Irina sat gingerly on the fluffy gray computer chair. She loved to e-mail her best friend, Maxine, and play trivia games. “Meow!” Irina looked down. Her white kitty jumped aboard the computer table. Irina laughed. “Wanna play too, Annie?” Annie nuzzled the computer. “Irina! Check the chore chart, young lady!” Irina rose from the chair. She walked to the chore chart. Her name was listed, for cleaning her closet, at seven AM. It was nine Am. “Mom, I was on the compu- . . .” Mom cut her off. “Chores come before fun and games, Irina. Now, shut off the Oscar and clean your closet.” Irina glanced at the Oscar. The game list was on. Just then, Annie slipped, and pressed the mouse. A trivia game of the show “Perfect Angel” appeared on the screen. “Mom, it’s just a few lousy shirts, skirts, and pants! Besides, a trivia game is on for “Perfect Angel!” She arranged her headbands by brand names: satiny to cloth, vinyl to plastic Mom looked frustrated. “Irina Jess Lashoka! Turn off that darn Oscar, or I will do it myself!” Irina didn’t budge, so Mom, filled with rage, went to the Oscar and shut it off. Irina stormed upstairs. She could smell turkey roasting, and biscuits. She went to her closet and sighed heavily. “Stupid closet,” she muttered. She took a shirt and flung it on the bed. “Hey!” Irina cried. My old paddleball! I lost it about a year ago!” She dug around and found her old sweater, toy boxcar, stapler, and colored paper clip box. She straightened her clothes and picked up her paddleball. “Irina! The Oscar’s free!” Irina glanced at her messy dress drawer, then thought about the computer. Drawer. Oscar. Drawer. Oscar. She went to her dress drawer and straightened them. She looked in her scrunchy drawer. “That looks messy,” Irina said aloud. “So does that headband rack. And my beanie babies!” She arranged all her scrunchies by color: dark to bright. She arranged her headbands by brand names: satiny to cloth, vinyl to plastic. She arranged her beanie babies by animal, by alphabetical order. She looked at her room, which was sparkling clean. She went downstairs, and Mom checked her room. “See, honey? When your room is so clean like this, it’s enjoyable.” Irina smiled as she sat by the computer. She smiled again. The trivia game for “Perfect Angel” was still on. Susan Decker, 9Eau Claire, Wisconsin Hannah Richman, 12Kittanning, Pennsylvania
Family
Song of a Wanderer
They say guilt is a staggering burden, but I think change is the heaviest load of all. All my life I had faced it head on, and I’m surprised that I was older when I finally decided that all of the wandering wasn’t fair. I still remember driving into the tiny, midwestern town in Iowa. The sky looked troubled and angry, and I recall that it looked formidable and opposing. It was November, and I was sure that the bleak landscape would soon be covered with a blanket of sparkling, white snow. I sat with my brother Rob in the back of the old VW van. We were both sullen and cross, angry with our parents for dragging us to yet another town. We glared at them from the back seat as they bubbled over at every little thing like ecstatic children at a birthday party. “Look at that adorable little house!” “It’s so darling!” “And all the little shops! Oh, how exciting!” I had heard it many times before as we entered a new place when roaming about the country on my parents’ vagabond trip. Our vagabond trip. They called themselves wanderers, but I referred to them as middle-aged hippies. This was the thirty-second town I had lived in throughout my life. I was thirteen, adaptable and, most importantly, accepting. Too accepting. Inside I was sick of the traveling and the wandering. I wanted a place of my own. I still remember driving into the tiny, midwestern town in Iowa My parents loved the traveling. They had been real hippies back in the sixties. They had attended rowdy rallies, smoked one or two joints in the hope of reaching an astounding level of intellect and insight, and had tramped around Woodstock in baggy bell-bottoms. They had married at twenty, gone to college, earned degrees in philosophy, and hopped in the old van. Thus began their life on the road. I was born at their sixteenth stop, in a tiny little town in Vermont in a red barn filled with fragrant hay. It was October, and my mother says that the trees were all boasting their brilliant fall colors of red, orange, yellow and brown, creating a dazzling sight visible through the