Deep breath, deep breath. I look straight into the mirror. “Hello,” I say to the fake audience. “My name is Henry,” I sigh, shaking my head. “Hello, my name is Henry and I am going to show you what would now be called a modern miracle.” About three hours every day are dedicated to magic practice. I drop to the floor and pull open my magic drawer. The sides are lined with tons of decks of cards. In the middle to the right I keep all my sponge balls. Then on the wall closest to me rests my set of linking rings. I pick out two decks of cards and five sponge balls and place them in my inside jacket pocket, then I join my parents in the living room. *          *          * As we ride in the taxi I talk to my mom about my plans to perform tonight. “I think I’m going to perform tonight,” I tell my mom. “Really, for who?” she asks. “Uncle Doug,” I say, looking at my feet. “Remember last time, when I failed every trick I did for him?” She looks at me and I bring my head up. “I know you’re going to be fine and he will like it whether the trick works or not,” she says. I nod my head slightly, but inside I am having my doubts. *          *          * As I step into my cousins’ apartment a waft of chicken, brisket, and mashed potatoes washes over me. I walk into the apartment and take off my shoes. My aunt starts walking towards us with a large smile on her face. She comes up and hugs me and I relax a little, but then when I see my uncle my hand tightens around my box of cards. I walk up to my uncle and give him a high five. “H!” he says loudly. “How are you doin’?” “Now please pick a card” “OK,” I say, a little halfheartedly. “How is school?” “Pretty good, it’s a little hard in a new school, but I’m adjusting to the new standards.” “Awesome! Walking between classes, right?” “Yeah.” “Soccer?” “Definitely! I scored a hat trick in my last game and we won five to two!” “Whoa!! You remember my story about my coaching years?” We both laugh, remembering his crazy stories. I relax and wander back to my dad, who is talking with my cousin Scott. We all move into the living room and everyone starts to chat. I see my chance to walk up to Doug and perform my trick, but then I falter. My past flashes in front of my eyes, seeing the cards drop and all the failures that have happened in the past. I tell myself that I will be fine, but my mind tells me different. Against my will I start walking towards him and I engage in conversation. Soon, before I know it, I’ve brought my deck of cards out and he is waiting. I snap out of it. “Sorry,” I say, “now please pick a card.” As he pulls it out of the deck my hands start to tremble, but I force them to be steady. He looks at his card and I instruct him to put it back anywhere he desires. “Now,” I say, beginning to recall the steps, “you had a free choice to pick any card you wanted.” He nods. “Then you replaced it anywhere you desired.” He nods again. I breathe in and out. Out of the corner of my eye I see one of my cousins flick on a light. The orange bright light pierces my eyes, burning down on me as if putting me on the spot. I go on about how I need to find his card. I gasp and my uncle gives me a strange look. I force a smile and continue. But it’s not the same. Now I’m feeling an overwhelming terror. There was a specific order of the cards that could not be disturbed, and I had missed one final step in the order. Now the cards sitting on the table are glaring at me as if another person lived inside them, telling me I was a failure. I shift my weight and continue with my patter until the first reveal. I throw the cards concealed in my hand onto the table. I point to the letter and suit on the two cards that match up to make his card and a look of surprise appears on his face. I go through the rest and I wince when he lands on the card that should be his. I close my eyes, my face burning, and gather up my cards. I completely ignore my uncle. I imagine my him shaking his head, his expression annoyed. I imagine him asking what should’ve happened—a magician’s nightmare. I start to walk away when I hear him try to speak. I interrupt him. “I know it was bad, I’m sorry I wasted your time.” A questioning look appears on his face. “What are you talking about, that was great!” My eyes get wide with surprise. Tons of questions race through my head. “What? But I messed up. Your card wasn’t the one I threw down.” “It doesn’t matter if you messed up. I loved the performance, and it was pretty cool when you made those two cards appear that matched mine. How did you do that anyway?” *          *          * From then on I performed for my uncle countless times in a breeze. Now I can talk to him about anything calmly because I know that I don’t have to be perfect. Progress not perfection. Henry Allan, 11New York, New York Andrew Cao, 12Freehold, New Jersey

