up your arse, England. Farewell forever.

“Hey!” The voice made her jump. She nearly fell off her perch on the crates. Her heart slammed to life in her chest, fear of being caught eclipsing her thoughts. She prepared to bargain with a deckhand for passage. To swindle him, or deign to seduce him. It would be more difficult than sneaking on, but manageable. It had to be.

This had all run a course through her head when she realized: the voice had come from above, not below.

Dorothy looked up. There was a face there, up on the deck a meter away from her. A mop of fabric-wrapped hair hanging over the railing. A women’s bonnet. A passenger.

Dorothy didn’t hesitate. “Pull me up,” she said, hoping the force of the command flattened the insecurities in her voice.

“That doesn’t sound safe, good lady.”

“Nothing about this is safe. Be a kind soul and pull me up.”

Round eyes blinked at her. Then they disappeared, away from the railing, where Dorothy couldn’t see them. She thought for a moment that the passenger had abandoned her. Out of fear, maybe. Or some reclusive religious doctrine. Or just lawfulness.

Worse, she could have alerted the ship’s crew, and then Dorothy’s whole plan would go to dust.

But she was overreacting. The woman returned a moment later. The sun lit her up from behind, casting her shadow onto Dorothy’s face.

A rope dropped over the ship’s edge, thick and crusted in places, but sturdy. “You don’t tell a soul about this, alright?”

“Of course.”

She grabbed onto the rope. She could feel the weight of the passenger on the boat, holding it in place. Climbing was difficult. The wood was flat, smoothed and sanded for the voyage.

Dorothy took a deep breath, tightening her stomach, and fell, strained from the effort, onto the deck of the ship.

The sky above her glistened with heat. It was rare to have hot days in England—but she reminded herself that she had traveled south, so maybe not so much anymore. She hoped it was a good omen.

She was still lying there, back pressed to Amnesty’s warm planks of wood, when her helper grabbed her arm. “We must go belowdecks,” she said. “We’ll be setting sail soon, and the crew would loathe to have anyone falling overboard.”

“Hm. They may want me overboard,” Dorothy replied.

The passenger huffed a laugh.

“Thank you, though. Miss…”

“Anne,” she said. “And you are?”

“Dorothy Law.” Her surname, rancid as it was to her, slipped comfortably off her tongue.

They wedged themselves breathlessly into a corner of the living quarters. It was crowded, with excitement and hope filling the few pockets of air that remained. Between bodies were faint glimpses of the beams holding the room up, and cannons pressed through portholes, and mats on the ground. Frizzy dark curls stuck to Anne’s face. Dorothy smoothed them away. When she inhaled it was like… # Choking. Deep blue in her diaphragm. Prickling through every open crevice of her chest. A natural person would have died by now. But Dorothy was unnatural, so instead her breath clogged in her throat and stayed there. Her nerves kept firing, her heart kept pumping, her brain kept thinking, but everything else neared the threshold of death. Drowning felt oddly like burning, a salt fire inside of her. How long had it been since she’d slipped from the surface of the water? A minute, an hour, a day…

14

# Three days since the ship took sail toward America.

Dorothy continued to evade notice, tucking herself behind beams when crewmen came down. Otherwise, she stuck near Anne. She tended to sick men since she knew she couldn’t die from their illnesses. She played with the littlest passengers, teaching Tommy, a farmer’s son, how to carve dice out of tiny chunks of wood from the floor.

“No one will notice,” she told him with a wink. “No one ever does.”

It might have been boring if she wasn’t intoxicated by freedom. The New World. A chance to start over, with no mother, no angry villagers, no self-censorship. No more pretending to be normal.

She was a witch. And now she would embrace it.

Anne came to her at midday, like she always did, with a handful of salt pork and bread hard enough to break teeth on. The look in her eyes was more earnest than ever.

“I don’t mind sharing rations, Dorothy.”

“What did I tell you yesterday?” Dorothy’s callused hands cupped Anne’s soft ones, and she pushed them away. “I don’t need food. Really, Anne.”

“You must. Or you will starve.”

“I will never starve,” Dorothy proclaimed. “I’m immortal.”

“You’re stubborn, is what you are.”

“And immortal. You’ll see.”

Dorothy had gone far longer without food. Sure, it was uncomfortable, but it didn’t hurt her, not beyond the embarrassment of her stomach growling.

“Just don’t feed me and watch what happens.”

“Doe, please.”

The urging didn’t faze her, but the nickname did. “Doe?” “Yes. Short for Dorothy.”

“Why?” “It’s easier to say. I’ve never been the best with words. Plus, you look like a doe.”

Dorothy frowned at that. “How do you mean?”

“Like, you’ve got a gentle face. You’re skinny. And smooth.”

As if to emphasize, Anne ran her free hand over Dorothy’s arm.

“You’re… unassuming. But you pack a strong kick all the same.”

Dorothy felt her gaze drift down to Anne’s slowly chapping lips. She raised it. “It’s a silly nickname. I don’t like being considered meek.”

“I never said that.”

Anne’s eyes were more doe-ish than her own: brown and big, too young for the tired lines of her face. She was pretty, but an exhausted pretty. The stress of life had crumpled her skin like paper, leaving gaunt cheekbones, too many folds in her forehead, too many crinkles when she smiled, all balanced out by the nobility of her features and the youth in her gaze. She was older than Dorothy—well, older in appearance, since Dorothy had looked the same for forty years. Age got complicated if she thought too much about it.

She sighed. She took a patch of salt pork from Anne’s palm.

Anne didn’t leave until she swallowed… # The water so salty it seared. She’d never died in an ocean before. There was so much spasming to it. Even when her lungs gave up, her limbs shuddered, tearing through the current one last time. It was hard to figure out exactly what was killing her, or if she was technically dead, when everything was so constant. She was being hollowed out, liquified. Her organs dampened and cleared up again. Her veins rusted but clung to life, as if sneaking under every blow of the waves, evading every strike of divine judgment. # “Why did you sneak on board?” Anne asked her one day.

Dorothy didn’t lie. “I’m fleeing England. People keep trying to kill me for being a witch.”

“And are you?”

Anne’s face was close to hers, her voice lowered. Dorothy could tell she was Christian, if not devoutly—some combination of

her demeanor and the cross necklace buried under her collar. She delivered the question genuinely. She didn’t seem angry, though.

She asked it like she was asking about the weather.

“I like to think so,” Dorothy said.

Floorboards creaked near them. Anne’s whole body tensed.

One of the men—Samuel, maybe?—squeezed past, probably looking for an empty space in which to sit. The women waited in silence until he was gone. They were curled up against the side of a cannon. It was a hidden place, but not that hidden.

After, Anne whispered to her, “I’m fleeing England, too.”

“Oh?” As liberal as Dorothy was with her backstory, Anne had never mentioned her own. Not until now. Anne’s bottom lip quivered, and Dorothy longed to reach out and hold it in place.

“I… I did a bad thing, Doe. The worst thing.”

“You killed someone?”

“Heavens, no!”

“Then what’s the ‘worst thing?’” Dorothy asked, hoping the interruption had soothed her a bit.

“I abandoned my husband. He was a merchant in Bristol. I stole all our silver and gold, and I ran.” Her round eyes moistened. “I left our children, too. Two boys. I didn’t even look back.”

It didn’t seem so awful at first. Then Dorothy remembered that most women were wives, and nothing more, especially if they were wealthy. Their only duty was loyalty, and bearing children.

Anne had deserted both. Running away was treason to the family.

“Why?” Dorothy asked.

Anne shrugged. “I know it’s shameful. But I had to, Doe. I needed it like I needed air. Everything in the world was telling me to go. My husband, he—he was a strong man. A godly man. I don’t think he was a good man. He threw coals from the hearth at me if I did wrong. But he was always better to the boys. That’s why—that’s why I didn’t look back. My sons don’t need me. They never liked needing me, even as little babes.”

She took a deep, shuddering breath. Dorothy clasped her hand to keep her from crying.

“I am telling you too much,” Anne moaned.

“You are,” said Dorothy. “Now tell me more.”

15

Shanett Berdayes

Photography Miami Arts Charter School Miami, FL

16

Flashing Lights Photography 2022

Helena Brittain mirth, myrrh, & mermaids i pluck scales & eyebrows, bleed from my legs, my eyes– i pluck those out too. a girl will devour you whole, season you with incense and crystals, let you stare up at her from the pot. she’ll share you at the dinner table, lead the mourning prayer with a scale between her teeth because sally sells sextapes not seashells. party sense enough to make a meal. chop me up like shark-fin soup; i’m a delicacy. i’m one of a kind. i’m no one. i’m a mermaid served at a seafood buffet. buy onetake one. take me. teenage vitriol, adolescent ardor, and all. whats as vile as the iridescent? as bile stirring in the toilet seat you dumped me in? the bathroom stall i hunch in, next to my plucked scales. i want to flush myself down; i don’t fit in the pipes.

17

Poetry Basis Chandler Chandler, AZ

Lucas Buckwell

Design Arts New World School of the Arts Miami, FL

18

Paragon Plastic roofing, heat gun, hot knife, rope, electrical tape 2022

Richard Cheng

Visual Arts Taipei American School Taipei, Taiwan

19

Views for “Avian Survaeillance” Rhino3D, V-Ray 3D Rendering, Adobe Photoshop 2022

Merritt Crumpton

Visual Arts Alabama School of Fine Arts Birmingham, AL

20

Misguided Quilt, paint, embroidery, marker, paint, band-aids, candy wrappers 2020

Mia Grace Davis

Spoken Word Academy Our Lady of Peace San Diego, CA

ocd & me: a contrapuntal (This poem is in the form of the contrapuntal. The two columns can be read separately as well as together from left to right.) ocd

&

me

draw near, darling... listen to my

obsessions:

dormant lies &

flames licking

skeletons framed by weak bones of

frail innocence, now cremated

truth. i am elusive,

guilt and its ashes.

pouring through

trembling fingers

your tarnished being -

imprisoned

allow me

with perpetual anxiety

to find sanctuary in

intertwining hands

your destructive palms.

of delicacy (i’m sorry).

don’t read into

my apologies for

suffering; i assure you, such

apologizing

is life.

my sixteenth consecutive apology.

used as a descriptor

i cannot help but shatter the universe,

yet i am a deceptor -

an earthquake swallowing certainty

or am i reality?

i would do anything to break this cycle.

21

Zoe Dorado

Spoken Word Castro Valley High School Castro Valley, CA

Manananggal Meets Corporate Feminism **The manananggal “self-segmenter” is a blood-sucking, man-eating mythical creature from the Philippines who, during the day, is a beautiful woman, but at night, separates from the lower half of her body, sprouting bat-like wings to feast on her prey.** I am a half-woman.

Separated at the waist so perhaps this means I am floating above myself.

Girlboss of the sky.

Fang-toothed-ghoul-demon-witch of Capiz and Silicon Valley.

I drain green juice from the mother’s womb.

I spit it out at the city who half-loves me.

It covers the streets in this type of emerald paper.

It melts in my hands like it just wants warmth.

Everyone is reaching to be held by this new gold.

It sprouts skyscrapers out of the earth.

Like magic. Like I too can be lifted from the ground.

Like I can make people who look like my face look up at me.

A winged beast. A spectacle.

Why else would you be staring at the sun?

But what can I say – I’m good at convincing.

I split the check. I split my body.

I pay what I owe. I am the paycheck.

I send it to the home in my mouth. I try not to swallow. I send the home the rest of my body.

The bottom half never left.

I imagine my feet left a trail and it stopped at the water.

It refuses to swim.

I don’t need to swim because I fly now.

I bite the air.

Though I’ve never learned how to breathe like this.

To say Yes and Yes like I mean it.

There’s no such thing as broken English.

So I trust you’ll understand my name.

I trust that your God will remember it.

Yes. I’ll win my country. Yes. I’ll paint it red. Yes. I’ll suck the blood.

I deserve the blood. I force-feed the hunger. I am the hunger.

I flew across islands and seas and cities to get here.

This is what I was born to do.

22

Kennedy Eagleton

Play or Script Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts Dallas, TX

High Definition EVA- An ambitious, young writer who is talented but a bit naive.

MARTY- Head writer at SMPR who’s a bit of a doofus but harmless.

TAMMY- An intern and Eva’s only real friend at SMPR. JOEL- relatively new to the writer’s room whose robotic demeanor is offset by his passion for his work VANESSA- An up-and-coming celebrity THE WRITERS CARL- jokey, Seinfeld-esque, standup type of humor LEIGHTON- stupid, sixth grade level humor REMY- a little off-putting and “edgy” humor DENNIS- witty, self-deprecating, Chandler Bing type humor The office characters will also play versions of themselves in the dream sequences.

SYNOPSIS: Eva is a newly promoted staff writer at SMPR, the most renown sketch comedy show on television. As she navigates her new work environment, she is visited by dreams that allow her to evaluate her circumstances through the medium she best understands: television. This helps her cope with not just the typical growing pains but the racial and gender dynamics that only heightened her difficulties. This play asks the question: can your dreams ever realistically come true or are they destined to live only in your mind forever?

SCENE 1- DREAM 1 Lights up on a high school hallway. Eighties electro pop plays in the background as a group of jocks (MARTY, CARL, LEIGHTON, REMY, and DENNIS) in Letterman jackets stand around a locker.

MARTY And so, she said, “well who do you think you are?” and I said “um the quarterback and the homecoming king. Who are you?”

A laugh track plays. MARTY’s gaggle of jocks crack up excessively, exchanging highfives, pats on the back and various forms of mindless validation. Suddenly a GIRL walks on stage catching MARTY’s eye.

Woah! Who’s that?

You guys ever seen her before?

No, I’d remember a face like that!

Does she even go to school here?

MARTY LEIGHTON REMY CARL

Laugh track plays.

DENNIS How else would she be opening that locker?

Laugh track plays. The girl turns around to reveal EVA who brushes a piece of hair from

23

her face and adjusts the books in her hand.

The jocks react.

Whoa!

Eva Campbell??

Since when does she look like that?

She’s hot!

Forget hot. She’s…sophisticated.

CARL LEIGHTON DENNIS REMY MARTY

The guys nod in agreement.

MARTY I mean like I want to listen to her thoughts on public policy and gender roles in the media.

LEIGHTON I wanna have a conversation with her about political ideals.

DENNIS Better yet I want to hear her views on Afrofuturism.

EVA passes in front of the guys and offstage.

They watch, mesmerized.

What’s Afrofuturism?

CARL DING DING DING. An alarm clock goes off.

BLACKOUT on the school set. Lights up on EVA springing up in her bed.

SCENE 2 Light up on TAMMY’s office. She talks to CARL at her desk.

TAMMY For the last time, the studio doesn’t want a “baby Sopranos” sketch. You need to come up with something else.

CARL exits as EVA enters with pep in her step.

She approaches TAMMY’s desk with two cups of coffee. She places one in front of TAMMY and sits on the edge of the desk.

TAMMY Ooh Ms. Big time staff writer was kind enough to get me coffee. I thought you would’ve already forgotten about little ole me.

It’s only my first day.

EVA

TAMMY Yeah, after years of getting coffee orders and staying here till midnight reprinting scripts.

EVA That was assistant writer Eva. I’m officially rebranding myself as staff writer Eva. Staff writer Eva has ditched her work Keds for her first pair of Jimmy Choos.

Is staff writer Eva broke now?

TAMMY

EVA becomes conscious of the childish way she’s sitting on TAMMY’s desk.

24

EVA Staff writer Eva is too professional to sit on desks anymore.

No, that’s your trademark.

Twas my trademark.

TAMMY EVA

TAMMY Well, someone is feeling all kinds of confident.

EVA I think I got a sign. I had a dream last night. It was like an eighties sitcom.

Marty and all the writers were like the jocks, and I was the new girl, and they were all like “wow she looks like she has great thoughts on Afrofuturism” and...

TAMMY stares, perplexed.

EVA I’m starting to realize what I’m saying doesn’t make sense. You had to be there.

TAMMY Girl, you’re the only person I know who dreams in HD. EVA No, look. I think it was about me turning over a new leaf and finally getting some respect here.

I mean these guys finally see me as their equal. This is how you work your way up the ladder in this business. I mean look at someone like Marty. Like he’s my boss now, but I know he started out as an intern. This means I’m on my way to doing the same.

A voice comes from an intercom on Tammy’s desk.

MARTY (OFF STAGE) Can you please have Eva report to the writer’s room?

Speak of the devil.

Off you go.

TAMMY TAMMY EVA turns to leave. TAMMY snaps at her.

TAMMY Hey! Stop looking so nervous. Take on the inherent confidence of any white man climbing the corporate ladder.

EVA adjusts her posture accordingly.

EVA walks over to the writer’s room where MARTY, CARL, LEIGHTON, REMY, DENNIS, and JOEL are casually chatting around a long table. Soda cans and chip bags are littered around the room. EVA enters and everyone stops talking.

MARTY There she is! You guys all know Eva. She’s been an assistant writer here for the past few years.

But now she’s been promoted to staff writer.

MARTY gets everyone to applaud.

MARTY She is also our first black female writer in the history of SMPR. (unnatural) And we love that for you, girl.

MARTY raises his white fist and makes everyone applaud again. JOEL, the other Black writer and EVA look uncomfortable.

25

MARTY notices EVA’s attire.

You sure dressed for the occasion.

MARTY (half-jokingly)

DENNIS Yeah you know we don’t really have a dress code.

EVA Oh, yeah. I didn’t really know how that applied to- I mean you know sometimes it’s not the same EVA gives up her explanation. An awkward silence fills the room.

MARTY (Jokingly) Well tomorrow I better see you in some jeans and a t-shirt.

Embarrassed, EVA selects a seat.

MARTY Alright you guys, I want to hear some pitches. Our host this week is Vanessa Ramirez.

The guys snicker. One whoops.

MARTY Yes, she’s beautiful but she’s also very talented.

MARTY makes deliberate eye contact with EVA as he speaks.

MARTY And we should do our best to write to her strengths, right? We’ve got some great sketch ideas so far…

MARTY gestures toward the list of ideas on the whiteboard.

MARTY We’ve got the “what if Lil Wayne played Mufasa” sketch courtesy of Carl, we have “my homework ate my dog” from Leighton, and of course “skinny dipping in gasoline” from Dennis but let’s really start writing with Vanessa in mind.

Yeah…

REMY

MARTY Not like that, Remy. I for one think we should give Eva a chance to share if she has anything prepared.

EVA Actually, I do have something. Thank you Marty.

MARTY Anything to support a BIPOC. (pronounces “poc” as “poke”) EVA Okay. I was thinking of a Wendy Williams or Andy Cohen talk show style spoof. But instead of celebrities talking about their upcoming movies, the extras from the movies talk about them and maybe talk about how high maintenance and dramatic the actors are. I was thinking Vanessa could play the extraJOEL I don’t think it makes sense when you think about it. Vanessa is way too hot to be an extra.

It’s not believable.

Everyone agrees. EVA is a little shocked but she continues.

26

Great observation Joel.

MARTY

EVA Okay…well if that’s a problem I guess I was already planning having Vanessa playing an extra in her own movie. So she’d be making fun of herself.

The writers murmur amongst themselves. EVA can feel a sense of disapproval.

MARTY Interesting idea, Eva. (pause) We want you to know that we see you. We hear you. Do you feel seen and heard?

The men stare at EVA. Sure.

Great. Who wants to go next?

EVA MARTY LEIGHTON immediately stands.

LEIGHTON Alright you guys. You saw this coming. Mortal Kombat style, all-out battle…Jesus versus Santa Claus.

The men clap. EVA is shell shocked.

Brilliant.

How do you come up with this stuff?

DENNIS CARL SCENE 3- DREAM II Dim, ominous lights up on a few tables and chairs in a restaurant, underscored by suspenseful music. A figure in a black trench coat and sunglasses inconspicuously sits at a table waiting. EVA enters and takes a seat.

This character should be portrayed by TAMMY. TAMMY slides a folder to EVA. Both women assume the roles of characters in a gangster movie.

Do you recognize this man? Joel Teller.

TAMMY EVA analyzes the picture in the folder, squinting and turning the photo.

Nope, sorry. I don’t know this guy.

Look closer.

EVA TAMMY EVA scans the picture again.

EVA Wait. I do recognize him. I guess he’s just so bland looking that he kind of fades into the background.

TAMMY And yet he still has the respect of his peers. He knows when to be a chameleon and when to stand out. That makes him powerful. That makes him useful.

27

What does that have to do with me?

EVA

TAMMY He’s the key. He’s the way you get to the top. You know what needs to be done.

DING DING DING: EVA’s alarm sounds.

SCENE 4 EVA, now in jeans and a t-shirt, enters and stops at TAMMY’s desk.

So I think I need to kill Joel.

What? No. Don’t kill Joel.

I think I have to.

EVA TAMMY EVA

TAMMY Eva, I think my gangster alter ego was telling you to get closer to Joel.

EVA Ohhhhh. Actually that’s a lot better. It’s good to know I’m not actively looking for reasons to kill my coworker.

You need to utilize him, befriend him.

TAMMY

EVA Oh I don’t know. I’d feel bad manipulating him like that.

Don’t! That guy is a huge douchebag.

TAMMY

EVA Yeah, he is kind of a douchebag, isn’t he?

TAMMY Definitely. You know how it is for us in this business. Sometimes you’ve just got to do what you’ve got to do.

EVA nods. She checks the time.

Oh, I’ve got to go. Bye.

EVA EVA exits offstage.

TAMMY I’m starting to like gangster Tammy. She’s kind of a badass.

SCENE 5 Lights up on the writer’s room. EVA resigns to her corner while the rest of the writers converse amongst themselves.

MARTY Alright you guys, have a great rest of your day. Have everything written and ready to go by Thursday.

Hi. Hey.

28

EVA JOEL

Everyone packs up to leave. EVA crosses JOEL who’s stuffing his backpack.

I’m Eva.

EVA

JOEL doesn’t make eye contact.

I know.

JOEL

EVA So, I know Marty has you working on the Jesus vs. Santa Mortal Kombat sketch.

Uh huh.

JOEL

EVA I was wondering if I could write it with you.

He stops what he’s doing and faces EVA.

JOEL You want to work on it with me? Like as equals?

Uh, yeah. Is that a problem?

EVA

JOEL No- I didn’t mean it like- It’s not like a race or a woman thing. I mean, Marty put me on that sketch. Me specifically.

EVA It’s no big deal. The guys work on each other’s stuff all the time.

JOEL They’ve also been here for years. They’ve earned that right. We still have to pay our dues.

EVA Don’t you think you’re being a little uptight?

I didn’t get here by breaking the rules.

JOEL

EVA Well, I did. When I was updating the scripts, I would slip in my own jokes every now and then.

Marty was pissed until he realized they were good. I never did it again, but a few months later, Marty promoted me. So trust me.

JOEL Fine, but I reserve the right to take it back at any time.

EVA Fine. Now, are you open to Santa wearing brass knuckles that spell “Santa” and “Claus” on each hand?

SCENE 6 DREAM III A typical soap opera voice comes over the loudspeakers.

NARRATOR VOICE On the surface it’s a simple writer’s room, but behind the scenes it’s a cesspool of lies, manipulation, and adultery. Balancing work and life has never been this sexy. Welcome to…

A title card appears reads: Reading Between the Lines

NARRATOR VOICE Lights up on a tidier writer’s room where EVA is agonizing over some papers. JOEL rushes in.

EVA immediately notices. JOEL trades in his icy exterior for a melodramatic flair.

29

What did he say?

EVA

JOEL He likes the script and he wants to use it for the episode.

Oh that’s wonderful!