open door. She says that I was born with my eyes wide open, as if the vibrant colors shocked me into silence. That’s why I’m so observant, she says, because I was born gaping at the world in awe and wonder. My mother was born in a New England state too, New York. She was born in the Catskill Mountains where the air is crisp and fresh. I went there once to visit my grandparents, and spent most of the time running through the little town of Cooperstown, marveling at the clear air and the abundant wildlife of squirrels, deer and countless others. I’ve never lived in a house; the van was always home to us. We slept and ate in the back of the van where my father took out the seats and nailed in a soft couch, an old wooden table, two cots, a refrigerator and a stove. I never knew what I was missing out on until I went over to a friend’s house when we were camped out in Alabama. It wasn’t a Georgian mansion or a Victorian painted lady, just a normal, suburban house. But it made my heart ache to see each person’s room, the tiled bathroom, the orderly kitchen. The privacy of a house made me want one desperately. I saw plenty of other houses. I saw cheap duplexes in Newark, enormous mansions in Beverly Hills, unoriginal ranches in Nebraska and Wyoming, beach houses in North Carolina and Maryland, even long houses in Washington State. I wanted all of them. As we drove past charming bungalows and farmhouses I grew miserable. I knew that I would forever envy the people who lived in them, and would always be jealous of those that lived here simply because they had a home. I hadn’t wanted to leave our last home in Wisconsin. It was in the northern part of the state, a place called Boulder Junction. There were thick forests of tall, straight pines that stood like a regiment of dignified soldiers. There was a main street of prim shops and little houses. The school was small, the people were friendly, and finally I was accepted as an individual. I had friends, I had good grades, and, for once, was content with who I was. And then my parents announced that we would move again. “We haven’t been to Iowa yet,” they explained. “We ought to experience the sights and sounds of the Hawkeye State!” But Rob was on many of the athletic teams, and I was on the honor roll and the student council. We cried and sulked for three days until Mom and Dad pulled us into the van and started up the engine. “Look at those little buildings!” “Aren’t they precious!” “This is such a darling town, don’t you think?” Mom turned and smiled her bubbly smile at us. We just stared back. Mom’s smile faded and she turned back to the window to gawk at something else. We stopped at a dumpy little place for Chinese take-out for dinner. I squinted at the menu. Though we had always taken out Chinese, McDonald’s or Pizza Hut for meals, I had never become familiar with the exotic names on the Chinese menus. I pointed at a dish and held it out for the waiter to see. “I don’t know how to pronounce this name,” I told him apologetically. He mumbled something, scribbled onto his pad, and shuffled into the kitchen to get the food. We walked back to the van with our little white cartons of chow mein, dumplings, beef and broccoli, or whatever we had decided upon. “This is good!” Dad exclaimed after tasting his chop suey. “We’ll have to come here more often.” I sighed. I had heard
A Winner
“Once upon a time—no, no, that’s not right . . .” Laura chewed on her thumbnail and pouted. “Gosh, I just can’t seem to get this right!” Finally, she threw down her pencil, crumpled up the paper and jammed it into the plastic trash can in the corner of her room. Smacking her forehead with a sweaty palm, Laura threw herself on her bed and punched her pillow. “How am I supposed to become the world’s greatest novelist, let alone the winner of this writing contest, if I can’t even start the dumb story?!” she questioned her tattered teddy bear, Henry. In exasperation, Laura rolled onto the floor and stared up at the chipped ceiling of her room. Smothered in the sticky embrace of the stiff quiet in her room, Laura’s mind filled with cloudy memories of the past. Tiptoeing in, they seemed to fill in the chinks of her brain connecting her to the world, and she was lost to reality. Images of a pleasant, smiling face and bubbling laughter flickered in Laura’s mind, as if she was watching her past on a movie screen. That’s when she saw it—the face. Like a dangerous beast, it