It was 7:32 a.m., my hair was getting frizzy, the fog outside my car window was limiting my vision to a few scrawny bushes, and my stomach was churning. “Hey,” my dad called from the front seat, “you OK, Pade?” “Yup,” I lied, because it wasn’t really a question, but conversation. He was satisfied and turned around. I turned up the volume of the song I was listening to on my iPod and turned around too. I stared out the window, making out the faint silhouette of pine trees in the distance. Distracting myself from the thoughts building up in my mind, I nibbled my ham-and-cheese sandwich. I wasn’t hungry. Suddenly, snap! The thought in the back of my mind popped out at me. All I could think about was, what would happen next? It was like in a cartoon when someone opens a closet full of junk and everything falls on the character. Suddenly I was drowning in questions. The only problem was that there was no way to gasp for air. My mind was spinning and the new plastic smell of the car made me nauseous. In the distance I could see a Hogwarts-type campus approaching. It was my sister’s. She was entering her first year of college at Vassar College. Emma (my sister) smiled at me from the front seat but I could tell it was a fake smile. “You OK?” I asked. “Yeah,” she replied, with the same tone I had lied to my dad with. We both knew she was thinking about something, but I didn’t know what it was. “Oh I remember that day!” Emma reminisced “Can I help you with something?” I said. I was trying to sound helpful, but I ended up sounding like that obnoxious teenager who works at Duane Reade right before you ask her where the Band-Aids are. Emma clearly didn’t notice and just replied with, “Nope, why?” She didn’t expect an answer (even though it was a question) so I just said, “Nothing.” Emma turned her head towards the window and so did I, but my eyes widened when I realized that Vassar was right in front of us! The car slowed and I paused my song. I could hear college girls screaming, “Honk if you love Vassar!” There was an old brick building glaring at me through the car window. Surrounding it were small bushes and skinny sidewalks that seemed to twist and curve in unnecessary ways. The sky was the color of a slimy unwashed windshield. Cold droplets of dew clung to blades of grass and mist floated through the air aimlessly. I took my time getting out of the car, slowly stretching, making sure not to go too fast. My dad seemed happy but his eyes were anxious. This is it, I thought to myself while I exited the car. Rain dribbled onto my shoulder and I pouted. Bearing a smile I suggested we go unpack Emma’s stuff. I didn’t know that I would need to carry anything. I ended up unpacking some of Emma’s pictures, and I found a picture of us in the rain when I was five and she was twelve. We both had brightly colored jackets on, left over from past visitors who had probably forgotten their jackets and my mom was making use of them. “Oh I remember that day!” Emma reminisced. She was sitting on her bed now, observing her room. I almost giggled, remembering playing in the rain and dirt that day. When it rained, worms would come up to the surface of the ground and you could find them and play with them anywhere. Emma taught me that. The weather in the picture was exactly the same as it was outside, but my face showed a totally different emotion than in the picture. I despised and loved that picture. Obviously I was happy then, I had nothing to worry about. I was naive but I guess in a good way because I was happy. I wished I was still naive and that’s what got under my skin. I knew about life and change. Later during lunch I sat down, being hungry for the first time since we had gotten to Vassar. As icy wet September air lingered through the blue-gray cafeteria a couple of unhappy college kids sulked around the cafeteria. A few lone professors sat together and nibbled salads but didn’t speak. I had gotten a pastry earlier and now had it out on my plate. It had French-vanilla buttercream frosting that tasted almost like perfume. It had chocolate sprinkles on top which were done so artfully that each sprinkle looked like it was meant to be there. Emma eyed me warily, hoping I wouldn’t notice. I felt a tinge of satisfaction knowing this. I caught a glimpse of her phone and I suggested an idea of mine. “Hey, Em?” I asked. “Yeah?” she replied. “So I was wondering if we could do this thing I just thought of,” and I explained to her what it was. “So we make a list of promises we’ll never break as sisters.” The minute I said it I realized how dumb it sounded. “You don’t have to agree to it, it was just an idea,” I added with caution. I didn’t want to get into an argument on our last day together just because we were all anxious. “Mm… OK, let’s do it!” Emma nodded approvingly and started to type our silly ideas. “How about, ‘Stay on top of your homework.’” I was going into fourth grade and nervous about it. Then we got into more “emotional” ideas. In just a few minutes we were laughing and shouting like monkeys. “Oo! Oo! How about… ‘Stick together!’” I stuck out two thumbs up to fake enthusiasm at my idea. We giggled stupidly and then, noticing people were staring, Emma stopped. So did I. I felt uncomfortable for the rest of the day. When we finally got in the car