But I’m worried.

About what?

EVA JOEL EVA

EVA runs into JOEL’s arms. He lifts and spins her in a circle. In an emotional shift, JOEL quickly puts her down and paces in distress.

Cue dramatic violin music.

JOEL I just hope it all plays well. When I write, it comes from the depths of my heart. It’s like the masses aren’t just judging my work, they’re judging the contents of my soul.

EVA Hey, we wrote this together. We’ve both got something to lose here.

Yeah, but mainly me.

Your vulnerability it’s…hot.

I want you.

JOEL EVA JOEL

JOEL and EVA are interrupted by: DING DING DING. SCENE 7 Lights up on EVA at TAMMY’s desk.

EVA I know, I know. It’s so weird. I didn’t feel that way about him yesterday. I don’t feel that way about him now. I have no idea what’s going on.

Ohhh I see what this is.

TAMMY

EVA What? What is it? Tell me what’s happening to me?

TAMMY This has nothing to do with romance but everything to do with power. Think about it. In the dream, he’s being possessive about the work you’re both doing, he’s demanding things from you. And you’re just submitting to it. Not just that, you’re feeding his ego. Your subconscious is warning you. It’s telling you to assert yourself.

EVA He was being a little bossy yesterday. And if I don’t learn to stand up for myself now, I might find myself fifty and still taking crap from the same pushy writers while everyone else gets promoted.

You have to fight for yourself.

TAMMY

EVA I can do that. I’ve had to do that the whole time I’ve been here. I can’t stop now.

30

SCENE 8 EVA and JOEL sit at the long table on opposite sides. They’re each surrounded by empty cans of Red Bull and takeout boxes, both clearly sleep deprived.

I now see how it gets so messy in here.

EVA

JOEL The infamous writer’s diet is solely made up of takeout and caffeinated drinks. Hey, you sure you want to keep sitting all the way over there? You can come over here if you want.

EVA No, I’m fine…but you can come over here.

JOEL rolls his chair over to EVA. He places his work in front of her and begins to explain with his pencil.

JOEL So, we’re almost done. We just need to decide Jesus’ final catchphrase. So- okay…

JOEL crosses to the whiteboard, drawing out everything he describes.

JOEL So at this part, Jesus has just summoned a fireball, but we call it the “burning bush”EVA

But that doesn’t make any sense.

JOEL

What do you mean?

EVA Well the burning bush is more old testament, pre Jesus. They’re kind of two different biblical eras.

JOEL Okay…I guess we can go back and change that later. But after that, Santa comes back with “Well Santa’s coming to town…and he brought Dasher… (gestures with fist) “...and Dancer…” (gestures with other fist)“...to kick your ass.”

EVA

Oh.

Oh?

JOEL (irritated)

You’re going with Dasher and Dancer?

I was thinking we would, yeah.

EVA JOEL

EVA I mean of all the reindeer names you’re going to choose Dasher and Dancer?

As opposed to?

Comet and Blitzen are right there.

JOEL EVA

JOEL I was using them in the order they’re listed in the song.

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EVA I don’t think it’s necessary to go in order. Mix it up.

Fine. We’ll do Comet and Blitzen.

JOEL JOEL turns back to the board.

So then Santa body slams him-

JOEL

EVA But wasn’t he just talking about using his fists, implying he would punch him?

JOEL Fine! He punches him three times! Then it ends with Jesus saying “And on the third punch, he rose” JOEL waits for EVA to say something.

EVA Shouldn’t it be “And he rose on the third punch?”

JOEL You know what? I’m done. I’m going home. I’m done.

JOEL exits, leaving his things.

You left your laptop.

EVA

JOEL (already out of the room) I’ll get it tomorrow.

I think that went well.

EVA SCENE 9- DREAM IV The scene opens on a dark stage. It is suddenly illuminated by a lightsaber held

by EVA wearing a dark cloak. She cautiously walks forward and calls out:

EVA Hello? I know you’re here. Show yourself!

A different colored lightsaber appears. The wielder approaches in a fighting stance, completely covered in a dark robe, their face obscured.

Who are you?

EVA The figure holds its fighting stance.

EVA We can do this the hard way or the hard way.

EVA starts on a tangent.

EVA Because I feel like people imply the easy way is talking things out and the hard way is fighting but they don’t understand that talking through one’s feelings can be just as taxing as any physical altercation. We need to learn to be more open to each other andThe figure interrupts by attempting to strike with their lightsaber. EVA lunges back.

They engage in a high stakes fight scene reminiscent of Obi Wan vs. Anakin. The

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stranger knocks the lightsaber from EVA’s hand. She has nowhere to turn.

EVA Wait! Before you kill me, just tell me who you are.

The figure removes their hood.

Joel?

EVA Just as JOEL strikes, we hear an all too familiar DING DING DING. SCENE 10 EVA walks over to TAMMY’s desk, a little disheveled.

Woah, you look like-.

TAMMY

EVA I feel like that too. Last night’s dream freaked me out.

Wow that’s new.

TAMMY (sarcastically)

EVA It was like- It felt more like a prophecy than just a dream.

Huh. That’s deep.

TAMMY

EVA I’m serious. Look… (lowers voice) It was like a Star Wars, sci-fi type thing, and I didn’t know who I was fighting. But then he took off his hood and it was Joel. Then he killed me.

You think he’s going to kill you?

I don’t know. Maybe.

TAMMY EVA The two stop talking when JOEL walks by. They wave politely. He reluctantly waves back.

EVA Sneaky little weasel. Did you see that look in his eyes? That was guilt.

TAMMY Okay I think you’re taking this too far. Remember last time you thought you had a dream about killing somebody, it represented something else.

A metaphorical murder perhaps.

EVA MARTY speaks over the intercom.

MARTY Tammy, can you tell Eva to come down to my office?

Yeah. She’ll be right there.

TAMMY

EVA You think that has something to do with Joel?

I wouldn’t rule it out.

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TAMMY

SCENE 11 Lights up on MARTY’s office. EVA opens door.

MARTY Hey Eva! Come on in. And shut the door, will you?

MARTY’s chipper attitude puts EVA at ease.

She closes the door and has a seat in front of his desk.

MARTY So I just wanted to let you know that I loved the sketch you and Joel worked on, and it has been approved for the show this weekend.

EVA Seriously? Oh that’s great! That’s actually amazing!

MARTY I thought you might want to hear it from me since this will be your first official writer’s credit.

EVA Thank you so much. This is everything I’ve ever dreamed of.

MARTY Oh don’t tell me that. Please don’t tell me that.

What are you talking about?

Eva, we’re letting you go. Budget cuts.

EVA MARTY EVA is lost for words.

MARTY Oh don’t make that face. That doesn’t make this any easier. Hey, you’ll still get that writer’s credit if that makes you feel any better.

My first and last writer’s credit.

EVA

MARTY No, no, just your first and last writer’s credit here.

EVA tries to pull herself together. She knows the one thing she cannot let herself do is cry.

EVA So is there anything I can work on or any feedback you have for me?

MARTY No no no no no. This isn’t about you. You were great…Well it is a little bit about you. You could...

MARTY contemplates the way he should phrase his next sentence.

MARTY You could try a little harder to fit into the office culture, you know? That would be my advice.

Hey, but feel free to reference us at any future interviews. That kind of thing goes both ways.

EVA What do you mean?

MARTY Just saying, giving the company a good review works for us.

Wow. Thanks for being so understanding.

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EVA MARTY

EVA leaves the room.

I think that went well.

MARTY SCENE 12 Lights up on EVA walking past TAMMY’s desk.

She runs into JOEL who’s in a stupor. She snaps out of her daze.

Are you okay?

Actually I’m not.

What’s wrong?

EVA JOEL EVA

JOEL Eva, I’m so sorry. I compromised my morals for a chance to be at the top, and I screwed you over in the process.

What are you talking about?

I think I got you fired.

Excuse me?

God, this is all my fault.

EVA JOEL EVA JOEL

EVA Woah, woah, woah. Can you just explain please?

JOEL I got invited to Vanessa’s trailer with the rest of the guys, and they started talking about you.

Marty kept complaining about how he always has to censor himself around you, and he asked me what I thought.

And what? What did you tell him?

EVA

JOEL The truth. That you were being pushy and overbearing and you didn’t really fit into the office culture.

What? Oh my god.

EVA

JOEL I’m sorry. I don’t know why you were acting like that yesterday, but I do know what it’s like to be a new writer. You were hired for a reason.

Yeah, to be the token.

EVA

JOEL No. You’re talented. And I imagine acclimating to everything hasn’t been easy. I don’t think Marty and frankly any of us offered you the same grace I got. Sorry.

JOEL walks away. TAMMY, who’s eavesdropped on the conversation, rushes to EVA’s side.

TAMMY Oh my god. You were fired? Are you okay?

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TAMMY hugs EVA who is too consumed with disbelief to hug her back.

I’m not sure yet.

I think this is my fault.

Did you badmouth me to Marty too?

EVA TAMMY EVA

TAMMY No, your dreams. I gave you terrible advice.

EVA No. I heard what I wanted to hear. You were just trying to help. God, I feel so stupid. I was overambitious and naive.

TAMMY You weren’t being stupid. You just wanted a real chance to make mistakes and try things out.

You wanted life to be like it is on TV. The quirky misadventures of the new staff writer girl as she rises to the occasion. But this is reality. Unfortunately, for some of us in this business, there are no fun misadventures, just mistakes.

EVA I’d say you were being a bit of a bummer if everything you were saying wasn’t painfully true.

TAMMY But every now and then there’s someone special who makes it and if that was going to happen to anyone, it would be you.

Right then, EVA gets a call. TAMMY returns to her desk.

EVA Hello?...Oh hi! Wow hi!...Oh that would be amazing!...11:30 tomorrow. Got it….No, thank you…

Before you go, how exactly did you get this number…Really?

EVA turns to smile at TAMMY. Yeah, she’s pretty special.

EVA SCENE 13 Lights up on EVA waiting at a table in a restaurant. VANESSA walks in shielding her face. She’s wearing baggy clothes and sunglasses.

VANESSA Sorry I’m late. I had to lose the paparazzi by switching places with my makeup artist. It would be great if during this conversation you could just refer to me as Stephanie.

EVA Oh of course, um Stephanie. Thank you so much for inviting me here. This place is really nice…

EVA opens the menu then quickly closes.

EVA …with such delicious, expensive food for a girl on a nonexistent salary.

It’s on me.

I’m not going to argue with you.

VANESSA EVA

VANESSA Alright. I’m going to cut to the chase because it’s only a matter of time before the paparazzi

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notice me and Stephanie have different colored highlights. I think you’re talented. I liked your work on the Jesus versus Santa sketch.

EVA I hate to admit this, but it was a joint effort. Joel and I worked on it together.

VANESSA I also heard about your sketch idea for me, the one about the extras…

I was told it wasn’t my best work.

EVA

VANESSA No. It was really funny. This may sound weird, but I’m glad you got fired. SMPR is a relic. Your stuff is fresh.

EVA You have no idea how much it means to hear you say that.

VANESSA Well it’s true. Which is why I’m making this proposal: I think we should work on something together.

What do you mean, like a show?

EVA

VANESSA Yeah a sketch show, sitcom, something like that.

Are you joking?

EVA

VANESSA If I was joking you’d know. I have great comedic timing.

EVA Yes of course! I would love to work on something together. I spent years dreaming of something like this.

Who said you ever stopped?

VANESSA DING DING DING. BLACKOUT. END OF PLAY

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Charles Estess

Photography Saint Mark’s School of Texas Dallas, TX

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Straitjacket Digital photography 2022

Simi Fadel

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Visual Arts Lovejoy High School Lucas, TX

Routine gouache and graphite drawings placed on top of a collage made with pieces of my dad’s sermon notes and presented in a handmade, hand-painted frame 2022

Yiyang Fei

Design Arts Montgomery High School Skillman, NJ

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Time Storage Station (Top vision) Resin, plastic sheet, wire 2022

Robert Gao

Poetry University Laboratory High School at Champaign-Urbana Urbana, IL

Chengdu / US under this golden-red sun, we splinter into psalms: one: ginseng soup; two: seventeen yuan; three: surrendering sky of city and boy. after untangling fishnet wet with seawater, the fisherman guts carps in prophesied dialect, topaz koi tumbling into the white claws of wakes—an iridescent fuse of the ocean sans serendipity. * always another mouth to plead the moon. when tide reaches knee-deep, I delve my fingers into the mauled skeletage of catfish, descale film the way my grandfather motions by candlelight—sichuan dialect in motion, fingers whirling a blur. all I do is nod, the vibrato of tongue lost in translation. outside the veranda, streetboys slide barefoot into the scars of a mid-autumn monsoon, cradling corrugated moon cakes for the lunar year—a year to pay homage, a year to beg split-toothed. * the plane roars. I mouth folk. no sound, but an anthem droning dissonant in promised dream—the vibrato of tongue lost in translation. * americanizing a name, in steps: siphon fricatives from pinyin, uncork diaspora out of assimilated syllable, calligraph syntax onto our yellowing teeth. on weekends, my father drives to chinatown, tires screeching hymnal over asphalt—unused to this foreign terrain. down a crooked alleyway, away from the flare of streetlights: the butcher muttering american. forgetting generational dialect. I am no impostor. face in the limelight, crooked kanji callusing into takeout boxes, I strip my tongue into predestination—into unwritten history. outside the veranda, thunderlight floods the soil with pennies, viridescent copper in place of silver. * & how this country’s flag dances in cadence to the autumn gale, red-tongued hues soldering blue to white. & how my brush sinks into shellac ink, etching ancestral names onto a makeshift epitaph. below the classroom sink, lodged under skinned tubes of acrylic, ghost hands descale candy wrappers by incandescent light—and the anthem drones dissonant over the intercom. and the yuan silvers lovely into quarters. and the flag I pledge allegiance to oscillates in unintelligible morse:

your name of chengdu bleeds american, drowned under your thinning mother tongue.

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Madison Girouard

Creative Nonfiction South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities Greenville, SC

FOR SALE. USED. BEST OFFER. When I was eight years old, I lived so close to the Florida coastline that on a quiet day, I could hear the waves crashing on the other side of the trailers and pine trees. Boats peeked over most of the house’s fences or sat in their front lawns, everything from small paddle boats to the latest and greatest the fishing world had to offer. I didn’t know the definition of the word disparity, but I knew what it looked like. In one direction, trailers were scattered across the dead-end road. In the other, suburbs separated us from the parks and highways. Every morning, my father and I drove down the same roads of cookie-cutter houses on the way to school. One day, the man at the end of our street left a Sea Fox out on his front lawn, twenty-six feet of white-painted stainless steel on his manicured lawn. The boat’s hull curved gracefully above the ground until it ran into the dirt. A cardboard box had been cut and spread wide across the bow. Written in thick black letters were the words, “FOR SALE. USED. BEST OFFER.” Each time we passed it, my father would say, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a boat? We could go fishing whenever we wanted.” I would usually follow that with something along the lines of, “We could watch the sunsets.”

Back and forth we’d go, our fantasies growing more absurd each time. One day, we would talk about paragliding in the middle of the ocean. The next, we’d plan our trip to the Florida Keys, a four-hundred mile trip over the water. Our conversations would continue for most of the twenty-minute drive to school, until one day the boat disappeared, leaving behind only a patch of brown grass. My father pointed it out and said, “Looks like someone finally bought it.”

He didn’t seem upset, but he didn’t sound happy, either. I tried to mirror his apathy. After all, the boat never belonged to us.

So why did I feel like whoever bought it stole something from me?

The rest of the way home, we didn’t make up stories of what we would do if we had a boat. They were no longer our stories, rather they belonged to the new owners. I didn’t say much.

Every time a ridiculous idea joined the list, I could only imagine us on the boat. We were supposed to be swimming with dolphins in the middle of the ocean, so far from land that nothing but deep blue surrounded us for as far as the eye could see. It should have been us, not the faceless people I would never see.

I stared out the truck’s window as we bumped along our unpaved dirt driveway. I hated the people who took our boat. They had no idea that I even existed, but I still hated them. My father’s black Dodge Ram slowed to a stop. He glanced at me in the rearview mirror and asked if I saw it. I had no idea what he meant until I looked through the window. My anger dissipated. The curved hull of the Sea Fox shone in our yard, its canvased roof flapping in the slight breeze. My father looked back at me. He fought his smile, but it split his face and he assured me we would work our way through our list of adventures. We had all the time in the world. *** As fall turned to spring and spring to summer, I saw less of my father. He spent most of his already-limited free time attempting to fix the boat. I peeked outside now and then to see him surrounded by pieces of the disassembled motor, covered in grease and attempting to put it back together like a boy surrounded by complex, expensive Legos. He would stop in front of the glass door that led outside, and my mother would look at me, as if to say, “He better not drag that mess in here.”

Every time, he failed to notice, or perhaps care, that my mother had just finished cleaning. He would come into the living room, his work boots caked with mud they steadily released onto the newly mopped floors instead of the boot brush or welcome mat, his hole-ridden work T-shirts tainted with large stains that carried

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the tang of metal and motor oil. He would insist he had it, this time he figured it out. Unsurprisingly, my father—who had worked on airplanes his entire career and had a dubious knowledge of the boat’s mechanics at best—did not have it figured out. He probably spent much more money trying to find the problem, and in turn, created more problems. Still, he was determined. Each day brought another grimy shirt, more mud, and longer Google searches that refused to give him solutions. He kept insisting that someday soon, we would get started living out our adventures.

Summer faded to fall, and as the grass browned and curled in on itself, my father started to lose passion for his project.

He spent more time in his garage and less by the haphazardly reassembled boat engine. Our conversations about the Sea Fox no longer held the promise of someday soon. Instead, they started to sound more like maybes. When my father’s passion dwindled to a dying ember, he was called away on military orders. He donned a tan camouflage jacket, boarded a plane, and flew to Japan.

Soon after he left, my mother had the boat moved to the corner of our four-acre property. Without my father to keep the underbrush at bay, nettles and ivy twisted over the boat’s cover, pushing through polyester already worn thin by weather and clinging to the yellowing exterior.

I watched from the second-story bedroom window as the earth claimed the boat. At first, I hated how the sun bleached the boat’s cover and eventually revealed the shining bow, then how the Sea Fox beneath gave way to the elements. It was supposed to be mine and my father’s, but it was deteriorating before my eyes.

Every time I looked outside, the earth had taken more of the boat.

Spirals of skunkvine pulled the vessel down, running it aground and strangling any hope the vessel had of being seaworthy. It rotted without my father’s attention, and over time even I gave up on the dilapidated boat in the corner of our property. *** We may have given up, but the world refused to let us forget about the Sea Fox. About a year after the boat was moved, my mother found a feral cat that had forced its way through the boat’s thinning cover and given birth on the deck. I wasn’t allowed anywhere near the boat for four months. She worried I would get on the wrong side of the mama cat and end up with claw marks running down my side. I wanted to see the kittens, but she always caught me as I attempted to lift the tattered edge of the cover and sneak onto the boat.

The next year, a hurricane blew through. It was one of those “once in a lifetime events,” though I need two hands to count how many I’ve lived through. My mother packed emergency bags for me, my brother, and herself, and together we made the eight-hour drive to my grandparents’ house. When we returned a few days later, we found the winds had launched a tree branch through the Sea Fox’s hull and punched a hole in the fiberglass.

The boat loomed above a small pond that had accumulated from the rain, anchored to land by the vines wrapped over its edges.

My father came back the year after the hurricane to find the bottom floor of our house ruined by water damage and the boat beyond repair. A few months later, we moved, leaving the boat on the plot of land that remained in our name. By then, I had forgotten about the adventures my father and I dreamed of. The plans had been swept away by work and school. Middle school flew by, and the boat completely slipped from my mind. *** In the summer before my junior year, we took a two-week trip back to Florida. My father didn’t tell me he’d listed the boat for sale, or even that he was considering getting rid of the Sea Fox. Instead, he rushed into the living room while I scrolled on my phone, shoved a pile of bills into my hands, and said, “That should

be four thousand dollars. Count it for me,” then ran back out. I counted the money, wondering if my father had some secret backdoor dealings I didn’t know about. Outside, my father talked to a man who looked about thirty years old and wore a faded Southern Tide shirt. He shook my father’s hand. As the new owner climbed into his pickup, he tucked his phone back in his pocket. I caught sight of a Facebook marketplace listing with a picture of our boat.

Underneath were the words, “Used boat for sale. Best offer.”

My father took the money once the man was out of the driveway. “Is it all there?”

I nodded, unable to tear my eyes from the disappearing boat.

We drove back to our home in South Carolina two days later. After the nine-hour drive, my parents said it was odd, how I kept staring out the window and not at a phone or computer. I didn’t tell them I was somewhere else, in the middle of the ocean, the sun sinking on our cerulean surroundings as dolphins jumped around the twenty-six-foot boat, far away from asphalt backroads and dirty cars and decayed dreams.

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Zakiriya Gladney

Photography University High School Tucson, AZ

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Untitled Medium format photography 2020

Claire Hahn

Visual Arts Seoul International School Sujeong-Gu, South Korea

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Hidden space Paper 2022

Ulysses Hill

Creative Nonficton Cathedral High School Los Angeles, CA

The Threat of the Black Boy It was one of those hot summer nights. One of those nights that follows a day so excruciatingly hot the seat buckle burns your hands as you get in a car. I had spent most of the day inside, of course, as a matter of self-preservation. I should have stayed inside, but my mom asked if I would like to accompany her on her Uber Eats deliveries, and I had nothing else to do. So, I said yes.

The drive to Silver Lake barely registered to me. Silver Lake is an upper-middle-class area right outside of L.A. My mom prefers going there to do orders because the tips are better and I don’t mind it because the area is more interesting. People crowd the streets. Each restaurant is new, eclectic, bright, and colorful. The neighborhood vibrates with the energy of youth. It is the type of place that caters to and thus attracts young people. The first order went off without a hitch, as did the second and third. Then we got our fourth order.

I can’t remember the name of the restaurant. It was some upscale sandwich place that is ever so common in L.A. It was the type of place that smelled like dirt, root vegetables, and a faint hint of must. The order was ready when I walked in, so I just grabbed it from the shelf set up in the corner for deliveries and walked back outside to the parking lot. My mom was waiting in the car, the engine humming as it sat there idling. The first sign of trouble was when the navigation app directed us to turn down a narrow street that was steeply inclined. The street was narrow, with a column of cars parked on each side. We crawled up the narrow road for a minute or two until my mom’s phone chimed, “Your destination is on the right.” But there was nowhere to park. I was already unbuckling my seat belt by the time my mom was asking if I could get out and deliver the order, so she didn’t have to park. “Already on it,” I replied.

I began walking up the driveway when the door to the house opened. In the doorway stood a woman looking down at her phone. She looked up. I met her eyes, and in them flashed something primal. It took me a second to recognize. It was fear.

My heart sank in my chest. “Uber Eats order?” I said, lifting the bag of food I was holding. “Yes,” she said timidly. Her “yes” was excruciating to me. She somehow managed to fill that one word with every ounce of fear displayed on her face. I wanted to leave to end this interaction that was so obviously painful to both of us.

I took a few slow steps forward. She shrank back into the door as if it were her only hope of survival. I considered just dropping the bag where I stood but thought better. When I reached about six feet from her, I stopped and gently set down the bag. “Enjoy your meal,” I said.

When I entered the car, my mom asked, “What was that about?” “She seemed to be scared of me,” “Oh,” she replied in a somber tone.