haunted her dreams, serving as a token of what she had lost. Choking on a sob, Laura clung to her teddy bear. Blinking, she returned to the present. Slowly rising to her feet, she quietly padded over to her night table, and tugged open the wooden drawer hesitantly. Rummaging inside for what seemed like hours, but was only a matter of mere minutes, Laura’s shaking fingers clasped what she was hunting for—the photograph. Revealing the picture, she stroked the figure lovingly. “Dad,” she whispered. “Dad . . .” Revealing the picture, she stroked the figure lovingly. Dad,” she whispered. Dad . . . ” Suddenly, her mother’s voice bit into the haziness surrounding Laura. “Laur, hon? Laura! It’s lunchtime! C’mon, sweetie, I have to leave soon! Laura, lunch!” Sensing the impatience in her mother’s summoning, Laura quickly stuck the picture back into the drawer and scampered down the steps. Sliding into a seat at the kitchen table, Laura drummed her fingers on the table as she inhaled the delicious smell of the grilled cheese baking in the toaster. Quickly gobbling up every last morsel of the sandwich, Laura listened to her mom tell her of the appointment that she had to run off to and that “she hoped Laura wouldn’t mind if she had to fix herself some dinner and she would be back early tomorrow morning.” “You know, there’s canned soup in the cupboard, honey,” Mrs. Hanley called from the front hall as she shouldered her purse and flipped up her sunglasses. “Be a love and take out the trash, will you sweetie? Oh, and don’t forget you do have homework to do even though it’s Saturday. Laurie — don’t spend too much time on that writing contest thing, you know just as well as I do that you have plenty of more important things to be spending your time on. Well, I’ll try and call when I get there, OK? Bye, sweetie!” Sighing, Laura cleared her place and rinsed off the dishes, after watching her mother’s beat-up station wagon rumble off into the distance. Typical mother, she thought disgustedly. Nonetheless, she did as she had been instructed to and emptied the trash out into the bin at the back of the house. Back inside her cozy room, Laura kicked off her tennis shoes and plucked the clothespin off her nose, pulling up the broken blinds on her window. Once again sitting silently at her desk, Laura stared solemnly at the picture of her dad that she had placed gingerly down in front of herself. Studying the man’s unique features, she decided she had a lot in common with her dad—the same wispy chestnut hair and twinkling green eyes. In fact, looking closer, Laura could see she and her father had the same smile, creasing at the corners and slightly lopsided. Laura could remember that smile from a long time ago—at her third birthday party when her father had dressed up like a clown and performed silly tricks; and at the beach when she was eight, when together they had built a tall, stately sand castle, crowned with a small stick and soiled piece of fish netting. Chuckling to herself, Laura recalled the time that her father had spilled an entire orange soda on his jeans on purpose to match Laura’s own when she had wet her pants. Smiling sadly at the picture, Laura felt that hole in her heart, that missing piece in the puzzle. True, it was a corner piece, hard to accommodate without. But, nevertheless, as Laura’s father had taught her, everything is possible. How many times had he said, time and again, no one’s a winner without making the effort? And Laura wanted so much to be her father’s daughter—to be the winner that she knew he had in his heart. Sharing the same secret passion, Laura and her father had always thought alike and acted alike. Now he was merely a whisper on the wind. But now Laura realized that it was up to her to carry on that special passion and bring out the real winner inside her that was bottled up. These selfish tears she had cried from time to time were the cork that kept her true self inside. And now, she was ready to unplug the cork. Filled with new inspiration and soaring spirits, Laura picked up her pencil and a clean stack of paper, and wrote. And wrote. And wrote. In fact, she set up her flashlight and was still busy scribbling well into the night. At last, when the first golden purple streaks of the sunrise were painted across the sky’s easel, Laura set down her pencil once again and sat back into her pillows to read what she had written. What her hand had written, with a mind of