“If I ran away, I would go here to live” It was just a typical day, a nightmare of an “as a family” picnic; my brothers following me around, me trying to get away and be alone for five short minutes. I’m sort of a loner sometimes, though when I say that, I don’t mean I’m a recluse, or that I’m not a people person, because I am. What I mean is that sometimes, or actually most of the time, I like to be just a little bit apart from everyone else, near to, but apart from, which makes sense to me but not really anyone else. It’s just that feeling, when you want to be alone, and if you could be alone, with no problem, whenever you wanted, the feeling would probably subside almost entirely. But when you have three little brothers pestering you, the feeling tends to get stronger, until you’re on the verge of running away. Which I was. Some kids, the stupid ones, probably would’ve gone away right off the bat, no thoughts whatsoever, gone to the most obvious place and gotten found within an hour. Not me. I had a plan, and the whole plan had one purpose, to go and live by myself, for a day or so, and then come back, smoothly and perfectly, with no mishaps, which of course I knew was unlikely and almost impossible, but I didn’t care. It would work. Almost everything that is planned well and done carefully works out in the end; I had done things like this enough to be sure of myself. My bag had been packed—an extra set of clothes and some bandages—and put under my bed next to my neatly rolled-up sleeping bag. When my survivalist dad started squirreling away canned beans by the dozen in preparation for Armageddon, or a tornado, whichever came first, I snuck one or two cans out every week until I had enough to feed myself for, at the most, three days. Beans were a pretty boring diet, but it was the only thing I could think of that would keep and wouldn’t be too gross if I ate them cold. So after a month, I had enough food, which left only one unresolved problem—water. I definitely wasn’t carrying close to twenty pounds of water for six miles in the middle of the night, which was when I planned to make my escape. And as the days passed and the date I had planned to leave on grew closer, that problem grew bigger and bigger. I would be staying near a creek, but the water there wasn’t pure. What I needed was a water filter or a clean, fresh, cold spring or a magic unicorn that shot water out of its horn or some other wonderful thing that either didn’t exist or that I just didn’t have. That settled it. I would carry the water. But on this particular day, when we had taken the truck to the creek, which was right below my hideout, for yet another “as a family” picnic that I was sure would end, as they all did, in someone crying and someone else with a scraped elbow; on this day, I was so full of two still-cold-in-the-middle hot dogs and countless burnt marshmallows, and happy in my family’s oblivion to my scheme, that somehow it just slipped out. “If I ran away, I would go here to live,” I sang out to my brother Max, who is two years younger than me and the biggest tattletale in the world. “You’re gonna run away?” He turned his wide-eyed face towards me and I saw that devilish, gotta-tell-no-matter-what glint come into his eyes. Then he turned to Adam and Nathan and yelled, “Let’s go tell Ma!” “Tell what?” Nathan asked. He was the youngest—five years old and had been too absorbed in playing with a dry, crinkly butterfly wing and three skins from some kind of creepy bug to hear what I had been saying. “Kelly’s gonna run away!” Adam yelled, jumping up and down. At seven, he was the most energetic of us all. Which could get annoying. I ignored them, caught up in the problem that was mainly my fault. My brothers skipped over the rocks and for a moment. I bit my lip, afraid they would fall. The creek here was all rocks and rushing water, which was fun for me, and Max, now that he was getting bigger and wasn’t afraid to “rock hop.” But I worried about Nathan and Adam, who were still little and not as agile and long-legged as Max and I. Then, I decided that if they fell, that was their problem. I turned and jumped into the creek. I was sick and tired of my parents’ unorganized, supposedly fun “as a family” picnics, camp-outs, and other generally boring activities. That night, I was lying in bed, trying desperately to read my favorite book, Shiloh, without anyone finding out, when suddenly Mom peeked her head in. “Max told me you said you wanted to run away and live in a zoo.” “The zoo?” I closed my book with a sigh. Marty would have to save Shiloh on his own. “Max also told me that to start growing, babies have to eat snails. And that wedding rings have lasers in them.” “He probably saw that in a movie.” “Not the snails. Mom, I’m not gonna run away. To a zoo.” I added the last bit so it wouldn’t be a lie. “But are you going to run away?” Mothers have the ability to read minds, I swear. I fiddled with my book, looked away. “Max has a wild imagination. I said I thought it’d be fun to live at the creek.” I grinned. “No clue where he got the zoo.” The really bad thing about me is that I’m the best liar I know, so I can get away with practically anything. But Mom usually knows what