I am often met with fear. When I was younger, I would have spent the rest of that day trying to figure out what I had done to scare her. I would have forgotten the incident after that, but by the age of seventeen, I already knew that all I did, all I needed to do was exist. Knowing wasn’t the solution, it ought to be though.

It was a curse more than anything else, instead of spending a day thinking about the incident and forgetting it entirely. The memory poked and prodded at that sensitive spot in my mind created by all those times people looked at me with fear. It lodged itself in that patch, one more stake in the bundle running my mind through. It is just one more: one wound in my mind, one more trauma on my soul, one more thing I must learn to cope with.

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It does something to a person’s psyche to be feared. To be feared is in many ways worse than being hated. To inspire fear in someone is to harm them. Something on one level or another one must feel guilty for or at least in some way regret. Regret, for whatever it was, that you did scare them. But what do you do if the only thing you did to inspire fear was to exist? Do you regret your existence? How do you fix existing? Can you? Should you?

The two last questions seem ridiculous for any adult, a comical overreach for any rational person. However, for a child, to be feared is to lose one’s sense of self. To see people recoil, to know that even teachers and educators, people whose job it is to nurture and protect you, fear you is soul-crushing. It leaves a mark, even in adulthood.

You are forced to question your right to exist when your mere existence harms others. You are forced to be more docile, even as a child, in some odd and infuriating attempt to somehow convince people that you are not a threat. But you must never let this moronic, infuriating, and - never forget - necessary charade lead you to show anger for even a second, because then you would be a threatening and angry black man. A man whose existence, even in the form of a child, cannot be allowed.

You might ask “Who fears a child?” No one? Everyone?

Both. No one fears a child. Everyone fears a man. They fear what the child will become because one day, the little Black boy will no longer be so little, and at some point, after that, he will no longer be a boy. He will be a man. A Black man. They fear this day because it is on this day, the day you are no longer a child, that people can no longer control you. An angry Black child is already a danger, but an uncontrollable angry Black man is a clear and present danger at all times.

The principal of the school where I attended kindergarten once said to my mom, “He is hard enough to control now, what are we going to do when he gets bigger?” This shocked my mom, a light-skinned Mexican woman. I think it was the first time she truly realized that I am Black. Not in a cultural or logical sense but rather in the sense that it will be the most important thing about me to many people, and whether consciously or subconsciously, they will quite often judge me solely based on that fact. I think it was hard for her, even harder for her than it was for me, to come to grips with the idea that while to her I am her baby, to the police I am a thug; to educators, I am a future threat; and to America, I am a subversion.

It was soon after this comment by my principal that I first saw the look. I say “the look” because it can be known by no other name. It is, in essence, the physical manifestation of the fear that any parent of a Black child feels. It is the look of fear in my mother’s eyes when I attempt to do one of many things people so often do that could lead to me being killed. It is the look my mother gives every time I try to go for a walk at night. The look so many Black children have been forced to see, have been forced to endure. The look James Baldwin attempted to describe. The look I shall attempt and fail to describe. I know I will fail but must attempt to anyway because it haunts me, and it haunts so many others, because even if I fail I must attempt to show America the pain it has caused and still causes in the hope, however idealistic and dimwitted, that America will change.

The look is primal, a distinct amalgamation of fear, anger, and sorrow. Fear that their child, their baby, could be taken from them without rhyme or reason no matter what they do. Anger at

you, the child, the young man, for wanting to do something that you should know better than to do. Sorrow for being angry at you for wanting to do something everyone else gets to do. Sorrow that they can’t just let you go for a walk at night because if you get stopped by the police, no matter how cooperative you are, you could still lose your life. It is the look of a parent terrified and grieving at the mere idea of losing their child; mixed with a hint of despair at knowing that they, your guardian, cannot guarantee your safety. It is the look that stripped me of my innocence by stripping me of my ignorance. From the moment I first saw that look, I realized my mother is not invincible. She is mortal like the rest of us, and there are problems even she can’t solve.

To realize your parents can’t truly protect you as a child, especially a young child, is a shock. The realization robs the little Black boy of the sense of safety which is so paramount to a happy childhood. With his sense of safety stripped away, everywhere he goes, the Black boy must cope with fear. Fear forever chipping away at his mind. At one point, he must choose either to become a man free of fear, a man like Huey, Malcolm, or King, or to stay a boy. For the former, he risks physical death, and for the latter spiritual. Either way, though, he is and forever will be viewed as a threat.

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Grey Jensen

Photography Skyline High School Salt Lake City, UT

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Graveyard Digital photography 2022

Elizabeth Keller

Novel Interlochen Arts Academy Interlochen, MI

We’re All Going to Decompose Burdock is beautiful. I wish it wasn’t, honestly. Things would be easier if I hated it here, if the storefronts were seedy old bars and boarded up drugstores, if the closest you could get to nature was a scraggly patch of grass between the lanes of traffic, littered with cigarette butts, if every neighbor blasted 80s pop until two am in their wild, drunken parties. But mostly it is quiet, serene. There are woods that surround us, the classic Pacific Northwest temperate rainforest, all pine needles and Douglas firs and little reddish-brown squirrels that dart through the canopy, their mouths stained with blackberry juice.

We are right next to the Columbia River, and I remember going down to the beaches with my elementary school friends, wading into the gentle waves, collecting smooth pebbles, making sandcastles out of mud with the rough silt cutting up our feet.

We built a fort there, too, out of driftwood and a couple planks of wood I stole from the dusty depths of the garage. My parents never missed them, bought for a garden shed project proposed years before but never finished.

The fort was far from the pinnacle of architecture we must have envisioned it to be, but we named it Drifty and got someone’s dad to carve the name in a piece of wood to hang above the entrance as a sign. I think there were five of us–we weren’t close, even then, but I think it’s harder to be afraid of a first grader than me as I am now–seventeen, tall, curled in a bit, I’ve been told, like a spider. I don’t think those memories would have mattered much for most people. A couple summers, popsicles, inside jokes. But it’s been such a long time since I’ve felt so much a part of something.

Right now, I’m biking on one of the dirt hiking trails around the edge of town. School got out for the summer just a couple days ago, and I’ve made it a tradition to do something outside to celebrate every year. The last few summers have been uncharacteristically warm–usually the early summer rains last until at least the end of June–and the mud has all but retreated from the paths. The trail is lined with spotted ferns, poison ivy, and little purple-flowered sprigs of miner’s lettuce. Miner’s lettuce is my favorite. It tastes a few degrees off of nothing and crunches under your teeth. It’s destruction with no consequences. If I wasn’t so glad to get out of school, I don’t think I would like this time of year. The sudden long stretches of empty time are jarring, and I can’t ever shake the feeling that there’s something more important I’m supposed to be doing. It’s almost like a horror movie, if it was one filled with pleasant cool breezes and the creak of my pedals as I dodge rocks or clumped-together roots. Something here is wrong.

My dad used to take me hiking when I was younger to celebrate the end of school. My mom would pack peanut butter sandwiches, extra socks, and our four water bottles in his big green trail backpack and reach down to unzip my little blue Paw Patrol backpack, checking to see if the ziploc bags of M&Ms she made were still there. Then she’d make me stand against the doorframe and my dad would put his arm around me.

“Look how big he’s getting!” she’d say, pretending to wipe away tears.

“How does it feel to be a man?” my dad would continue, and at six I’d giggle and puff out my chest.

“Look at me!” I’d cry, hunched over in my imaginary office chair. “Taxes!”

Then my mom would laugh, big and wide and open, and my dad would usher me through the door.

“Ready to hit the trail?” he’d say, and though I was experienced for my age and it was only a couple of miles, I’d say, dramatically, that I didn’t know.

The last time my dad and I hiked together must have been the end of fifth grade. That was around the time I started

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finding spiders. They were daddy longlegs, so not spiders really.

They’re in class Arachnida but only have two eyes and don’t spin webs. They’re also known as harvestmen. I checked out a lot of books on spiders from Burdock Elementary’s library that year.

The library was a calm place, full of animal-patterned beanbag chairs and little garlands of paper hearts dangling from the ceiling.

I kept finding them just in the corners of my vision, scurrying underneath the bookcases or scuttling across the ceiling. Nobody else seemed to notice the infestation, and when I tried to talk to Mr. Osburn – homeroom teacher, thick round glasses, startlingly bushy eyebrows – about it, he asked me, briefly and clearly uncomfortable, if everything was alright at home. I replied that it was, except for the spiders, and maybe if there was some sort of exterminator or bug spray (I’d read that peppermint oil was supposed to be good for that sort of thing), that would be helpful.

He avoided me for the rest of the semester.

I know Mr. Osburn must have called my dad, which must have been nearly as uncomfortable. I would almost feel bad for him, almost, if he hadn’t made school more isolating when I was already incredibly lonely. Whatever he said, though, my dad never brought it up.

He’s kind but a little bit gruff, and anyway we don’t talk very much. He wasn’t mad though. I like to believe that even by then I had gotten quite good at reading people.

So my dad picked me up from fifth grade graduation in his slate-colored pick-up truck.

We drove the fifteen minutes to the Cape Horn trail in relative silence, the old built-in radio blasting AC/DC. I was young enough then to still cling to imaginary friends.

I had one in particular that I liked to think would accompany me on car rides, leaping and dancing out the window to keep up with the car. He was a wispy, translucent boy, nearly a ghost. I called him Ari and pretended he was watching out for me. Just then, Ari was getting a significant amount of poison ivy on his bare feet as he leapt among the plants on the side of the road. I offered him a place on the roof of the car where his feet could rest but where I could no longer see him.

Ari unavailable, I turned to my dad. “Why is your truck gray?”

“I like the color.” He reached over and turned down the radio.

“I think gray is sad. It makes me think of the rain and winter.”

A grunt.

“I think if I had a truck it would be bright red. Maybe I’d add orange flames on the doors.”

“That’s tasteful.”

A full understanding of sarcasm was one of my later acquisitions, so I said quite enthusiastically that I agreed.

The trail started at a little footbridge with a sign stating in blocky green lettering that “There Is No Such Thing as a Poop Fairy, Clean Up After Your Dogs.” It had always made me giggle, and I pointed it out to my dad. Then there were dust-covered switchbacks, the old logging road covered in blackberries, the hillside covered with sword fern and thimbleberry. Chickadees twittered in the underbrush. The sky was clear and, surprisingly for mid-June, only marginally gray. It was warm and unusually muggy and I felt as if everything was trapped under a dish-soap bubble. I reached out a finger and imagined I was popping it.

About halfway to the lookout point we passed a large patch of white flowers. Their stalks were square and leaves frothy like those of a carrot’s.

“What are those?” I asked.

“It’s poison hemlock,” my dad replied. He was less of an outdoorsman than his stocky build or incongruously expensive hiking boots implied, but the summer before he had picked up

Plants of the Pacific Northwest from a garage sale and read it ferociously, hunched over in a fading lawn chair and eating black olives out of the can.

“Cool.”

“You could die,” he said, mildly.

“Really? How?” “It’s so poisonous that if you touch any part of the stem, even brush up against it…you sure you want to know?”

“Yes!” “Your organs would shut down. One by one. You’d be paralyzed and slowly suffocate and you wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. Can’t speak, can’t move.”

“Woah. But wouldn’t they clear the hemlock off the trail?

Since it’s public?”

“You’d be surprised how little they care. So you better watch out for yourself, yeah? Nobody’s going to save you.” He ruffled my hair.

“Yeah, don’t worry. No stupid flower is a match for me.”

I imagined my dad cradling my limp body in a field of gently swaying white flowers. Tears would fall on my open eyes. I appreciated the melodrama for a few seconds, then, horrified, shoved the image away. I didn’t want to be dead, and I didn’t want my dad to be upset.

We reached the overlook around one in the afternoon.

That was the fastest we’d ever gotten there. In fourth grade, my feet hurt and my socks were soaked through from when I tripped in a stream, in third grade my dad had to carry me on his shoulders as I complained all the way, and in first grade we only walked half a mile and afterwards I told my dad I probably had gangrene, not knowing what that was. In second grade we didn’t go.

The overlook was a circle of bare dirt, the underbrush cleared away and tossed in drying piles around the perimeter like dust bunnies that had come to life and then fallen into a deep sleep, their wiry, leafy bodies splayed about in the middle of an energetic dream. The fir trees cast the entire clearing into shadow, but if you stepped close enough to the edge where the cliff fell away into the Columbia River Gorge, the whole world seemed bright blue and green and impossibly big.

I hopped up on the first big rock I could find. “Hey Dad! I’m calling this Mount Will.”

“Wow, what a large and impressive mountain. I can barely see you up there.”

“Come on.”

“I just think you might be taking too much credit.” He raised his eyebrows. “And anyway, do you really think you could climb a whole mountain alone? You’d get lost alone in the snow.”’

“Fine. Mount Will and Dad.” “I can live with that.” He patted his pocket. “Do you want an energy bar? Water?”

We stayed there, me perched awkwardly on Mount Will and Dad splayed out next to me, for about half an hour. At one point, my dad wandered off, maybe to pee, maybe to pick some blackberries, maybe to skip some rocks in the little ice-cold stream. It didn’t matter then, and it doesn’t matter now, why he left. Looking back, I wish I could remember. I didn’t realize until much later how much that interaction, that “be right back, Will,” was like saying goodbye.

So there I was, alone in the clearing, looking out over the great blue expanse of the Gorge. I was holding a bag of trail mix, and I tossed the seeds in the center of the clearing, trying to get them in the little divot of dirt like a game of cornhole.

A robin hopped out of the ferns to nibble on the seeds. I think I even named it, something childish like Tweety or Rascal.

A shadow fell over the seed pile, stretching out like a singular outstretched hand. It was a red-tailed hawk, preparing to dive.

“Hey, go away!” I shouted. “Leave it alone!”

The yelling did nothing, and I expected the hawk to reach out with its talons and carry the robin away, but instead, it swooped down, stuck out its neck, opened its beak, and bit the

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bird’s head off with a delicate snap. Then it left the body, spreading its wings and soaring off above the trees.

I approached the robin cautiously. It was the first time I’d seen a dead animal up close, not counting the possums I sometimes glimpsed on the side of the road before we sped by. There really wasn’t much of an identifiable bird left, the remaining body covered with a substance that looked a lot like tar. I’d never seen a hawk act like that, using its beak and hunting not for food but what I could only assume was some strange kind of sport.

Now, I would leave the bird there. Maybe kick some dust over the body. I definitely would not do what I did then, which was cradle the robin in my palms like a delicate egg, fascinated by how the blood ran over my fingers.

It was then that my dad came back into the clearing. I spun around, shoving the robin out toward him.

“Look what I found! Isn’t that so weird? Sad, too. I didn’t know hawks would just eat the head.”

“Will. What’s that?” He took a cautious step forward.

“This robin. It was eating my trail mix and this hawk just bit its head off.”

“Hawks don’t bite.”

“This one did.” I chuckled nervously.

“I need you to tell me the truth.” He was slightly pale but his voice was hard.

This confused me. I knew it wasn’t nice to lie. “I am. I promise I am. I know it sounds weird.”

“You could have just scared it away from your food – God, Will. Why was this the first thing you thought of?”

I couldn’t convince him that I hadn’t killed the bird. I think he was almost waiting for proof that I would do something like that. So I wiped the blood off my hands on the grass as best as I could and we walked down the trail in silence.

That was the last time we went to Cape Horn together, but if you get deep enough in the woods here, all the trails look the same. Matted dead pine needles. Mossy rocks. Deep brown dirt that clumps and smears under your fingertips like clay if you play with it long enough. I’ve found new trails. I’ve adapted.

I shake my head, clearing away the last wispy strands of the memory. This clearing especially is a lot like Cape Horn.

Without thinking I’ve ridden the length of the entire trail, which brings me to the edge of the woods that push up into the highway.

Every time I come this way I feel like I’m stepping through a portal: on one side, the woods and the beach, peaceful and quiet except for weirdly shaped shadows and unexplained rustles in the underbrush. On the other side, Main Street, rows of run-down clapboard houses, rusty water fountains that taste like eggs.

Sometimes in September when it’s still warm outside I go get ice cream and talk to myself. It makes everything less lonely, or at least it breaks up the monotony. I do wish there were more real people I could go with. There aren’t nearly so many sideways glances or giggled “speak of the devil”s when I’m not alone.

Sometimes I catch myself describing my surroundings like a fairytale. The hawk swooped down, scooping up the mouse in its enchanted claws. The sun set over the trees, washing the paper mill in an orange glow as the townspeople stared. I don’t mean to be pretentious about it. Burdock is decidedly normal, cigarette butts in the gutters, the Burgerville where everyone hangs out, the school fundraising bake sales I like to make brownies for and present under any number of creative pen names. Chocolate chip, Wilmot Lersey. M&M, Charles Montgomery. Lemon bars, Steve.

Really the only thing out of place is the paper mill, which stands, retreating into the woods, on the northern edge of town. It used to be painted a cheerful sky blue, but since the freak accident nine years ago when the roof caved in and the paint was stripped off the walls, it’s become a patchwork of rust.

Anyway. I don’t mean to romanticize. But the days are long here. Besides my job at Birdhouse Boutiques putting price stickers on old mugs that say things like “Retired: I Worked My Whole Life and All I Got Was This Stupid Cup,” or leaning against the bed in my room and halfheartedly reading a book, or playing Mario Kart,

nothing too creepy so my parents don’t panic, there’s not much else to do.

I park my bike outside the thrift store and push through the double doors. They creak like a chorus of distressed cicadas and I make a mental note to ask Silas if I can oil them. I check my watch: it’s five forty. My shift on Tuesdays doesn’t start until six, but Silas likes to keep a loose grasp on time. I hear voices in the storeroom behind the checkout counter and stick my head in the door. It’s Noah and Hudson from school, seniors, a little standoffish. Noah is sprawled across a makeshift bed of cardboard boxes, peeling the peel off a tangerine in little lacy curls and flicking them toward Hudson, who’s perched on the edge of a plastic patio chair. I watch as Noah flicks a speck of peel into the collar of Hudson’s shirt.

“Nice,” Hudson says. “There was some spin on that one.”

“I should quit soccer and do basketball instead,” Noah replies, smiling slightly.

“Just don’t give anyone a concussion again.”

“God that was the worst. I didn’t expect Amy to stand in front of the hoop.”

“That’s how basketball works, dude. You’re just not supposed to hit your ex-girlfriend in the head when you try to shoot.”

“Asshole. Stop bringing it up.”

Hudson laughs. “Hey – that reminds me, are you going to Josh’s party tonight?”

Noah rolls over on his side. “How does that remind you of anything? That’s not related, like, at all.”

“But are you going?” Hudson tilts his head to the side, slightly.

“Course I am. What kinda question is that?”

“Cause I heard Amy’s going to be there.”

Noah lifts his head up from his arms. “Shit. Really?”

“Yeah. Are you just going to avoid her?”

“What else can I do? I threw a basketball at her head.”

“Not on purpose though right?” Hudson sets the tangerine aside and studies Noah’s face. “Oh my God. Was it on purpose?”

“No! Of course not! Who do you think I am?”

“Suspicious.”

“It was an accident! But if I go to the party and I see her there she’s going to dump punch in my face again and I like this shirt.”

I stick my head in the room further and Noah notices me. He glances at me briefly, his gaze washing over my face like I’m a stain or weird speck of paper on the wall, something that’s interesting for a second at most.

“Hey, Will.”

His voice seems blank and monotone. It fits his face I think, features perfectly even and symmetrical and therefore unmemorable, eyes, hair, and eyebrows the same muddy shade of brown.

Hudson glances up also. “Hey.” “When did you start working here?” I ask.

“Today. I don’t know where Silas is though so we’re just chilling,” Hudson says. He turns back to Noah. “Do you think you could get the peel all the way across the room?”

Noah looks away from me and leans back on the cardboard boxes. He makes another tangerine curl.

“Hudson, do you know if Paul’s gonna be at the party?

Cause I might…also be avoiding him.”

I know that this is my cue to leave. I look at Hudson and Noah one more time, relaxed and laughing. Hudson’s shirt is really stupid, I notice. It says “It’s only funny until someone gets hurt, then it’s freaking hilarious” in big blocky letters on a purple background. I wave, awkwardly, before I duck out, but they’ve made a point not to look at me. I can feel my face getting red and when I put my hand to my cheek it’s hot to the touch. I should have gotten used to it by now, but watching everyone else laugh and talk still stings. The last week of school I found a book in the library that said the human mind is strongly embodied. I get lonely behind true ribs one to seven.

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It’s funny, really, that Hudson and Noah even bother to say hi. They were the first kids, along with Nadia Walters, to repeat the rumors I’m sure everyone heard at home.

“Mom and Dad told me last night that Will was the reason the mill collapsed,” I overheard eight-year-old Noah tell sevenyear-old Hudson in the lunch line.

“Yeah. Daddy said they found him in the rubble when everyone was hurt. Just sitting there. It’s weird. I thought he was kinda cool.”

Then Nadia, bossy and nosy even then, butted in. Her voice, then and now, was like if a cat drank a ton of cotton-candy flavored cough syrup. She had on red heart-shaped sunglasses and plastic butterfly beads in her hair. “My Dad was one of the first ones there. He said it was really going down there, with Will in the center of it all.”

“I bet he did something to the mill,” said Hudson. He tossed an apple back and forth in his hands.

“He definitely did something to the mill,” Nadia said. “My mom said so. She said there’s something off about him and there’s no reason all those people died if it wasn’t for him.”

“My Mama said it’s not nice to talk about dead people,” said Noah, pouting. “But yeah.

“After she said that, she said he definitely had something to do with it. She wouldn’t tell me what. But something.”

I was only three people behind them in the lunch line, and I don’t know if they knew I was there. I know we were all young, not trying to be mean and just repeating what our parents had told us. And it’s not that all of it, everything that has happened since me being eight and the mill, the bullying and the stares and the isolation, was really the other kids’ fault. Not properly, anyway.

When I allow myself to think about it, really think about it, I blame it mostly on the adults, the ones who told their kids what they thought I had done. It still stung. All of it still does.

I look out over the aisles. There’s Mrs. Boelmann in Aisle 3, the one with plastic birdhouses, toddler dresses, an impressive assortment of sunglasses, and a porcelain figurine of a dolphin with Elvis’s head on it. Once I asked Silas if the store might benefit from a different, more easily traceable method of organization.

He looked deeply affronted and told me that the store was already carefully organized, each aisle by the mood it evoked in him.

I wave to Mrs. Boelmann. She catches my eye and looks away quickly, moving further down the aisle and immediately reaching out to pick up dolphin Elvis. I lower my hand quickly. It’s now three minutes after four and I really do need to go find Silas.

I find him in the back room where we keep incoming donations. It’s murky and the only light comes from a lamp in the corner. Some lady dropped it off a few years back when I first started working here and Silas liked it so much he refused to put it on the shelf. It’s a porcelain eyeball, with veins that are purple instead of red.

He’s hunched over the plastic folding table in a position he always says hurts his back but which is nonetheless his default way of looking at things. He doesn’t technically need my help but I think he likes the chance to commentate. I walk up behind him and tap him on the shoulder of his lumpy pumpkin-orange sweater.

“We got a donation of taxidermied birds today.” Silas looks at me and lifts a cardboard box with “Grandma’s creepy bird collection” written on the side, sharpie marker in rounded, childish handwriting. He opens the top flaps and takes out a slightly lumpy crow, setting it gently down on the table. “He’s beautiful, isn’t he?”

“Yeah.” The beads replacing the crow’s eyes make him look sharp and scheming, but he really is very lumpy and his feet are bent back at strange angles. I study Silas’s face. He’s looking at the crow with something nearing reverence. He reaches out and nestles an unruly feather back into place.

“I used to keep birds,” he says. “Back when I was younger, mid-twenties to thirties I’d say? When I met my wife she made me throw them out, said they were creepy and killing them to display was cruel. Maybe it was, I don’t know. I don’t think anything’s really that black and white, you know?”

I nod, uncertainly. It had always seemed black and white to me, growing up. I’m evil, the town is good. Choosing to be alone was cruel, but up until I was eight, the few years where I can honestly say I had friends, I was not. Even that last hiking trip with my dad. Even picking up dead animals was evil. Even if I hadn’t killed them.

“Anyway, I loved those birds. An American Robin was my first. My cat had killed it, left it crumpled up and bloody on my doorstep. I thought it deserved a proper send-off. I couldn’t bear to see such a beautiful creature reduced to a broken heap like that. I did a terrible job of it. All beginning taxidermy is like that I suppose.

Besides, I learned by correspondence course. It’s hard to tell the stuffing to wing ratio from a pamphlet.”

I watch him without saying anything. Sometimes he has these philosophical moods and the best thing to do is to let him talk through them. It’s nice in a way. He has such a strong presence. When he talks, it makes you feel like a part of something. I can almost forget I’m in the back room of a thrift shop, standing next to a dirty plastic folding table, with an overflowing trash can in the corner and air that smells like expired perfume and a little bit of cheese.

“My next bird was a crow. It was a lot like this one, come to think of it. I think it’s wonderful how these things work out. What a human thing it is to share such specific experiences.”

“I’ve never stuffed a crow.”

“Only from a lack of trying, I would guess.”

“Sure. I don’t think I’d want to. I’d feel bad. Crows are really smart.”

“They are.” He gestures to the misshapen crow in front of us. “Some use sticks to retrieve bits of food in hard-to-reach places. This crow has a broken beak, but if it didn’t, it would be a very social bird. I’ve even seen them imitate the voices of people. When I was a little boy in grade school, a crow stole my homework.” He chuckles. “I was so mad. I had labored all night over that essay – what was it on? Dante’s Inferno? – and that damn crow just swooped down and swept it away.”

Silas glances back down at the lumpy crow on the table.

“Anyway. I’ve rambled on enough. How are you doing today, Will?”

“I’m okay.” It’s my default answer for more reasons than one.

I think Silas might be the only person who really seems to care.

“A neutral state? Good, good.”

“Mrs. Boelmann was interested in dolphin Elvis. I tried to say hi to her earlier.” “I’ve always been fascinated by this town’s preoccupation with you. You’ve become somewhat of an urban myth. I mean, honestly. You were eight.” He studies my face.

I reach into the cardboard box and begin pulling out the packaging, brown paper in a pile to my left, styrofoam pellets in the trash to my right. I saw Mrs. Boelmann in the church common room one time in middle school. She was surrounded by a circle of women and there was this horrible keening sound.

I didn’t realize until ducking out of the room that she must have been crying. There were some people in the hallway outside, too, church men with shaded faces I couldn’t recognize. They were talking in hushed tones and I couldn’t catch everything they were saying, but I did hear “doesn’t deserve the reminder.” That was around the time my parents decided it was better for everyone if we stopped going.

“Mill mythos,” I say, adopting a false scholarly air. “It has a nice ring to it. But I don’t think that’s right. I can’t blame anybody.”

I think of the loneliness, bone-crushing and slowing down my movements. “As much as it sucks.”

“That’s wise of you. Sophocles said ‘to exist is pain,’ of course.”

“Is that what you live by?”

“I’m in a mood for the scholars. The birds make me idealistic.”

I gesture back at the crow on the table. “What are we going to do with this one?”

“Somehow I don’t think this town has much of a market for taxidermy.” Silas knits his eyebrows as if the rest of Burdock

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could see the disapproval written on his face. “Would you like to keep it?” He picks up the crow, holding it out to me.

I laugh, nervously. I can never tell when Silas is joking. “I think my parents would have an aneurysm. The whole town, too, if they found out.” I wouldn’t even have a chance to explain myself.

Walking through the front door with a dead bird would be all the confirmation my parents would need to decide, once and for all, that I was evil. I try to picture the horror on my mom’s face. I can see it all too clearly on my dad’s. He’d go pale, just like that day at Cape Horn. I’d try to approach him and he’d take a step back. “God, Will. God.” “No?” He sounds disappointed. His eyes have always been steady and blank and I think if there are glints of humor I won’t be able to detect them. “Are you sure? He looks well preserved; he would keep well.”

I nod, wincing. I still hate to disappoint him.

“How about this?” He claps me on the shoulder, his grip heavy. “I can teach you myself. You need some sort of direction in life.”

I step back. “What, you think I should leave Burdock and become a taxidermist?”

Silas raises his hands in mock-defense. “Not as a career, not if you don’t want to. Just come with me this weekend, shoot a robin or too. I do think it is important for one to connect to one’s roots.”

“Roots?” It feels like the room has gotten dimmer, the air thicker and viscous, pooling around the corners. I look at the eyeball lamp and I can’t tell if I’m imagining the blinking.

“I just think you might benefit from killing a bird.” His smile quirks unevenly up towards his left eyebrow.

I try to back away again, but run up against the pointed edge of a plastic bin. I stop, rubbing my left shin with my right foot.

Silas is still talking. I wonder offhand if I did anything to prompt this. Even before I started working here, Silas has always been an impartial confidant.

“It’s always made me feel alive,” he says.

A sharp jab of panic sparks in my chest. I don’t know what Silas is playing at.

“I’m going to go see if Mrs. Boelmann needs some help,” I say. I intend to do no such thing. She’s jumpy around me at the best of times, and right now I think she might run away. I can’t say it wouldn’t be justified. I feel like Silas’s suggestion has left some sort of visible mark, some subtle but essential change that says “look at me. Look how dangerous I am.”

I have forty minutes left before I can leave. I wander down Aisle Seven. The entire collection of Goosebumps books. A stuffed seahorse doll. An Alfred Hitchcock Barbie. There’s a lot of green in this aisle. Maybe Silas organizes by color theory.

Thirty minutes. There’s a tiny window at the back of the store, way up high above the shoe rack. The sky is a strange greenish gray. I wonder if it always gets dark this early in June.

Somehow I can’t remember. Maybe there’s something taped over the glass. Birdhouse Boutiques had a banner last year before someone stole it. There were birds printed on the plastic, a V of crows flying off into the cloudy sky. I remember the fifth grade camping trip, the acrid tang of the pine needles, the way the wetness mixed with the feathers, dying the robin’s fluffy underdown a shocking, startling red.

I squeeze my eyes shut. The body wasn’t disturbing without the head, not necessarily. It was more symmetrical that way, like a tea kettle or a genie lamp. I try to will the thought away but it just comes back, over and over again. Did I enjoy it?

Was the hawk a hallucination, or something I controlled? I don’t think I could have killed the robin myself, but how can I be sure?

Sometimes I bike out to the ruins of the paper mill and stare at the scraps of wood and sheet metal, try to remember. Eight is plenty old enough to form memories. Maybe I hit my head.

Twenty minutes left. Silas passes me carrying the crow to Aisle Five. He tilts his head at me but when I don’t respond he shrugs and continues on. The garish orange of his sweater seems out of place, even among all the other bright colors. The birds are

blurring together: I can picture the crow’s crooked head snapping off with a sickening squelch, its oily black feathers turning gray and terracotta orange.

Ten minutes. I look down and I’m holding a shot glass with hermit crabs painted on it. I think Noah and Hudson are doing something in the clothing section. I can hear voices, snippets of conversation. I think they’re saying something about cheesecake.

It’s so trivial and their voices have such a nasally timbre, like a pair of magpies, that I put down the shot glass and clench my fists, fingernails digging into my skin.

I might as well leave now. The bell above the door tinkles as I push against the glass but nobody stops me. It’s dark outside, inexplicably so. It should only be 7 pm but the sky is a muddy gray and maybe I’ve lost track of time. The streetlights cast yellow shadows on the concrete and at any other time this would be beautiful, a still for a movie.

To get home I need to go four blocks through downtown or cut through the woods behind the store and a bit along the highway. The first is faster but the second gives me more time to think. Not that I want to, right now, but I want to be around people even less.

The path is narrow and padded with pine needles, so my footsteps don’t make any more noise than a gentle, dull pat. The ferns reach out and brush against my ankles and I can almost imagine their fronds are fingers, thin and strangely boneless, reaching out to grab me. I break into a run and stumble out onto the highway.

Normally this stretch of road is deserted at night, the few lonely cars zooming past and streaking out into the distance.

There’s a billboard a few feet off the road, framed with dirty yellow light bulbs, with the slogan Like a Good Neighbor, Statefarm is There. I don’t think middle-of-nowhere Washington is the best place to advertise insurance, but the paint has been cracked and peeled for as long as I can remember, so maybe it was an old mistake. I squint at the billboard. I think I can see a person standing under it, or maybe two people standing close together.

There’s no reason to be standing under a billboard in the dark, even if it is only eight, so I walk closer.

There’s definitely two people. One I recognize by her curly hair and the chunky off-the-shoulder sweaters she always wears: Nadia, popular, probably next year’s Prom Queen. We don’t talk to each other much.

The boy I’ve never seen before. He’s tall and skinny with short brown hair, and he’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt of garish intensity. His face is mostly hidden by a pair of round, gold-rimmed sunglasses. I keep walking, awkwardly, unsure if I should stop, but the boy waves vigorously and gestures me over.

Normally I wouldn’t respond. Normally I would keep walking and focus back on the ferns waving on the side of the road and ignore how everything stings. Tonight, though, things are already wrong, and so I walk over, stopping seven or eight feet in front of the pair.

I glance up at Nadia. Her eyes are narrowed and she keeps glancing over at the boy as if she wants to say something. I know how to deal with this: I drop my arms to my sides, loose, palms up. I can’t be hiding anything. I smile awkwardly, hover. I know my place in Burdock, but the robin keeps flashing through my head. I don’t want to be the person who everyone’s afraid of.

“Hey! I’m Hugo,” the new boy says. He extends a hand with unexpected enthusiasm. I’d have to jog forward about six feet to shake it the way I’m positioned now, so I just wave.

Hugo’s smile falters slightly, then replaces itself, just as bright as before. “It’s great to meet you! My family’s here for the summer–I just got here and Nadia’s showing me around.”

Nadia glares at him, and smiles tightly at me. “Hi, Will.

Sorry to bother you. We’ll get going.” She clasps an arm around Hugo’s shoulders and whispers something I can’t make out. Hugo just looks confused.

“No,” I say, then louder. “No.”

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Caroline Kim

Design Arts Orange County School of the Arts Santa Ana, CA

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Kids Tiger Drink Box Reveal Procreate, Adobe Photoshop 2022

Sherice Kong

Creative Nonficton Ridge High School Basking Ridge, NJ

A Smart Girl’s Guide to being an ABC After American Girl’s “A Smart Girl’s Guide” I. Growing Pains Your mother says you need to eat everything in the Tupperware container she packs you. Don’t leave a single grain of rice unswallowed, don’t let a single pea roll away from the smooth plastic and squash itself into the ground. She tells you this because every night after dinner, she is the one who scrapes the entrails of your plate on to her own because you got distracted by the fluffy stuffed animal on television. Call now and get 50% off a second!

You’ve called the number looped underneath the leopard’s falsely growling face on a squeaky toy phone, holding up the yellow plastic to your ear. Bring bring! you would hum, mimicking the way you’d heard your mother’s phone ring when she dialed death’s door on the day your sister’s university called your mother. The day your mother wilted. You imagined that the nice lady’s voice would sing through the phone, and you’d buy a pink giraffe and a blue leopard.

Free shipping, she would exclaim.

Here’s the best way to deal with the kids that cry out in disgust when you snap open the lid of your container: protest loudly about how much you hate your mother for giving you this food. Squeal in horror as you spoon the rice into your mouth. Cringe as you swallow. Give them a performance they won’t forget. Eventually, they’ll begin to like you, and they won’t even mind as they all cluster around you, moths to a flame. At recess, they can almost forget about you and your food as you cascade down the slide, its burn a welcome pain.

At home, your mother will ask you how you liked the food. You don’t say you hate it outright. Instead, you talk about Lunchables and Pacific Cooler Capri Suns and pizza with cheese so tough it could pass for nails. She listens to you talk, her gaze fixed on the fake bouquet a neighbor gave as a housewarming gift. Water it every day, the neighbor had said, but the leaves were hard as plastic and it smelled like an abandoned house. Your mother says she’ll think about it.

The next day, you unzip your lunchbox, hoping to find yellow plastic containing crackers, ham, and cheese, and two perfectly unbroken Oreos. Instead, you find that your mother has given you a serving of white rice, sauteéd chicken cut into cubes, and a small spoonful of tofu. For dessert, there is a small square of Hershey’s chocolate. You pick everything out, stuff the chocolate into your mouth, and let the food fall to the ground. You pick up Jeanie, which is what you’ve named your pink giraffe, and prance off to the playground.

Everyone gathers around to touch Jeanie. A girl in a skirt leans forward and tries to grab Jeanie away from you. Let me touch, let me touch, she pleads, but you are headstrong and possessive, everything your mother told you not to be, and you tug it away from her grasp. In a fit of childish anger, you both yank on two ends of Jeanie’s body, decapitating her.

The teacher walks over to see what the commotion is all about.

The girl is crying and tells the teacher that you ripped apart her giraffe. You are trying to tell the teacher that no, Jeanie is yours, but the girl’s mom is on the PTA so you’ve already lost the argument. You have to write a letter to the girl with a very flowery apology. You forge your mother’s signature and return it to your

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teacher and the girl the next day. They seem satisfied. Jeanie’s head is resewed on again by your mother, but she wobbles.

The next day, you unzip your lunchbox. You are sitting at the far end of the lunch table. Your mother has packed white rice, chicken, and broccoli. Tucking your legs underneath you, you slowly spoon it into your mouth. And you finish all of it.

II. Split Dear American Girl: Help! I never understand what my teacher is saying at Chinese school! My parents don’t speak it at home with me, either, because they say they want my English to be better. How can I get better at Mandarin on my own? ~Tongue-tied Dear Tongue-tied: You might be surprised to discover that your situation is common.

In fact, you probably have a case of a split brain! Not to worry, as this is very common in Chinese kids. Basically, you have two routes here. One, you could actually try to learn Mandarin on your own. There’s a wide variety of resources for you to use: YouTube, listening to Chinese vloggers, and/or reading Chinese books. All of these are sure to bolster your fluency and make your relatives coo over you when they realize you’re aware of their cultural references. But this route is difficult, especially because it’s likely that you will have no one to accompany you on your linguistic journey.

So stop. Drop the language. Beg your parents to let you stop Chinese school in second grade. When it comes time to pack your backpack and drive to a dinky high school half an hour away where Chinese school is held, fake an injury. When your mother is yelling at you, let the faucet run, the water a stream of sins. Stick your body into the sink. Baptize your hands first because they are what has ached most. Afterwards, dip your head inside so your mother is muted. While you are letting the water drip inside your ears, think about how this is how you become full. Not a single drop wasted, the silver of the faucet a gleam of guilt. Finish it all. The water will grow inside you like a glimmer of gold and you will forget how greedy you once were. How hungry you were for something that wasn’t yours.

And eight years later, when you become a writer, a poet, a prosaist, you will try and write about how you felt learning Mandarin. But it all feels so fake. You’re looking up the word for ashamed and cross-referencing it against other sources. Before you know it, cánkuì is the only word that hammers itself against the meat of your skull. You give up. Tell yourself that the language doesn’t matter. You try to write about your mother’s childhood in China.

But it all feels so fake. They are not your stories to tell but it feels like a betrayal not to know them.

But it’s okay to forget. Gone are the days of dictation where you would frantically try to recall characters from memory as your teacher shouted out phrases. When would you have used them?

You only speak English now. Mandarin is shriveled up and dry.

Every language is loss. Try to be glad that you only have to bear the grief of one.

III. Dim Sum Uncle Chen wears a suit and greets your father with a thick handshake as you shake off the snow from outside. The starch of his collared shirt is soaked with sweat from the hot interior of the restaurant. On the far wall is a massive, glittering character for good fortune. The waitresses are wearing stiff red vests over white blouses. Uncle Chen reaches behind the counter and presents you with Jeanie, who you’d lost a few months ago in the sleepy blur of Chinatown. He escorts your family to a four-seat table, and presents you with the little guide to the dim sum carts: 凤爪 Chicken feet

金门超市的恶臭 The stench of Kam Man

你可耻的美国口音 Your shameful American accent

烧卖 Shumai

小笼包 Soup dumplings

春卷 Spring rolls

糯米饭 Sticky fried rice

自卑感 Inferiority complex

你妈妈的失望 Your mother’s disappointment

蛋挞 Egg tart

Because you are living in a competitive school district, the discussion is bound to turn to college. People talk about the Korean girl who faked dual admissions into Harvard and Stanford.

People talk about the Harvard lawsuit against Asian-Americans.

Matt talks about how he doesn’t understand why the lawsuit gained momentum anyways, after all, Asians are treated the same as white people in college admissions. In fact, he says, they’re probably treated even better. You wonder if this is what your father says he’s worked so hard for. How he left familiarity and came to a new country where the only word he knew was “hungry.” You wonder if he’s worked so hard to get accepted just for some boy to tell his daughter that all of her hard work means nothing. You can stand up now. You can open your mouth and tell him how hard you worked and how his words mean nothing to you, and how he has no idea of what you are or what you know you can be, but you know it won’t quite pack the punch you mean it to.

V. ABC Checklist A pair of gaudy gold earrings from your grandmother Thin slices of wagyu beef A pack of Always pads (because your mother said tampons took your virginity) A boyfriend whose promposal you turn down because AP exams are coming Squished Hi-Chew on the way to a Youth Symphony audition Y

IV. How to Deal with Confrontation

Your Mandarin coated in a thick American glue

It’s very likely that in high school, you will encounter a white guy named David, or Kyle, or George, or Matt, or Matt, or Matt. And in this encounter, which will most likely take place in your AP Government & Politics class, you will realize how very little people change, especially in a suburban town. You are the one that’s different now, but you realize that you’ve always been different.

Here is American Girl’s easy 5-step guide to getting through it.

Colloquialisms you don’t know

1. Junior year of high school. Everyone’s conversations are about college. Half the school is addicted to Naviance and the other half is getting drunk every weekend. Don’t tell anyone what your plans are. When your mother asks about your major, say something safe.

Computer science, finance, business. Anything that makes big bucks and doesn’t require a graduate degree to do it.

2. Numbers. You are defined by your GPA, how many extracurriculars you are in to bloat your application, by your SAT score, by the number of people in your LinkedIn network. You are nothing without your numbers and some days you feel more program than person.

3. Can you follow in the steps of your older sister? After all, if she could go to an Ivy League, then why can’t you? What’s your excuse? A trick: bring her up in conversation with your calculus teacher. Even the librarian knew her name. As long as you can rule in the shadows of her success, at least you can tell your parents you tried.

4. Stay up until 3 AM studying for a physics test. Burn your brain blue with formulas. Flip through your sister’s old test. Sometimes, the teacher doesn’t change the questions. Your GPA will foot the bill of your suffering, at least until you burn out. Even on nights when you don’t have homework, you are always working.

Internships, summer programs, jobs. You find little ways of saving time which you learned from your parents. Eat while doing calculus homework. Sit on the sidelines in gym and finish your supplemental essays.

5. In your AP Government class, you will likely have a discussion on minorities in America.

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Hard guava candies that leave a knife-like taste in your mouth Lunar New Year spent at your father’s coworker’s house Leftover ramen seasoning packets that you’re saving (for what?)

Red envelopes from your father’s coworkers containing 5 元 Hard milk candies that glue your teeth and tongue together The way your mother’s hand slips into yours in the crowded theater The vacant Asian aisle at the American grocery store that sells bland soy sauce The feeling that this could never be your home

VI. An Open Letter Dear [ ], I know I used to say I hated you all the time. It was the summer before college and all my old high school friends were already a thousand miles away and we’ve agreed to forget each other. The future seemed as shrunken as a silken, glitzy qipao two sizes too small. I drove you up to New York to spend some time together before I left for college. On the way, I passed by the old dim sum restaurant we used to frequent on Saturdays after Chinese school.

I asked you to stay in the car because I knew your joints hated the cold. I went inside and looked at the menu and noticed that the entries in red had been all scribbled out. Uncle Chen was gone.

Fled back to China when America became a minefield. In his place was another uncle who I would never recognize. I ordered a plate of 烧卖 and sat down in a booth, watching families with children like how I used to be, running around the restaurant and bumping into the carts. I got up and paid the bill, swiping two hard guava candies from the glass dish. You were listening to a Teresa Teng CD, her voice expanding the car into entropy. In the Holland Tunnel, the lights blinked off, scattering headlights across the tiled walls.

I slammed on the brakes and heard a squeak from the backseat.

Twisting around, I saw the culprit. A pink giraffe squeezed up against the backseat. Its neck was limp and its fur was covered with dust. I thought I had lost her in the fluorescent aisles of an H-Mart when I was 7. Now I was 17 fleeing my future by driving straight into the past. Flushing’s Chinatown was a place where the soundtrack was a dozen nainais standing outside a grocery store selling overripe pomegranates. The signs were gaudy like gold earrings but wholly familiar, garish rectangles staking their claim on the sides of dilapidated buildings, advertising massages and liquors and fancy perms. We sipped boba tea through watercolor straws and spit the black tapioca on the sidewalk, their bodies spelling out our sins.

At Bland Park, after I purchased a bag of wontons from White Bear, we sat on the swings and watched the city breathe. I thought about what my life might have been like if I was born here and not in suburban New Jersey. All the kids spoke Shanghainese to each other. They smelled like cigarette smoke from their deadbeat uncles. I might have been more like you, like a daughter that wouldn’t break her mother’s heart. On the car ride home, we get stuck in tunnel traffic. I tell you I’ve always loved you even if I was ashamed of who you were. You turn to me, caress my face with your hand, and tell me you’ve always understood.

Love, Your Best American Girl

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Django Lewis

Visual Arts Fiorello H. Laguardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts New York, NY

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Granny’s Kitchen (3) Oil on canvas 2022

Audrey Lim

Play or Script Choate Rosemary Hall Wallingford, CT

A-Loi-ah NOTE: A-Loh-oi is an English phonetic spelling of daughter in Cantonese.

CHARACTER LIST: (in order of appearance) JADE, a Chinese-American teenage girl, trying to make up for a culture gap between her and her parents.

BOY IN COMPUTER, a possible but absent love interest.

MOTHER, an older Chinese woman, doing her best for her daughter but adjusting to America.

VENDOR, an old man, tired and hunched.

VILE MAN, racist.

ENSEMBLE (pedestrians, crowd of Chinese men and women, paramedics) SCENE I A Chinese-American girl — Jade.

She sits at a desk. A computer is open in front of her, the light from the screen reflecting on her face. Jade is talking to a boy through the computer.

JADE I wish you could be here.

Or rather, I wish I was there with you. Vacation in the Hamptons sounds fun.

Scuffling and breathing noises.

Jade is slightly miffed.

JADE I would enjoy summer break significantly more if my family wasn’t so infuriating. You know?

My mother is always scolding me. Yelling at me about everything. And in Chinese, too.

I just want to scream right back at her and say, shut up! Shut up! Or at least speak English!

She doesn’t understand me. Not like you do.

Yeah.

He speaks.

BOY IN COMPUTER JADE

BOY IN COMPUTER I have to go. My mother is taking us horseback-riding on the beach.

I didn’t know you rode horses.

JADE

BOY IN COMPUTER Yeah, well — we just started talking, so there’s a lot you don’t know about me.

Anyways, um — I’ll try to call you later. (awkward). Bye. The computer goes dark almost immediately.

— Bye.

JADE

She shuts the computer.

Mother enters. She has a Chinese accent and her English is choppy.

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MOTHER Jade, I’m going to market to pick up dim sum for ning-ning.

JADE

Okay.

She stands up and marks a ballet routine.

Her movements are awkward and clumsy, like a penguin’s.

MOTHER I cannot go alone. Chinatown too dangerous now.

JADE Go with Max. I’m practicing for my recital next weekend.

I need to get the four pirouettes right so I can be better than Bethany.

She does four pirouettes but stumbles, dizzy. Her technique is questionable. She looks annoyed.

MOTHER Max is seven years old. He cannot protect me from men who beat you up.

JADE

But I can?

MOTHER I would go with baba but he on business trip. You are oldest child. Come now.

Mother makes her way to the door. Jade continues to practice her routine.

MOTHER A-Loi-ah, you are not a ballerina. Give up. Bethany cannot dance the yangge dance like you.

Let’s go.

Mother exits. Her comment was meant to be a compliment but Jade takes it as a jab. Her shoulders slump. She kicks the air. Like a good daughter, she obeys Mother and exits.

SCENE II The streets of Chinatown. Glowing Chinese lanterns hang on a string across the stage.

Mother and Jade enter. Mother carries a basket.

An old vendor pushes a fruit cart displaying traditional Chinese fruit: yumberries, starfruit, longan, lychee, etc.

Pedestrians enter and exit. They look frightened, always walking in groups.

You want starfruit or lychee?

MOTHER (to Jade:)

Neither. Why can’t we just eat watermelon?

JADE

MOTHER One starfruit, two dozen lychee.

(to the vendor:)

The vendor bags the fruit. Mother pays him.

Doh-jeh. (Thank you).

VENDOR

He takes out a wipe and cleans his cart.

Jade takes the basket from Mother, sets it on the floor, and fills it with the fruits as she talks: JADE All my friends at school eat watermelon in the summer. I’m tired of you always buying Chinese fruit.

MOTHER Are you tired of your heritage? A-Loi-ah, you are spoiled. So spoiled!

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JADE

Mother —

MOTHER When I was a child, we had no food. No electricity.

You are first in family to own computer! Huh?! First in family!

We were so poor. We ate scraps like dogs that run around wet markets.

Jade bristles. She’s heard this lecture several times.

JADE

Yes, Mother.

Mother notices Jade’s shoelace is untied.

MOTHER Aya, tie your shoes! Otherwise you trip and fall and break your face!

A-Loi-ah, so stupid-la.

How do you know how to do anything?!

Mother kneels down to tie Jade’s shoelace.

The Vile Man enters. Unlike the other pedestrians, he walks alone.

Jade spots him. She freezes.

The Vile Man notices Mother squatting on the ground. His face twists nastily. He goes up to her.

VILE MAN You can’t squat in the middle of the street, chink. You’re blocking my path.

Mother stands up and faces him, brave.

MOTHER

Go away.

VILE MAN

Or what?

MOTHER

Or I call the police.

VILE MAN

(laughing:) I’m not afraid of you, chink!

He kicks Mother. She falls to the floor, covering her neck like she is bracing for a terrible earthquake.

JADE

Mother!

The Vile Man beats Mother up, kicking and punching her.

The old vendor and the pedestrians begin scrambling, running in every direction, shouting in Cantonese. It’s chaos.

VILE MAN Go back to China where all the diseases are, you dirty chink! Railroad-builder! Dog-eater!

STOP! STOP! You evil man, stop it!

JADE (screaming:)

She pulls out her phone and dials 911.

JADE (to the operator:) Help, please! Chinatown! Uh, Clay and Stockton Street! My mother is — The Vile Man knocks the phone out of Jade’s hand.

He pulls back his fist to make a punch at Jade but a horde of older Chinese men and women, led by the old fruit vendor, chase the Vile Man with brooms.

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Mother is covered in bruises and her nose is bleeding.

Jade sobs as she holds her. The crowd gathers around them, hushed. Mother reaches up and touches Jade’s face with her hand.

Sudden silence. The world falls away. Blackout.

Yellow spotlight on Jade and Mother.

Jade —

MOTHER (raspy:)

Blackout.

SCENE III Blue spotlight on Jade. She stands at the corner of the stage. She speaks to the audience.

JADE I’d never thought about death before. I never needed to. I’m sixteen.

I have a good twenty years before I have to worry about which retirement home to send my demented parents to and then maybe another five years before they pass away from old age. I have twenty-five years. Tick, tick. Twenty-five years, no, three hundred months, no, seconds. Three hundred seconds. Tick, tick. Tick, tick. Clocks are beautiful inventions.

Five minutes. Tick, tick.

Someone should invent a giant clock that hovers in the sky with the birds and wisps of clouds so anybody can just look up and know the time and never be late to anything — (looking up to the sky:) I have five minutes and counting.

SCENE IV The stage floods with blue light, rippling as if reflected off a pool.

Jade walks back to Mother, who is still on the floor, and sits down, cradling her.

Jade.

MOTHER (raspy:) JADE

Shh. You’re okay. Help is coming. You’re okay.

Mother tries to sit up but can’t.

Jade brushes the hair out of Mother’s face.

MOTHER (humorously:) A-Loi-ah, see what trouble happens when you don’t tie shoes? Aya, you give me a headache.

I’m sorry, Mother.

JADE (laughing softly through tears:)

MOTHER My bell, Jade. The porcelain bell in my closet. Ring it.

Okay, I will.

JADE (not really understanding:)

MOTHER No. Listen. Take it. Ring it. My maamaa gave to me. I give to you now.

Take it from my closet. Hang it in your room. It brings comfort when you are sad.

JADE Mother, the ambulance is coming and you’ll be okay. They’re going to take you to a hospital and treat you well and the man who did this will be caught and put in jail. I promise you.

Tell me a happy memory.

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MOTHER

A happy memory?

A happy memory.

JADE (she pauses, thinking:) SCENE V

Two Memory Ghosts enter, carrying a lantern together.

They set the lantern down and sit as if warming themselves by a fire. They mime the happy memory as Jade talks.

JADE Before I got busy with school, we used to make dumplings every weekend. Remember?

You would make the meat and vegetable filling the night before and the whole weekend we would sit in the kitchen and lay small, circular, thin sheets of dough on our hands and dab the edges in water and fold hundreds of dumplings. Every weekend.

Your dumplings were always so beautiful — they looked like little babies wrapped in wheat-colored blankets, dreaming about hot milk and steam. And my dumplings were always so ugly and you used to say, if you make ugly dumplings you won’t marry well. Do you remember?

Yes.

MOTHER

JADE Yes. And — And on Monday you would pack some dumplings for my lunch and all my friends were jealous of me because of how good my food looked.

But I wasn’t proud. I was embarrassed.

I wanted a peanut butter jelly sandwich and chips like my American friends because I wanted to fit in.

How stupid of me. How stupid.

I’m so sorry, Mother. I was a disappointment. I am a disappointment.

But I loved making those dumplings with you. Truly. They made me happy.

I’m sorry, maamaa, I made the happy memory turn sad. I’m sorry. When I have money I’ll build you your dream house, with red paint and a fish tank and a big table to play mahjong.

I’ll build it for you and we’ll live there together.

Okay? I love you.

The first Memory Ghost kisses the second Memory Ghost on the forehead.

The first Ghost holds the lantern up as if trudging through a dark cave.

The second Ghost grabs the back of the first Ghost’s shirt and walks, leading the first Ghost away backwards.

They both exit.

A-Loi-ah.

Yes? It hurts.

I know. I’m sorry.

MOTHER JADE MOTHER JADE

MOTHER A-Loi-ah, I am glad I came to America. Now you have better life.

Her eyes close.

Maamaa — Maamaa, open your eyes.

Three paramedics rush onstage.

Are you —

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JADE

PARAMEDIC 1

Yes, help her! Now! It looks bad.

Check for a heartbeat.

JADE PARAMEDIC 2 PARAMEDIC 3

Two of the paramedics lay a stretcher on the floor.

They lift Mother from Jade’s arms onto the stretcher.

They get out their medical kits and begin checking her heart rate.

The lights begin to dim.

The paramedics count to three.

They lift the stretcher into the air.

Spotlight on Jade as the paramedics begin to carry Mother offstage.

Something catches her eye.

She walks downstage.

She peers into the distance. A porcelain bell rings, delicately.

Blackout.

THE END

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Daniel Liu

Poetry Lake Highland Preparatory School Orlando, FL

Thrifting My mother says I reek of the dead. In a dressing room, I slip into another American’s flight jacket: pretending to be a soldier or an exile, eyes locked onto the flag embroidered on my shoulder—there are better people to be than a devotee, she tells me. From this side of the corduroy, Chinatown is a series of cowboy boots and used bridal gowns, dishwater-stained cargo pants and desilvered mirrors, narratives in leather and sweat-stained cotton. She tells me when she was first smuggled into the US, she could only afford secondhand clothes. How a pair of used food service shoes becomes a grudge, black rubber soles biting the tiled floor, feet bruised with the marks of a restaurant kitchen for two decades. How grief becomes a splitting in the seams. Making a living in this country is more similar to selling your rotting yellow teeth than any payable amount of debt, more like the weight of a nylon shell windbreaker in a Brooklyn winter than a Buddhist temple on the East Coast. She has a green card now, but still the same blue veins scarred onto her arms reminding her of what American dream she sold her body to. The same old cardigan she bought her first July on the spit-eroded curbs of Sunset Park. This fantasy of silk is not romantic, it’s necessary for survival, for continuing even with lost fingernails and food stamps that will last only until the weekend. Today, I hang oversized resort shirts over my forearms to make room for a ninety-nine-cent novel about immigrant labor and a woman who hasn’t been home since 1997, asking whether she should have left in the first place. I agree with my own hands and become a perfect son.

Sometimes history is a way to say hurt—all the ways immigrant blood fills grease traps. All the objects America has stolen.

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N.Y. Ling

Poetry

SYNONYMS OF “CHINESE DAUGHTER” I. Vessel (n.) — to which we carry

and are carried as national treasures floating in & out of rooms with jaded gazes to which family pride weds us like a prince cleaves the air under our tongues years ago, my mother packed her wishes / worries / wants into her belly fastened the latch on my body & measured the ocean in heartsick seeping through my pores crying for the city as in 广州 — how I keep you close a pocket-prayer that I’ll recall like my ancestors same eyes stroking a grieving sky

II. Legacy (n.) — an undulating bearing of light across histories

a stick of incense

traces 云端

into existence, my birth name a lazy haze of smoke all mirrors epiphany (n.): when a girl discovers her hands can cup her ribcage into spidery webs of steel waxing gibbous moon for a mouth can swallow any boy’s promise down easy can weave a definition 1 inside a definition I tell you I write poetry but I’m only echoing my mother & her mother’s strife to each line that listens do we lie only to promise our past selves as in look, I swear I’m better with each iteration—?

III. Parasol Girl (n.) — a stereotype I am force-fed

from Lady Liberty’s teat milky dissection of beauty standards & my eyelashes won’t curl like a dragon’s tail like a white girl’s Nirvana poster in her bedroom I am reborn as a koi 鱼 she flickers back at me & I swim back / back- bone bruised as we sob in Manhattan’s back alley far too many Parasol Girls lost to the mechanical man’s mouth spit-fire subway toothless tyrant— won’t you smile for my sake won’t you comply go back to your home? is this the welcome doormat I wipe my feet on?

Mother I’ve tried to stamp my feet to your rhythm but tonight I only feel my own heartbeat

IV. Unborn (adj.) — for centuries all we knew was to gaze upwards glassyeyed maidens our limbs pried from liquid decay veiny diaspora how we assumed the art of discarded angels supple as the dirt is this girlhood—?

to end before we could even begin to bruise our knees on concrete jungles I can’t tell you the rest but my mother rewinds the tape every night behind her eyelids how we thrashed in a village faceless men claimed our throats animalistic bone tensing to the blade as if it recognized itself the creator or the crime—

V. Shapeshifter (n.) — because I am godless,

with no name

I name myself one christened a 寺庙 in which sunlight kisses my altar & to my mother I’m all softness underbelly of a woman unlearning the sting of a touch because she was never able to & to the boy next door I’m another tender object a secret he slips from mouth to mouth but cannot keep & to my classmates I write better than I whisper trading answers under the table for a piece of belonging I chew but do not swallow my jaw unhinges to assimilate I’m told I look prettier like a tapestry so weave me whole weave me whole

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&

Miranda Lu

Visual Arts Leland High School San Jose, CA

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Untitled Mayonnaise and ketchup packets, twine, packing tape 2022

Sam Luo

Spoken Word Alhambra High School Alhambra, CA

Elegy to Saigon O Saigon— We read about you in the 11th grade.

In fifth period, American history where the textbooks authored by your oppressors only say so much about our involvement. I get asked, Do you miss Saigon?

Miss Saigon as if I’ve ever been. Not “Miss Saigon” produced by your oppressors—by their stage play: Writing off your starved girls in a severed country as prostitutes. Pretty & powerless. We wrote about our indifference. Our textbook language of pith over pity. Still, we were eager to write you into our history books & that’s one way of apology.

In our books. In our multi-editioned American history textbooks, a new print every year. We read about you & we moved on. We overwrote our inventory of casualties; flipped pages past the cadavers. Past war. But we paid our dues. We memorized the date of your collapse for the test. April 30, 1975. See? We care. We didn’t sweep you under the rug. We milked every American dollar we could rack from your cows. Your cowering girls. Your dying. We cashed in on that because we care. Though, we forget & expect you to forgive.

I don’t know how to tell you of your people. Of their fleeing & your grandchildren. How they continue to bleed, now, on American soil. We read about it on the news. Another war. The race war.

Your oppressors make very little from this. The textbooks too new to monetize this tragedy.

I think we will wait. Will move on. In this elegy— we glimpse into the cruelty of the oppressor. I tell you the oppressor is cruel.

If you were here, you would sigh at my redundancy. You could read a poem about oppression & know you are elegized.

You could see your people plastered on the sidewalk in America, in the New York Times, their innards spilling onto the bustling streets of New York. You would.

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Khalil Mcknight

Visual Arts New Orleans Center for Creative Arts New Orleans, LA

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Still N***a Acrylic on canvas 2022

Ashley Park Conjugates This poem is an apology for all the words I can’t pronounce correctly The last time you saw me, I hung my head in shame Forgot every way to say sorry.

“Mianhaeyo.” (translation: I’m sorry) I’m sorry.

“Jwaesonghaeyo.” (translation: I am sorry) I am sorry.

I don’t know how else to talk to you So instead it is a grin with chili flakes stuck in my teeth Scrubbing the dead skin off your back in the sauna Stepping on your spine To smooth out the cricks and the cracks in your bones Before I left, you wrapped me up in your loose dress And I breathed in the smell of dried dates that clung to you When you hugged me to your chest, and whispered Saraenghae (translation: I love you (informal)) My mouth went dry.

80 years ago, your mother split her soul in half And you split yours And my mother split hers And I might too someday But last night, I found myself running down the stem, and the branch, and the tree trunk landed at the roots, and I got lost In the beginnings and endings And could haves and shouldn’t have been But I knew that it started with a Saraeng (translation: a love) I am telling you I am sorry Screaming it at the top of my lungs Jeo dello yo? (translation: can you hear me?)

Can’t you hear me?

Are my words getting lost in translation?

The ocean between us chopping my voice into an incoherent echo?

And you don’t know who I am anymore!

But I’m not who I say I am, not Korean, just a nameless granddaughter Do you know my name?

Do you understand the language I am speaking?

Because I don’t.

Whenever I pronounce the name you gave me My tongue feels like it is held down by 50-pound weights And the last time you told me you loved me, I couldn’t say it back without the words sounding wrong so If I should get the chance to see you again I’ll say “Mianhaeyo.” (translation: I’m sorry) I’m sorry.

“Jwaesonghaeyo.” (translation: I am sorry) I am so sorry.

Saraengheyo I love you (translation: I love you (formal))

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Spoken Word Orange County School of the Arts Santa Ana, CA

Emily Pickering

Creative Nonficton Interlochen Arts Academy Interlochen, MI

Speak When I was in kindergarten, I played Alice in a community musical production of Alice in Wonderland while two hours away, my sister struggled to stay afloat in a sea of sick newborns. As I pantomimed eating plastic cake and waving to the Mad Hatter, she fought for breath in the NICU alongside an army of intensivists, surgeons, doctors, and wires, the problem yet to be named. At the time, I hadn’t fully grasped how our lives would change, the pitted silence that would soon settle over us. How the expected late nights and endless crying were an impossible hope now, floating away from us like the thick smoke rings blown across the stage from a boy in a stuffed caterpillar suit. I simply stood there in my blue patterned dress and matching headband, unaware of the choices my mother faced across the city: brain surgeries, types of feeding tubes, which care unit to be switched to next. My carefully polished shoes were a size too small, and I was too busy looking forward to this still-intangible sister growing enough to fill them to consider what would happen if she never could. I didn’t forget a single line. * When my sister was first born, the top of her mouth and most of her chin needed to be entirely reconstructed and some part of her brain was too small, which wasn’t fatal but she probably would have preferred it to be. In those initial few weeks, she was routinely studied, measured, and memorized, determining her future ability to speak, eat, and walk. Her body withheld the answers to these problems, solutions slowly unfurling with her growth. Each abnormality was treated and analyzed separately, surrounded by an orbit of diagnoses and interventions. Surgery for the cleft palate, an omnipresent feeding tube, occupational and physical and speech therapies.

Here’s what was definite: Coffin-Siris syndrome is extremely rare, with only several hundred cases having been extensively documented in medical literature. A birth defect, named like a bad screw coming off the assembly line. Coffin-Siris syndrome, known for its various degrees of developmental delays and distinct facial features. It’s only been six years since they stopped referencing mental retardation as a possible symptom, and switched to the more sensitive term of intellectual disability.

The list of mutations is long and unfinished, but many things had to go wrong for various anomalous genes not to connect during development in the womb. Notably, the BAF chromatin remodeling complex is a crucial component of gene expression and differentiation, and it’s been theorized that changes in this complex, often found in CSS, can impact language development, causing a multitude of speech delays.

That turned out to be the case for my sister. In her early years, sign language filled the gaps like insulation in a house.

This method of communication wasn’t much better; her words were fragmented; sentences often abandoned to lie dormant and limp. More, please. Where are you? Come back. Tired. Hungry. ASL interpreters only draw attention when they do not perform their job correctly. Otherwise, the goal is to blend in; the ones who notice are those who are trained to turn a watchful eye. People do not become interpreters to be seen. * Years ago, a classmate’s mother told me she was proud of me for the way I behaved around my sister. I felt pleased by that statement. How nice it was, to be complimented for something

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I didn’t have to work for, something inherent to my being. It took time for me to begin resenting the portrayal of disability as a loss to be triumphed over; a Herculean effort to merely exist like everybody else.

I watched closely as my sister balanced her workload of therapies like overflowing dinner plates waiting to be dropped.

Sometimes she would invent her own words, pairing hand gestures with a feeling to convey. She stopped asking for anything unless she could say it in sign. Each motion a mark of something, and sometimes an absence holding heavier weight. A refusal to acknowledge the words she could not create. * And then there were the migraines, shutting her away in our parents’ bedroom. At least once a month, a thick, heavy blanket laid over the house, like little fists had yanked the air out, clementine-sized crevices just big enough to choke us when we tried to speak. I never missed her choppy attempts at communication more than the days when the house was silent.

Lewis Carroll suffered migraines too, to the point that historians believe some of the distortions Alice experiences in Wonderland were informed by the author’s delusions. Migraines disrupt the relationship between mind and body, manufacturing false sensory data, cleaving the brain and forcing a person to question the information it supplies. After years of asking my sister what sensations she feels, what signals she’s being sent, she must relearn to ignore them. Turning pages of oversized shoes and tiny doors twirling around the words with dizzying speed, I looked for Alice, wondering if her brain also pressed against the walls of her skull each time she ate the magic mushrooms, until everything splintered in a blue haze and she burst through the ceiling. * When my sister first started speaking, she had to refine every inch of her words. How to stretch and curl sentences, when to hold syllables lightly, how to make them float, when to let the words tumble forth thickly and when to filter them out. Every night, she stood by the refrigerator, covered in charts and magnets and long, never-ending goal lists, and practiced accentuating sharp sounds and rolling her tongue around the fat vowels. The sounds piling on top of each other, creating impossible mountains we all struggled to see over. * In middle school, I hung up my checkered dress and traded acting for spoken word. Poetry readings and publications became obsessions of mine, and I chased these goals with the same determination that had driven me years earlier playing Alice.

I found it strange that the two things I was best at, acting and creative writing, involved the command of language. While my sister struggled to separate tear from tier and snake from sneak, I played with language like it was a toy, lifting and stretching words to match my emotions, cutting off the ends of sentences and changing nouns to verbs simply to explore the feelings that elicited. Sometimes I felt guilty: I wished I could donate this ease with language to my sister. My sister will never understand poetry. Metaphors, rhetorics, the difference between ghazals and sonnets—it’s all lost on her. But every time I step on the stage to read, I hear a happy shout, usually from one of the very first aisles, her little fists pumping in the air, my name echoing off her tongue.

Her words alive, now solid enough to hold their own shape and fill a room. * I am still learning how to write about my sister, how to write about my identity, how to separate the two. It turns out it’s difficult to tell an origin story whose subject is not myself. This is particularly important now that my sister’s conformity has finally offset years of wide berths and prying eyes from strangers.

The sign language has receded, speech therapy becoming more of an annoyance, trivial remarks over the dinner table about incompetent teachers or useless assignments. What they do not tell you is that disabilities do not go away once they have slipped below the surface; a condition continues to exist even if only in memory, burned into bones that are long grown, overturned cells that struggle to leave behind a shapeless past.

My sister still has a tendency to use the wrong verb tense or say nonsense sentences. Some days we try to dismiss it, letting the choppy syllables wash over us gently. Other days, my cheeks flush. On those days, it matters that she gets the words right, matches pronouns to speaker, softens into the commonalities of casual speech. I don’t know why this is still so important, but it is, as if without the steady slope of improvement, both of us will fall, our heels sliding off soft sand, tumbling down a rabbit hole of our own making.

But for all the hours I’ve spent going over vocabulary and verbs with my sister, I’ve picked up some lessons too. I’m learning that language can be both a spotlight and a soft crack of bleeding light, the kind that comes from gentleness, soft conversation, a simple hand gesture. I may struggle to resist correcting her in public or silencing her when she shouts mispronounced words, but I’m also working to balance my useless desire for smooth interactions with the genuine connections we form.

I never told my sister how every time she’d almost died in the hospital, I’d cried at the thought of never hearing her voice.

Those feelings will likely never be spoken: reflection is more a weapon than a tool of sentimentality for us. We’ve come too far for that. What I have instead is this: My sister and I, acting as singers in the early morning, the sky covering us like a velvet blanket. There’s no need for perfect pronunciation when it’s just us in the car, a slate of clouds having spooked the sun from view, rain droplets drumming on the roof, us tapping out a rhythm that reverberates across the dashboard. We have created our own language from pure, mutual understanding, the kind that transcends any other way to speak and says exactly what is needed, no more, no less.

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Marlene Schwier

Visual Arts Interlochen Arts Academy Interlochen, MI

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Hold Still Mixed Media - old artwork, scrap yarn, ClingWrap 2022

Ethan Shames

Photography Avon Old Farms School Avon, CT

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Quin I Digital photography 2022

Britney Simbana-J

Photography George Washington Carver Center for Arts and Technology Baltimore, MD

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Your Landscapers Digital photography 2022

Neil Song

Photography Saint Mark’s School of Texas Dallas, TX

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美影(Shadow of Beauty) Digital photography 2022

Sara Sonnenblick

Photography David Posnack Jewish Day School Davie, FL

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Lady-Like Digital photography 2022

Mac Stern

Play or Script Natomas Charter School Sacramento, CA

Suspense Scene “22 June 2022” SETTING: The waiting room of the Arlington Pregnancy Clinic. It’s mid-day and packed with people.

AT RISE: The clinic is lively, with people talking amongst each other. There’s the sound of hospital equipment, ultrasounds, heart monitors, and carts wheeling on linoleum.

The RADIO is audible in a break of silence.

INTERVIEWER V.O. Thank you, Greg – I’m here today at the Texas State Capitol, and it’s clear that there’s an uneven divide between the people. On one end, our Pro-Life group celebrates the likelihood, and down here, on the other end, there’s a small, proclaimed ‘Pro-Choice’ group.

They’ve yet to come in contact, but I think this is a sign of what’s to come in Texas, and the country as a whole. It looks like we’ll be seeing much more of–/ The radio CUTS OFF, and the room is silent.

People start to murmur and talk to one another.

MATEO looks up fearfully. Beat. He approaches the front desk. EVELYN sits behind the desk, sidetracked with other tasks.

MATEO My name’s Mateo, I…I had an appointment for 1pm. Today.

Evelyn looks him up and down and then continues going about her work.

Please.

(whisper)

MATEO CONT.

EVELYN We’ll be with you shortly.

MATEO (quietly) I don’t have time to wait.

Sorry?

EVELYN

MATEO I don’t have time to wait.

EVELYN And you think the rest of these women do?

Please-/ /Wait. Your. Turn.

MATEO EVELYN

MATEO This is the fifth clinic I’ve gone to in the past week. I know this place is off the grid. I looked you up. I made my appointment, and it’s already half past.

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EVELYN Ma’am, there are real women in this clinic who need pregnancy services.

I know, I just-/

MATEO

EVELYN /You just think because you chose to make life harder for yourself, you get to pout your way to the front of the line?

MATEO If you could please, just-/ EVELYN Tell me why you belong here.

I’m pregnant.

MATEO

EVELYN scoffs.

Just go sit down.

EVELYN

MATEO I can’t. I can’t wait any more.

EVELYN (sarcastically nice) Well, what can I help you with today, dear?

MATEO I made an appointment. At 1pm. Today. For an abortion.

EVELYN

A what?

MATEO

Jesus,/

EVELYN Well if you just stay seated, a consultant will be with you shortly.

MATEO I already spoke with a consultant. I’m supposed to have a procedure, today.

A procedure?

EVELYN MATEO

…Yes.

EVELYN (starts to write) And who did you speak to…

Dr. Maxwell. (writing) Doctor…Maxwell…

MATEO EVELYN

Beat.

And what exactly did he say would happen, today?

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MATEO He said…he said that today he’d take “necessary procedures to avert... pregnancy crisis.”

Evelyn smiles.

Crisis, huh.

EVELYN MATEO

Are you-/

Evelyn grabs his hands.

EVELYN There’s life inside of you, Mateo.

MATEO

What?

EVELYN Have you ever really thought about that?

I-...well. Yes.

MATEO

EVELYN You’ve thought about the living being. growing. inside of you.

MATEO

I…have.

And isn’t it beautiful?

EVELYN MATEO

Yes, but-/

EVELYN (creepily) So, what makes you think…you can kill a living thing…because it isn’t she squeezes his hands.

Convenient. For you.

Mateo pulls away from her. He is still trying to be quiet, but some people in the waiting room have started to listen.

MATEO It’s only been 6 weeks.

EVELYN

Ah.

MATEO I had an ultrasound last Sunday. You couldn’t even see…it’s barely visible. I can’t even see the…hands, or feet, or– Beat.

I– I can’t do this anymore, please-/ God protect you.

EVELYN

Silence.

Mateo is about to go sit down. But something holds him back. He turns back to Evelyn.

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MATEO I married my husband 5 years ago, and all we’ve wanted was to have a baby. Two months ago I turned 30. We’re finally settled. For a long time, it was hard to imagine having a child; I didn’t think I could be a parent.

EVELYN

I see. So,/

MATEO /I’m a non-tenured professor. My husband went back to school for his masters. We aren’t ready. I’m not ready.

EVELYN

You-/ I’m. Not. Ready.

MATEO

EVELYN Well maybe you should have thought about that before you-/ MATEO /If I don’t get treatment, I will die.

EVELYN Oh you’ve gotta be kidding me.

MATEO I was talking with my doctor 2 weeks into my pregnancy, and he… sorry, he told me that…

Beat. This is extremely painful for him.

MATEO CONT. Testosterone is causing the atrophy of my uterus, and uterine walls.

Beat.

In a whisper, If I don’t get this treatment, I will die.

Silence.

EVELYN (under her breath) Better to die than to murder.

MATEO

What?

EVELYN We’ll be with you shortly.

STOP SAYING THAT!!

MATEO

The patients in the room all look up.

MATEO CONT. You think this doesn’t hurt? That I want this to happen? I am falling apart against my will, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

All I want is to raise a child, to hold their hand and lead them through life. To be what I never got to have as a child.

I want a child. Just not now.

Not. like this.

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You don’t get to decide when my life changes. I’m a grown human being. I have livelihood. I get to choose when and how I have a child.

EVELYN Not here, you don’t. Try three states over.

MATEO

I can’t.

God, you…/

EVELYN MATEO

/I what.

You remind me of…

EVELYN

PATIENT #2 walks up to the desks, shoving past Mateo.

PATIENT #2 I had an appointment for 1:30?

EVELYN Sign in here…and Dr. Brown will be with you shortly.

PATIENT #2

Thank you.

Patient sits down. Beat.

Evelyn can’t look him in the eyes.

I guess I’ll just wait.

MATEO

He’s about to leave,/ come here.

EVELYN MATEO

I’m okay.

EVELYN You will die if you don’t listen to me.

Beat.

He comes back.

What.

MATEO

EVELYN We provide pregnancy crisis aversion.

MATEO Yes, and I have an appointment scheduled for,/ EVELYN Pregnancy. Crisis. Aversion.

Beat.

Crisis. Aversion.

Oh.

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MATEO

EVELYN What you need, you will not find here.

Beat.

You need to leave.

MATEO I don’t know where to go.

EVELYN South Dallas Planned Parenthood won’t close until it’s confirmed.

Beat.

MATEO Why should I trust you?

EVELYN You remind me of my son.

She surprises herself.

MATEO

Jesus,/ /I didn’t protect him.

EVELYN

Beat.

She starts typing, pretending to not pay attention.

There’s a gas station 5 miles south of here. You’ll need a full tank.

But,/

MATEO EVELYN (loudly, with a smile)

Thank you, we’ll be with you shortly.

Mateo takes a few moments.

Mateo exits.

END SCENE

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Gavin Trotmore

Design Arts Berkeley High School Berkeley, CA

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Dyed Denim Suit Dynamic Pose Denim, bleach, dye 2022

Margaret Tsai

Design Arts Morrison Academy Kaohsiung Kaohsiung, Taiwan

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Zero Waste Pattern Cutting Crochet fabric, Adobe Illustrator 2021

Amy Wang

Short Story Westview High School San Diego, CA

Ama There is a grove behind my house in which things do not grow so much as crawl towards the nearest light. Even the plants cannot tell the difference between the sun and camphor; when I was twelve, I left my flashlight buried in the dirt for a week, and when I came back the bushes had devoured the batteries until there was not even a glow left behind. Ama says that it is because I spent too long playing hide and seek in the trees as a child that I now find myself following streetlights, dizzy firetrucks, every bitter flash of white against the skyline. Ama says that she had an aunt once who did the same thing, and now she is just another soft-spoiled fruit, withering in the dirt. Annie, Ama says, her name was Annie. She married a white man but when it came time for them to leave it turns out he wasn’t even serious about marrying her in the first place. So he left her and she had to slit her own throat, from jaw to jaw in a little red smile. When I ask Ama why Auntie Annie didn’t just use a bullet like the people in movies do, she draws the cleaver from the stack of kitchen knives and chops watermelon rinds into dust. To pulverize your own brain like you pulverize fruit is to commit a sin, Ama says. When I ask Ama why Auntie Annie married the white man in the first place, Ama tells me it was because she did not know the meaning of pride. Ama tells me it is best to marry a man without a shadow. Only then can you be the only thing standing behind him, Ama says. *** Ama tells me that if a man ever offers to buy the sum of my organs, I should kick him in the shins and run away. It’s bad to sell your body, she tells me. Your body is the only thing you have to keep to yourself. When I ask her how she knows this she spits on the sidewalk and tells me to rub her back, which is pit-scarred from shrapnel. When I run my fingers over Ama’s spine, I can still feel little rough edges underneath her skin, like half-moons peeking out behind the curves of her bones. *** Once, I brought home a box of croissants from the nice white lady across the street. When Ama saw it, she made me bury them in the soil of our backyard. The two of us watched the leaves eat them, tearing apart each buttery layer until the ground was littered with crumbs. Ama says it is better to be hungry and prideful than well-fed and shamed. Ama says that if I become like her aunt, living off of the mercies of mei guo ren, I’ll become a soft-spoiled fruit too, a mandarin dripping thick juice into the sidewalk. Ama says not even the meanest white man would want to marry a smashed orange. Too sticky, Ama tells me. Even the mailman would not take if you offered. Ama says lots of things, but I don’t listen to all of them. Most of what she says is only halfreal, anyways, like a story split into crosshairs, each branch only partially true.

When I do listen, she makes me sit down in the kitchen and wash her hair. Usually, this happens at night before bed, with the rice-wash bucket from the day before. As the milky water splashes all over us she tells me the stories her aunt told her before she died. According to Ama, Auntie Annie was smart before she fell in love with the white man. She had a good mind, Ama tells me. Also why she didn’t want to use a gun. Such pretty brains, too much of a waste to shoot. Whenever Ama tells stories of Auntie Annie, I always wonder where her own place is in them. When I ask, Ama tells me I am too young to understand and changes the subject.

That night, when the two of us are in the bathroom, Ama tells me the moon will steal my hair if I don’t dry it before bed. You would not be such a pretty little girl if you had no ponytail, Ama says. Ama tells me that if I find buttons I should bring them home and put them in a plastic bag so that she can add them to my shirts. We will have to button your jackets all the way up to your forehead in order to hide your scalp if you aren’t careful.

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*** Ama doesn’t love me, but she likes me enough to let me trade chores for three meals a day and the spare room bed. When I was younger I used to ask why she kept me if she wasn’t willing to raise me for free, and Ama spat into her palm and showed me the phlegm, sticky white against her red skin. Having a child around saps the pain out of my head, Ama said. A cat would be better but in America, you can’t let them keep house on their own when you’re out.

Ama is too young to be a mother, so I believe her when she says that I am not hers. When I ask where she found me, Ama says she picked me up on the street corner one morning when she was buying youtiao after she watched a Hallmark movie about a nice white couple doing the same thing to a stray dog. You had such small eyes, Ama reminisces. Like little buttons in your head. Ama says that even though we aren’t from the same blood, she looks out for me because she likes the karma it gives her. Later, I ask her if she and Auntie Annie were from the same blood too. Ama does not ever look sad, but her eyebrows darken into the closest approximation of anger that someone with a face as stiff as hers can muster. Not from the same blood, Ama tells me. She lost that blood when she left me behind. *** As Ama gets older, her stories change, as all stories cut from their roots do. Sometimes, when she talks about Auntie Annie slitting her throat, Auntie Annie ends up living. The doctor stitched her back together, Ama tells me. But she still ended up leaving with the white man, so what’s the difference? Sometimes, the story ends after Auntie Annie’s husband comes back to her.

Sometimes, Auntie Annie turns into a swan, and the doctor plucks out all her feathers, making a cape of them. Sometimes, Ama calls Auntie Annie jiejie before she starts all over again.

When Ama tells me the last rendition, we are sitting in the grove, feet propped up on the roots of an orange tree. Both of our hands are sticky with the freshness of a half-ripe mandarin. She was a good jiejie, Auntie Annie says. She would have been a good mother to you if she had lived. *** Sometimes, Ama takes out her old photo album and shows me the family she has back home. No matter how carefully I try, I cannot find anyone who resembles her description of Auntie Annie. None of the faces resemble Ama either, but she says that’s a good thing. Ama tells me that she has no mother, but her father was a wastrel and a drunk. A very bad man, Ama says. Some years, he drank so much I could not even buy a toothbrush. That is why my teeth rattle so much in my head. Ama opens her mouth and spits a tooth on her palm; we observe it together and find speckles on each side, like dice.

Because her bones are so soft, the doctor tells Ama to make sure her body has enough calcium. Ama understands that as an order to eat milky things, which usually means ice cream. When we go out to buy Ben and Jerry’s, Ama makes me hold her hand. So you don’t lose yourself like she did, Ama tells me. Her fingers are tight on mine every time we pass a boy my age, as if she is afraid their gravity will pull me out of her orbit. *** After I tell Ama I like girls instead of boys, she goes three days without saying a word.

On the fourth day, Ama opens her eyes and speaks again.

I know your heart, she says. It is as soft as my bones. Finally, she sits me down at the kitchen table and makes me prick my fingers on her sewing needles. The two of us stare at the little red crescents bleeding their way through the tablecloth. Maybe

it’s better this way, she says after a long pause. You don’t have to worry about breaking your own heart. You just have to worry about breaking mine.

But isn’t that what I’ve always worried about? Isn’t that what I owe her, after all the times she has smoothed salt onto my wounds or wrapped ice around my fingers to make them stop bleeding? *** When Ama goes to the doctor, he tells her to be careful because some bones are brittle, just like some people. Like me, Ama says with a laugh. But who could be as patient as your mother? She taught me to sew, and how to be alone, and how to carry the breaking inside.

The walls in Ama’s apartment are covered with postcards and pictures; there is one photograph of herself huddled beside a giant tree, smiling for the camera. Ama says she cut a hole in her shirt and stuck her head through it, to make the picture. The best part is this, Ama says as she guides my fingers to the edge of her stained old blouse: I didn’t have to twist my whole body to look back at the camera. *** When I was a little girl, Ama told me that the opposite of love is not hate. It’s indifference. I told her I still didn’t understand.

That’s because there’s a difference between love and sex, Ama explained. You already know how to love. The other is as easy as taking off a shirt. I think of this as I pack my suitcase, as eighteen descends upon me like a wedding veil. Ama is not one for drawnout goodbyes. When I leave for college, shoving my bags in the back seat of a taxi she doesn’t finish paying for, she just throws her arms up and smiles. Go ahead, she says. Get out of here. Don’t call me unless you know you’re dying.

Later that year, I come down with a fever that feels like a cold in the first moments before it becomes something more. My roommate Lucy and I think I’m going to die, but after twelve hours of drifting between hallucination and reality, the fever breaks. I had kept my hand on the phone the entire time, Ama’s number punched in.

Afterward, I tell Lucy that I had surfaced with calm in my bones, the kind of calm that comes with knowing you can’t die because you owe someone too much. It was the same kind of calm I had felt when I had first grown old enough to understand who Ama was to me, to be certain of what we were to each other.

It was a calmness that I had felt about first love and eighth grade.

With being certain that I would always have a home.

I am young, and this is my first fever of many. But later, I find myself dreaming of blood and cotton as I remember Ama’s face when she sent me away. I will always think of her when I look at the tattoos on my arm, when I remember Auntie Annie’s hot, sweaty hands on the steering wheel, how her life must have spilled forth from her mouth in that last and final moment. I will always think of her when I look into the mirror—it’s instinct to try to find shades of Ama in my own face.

All I ever see is my own sad reflection. And I wonder which of us is happier now, Ama or me. I wonder if I could ever be happy, really. I wonder if I should have just stayed, if Auntie Annie had ever felt the same way, if she had ever felt regret creeping up the soft column of her throat even after she knew it was too late to ask her white husband to turn the car around.

She would have been proud of you, Ama had told me once, looking at me over teacups on the kitchen table. You didn’t need a second chance. You got it right the first time. But you knew that all along, didn’t you? I said.

Yes, she had said. To my surprise, I could hear the certainty in her voice.

I knew then that she believed it, that she was telling me because she knew I needed to hear it more than I had ever needed anything else.

In the end, she was the only one who knew I was going to be okay on my own. And in the end, it meant more to me to know that, than if I had ever belonged to someone else. I had Ama’s

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faith, clutched tight to my chest like a small silver coin. What else mattered?

Ariana Wang

Short Story The Hockaday School Dallas, TX

The Butterfly Effect night.

I find out that Vivian’s boyfriend is hitting her on a Tuesday

We’re sitting cross-legged on the floor of my dorm room when she pulls off her sweater and guides my hand to the purple bruise beneath her breast. It fans out across her abdomen like rippling water, like something alive and greedy. I make my hand into a fist and fit my knuckles against her damaged skin. They don’t fit quite right, marbled skin leaking out from beneath my fingers, and sweet, selfish relief courses through my veins before anything else I know to feel.

“It’s hideous, I know,” Vivian says like she’s talking about an inflamed zit or an awful haircut. “I don’t think I’ll be able to wear a bikini for the rest of the month.”

I trace my fingers around the edge of the bruise, where purple fades into blue fades into pale skin. It’s a sprawling galaxy condensed into a stomach-sized mark, Vivian’s very own Andromeda.

I tell her, “I’m going to kill him.”

“Oh, don’t do that.” Vivian laughs, and her stomach flutters delicately beneath my hand. I press down a little because I’m curious and because I can. She grimaces. Says, “It’s so ugly.

What am I going to do?”

“It’s not,” I say. “Ugly, I mean. It kind of looks like a butterfly.”

We both stare at it for a while.

“Hm,” Vivian says finally. “It does, doesn’t it?”

Then, she cries. *** Vivian is the type of beautiful that makes heads snap up and down like a light switch instead of turn because everyone is too intimidated to stare. You look at her for that one fleeting second, and you know deep inside that she is the prettiest girl you will ever see.

It feels wrong to see someone so beautiful cry like this.

Perhaps it just feels wrong to see someone cry like this and still be so beautiful.

Vivian’s bigger than me, but I shift and nudge and crowd until she’s cocooned in my body, folded tight and neat and tucked between skin and bone. Until her heartbeat is my own.

In the morning, when she climbs out of my body and her wings unfurl, she’ll take flight and shatter the sky like a falling star.

Or maybe, she’ll plummet. *** Immediately after emerging from the chrysalis, butterflies cannot fly. Their wings are wet at first, soft and wrinkled like wet paper towels. Unusable, worthless.

I tell myself that this is why Vivian hasn’t left him yet.

Because she’s still suspended upside down somewhere, waiting for her wings to harden. Waiting for the day she can soar. *** “Do you love him?” I ask one night, and Vivian laughs like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

Her long fingers curl around my thin shoulders and urge me down until my head is pillowed on her thigh and grass is prickling against the back of my legs. Her hands brush through the tangles in my hair, careful even though I have a hard head and I’ve told her that she can tug as hard as she wants.

“Look at the stars,” Vivian tells me, cupping my chin and lifting my face to the sky. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

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It’s a clear night, stars scattered across black velvet like pearls, but space has always been Vivian’s thing, not mine.

I gifted her a telescope for her birthday last year, one of those cheap plastic ones that’s always propped up on display in Walmart, but Vivian didn’t seem to mind that the poles could not extend far enough to reach her face. She’d crouched on the ground and pulled me down next to her, and even though I was wearing my favorite pair of jeans, the grass stains didn’t seem so bad next to her smile.

Then and now, my thing has always been Vivian.

“There’s Corvus.” She lifts an arm and draws lines in the air, coaxing the mess of dots into the semblance of something real.

“A pure white raven, sent by Apollo to watch his lover. When Apollo found out that she was cheating on him, he turned all of Corvus’ feathers black.”

I nod even though I don’t understand. I never understand – why Vivian is so gentle with my hair, why she doesn’t leave, why there’s a new bruise on her arm so dark that it stains my fingertips when I touch it, why she doesn’t leave, why she stays, why she doesn’t leave. *** The butterfly effect, according to Merriam-Webster: by which small changes in initial conditions can lead to large-scale and unpredictable variation in the future.

The small changes: the healing bruise on her stomach, the lip gloss she stops using, the concealer she starts using.

The large-scale and unpredictable variation: me, falling in love with her. *** Vivian wears her bruises like jewelry. A ribbon around her throat, a braided chain circling her wrist.

“This isn’t safe for you,” I tell her. “I know,” she says.

There’s an ice pack on her wrist and one on her ribs, and I’m wrapping ice cubes in paper towels now because we’re all out of ice packs. Vivian presses an antiseptic wipe to the cut on her cheek, hissing through her teeth. I can feel the burn in my own skin, the staggering sting of phantom pain.

“I fought back this time.” Vivian smiles, but her lip is split, and there’s the Milky Way on her cheek. “You know what they say: float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”

But I’ve been stung enough times in my life to know that a bee doesn’t sting unless it absolutely has to. Because when it does, its stinger remains hooked in the skin so that when the bee tries to fly away, its organs are ripped clean out of its body. I look at Vivian now, with her hollow voice and hollow eyes, and wonder if she already knows this.

I say, “You should leave him.”

Vivian shrugs with her good shoulder, the one we didn’t just pop back into its socket. I remove the ice pack from her hand and weave her fingers through mine. Her skin is cold, but I don’t let go, not until my warmth has drained into her. Not until her cold has consumed me completely. *** I don’t see Vivian for another week, and then she appears at my door all at once. Her eyes are glimmering with tears, and her body is trembling so hard that her teeth are beginning to chatter. I help her climb into my bed, and then I slip in next to her and hold her until her breathing eases. I stroke her hair, and I know now why

she was always so gentle. It feels cruel to be rough with something so fragile.

“You know I love you, right?” There’s enough finality in her voice that I understand what she’s too afraid to voice.

I say, “You’re not going to leave him, are you?” because saying you’re going to leave me, aren’t you? is too difficult.

When she kisses my cheek, her tears mingle with mine. It’s enough of an answer.

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Ray Wang

Design Arts Taipei American School Taipei, Taiwan

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Remembrance: Sketches & Front Page Graphite, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Indesign, Vray, Rhino 7 2022

Kennedee Woodson

Photography Stivers School for the Arts Dayton, OH

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Crown Series 2 of 5 Silver gelatin photography 2022

Jacqueline Xiong

Creative Nonfiction Glenda Dawson High School Pearland, TX

Girl Gods Back in elementary school, there was this girl named Naomi who no one really paid attention to. Like me, Naomi was Chinese-American, quiet enough to be called nice, and modest to the point of un-coolness. The only notable thing about her was that she always wore a washed-out gray drawstring jacket. People made fun of her when she refused to take off her gray jacket even while running laps in PE. Some asked jokingly whether she was Muslim, while others tried to roll up her baggy sleeves to see if she had an ugly birthmark hidden somewhere. No one really found out, because every time PE came around, Naomi only clung onto her gray jacket and walked away faster. Sometimes I walked with her, but other times I was too busy peeling off my own four layers of sweaters and winter jackets to remember Naomi’s unfortunate predicament.

The change happened sometime in middle school.

Precisely, it happened after the first week of seventh grade, when boys and girls were separated and taken to different rooms to learn about puberty and private parts. Apparently wild things and sexual awakenings happened in those rooms. Rumor got out that a boy had somehow gotten hold of a Stayfree Maxi Pad and stuck it to his forehead for an entire period—a class period, not one of those monthly blood rituals. And apparently, three or four girls had already started their periods, not to mention that a bunch of boys had already started doing whatever boys did during puberty.

The specific details never went around on the girl’s side of the gossip, but it was still shocking enough to make a change. Girls and boys divided into boy friend groups and girl friend groups. The line was supposed to be rigidly drawn and strictly followed, but it still caused an inappropriate number of giggles and red faces whenever the Wedding March was sung for the next it couple of the grade, accompanied by the jealous oohs of respective friends.

All of that had no impact on me or Naomi. For the girls who transformed silently, you woke up one day to be suddenly plunged into the unknown of your own body. Even worse, you were all on your own. You started learning how to soundlessly open pad wrappings in a bathroom stall. How to scrub out the brown stains on your underwear without your mom knowing. How to pick battles with an ever-changing body that became your own responsibility.

The most startling change of all was when Naomi took off her gray jacket on the last day of seventh grade. Ever since the puberty lessons, dumb jokes had gone around about her name; a group of boys had snickered out I moan when Naomi passed by and forcibly made the name stick. It was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard. But for a year I found myself embarrassed talking to Naomi, as if by saying her name I was committing some kind of sacrilege. Now people were saying that she never took off her jacket because of the hickeys and scratches all over her skin.

Apparently she had a whore’s name. She also happened to be Japanese and meek. Docile.

When Naomi pulled off her frayed gray jacket, it was under the June sun. She squinted a little at the white sky before crossing her arms over her chest, her skin pale and untouched under the light. There was no point in undressing because people would keep saying new things anyway, but all she wanted to do was to breathe.

Looking back even now, there was a certain sacredness to her reveal— to the altars never built for a girl whose transformation was all her own. I never got to know why Naomi didn’t take off her jacket in PE.

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*** At fourteen, I had already conquered my own body. My body to me was solitary at times and crowded at times, familiar at times and unrecognizable at times. The funny thing was that the conquest sometimes wasn’t even my own. At school, it was getting dress-coded by teachers who examined the length of shorts and the presence of spaghetti straps; in the lunchroom, it was justifying to people that a Snap score over a hundred thousand didn’t mean anything, and at home, it was determining the exact degree to which my new shirt revealed my middle. Along the way, I amassed new definitions for things that I already knew existed— muffin tops and flabby bellies, hourglass figures and plastic surgery, self-love and the male gaze.

The summer before high school started, I spent three months waddling through syrupy-hot Wuhan, burning my mouth on freshly drizzled Tanghulu while lazily taking taekwondo lessons to protect myself from people with potentially malicious intentions. Before we flew to China, my grandma had taken my arm and showed me a WeChat article in which a middle-aged Chinese lady talked about girls revealing their tofu-white legs under the summer sun. My grandma hadn’t confiscated my shorts, but she’d decided on the spot to sign me up for martial arts lessons, in case I ever needed to knee someone in the groin.

Ultimately, the summer passed without any groin-kneeing.

Wuhan remained vibrant and sweltering and unceasing. In July, I visited an uncle’s house with my grandparents and played with a baby cousin while the adults went out to a sushi restaurant. Before they left, my grandma pulled me aside once again and warned me that my aunt was staying behind. groin?”

Half-jokingly, I asked, “Do I need to knee my aunt in the

There was an odd expression on my grandma’s face. It was familiar, as if my own facial muscles remembered making this exact same motion. “Don’t joke about things like that,” she said.

She frowned, then said again with more emphasis, “Don’t make jokes like that. You’re on your monthly thing, right?”

I nodded, trying to appear bored, but the truth was that I’d never gotten used to the way she muttered monthly thing.

Embarrassed, with a touch of reverence and shame. My grandma said quickly, still under her breath, “Your aunt has— well— health concerns. She doesn’t get it anymore.”

“Get what?” I asked.

“The monthly thing,” my grandma hissed. She gestured vaguely with her hands. “Your aunt doesn’t menstruate. Anymore.”

I had no idea why she was telling me this. I was one of those girls who started my period before the puberty lesson.

The health teacher said that normally girls started menstruating at thirteen, but I was three months away from thirteen when I started, on the cusp of normality. I thought that not having to stuff pads in my underwear in hundred-degree summer weather sounded like a good idea. “Good for her.”

My grandma cringed. I backtracked. “Not good for her?”

The look on my grandma’s face suggested that it was, in fact, not good for her. “The reason I’m telling you this is because

your aunt and your uncle don’t have a good relationship. They have certain—needs— that are unfulfilled.” She was still talking in that tone of hers, with that hushed reverence and agonizing secondhand shame. “They are—” “Sexually unsatisfied?” I asked.

Horrified, my grandma gaped at me. “How did you know?”

I shrugged. Right now I was embarrassed and itchy and I couldn’t care less about my sexually deprived aunt and uncle. “So, what about them?”

My grandma pulled herself together, looked straight ahead, and said in one long breath, “I want you to ignore whatever odd things your aunt does when your uncle is out.”

Both of us were glad to be done with the conversation.

I nodded, waited until the adults left, and took my iPad into the bathroom farthest away from my aunt’s bedroom. A part of me was waiting for her to do something like play sex tapes on the family room TV or invite a lover over. But the other part of me— the part of me that had never quite been normal— knew that instead of odd things, all I heard was a woman’s compressed, stifled crying. It was not a weakness.

Crouched there on the bathroom tiles with an iPad between my arms, I suddenly realized why my grandma’s expression had felt so familiar. It was the exact same way I used to talk about Naomi. *** After the syrupy stickiness of Wuhan summers was sufficiently far away, I moved away from my old Wisconsin school and started high school anew. Everything was freshly blank here in Texas. The first year of high school, I found out about a death in a nearby school district that had made its way to the local Houston newspaper. The article was from a few years back, its photos blurry and yellowed. It talked of a girl who’d hung herself on her high school’s staircase railings to die immortal, like Juliet who’d stabbed herself to die in memoriam. I made sure I cleared it from my browsing history so my parents wouldn’t see, except there was nothing immortal about death anyway.

But it didn’t matter much. Every other week or so, something new would be brought up. Girlhood began to approach womanhood and suddenly there was an enormous world outside my own. More and more news piled up by the day, yellowed photographs giving way to blurry videos on social media. A female college student who’d immigrated to America only to be found dead in the back of a taxi. Asian women turning unmoving while getting their hair done in a Chinatown salon. Women whose rights over their own bodies were legislated by white men, whose rights were defended by waves of protests that lasted maybe a month after the initial outrage— women and girls who were cautionary tales, tragic heroines, shock factors in newspaper headlines and dinner table conversations. They were made holy by the violence against them, and they were made gods in the wake of their deaths.

At fifteen, I now felt liberated from the world. High school was in full swing and things no longer felt sacred. You could talk about sex professionally. You could say period, menstruation, nipple, and none of it was bad or inappropriate. I was far away from the elementary and middle school of my puberty ages. Now, I was in stifling hot Texas, where no one bore witness to the dark history of my pubescence and where there were as many dress codes as teens coming into their own. A girl in a bikini was no longer a god; you could toe the dress code line as much as you wanted and you’d be a martyr, not a whore. It all became very similar to the beginning, when your body became your own responsibility.

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But girlhood had a body and it was always shrouded in myth.

In rules and in words and in grey jackets that you must take off to prove your purity. Whether in Wisconsin or Wuhan or Texas, whether at thirteen or fourteen or fifteen, I was here in the lunch room or at the dinner table, listening to the myth of another girl immortalized by her death. Be quiet, I wanted to say; I wanted to turn against the boundaries that held my body in place, to shout something that would make a difference instead of a simple protest: I don’t want to listen. But I had never known what to do. Was it better to listen, to perpetrate this silent violence with my own silence, or to refuse to listen even when violence was in fact all around and unstoppable?

Who was I memorializing by choosing to listen or not? Since childhood I had remembered those girls and those women— should I forget or hold their names close, despite being as powerless as I was? They didn’t need altars; they needed change that was not sacred transformation, a body that was their own.

Even now my body is not quite my own. On chilly days I feel as if Naomi’s gray jacket sleeves are brushing against my arms; whenever I bleed I still feel compelled to stop the redness from running free. I stopped using a period tracker, but I always count down the days to my next period to make sure it won’t tear free of its constraints and fly away, leaving me to stand in place, my naked foot just a centimeter outside the line. I never contacted that aunt of mine again after my summer in Wuhan. But she still sends me pictures of my growing baby cousin over WeChat, which I like.

One of these days, when I’m fifteen and eleven months or sixteen or twenty, I’ll figure out how to make the lines go away.

One of these days the lines will no longer stitch the edges of my body and weave into more lines for people to navigate in the spaces beside me. One day I’ll truly understand the myths of my own body— I’m learning to shout.

From the start, I knew why Naomi never took off her jacket during PE. Why did she have to? All she wanted was to breathe.

Hans Yang

Novel Canyon Crest Academy San Diego, CA

FRESH ON THE BOAT I

LI: I suppose.

INT. PLEASANT BIG BRAVE GARDEN.

NARRATOR-IN-THE-MIRROR: Their eyes are looking to California.

Not to the street vendors or the local schools, or their cousins in some other cities. Engineers want rights to their patents so they don’t get leeched off of every invention they make; writers don’t want to put out a second fuckin’ Harry Potter and disappear in the night with traces of the CCP on their doorstep for some minor censorship infraction; students want to study internationally.

[EMPTY ONE-ROOM APARTMENT ON THE TWELFTH FLOOR OF ‘PLEASANT BIG BRAVE GARDEN’. ROOM 1205. LIGHTS ARE OFF. ONE HUNDRED FIFTY SAN FRANCISCO POSTCARDS SCATTERED ON THE GROUND. NARRATOR IS UPSET. SO IS LI.] LI ENTERS IN FAKE YEEZYS AND A NAVY-BLUE COAT. HE SITS DOWN IN FRONT OF THE FULL-LENGTH MIRROR IN THE FAINT DARKNESS. IT IS STAINED IN CHILI OIL. HE BALANCES A CAMEL LIGHT IN THE CORNER OF HIS MOUTH AND STARES IN.

LI: [Sadly, a sigh.] Ah. NARRATOR-IN-THE-MIRROR: You good?

Li: Today was the last straw.

LI: [Hesitantly.] Of course.

NARRATOR-IN-THE-MIRROR: What happened?

NARRATOR-IN-THE-MIRROR: You’re drooling excessively.

[LI THROWS UP HIS HANDS] Li: I lost face. I used my college degree in literature to defeat grandpas at Xiangqi. I wasn’t supposed to win. What the hell even is losing face? It doesn’t even make sense. I know it’s colloquial, but you’d think that Chinese students with razor-sharp intellects would figure out how this is totally bizarre. Well, I guess not completely bizarre. Take Xiaowang from the Internet Cafe, that Shanghai Jiaotong engineering alumnus?

LI [Closes his eyes]. Mm. Getting fat as shit cooped up in here, but a heaping plate of stir-fried pork with chives as garnish and black bean sauce drizzled all over it would be one of the best things for my mood right now. Some fluffed jasmine rice sprinkled with sesame.

NARRATOR-IN-THE-MIRROR: The one who wanted fake Yeezys and a computer science internship at Beijing Normal?

LI: [runs hand through hair.] Not hungry right now. Purely trivial speech.

LI: Yep.

NARRATOR-IN-THE-MIRROR: Naturally. [Pauses.] You have a meeting in ten minutes with that awfully suspicious employer–

NARRATOR-IN-THE-MIRROR: Did you actually hook him up with the TaoBao retailer?

LI: Yep. Economically, however. But it wasn’t even for Yeezys anymore. Seemed so serious when I talked to him.

NARRATOR-IN-THE-MIRROR: Damn, cuh– what’s up with him?

[LI curls up on the cigar-butt stained mattress his dirty ass is sitting on.]

LI: I feel like he changed. For his own good. Doesn’t drink as much beer. We used to go on excursions at the 808-nightclubs during the wee hours, going absolutely bonkers. Drip out half our paycheck on the dance floor then giggle about it the day after. But now when we go, Xiaowang just stands by in the din, watching the people in a strange passiveness.

NARRATOR-IN-THE-MIRROR: Like a zoo visitor.

LI: It’s just strange, that. We stopped going a few months ago. Now he’s trying to get back together with his baby mama and two kids, and build a future for them. Overseas, as well. Funny that back then when we were leveling up to two-hundred in Diablo he never thought about that. As we looked for coupons in the seat cushions for packets of red pepper Shin ramen. And now he won’t talk to me.

NARRATOR-IN-THE-MIRROR: Good for him, that.

LI tosses a baseball aimlessly up at the ceiling above his head, catching it as it comes down.

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NARRATOR-IN-THE-MIRROR: [Laughs.] Seems that your eyes are elsewhere right now like the rest of the dreamers.

LI: Hey, there’s definitely nothing wrong with the company. It’s a really reputable local business.

NARRATOR-IN-THE-MIRROR: Hah, I guess you could put it that way.

LI[grins, searching closet for something.]: I’m sure I’ll get the job, with my college degree and whatnot, you know? And my overwhelming confidence, brimming like bone stew. And my great personality [trails off.]

NARRATOR-IN-THE-MIRROR: Yes, I’m sure as well.

[IN TRUTH, LI WOULD LOVE A CHEESEBURGER.] LI EXITS HIS APARTMENT, SLIPPING ON A BLACK BLAZER WHERE THE STAINS ARE NOT SO EVIDENT, AND BEGINS TO DESCEND TWELVE FLOORS. *** A Shanghai bar does funny things to attention.

In the drifting hubbub of slim women sliding up against the sides of suited investment bankers who don’t care about anything except a picture of Mao Zedong on a sheet of light red paper, attention frays and falls apart. Sometimes you can even cry out something like “Go America” or “I Don’t Like Mapo Tofu” without getting a dozen stink eyes from middle-aged guys. The din is formidable otherwise, impenetrable.

However, there is a man who can interrupt this hubbub, a strange genie. The man is named ‘Tang Ba Ba’, (Sugar Daddy), the product of botched aesthetic consumerism, a dissatisfied 5’3” wife at home, and a completely understandable affinity for unemployment. The man is enormously fat, and looks like a freshly fried sesame ball sans the heavenly red-bean smell. The man is unfortunately my clandestine employer (at least for the time being). He is sitting across from me under the romantic red-tinged glare of halogen lights. I do not need to mention that the moment is absurdly out-of-place. I am looking into his beady eyes and imagining he is a plate of poorly-made pork. unsure.

He is talking about an elusive translucency. Of what, I am

“Tsingtao,” Sugar Daddy asserts monosyllabically and vomits all over the floor.

There we go.

He wipes his mouth with the corner of a tablecloth. “The translucency of Tsingtao beer is important for its taste. If you shake it a little the bubbles go up and up and make this wonderful taste on the tongue that washes away your boss’s harsh words and dulls the sting of waking up every morning at the crack of dawn-” He is half-drunk, but the numerator of the fraction is becoming rapidly larger.

“Look,” I prop my elbows up on the maroon-streaked table in an attempt to seem more serious and to snap him into relative lucidity. “I really want to go to the United States- uh- you know in that way-” “Illicitly?”

“Sure.”

“Why do you want to go?”

“Tourism.”

The one on the left who is bleeding his entire hand of cards points at him. “Come on, don’t touch her, man - we’re in public, Ba, come on, you don’t want to do that. What would your mother say?”

The bald one with Ray-Bans in the center is bleeding his hand even more, like a stuck pig, but he’s about to win. “That’s pretty rude, Daddy. You’re gonna get locked up for a while if you do that.”

The third one is in the bathroom.

I can’t help but burst out in laughter for some reason, and the partial silence shifts into awkward completeness. I forgot to mention that attention does funny things to perception.

Once the great wall of noise lowers, it’s a lot easier to notice the bizarreness around me. I notice for the first time how the bar is so oddly juxtaposed the whole scene seems like something out of a Murakami novel. I dunno, maybe it’s because of the tortoiseshell and ginger-colored cats lingering by the door with the street kids.

Or possibly it’s the Japanese exchange-student chicks chatting about Hegelian philosophy with the Beida professors teaching outof-town.

At this point though, the cats aren’t lingering, they’re staring at me like I am an odd piece of tuna, and the chicks are not holding a philosophical forum, they are tilting their heads at me like mother hens watching a soot-blackened duck. Perhaps they might ask me about my knowledge of Nietzschean ethics.

I take off my glasses and inch my face closer to Sugar Daddy, his stubble reeking of soju and sriracha. Slap him openfaced on the chin and watch his face jiggle like honey jello.

Apologize profusely afterwards, out of habit.

He fucking laughs.

It’s terrifying – he resembles an amiable Jabba the Hutt, with chopsticks and beer-bottle still in hand, bellowing over the complete silence. The bartender, staring, overfills a shot until it waterfalls onto the steel countertop below it.

“Bull-” He laughs and raises a flabby hand upwards towards the halogen lights. “-shit!” The hand comes down so hard that it rattles the entire counter, and the bartender leaps back, a Moscow Mule on the rocks with a tiny sprig of mint on it in his hands.

“What is over there that isn’t here? Fast food twenty feet from you open 24/7 and milling crowds of blondies? Basic property rights to patents?”

“You’ve got it in you,” Sugar Daddy pats his face with a napkin, keeling over with laughter. The regular customers and the waiters begin moving again amid soft laughter, and we return to small talk. “You’ve got it in you, Li. The spirit of the Republic, brother.”

The whole bar is hushed; pool cues hang loose in skeptical hands, startup company CEOs gaze serenely from their marble pedestals, TOEFL tutors extinguish dirt-cheap cigarettes.

“Gonna be honest – that hurt like shit, but I do admit I needed it. Great condolences to Joan.” He beckoned Joan over (big brown eyes?), exchanged a light word with her, and

“Women, I guess?” It takes me back to my high-school debate days, trying to fish a barely adequate answer out of murky waters in a frighteningly small timespan.

“You know the waitress’s name– have you come here before?”

“Look at this pretty girl!” Sugar Daddy grabs a waitress by the waist- immediately I grimace and lock eyes with her and make an apologetic motion. “Big brown eyes, healthy, a sweet girl, a paragon of the spirit of the Republic! If you get married she’ll probably support you even if you become a watercolor artist! You won’t find better than her in A-merica!”

She flips me off (with both hands), and motions for me to do something. I do not have to mention that I essentially cannot.

Sugar Daddy is my last resort employer, basically my owner. But for my dignity (and her safety) I have to do something– analyze the audience first – the Zhonghua smoking elders playing poker give their takes on his behavior and discourage him.

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“Aye.”

“Yes, of course. Another of our nicest staff is Hangul. Ah, Hangul. He’s one of the best chefs in China, but he’s always in the kitchen cooking up some variation of stir-fried rice noodles or stir-fried soybean pork.” Sugar Daddy takes a draft. “Came from the DPRK, he did. Ran across the demilitarized zone in a field while we were visiting a colleague in Daeseong for rocket launcher shipments. We were in an abandoned school, and this emaciated kid runs up to us, half naked– and it’s a starved Hangul, barely standing on two feet, stinking of fermented cabbage. It turned out that he subsisted purely on surplus kimchi and dandelions for five days and–” “You know all of them?” I’m not listening, nonchalantly picking at an ice cube in my drink, and interrupting before he could veer off any farther. “The staff of this bar?”

He glances at me with a highly concerned expression.

At a speed I didn’t think would be possible for a man of his neck mobility.

“Li.” “Yes.” “Hell, Li, this is a bar run by the Triads. Organized crime syndicate.”

[NARRATOR-IN-THE-MIRROR: …awfully suspicious employer…family business…]

“Are you blind? Everyone has pistols at their waist or for the old-heads that I know are responsible, assault rifles. No legitimate establishment in China would have armed customers or staff. That’s for the Renminjingcha to take care of any altercations.”

I frown and peer at the elderly men at the poker table, reeling back. All of them have bullpup assault rifles in their laps, concealed by the fringes of their polos. They wave in my direction and let loose a goosebump-inducing rattle of kekekekes only chronic smokers can release, pointing as if I was a monkey. Joan passes by, toting two chrome Berettas at her waist, innocently asking if we need our plates cleared.

“However, that is enough!” Sugar Daddy harrumphs and reaches into his ass and brings out a thin manila envelope. “Time for your interview. There is an unattractive man and an attractive woman that must see me immediately after this. So we must make haste.” Joan takes the food away and wipes the table clean.

“Alright.” [LI is not alright. He is severely weirded out and way too drunk to answer any questions with relevant coherency.

But he presses on. Because that is the type of man LI is.] “How’s it going to work?”

“It’s a very simple interview. Five open-ended questions.

We want your qualities to shine in your answers. We do not require any standardized test scores, and do not accept Early Decision as an application option.”

“You sound like a robot.”

“Apparently in America there’s an organization called Collegeboard who talks like that and they extort high school kids out of their parents’ retirement savings and their dreams.” Sugar Daddy snorts disdainfully. “Terrible stuff, really. Even worse than the things we do sometimes.”

“Intriguing.”

“First question: what type of women or men do you like?”

“What the fuck does that have to do with anything regarding the position? It’s a fun question and one I’d be inclined to answer, but just wondering.”

“Just answer, Li.” “Well,” I pondered, aggregating all of my experiences with women in a mental spreadsheet. I grimaced. It wasn’t pretty.

Damn, Jessica from Shanghai International School. Oh, Lili in elementary school. “It isn’t simple.” I tilt my head to the side and open my arms.

“I’m not expecting them to know every scene in the Three Kingdoms, per se, but I like intelligent girls who write good poetry, but not about nature– about the ruggedness of urban life and shit.”

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“Like Mo Yan?” “No, no, he’s far too depressing for my taste. More like–” I ponder again. “On another note, there’s not really a certain poet I lean towards. I just go by general feel.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

“Second question: what is stopping you from attacking me and slitting my throat as of the status quo?”

“The Triads behind you.”

“Excellent.”

“Third question: have you ever held a pistol in your hands?”

Surprisingly, I had. Rowdy and out of sophomore year in university, my buddies and I had taken a trip to a local gun range during summer break, where we tried out different weapons. Jack gave himself a concussion.

“Indeed I have held a pistol, and fired it as well.” I nod.

“Great to hear.” He flips the file page.

“Same here.”

“Fourth question: what happened in 1989 near the heart of Beijing?”

“Not sure.”

“Come on.”

“No– seriously, I have no fucking clue. Is this supposed to be common knowledge for all applicants? I’m an engineer, not a historian.” I glance around nervously.

“We all know, Li.” An elder rolls up to me with the tip of an AK-47 mounted to his wheelchair, humming in approval. “Yessir, back in those golden days, when the tanks were coming and I just stood there, it was frightening, no doubt, but—” Sugar Daddy gently nudges him away. “We’re having a new member, Elder Hong. Can you please give us some time, venerable one?”

“Give me some milk candy first.”

I look on horrified as the wheelchair-ridden Elder Hong accepts several white pellets of something Sugar Daddy pulls out of his pants.

“Well,” S.D. puts the rest of the candy back in his pants.

“Can you think of it now?”

I close my eyes and keep them shut. Might as well tell them for the interview– no CCTVs or moles nearby to rat me out for high treason. “During the period between April fifteenth and June fourth, student protestors stood up against government forces in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in an attempt to stand as a symbol for peace and democracy among the–” “I think that’s adequate.”

Sugar Daddy nods in approval, turning to Elder Hong, who is intently listening. He whispers. “Is what he’s saying the right history?”

“I think so, young one. I’m not quite sure exactly what happened during that time either.” Hong whispers back to him.

Sugar Daddy straightens. “You’ve done spectacularly so far–now for the final question.” Dramatically he throws the manila folder and the papers go flying.

I’m going to America; I’m going to America, I’m going to America…

“Of course.”

“Number five– Can you outrun an entire cohort of Shanghai Triad enforcers while half-drunk?”

I’m going to– *** They stopped chasing me after I got to the outskirts of the twentieth ward, when I was still sprinting like mad. One of them, a half-naked man with a cleaver-in-hand, saw me collapse with exhaustion and took pity on me. With his balls in my face and a balaclava slipped over his head, he handed me an iced coffee that he’d robbed from a university cafe nearby and absconded, presumably back to the bar.

It was past two when I managed to hike up the twelve stories of Pleasant Big Brave Garden, the windows open to the low-slung moped factories and snack shops strung together in a messy patchwork below. I slumped to the doormat, head in hands; opened AliExpress on my smartphone, and bought yet another California postcard.

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Bayan Yunis

Photography Carroll High School Fort Wayne, IN

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Predictable Digital photography 2022

YoungArts About

About YoungArts Established in 1981 by Lin and Ted Arison, YoungArts identifies exceptional young artists, amplifies their potential, and invests in their lifelong creative freedom. Entrance into this prestigious organization starts with a highly competitive application process for talented artists ages 15–18, or grades 10–12, in the United States. Applications are adjudicated through a rigorous blind process by esteemed disciplinespecific panels of artists. All YoungArts award winners receive financial awards and the chance to learn from notable artists such as Debbie Allen, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Germane Barnes, Wynton Marsalis, Salman Rushdie and Mickalene Thomas.

YoungArts award winners are further eligible for exclusive opportunities, including: nomination as a U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts, one of the nation’s highest honors for high school seniors; a wide range of creative development support including fellowships, residencies and awards; professional development programs offered in partnership with major institutions nationwide; additional financial support; and access to YoungArts Post, a private, online portal for YoungArts artists to connect, share their work and discover new opportunities.

Past YoungArts award winners include Daniel Arsham, Terence Blanchard, Camille A. Brown, Timothée Chalamet, Viola Davis, Amanda Gorman, Judith Hill, Jennifer Koh, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Andrew Rannells, Desmond Richardson and Hunter Schafer.

For more information, visit youngarts.org.

Join the conversation Instagram @youngarts YouTube @youngarts Facebook /youngartsfoundation Twitter @youngarts

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Notable Winners

*

U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts YoungArts Guest Artist

†

Doug Aitken

Daniel Arsham

Hernan Bas

Terence Blanchard

Doug Blush

Camille A. Brown

Timothée Chalamet

Gerald Clayton

Viola Davis

Allegra Goodman

Amanda Gorman

Judith Hill

Jennifer Koh

Sarah Lamb

Tarell Alvin McCraney

Jason Moran

Eric Owens

Billy Porter

Andrew Rannells

Desmond Richardson

1997 Theater †

1986 Dance*†

Elizabeth Roe

Hunter Schafer

Kerry Washington

Chris Young

1986 Visual Arts†

1984 Film†

1983 Theater

1994 Classical Music*

1988 Voice†

2000 Classical Music*†

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1999 Visual Arts†

1997 Dance*†

1985 Writing *

1998 Dance*†

1987 Theater

2017 Design Arts

1996 Visual Arts

2013 Theater

2015 & 2016 Writing

1999 Theater †

1994 Theater †

1980 Classical Music†

2002 Jazz*†

2002 Voice†

1993 Jazz†

2003 Voice*†

Guest Artists Derrick Adams

Debbie Allen

Germane Barnes

Mikhail Baryshnikov

Endia Beal

Ignacio Berroa

Ron Carter

Ayodele Casel

Lisa Fischer

Renée Fleming

Frank Gehry

Nikki Giovanni

Marika Hughes

Bill T. Jones

Naeem Khan

Dr. Joan Morgan

José Parlá

Rosie Perez

Paula Scher

Jeanine Tesori

Hank Willis Thomas

Mickalene Thomas

B.D. Wong

Jeffrey Zeigler

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2023 Guest Artists Chip Abbott Dance Coach Leticia Bajuyo Visual Arts National Selection Panel Jenni Barber Theater National Selection Panel Germane Barnes Design Arts Guest Artist Letty Bassart Interdisciplinary Guest Artist Ignacio Berroa Jazz Guest Artist Richard Blanco Writing Guest Artist Corinne May Botz Photography National Selection Panel Chair, 1995 Photography & U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts Kimberley Browning Film National Selection Panel Daveed Buzaglo Voice Discipline Coordinator, 2012 Voice Elinor Carucci Photography National Selection Panelist Devin Caserta Visual Arts Discipline Coordinator, 2006 Visual Arts Christopher Castellani Writing National Selection Panelist, 1990 & 1992 Writing Robert Chambers Visual Arts National Selection Panelist Victoria Collado Writing Guest Artist Len Cook Interdisciplinary Guest Artist

Clinton Edward Dance Discipline Coordinator Dave Eggar Interdisciplinary Guest Artist, 1987 Classical Music & U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts Diana Eusebio Design Arts Discipline Coordinator, 2016 Design Arts & U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts Jason Ferrante Voice National Selection Panelist Vanessa Garcia Writing National Selection Panelist Gino Grenek Dance Coach La Tanya Hall Voice National Selection Panelist Rosie Herrera Dance National Selection Panelist Robert Hill Dance National Selection Panelist David Hilliard Photography Guest Artist MaryAnn Hu Theater National Selection Panelist Baba Israel Interdisciplinary Guest Artist Javon Jackson Jazz National Selection Panelist, 1983 Jazz Catherine Jimenez Photography National Selection Panelist Jlin Classical Music and Jazz Guest Artist Loni Johnson Visual Arts National Selection Panelist

Nicole Cooley Writing National Selection Panelist, 1984 Writing & U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts

Lucy Jones Design Arts Guest Artist

Lucia Cuba Design Arts National Selection Panelist

Tanya Kalmanovitch Classical Music National Selection Panelist

Machine Dazzle Design Arts Guest Artist

Dariush Kashani Theater National Selection Panelist

Rick Delgado Film National Selection Panelist, 1992 Film

Yashua Klos Visual Arts National Selection Panelist

Edouard Duval-Carrié Visual Arts Guest Artist

Joan Lader Theater and Voice Coach

Kenny Easter Dance Coach

Pascal Le Boeuf Classical Music National Selection Panelist, 2004 Classical Music & Jazz

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Yvonne Lin Design Arts National Selection Panelist

Gerard Schwarz Classical Music Guest Artist

Marina Lomazov Classical Music National Selection Panelist

Vernon Scott Dance National Selection Panelist

Taylor Mac Theater Guest Artist

Jean Shin Visual Arts Guest Artist, YoungArts Trustee, 1990 Winner in Visual Arts & U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts

Russell Malone Jazz Guest Artist Jeremy Manasia Jazz National Selection Panelist Arsimmer McCoy Interdisciplinary Guest Artist Johnathan McCullough Voice Guest Artist Alex Mediate Photography Discipline Coordinator, 2016 Photography Hollis Meminger Film National Selection Panelist Aaron Miller Classical Music Discipline Assistant, 1998 Classical Music Dr. Joan Morgan Writing Guest Artist , YoungArts Trustee Nicole Mujica Theater Discipline Coordinator Shamel Pitts Interdisciplinary Guest Artist, 2003 Dance

Risa Steinberg Dance Coach Grace Talusan Writing National Selection Panelist Nadhi Thekkek Dance Coach Demondrae Thurman Classical Music National Selection Panelist Cristy Trabada Film Discipline Coordinator, 2016 Film Chat Travieso Design Arts National Selection Panelist, 2003 Visual Arts & U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts Adeze Wilford Curator Tom Williams Jazz National Selection Panelist, 1980 Jazz BD Wong Theater Guest Artist

Marcus Quiniones Theater Coach Noel Quiñones Writing Guest Artist Christian Reátegui Jazz Discipline Coordinator Chire Regans Visual Arts Guest Artist Christell Roach Writing Discipline Coordinator, 2015 Writing Alejandro Rodriguez Interdisciplinary Guest Artist Shamie Royston Jazz Guest Artist Matthew Saldivar Theater National Selection Panel Chris Sampson Voice National Selection Panelist Marlon Saunders Voice Guest Artist Reid Schlegel Design Arts Guest Artist *as of 12/14/2022

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Special Thanks to Educators

YoungArts would like to acknowledge the following educators, named by the 2023 award winners. We can only do the work we do to identify, recognize and award outstanding students in the arts with the support and effort of educators, teachers, instructors, coaches, homeschoolers and arts practitioners.

Leslie Long Julia Gregory Amy Menas Tony Chirinos Cassandra Claude Linda Bon Jan Sloman Josie Walsh Catherine Cho Judith Switek Sarah Blackman Brian Wuttke Mark Churchill Philip Neal Peter Valera Gussie Danches Frank Almond Alexander Blake Paramita Maitra Nicole Croy Jeremy Lundquist Misha Vitenson Dennis Grantz Joseph Elliot Danielle Palorames Howard Schott Rebecca Limerick Anupama Srivastava Kathleen TieriTon Marc Ganzglass Emily Mohn-Slate Preston Pierce Terry Patrick Harris Joe Sniegocki Jason Anderson Jennifer Parchesky Carrie Hill-Leech Christine Baker Jamel Booth Dennis Hodges Leah Stahl Angie Cohen Alexis Lambrou Jim Walker Laura Saggers Hye-Jin Kim Don Zentz Julius Tolentino Ann Setzer Timur Rubinshteyn Zena Ilyashov Mark Hilt Victoria Mushkatkol Ayako Oshima Cameron Shim Wang Lu Doug Blush Yoheved Kaplinsky Glenda Timmerman Mr. Will Lagos Victoria Lee Christopher Sabocik Nathan Hughes

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Erik Clayton jihee Kim Melinda Ronayne Jennifer Young Mahlstedt Leo Park Theresa Shovlin Renato Biribin Joshua Murray Robert Beaser David Higgs Zachary Steele Chanel DaSilva Enrique Toral Ning An Nicole Cusick Gabriel Berent Nealya Brunson Peter LaBerge Roxane Carrasco Kimberly Waid Sam Boutris Clara Kim Dave Eggar Reb Limerick Daniel Dona Aisha Sidibe Valerie Anthony Aaron Orullian Guinea Bennett-Price Ludmilla Lupu Brian Carter Gretchen Teague Cameron Stymeist Chris Leslie Kirk Averitt Valentina Gottlieb Daniel O’Reilly Rowe Lynelle Smith Scott Hunt Brice McCasland Greg Sinacori Nicholas Brust Eddie Brown Chad Bloom Hannah Harris Hillary Hogue He Zhan Catherine Payne Martin Beaver Ilana Vered Mala Tsantilas Branndi Lewis Victor Smalley Annelle Delfs Robin Sharp Kelly MacKenzie-Thurley Elizabeth Bishop Christine Abraham Christine Moore Vassallo Ernesto Montes Igor Resnianski Anna Polonyi Jessica Henry Enid Gonzalez

Adam Casey Fallis Ya-Fei Chuang Natasha Pasternak Margaret Clark Molly Schad Katie Viqueira Sydney Carlson Jim Gasior Ryan Meehan Vania Saleem Ida Saki Katie Barnard Bradley Barrett Jaren Feeley Dornell Carr Yusha Sorzano Jeremy Manasia Bethany Pettigrew Lee Akamichi Angelia Perkins Marie Gaschler Jennifer Sandusky Hilerie Klein Rensi Alan rossi Joshua Lawrence Ashley Jones Renna Moore-Edwards Dr. Katherine Jolly Courtney Kaiser-Sandler Yuanan Cheng Inyoung Seoung Mark Gonder Mariné Ter-Kazaryan Caleb Paull Dan Perez Leah Stahl Mike Hyland Yi-Fang Huang Dimitri Murrath Emil Khudyev Stephen Scarpulla Mary Lynch VanderKolk Dan Dery David Morgan George Garzone Kristy Modia Marion Feldman Keenan McKenzie Jim Ketch Kristina Zakrzewski Tony Braithwaite Sarah Koo Spencer Nilsen Alison Mahovsky Rebekah Binford David T. Little Samuel Cheney Zhao Wei James Moore mark small Armine Karapetian Donato Kathy Cammett Brittany Cavallaro Shannon Cassano

Elaine Douvas Megan Buckland Jane Jingyu Zhang Desiree Ruhstrat Gregory Wilkin Benjamin Smolen Jonathan Koh Jinjoo Jeon Jinyoung Park Kim Lucas Aleman Julianna Evans Melinda Rodriguez Cynthia Hughen Adam Smyla Salwa Rizkalla Katherine Needleman Jonathan Weil Carol Wincenc Alan Semerdjian Josh Wood Vidal Rivera Ayako Oshima Neidich Sharon Neff Connie Chung Tatiana Kasatsky Charles duChateau Christina Hendershaw Courtney Kaiser-Sandler David Driggers Joseph Cypressi Nancy Weems Cody Toscano Teresa Blume Allen Anderson Marine Ter-kazaryan Matt McKagan Kate Doak Daniel Felsenfeld Julia Krohn Magaret Reges Marjorie Lee Nicole Gingrich Chris Battistone Myung Kim Tracy Fordham Elizabeth Alexander Hans Boepple He-Lyun Chung Megan Barrera Kristin Keenan Warren Sneed Madison Hicks Brent Stater Lovell Bradford Jenny Cresswell Dmitri Vorobiev Ashley Clarke Robert “Jake” Jacobs Cathy Burnett Melissa Clark Steven Kirby John Walcutt Tyler Hanes James Gasior

Eric Cruz Jess Hendricks Karen Bennett Marcus Brown Rob Denien Scott Hunt Jennifer Hayghe Jana Ballard Susan Chadwick Charles Ruggiero Judie Jackowitz Diego Guiterrez Emily Cinquemani Jenny Gifford Marshelia Tillman Ann Setzer Jaqueline Bayne Vlada Kysselova Leslie Denning Aaron Orullian Linda Woolley Janaki Sivaraman Heidi Serrano Sophie Arbuckle Joe Kemper Michael Pellera Douglas Marriner Mika Perrine Corrie Witt Cameron Stymeist Cathy Burnett Brittany Fegans Hideko Amano William Griswold Eric Hankin Shanpatick Davis Valerie Adelung Lisa Jepson Hung-Kuan Chen Jamond Mccoy Gil Domb Scott Cmiel Leanna Kirchoff Kristi Manno Kevin Blancq Linda Hallman-Darr Peter Horvath Lisa Cotie Jacob Dogias Pat Whiteman Nicole Quintana Bob Sloan Dominick Farinacci Michaela Florio Joshua Lawlor Divya Shanker Steve Watson Amanda Blaikie Albert Blackstone James Dragovich James Bohanek Matt Daniels Courtney Kaiser-Sandler David Wong

Bob Hackett Darcy Parker Bruce Karyna McGlynn Amelia DeMayo Lorraine Helvick Hali Kessler Philip Ruiz Kristen Summers Lee Lobenhofer Greg Petito Emilio Mesa Darren Dalton Nicole Pedroche Audra Scott Heather Smith Matt Slocum Taylor Eigsti Tsuna Sakamoto Eddie Severn Cristina Pinton Veda Zuponcic Ian Krouse Anna Dunn Eugene Watanabe Grace Wall Ira Nepus Kevin Gianino Beth Rota Yulia IIina Phinny Kiyomura John Tranter Angie Sijun Lou Susan Deaver Masao Kawasaki Daniel Rotem Sherry Insley Hans Jensen Joan Kwuon Tanya Darby Paul Carman John Reynolds Bruce Boiney Glenn Sims Tawnya Kuzia Michael Powers Tawnya Kuzia Christa Smutek Chirino Jesse Miriam Stahl Patrick Owen Maggie Anderson Audra Scott Sujatha Srinivasan Tom Dickinson Raymond Roberts Karl Resnik John Hauer Lorraine Nubar Kristin Heller Bob McHeffey Jason Goldstein Tracy Selina Chan Jeanine Boutiere Lin Ma David Badgley Amy Keys Adam Rocha Brandon Berrett Jacqueline Porter Robert Wilson Jerad Lippi

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Rose Santos Julian Martin Tonya Holloway Bob Deboo Brian Bromberg Lesley Lee Michelle Hayes Li Lin Alexandra Pacheco Garcia Daniel Foster Jennifer Turbyfill Ying Chi Tang Stephen Scott Scarpulla Jim Falletta Mariya Kudyakova Jeremy Lum Roza Yoder Paul Frucht Elizabeth Chang Stephen Crawford Dianne Sleek Jeanie Chu Sharon Mann Vardan Gasparyan Eric Lifland Leo Krubsack Dann Zinn Richard Hill Rachel Turk Michael Lewin Julie Hom-Mandell Sasha Starcevich Kevin Garcia-Hettinger Zeping Cai Robert Lipsett Yi-Heng Yang Brian Peter Eric Day Derrick Gronewold Adriana Manfredi Yuka Fukuda Angela Apte Marream Krollos Harel Gietheim Crystal Garcia Elizabeth Faidley Peter Barsch Mark Kyungsoo Bias Bart Marantz Kevin Turner Matthew Helton Dat Bui Catherine Karoly Elmer Su Maksim Shtrykov Jason Lin Yiming Wu Michael Hernandez Yiheng Yang Ms. Elyse Mirto Ted Sugata Natalie Uehara Anne Talman Steve Kronauer Levi Saelua Cynthia Van Maanen Sean Schulze Bob Himmelberger Brenda Huang Shauna Markey Lukas Janata

Bradley Akers Jeff Chang Tadej Brdnik Peck Allmond Silas Hoover Brian Scanlon Birgit Fioravante Susan Hodo Carol Chuang Leydis Sanchez Catherine Keen Joel Chapman Mary Nessinger Reynaldo Bode Jacqueline Reynoso John Perry Jessica Lipman Zachary Tilkens Jing Qiao Madi Hicks Hasu Patel Haley Heckethorn Jeffrey Smith Alison Collins Josh Meyer Elise Payne Blake Elliot John Riley Dave Pollack Jonathan Leathwood Jennifer Gilbert Marcus Ong Ryan Quinn Dr. Nicholaus Yee Daniel Reiter Alice Ju Cyrus Beroukhim Ken Radnofsky Jeff Clark Yousun Chung Richard McGowan Catherine Tousignant Michael Boitz Klaudia Szlachta David DeVoto Paul Cigan Nathan Eklund David Matchim Molly Carr Michael Rosemond Seungho Choi Vicky Wang Victor Kasatsky Manuel Sosa Katie Thoma Theresa Shovlin John Weems Pablo Infante Ryan Ellefsen John Catoliato Dave Monk Kaitlin Botts Rob Blaney Stacy Rapoport Manny Perez Katherine Powers Martin Langford Kathleen Gavin Nathaniel Baker Will Swenson Tatum Greenblatt

Martin Bakari Stephanie Dorian Smith Laurie Kanyok Sanseria Murray Keith Perelli Winston Choi Piper Ward Mary Ann Swerdfeger Irene Jalenti Katharine Branch Ed Paolantonio Jason Gillman Gina Buntz Anita Sivaraman Hyun Jung Joo James Donahue Jesse Chirino Aaron Thacker Elizabeth Honeysett Justin Cashingino TIm Washecka Anthony Gozzo Janette Gillis Jemal McNeil John-Michael D’Haviland Brendan Jennings Anne Cooper Kim Nazarian Pushkala Gopal Marie Jureit-Beamish Jessica Etzel John Corwine Sarah Gibson David Hibbard Kristin Howell Donivan Barton Gregory Mills Rebecca Portnoy Charlotte Littlehales Tyler Henderson Rufus Choi Nicole Jacobs-Licht Madison Holtze Matthew Harris Kathryn Matherne Michelle Stafford David Scalise Joseph Rutkowski James Millar Sihao He Kyra Mihalski Marshall Hawkins Jessica Woodman Dan Rowe Matt Helton Wilhelmina Smith Tony Thomas Jeffrey Miller Landon Baumguard David Maquilin Todd Lanam Cynthia Sanner Ariel Allal Andre Huang Lena Grozman George and Ashley Birkadze Lindsey Gough Marija Ilic Elizabeth Garrett Dan Miller Leslie Eames-Pierce

Robert Dorries Zac Mans Itzhak Perlman Steven Tenenbom John Walz Mariaelana Ruiz Margarita Nuller Andrew Lyman Camiah Mingorance Rachael Guma Ronald Leonard Erica Von Kleist Lois Hunter Emily Freudigman

National YoungArts Week Supporters Cornelia T. Bailey

Foundation

Sidney & Florence Stern

Family Foundation

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We’re honored to support YoungArts.

Caring for the community starts with providing support for the people who live in it. So we’re proud to work with YoungArts. Together, we can inspire and build better lives and communities.

Truist.com Truist Bank, Member FDIC. © 2022 Truist Financial Corporation. Truist, the Truist logo and Truist Purple are service marks of Truist Financial Corporation.

YoungArts Supporters

Thank you to YoungArts’ most generous donors who make programming throughout the year possible.

Micky & Madeleine Arison Family Foundation

Sarah Arison & Thomas Wilhelm

Jeffrey Davis & Michael Miller

Jay Franke & David Herro

Agnes Gund

Michi & Charles Jigarjian / 7G Foundation

Sidney and Florence Stern Family Foundation

Sandra & Tony Tamer

Bruce & Ellie Taub

Leslie & Jason Kraus Steven & Oxana Marks

PRADA

Support for YoungArts programs is provided by the Miami-Dade County Tourist Development Council, Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; and the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Arts and Culture, the Florida Council on Arts and Culture, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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The best investments are the ones we all appreciate.

Northern Trust is proud to support YoungArts. For more than 130 years, we’ve been meeting our clients’ financial needs while nurturing a culture of caring and a commitment to invest in the communities we serve. Our goal is to find you perfect harmony.

TO LEARN MORE VISIT

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Board of Trustees as of December 2022

Sarah Arison, Board Chair Richard Kohan, President of The Board Natalie Diggins, Secretary Richard S. Wagman†, Treasurer Derrick Adams Doug Blush* Hampton Carney Linda Coll Brian Cullinan Kristy Edmunds Bernardo Fort-Brescia Jay Franke * Danielle Garno, Esq. Rosie Gordon-Wallace Michi Matter Jigarjian Jason Kraus Steven Marks, Esq Lauren Matthiesen.

Michael McElroy * Dr. Joan Morgan John J. O’Neil, Esq. Glenda Pedroso Victoria Rogers Jean Shin * Zuzanna Szadkowski * Sandra Tamer Joseph M. Thompson Maurice M. Zarmati Trustees Emeritus Armando M. Codina Meryl Comer Justin DiCioccio Agnes Gund John J. Kauffman Dr. Ronald C. McCurdy Dr. Eduardo J. Padrón Desmond Richardson * Marcus Sheridan

* †

YoungArts award winner Trustee Emeritus

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We believe in encouraging the growth of the artist of the future

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We believe a world that embraces artists is vital to our humanity.

The artists of tomorrow need professional and creative development support today.

With the help of our community, YoungArts offers artists the tools they need to pursue a life in the arts, including a lifetime of training, funding, mentorship and community.

Make a contribution today.

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