Tom Green is very spoiled and lazy—until an accident forces him to change his life Tom Green was very proud to say that he had the best life any human could wish for. He would wake up in his cushiony white bed and then head down his marble staircase, where a delicious breakfast was waiting for him, prepared earlier that morning by his personal chef. If he were to have something involving chocolate, the chocolate would be from Switzerland, where, he believed, the best chocolate came from. If he were to eat something involving berries, the berries would have been freshly picked that morning. Everything had to taste amazing in Tom’s house. If there was ever something that didn’t meet his taste buds’ expectations, it would instantly hit the bottom of his trash can with a small thud, and the chef would be off to prepare a new and better dish. However, this morning was different. When Tom went downstairs to eat his breakfast, there wasn’t anything there, except for a note. If he were like his other wealthy friends, he wouldn’t have known how to read the note because he and his friends all knew that reading was just a waste of time. There were far more important things to do out in the world, like making people do what he wanted them to do. But no, he wasn’t like his friends. He knew how to read. The reason for this was because his parents (whom he had banned from his life) had made him go to school when he was young. That being said, it would have been possible for him to get a job earlier because he had an education, but he had forgotten all his math and facts years ago, and the only thing he remembered how to do was read. Now you may be thinking, “If he didn’t do any work, where did he get all of his money?” and here is the answer: he threatened his parents by saying that if they didn’t give him money, he would reveal to the world that they had killed their last servant, but he wouldn’t tell everyone that it was in self-defense. So every month, they would send him an envelope with huge amounts of money in it (they made their money from their jobs; his mom was a scientist, and his dad was a successful lawyer). Anyway, back to the note. Tom picked up the note and began to read. Here’s what the note said: Hello Tom. Right now you’re probably wondering, “Where is my chef?” and, “Where is my breakfast?” And I bet you’re also thinking, “When I find that chef, he is going to be fired!” Well, I hate to break it to you, but there is NO WAY I am going to work for you for free. Now that you’ve read that part of the note, you are probably thinking, “How is that possible?” I will tell you. You know how you let me swipe your card at the ATM? Well, this morning, I went to get my money, but it said, “Tom Green has no money left to spend.” That’s when I started to investigate further. I knew you got all of your money from your parents, so I went to their house to see if I could get some answers from them, but I learned something very shocking when I arrived at the house. I also saw a note that said, “Dear Tom. Your parents are dead.” At that point, Tom did a small happy dance and then continued reading. “They died in a fire that also burnt all of their money. I hope that doesn’t affect you at all.” That was all the note said. Sorry Tom, your parents are dead. People are already making plans for what to do with your house. Since they were paying for all of “your” stuff, your things are actually their things, and they said in their will that all of their money and houses will go to your younger sister, Emily. You’ve just lost everything. You have nothing left at all. Nothing at all. Tom didn’t know what to do. This can’t really be, can it? This can be solved simply. I just have to go see if my parents are still alive. If they are, everything is fine, but if they aren’t . . . well, they can’t be dead! Everything is perfectly fine, and this note from the chef is probably fake, just to get me to work more, he thought to himself. But deep down inside, he knew there was a big chance he had lost everything. In fact, he was so worried about this that he went into his safe to grab all of his remaining fortune that he hadn’t yet spent on luxury items! He grabbed his most prized possessions and stuffed them all in the trunk of his shiny white car. Then he drove off to see the people he was praying were still alive. He parked his car and prepared himself for whatever he was destined to see. He looked up. It seemed as though his heart had stopped beating. When his eyes met the ground, he could see nothing except for ashes. There must have been a fire, which destroyed his parents’ house, and his parents must have been in it. He realized that this could only mean one thing: if he wanted to stay alive, he would have to get a job. *          *          * Tom woke up. He was sleeping in his new home, a small shed he had bought yesterday, the day he’d found out he had lost everything. He hated everything about this shed. It had the smell of rotten food, the bed was rock hard, there was no personal chef, and so worst of all, he would have to cook his own meals. Tom didn’t have that much money left after

A girl wakes up to discover that everything has turned yellow Bright as the sun, a color stands out from the rest. That’s yellow. Everywhere I go, I see yellow. I looked in a store in France the other day, and then I said, “Hey, look. The store’s all yellow.” All the clothes were yellow: yellow boxers, yellow sweaters, and yellow pants. Yellow sandals and dark-yellow mugs with brightly colored cheese painted on the cup for decor. The walls were yellow. We walked into a yellow café, and my mom ordered a blue cupcake, even though it was yellow to me. It was delicious. The creamy, rich frosting hit my lips, melting in my watering mouth. But the smell—that cupcake, it smelled weird. It smelled very different from a normal yellow lemon cupcake. Mom and I walked out the door after I had eaten everything down to the crumbs. I opened the bulky, hefty door, and a frigid breeze hit me. I stepped outside, onto the yellow pavement, and I narrowed my eyes toward the shops scattered across the street. Everything on the street was yellow. The shops were yellow. Even though my mom said that the walls were grey, they looked yellow to me. After hours of shopping, Mom started to get worried to the point where she took me to see the eye doctor. When we walked in, I asked the lady at the front desk why everything was yellow, including everyone in this building. She just took my hand, and we raced through the maze of yellow. We came across a large yellow door labeled “Dr. Johnson.” Under the label was a message scrawled, “Come on in!” The woman reached for the door handle and tilted it downward. The door clicked open, revealing the tight room. The woman ushered us inside. The doctor and his room were a garish shade of yellow. I wanted to scream, but I sat down in the chair for the doctor to examine me. After the eye exam, the doctor said I was colorblind, and the only color I could see was yellow. I had a yellow life after that. I went home, depressed and let down. I could feel my body go numb. The only thing I could do was sleep. I dreamt in yellow and slept for days to come. I woke up out of my coma and shuffled to the door. When I opened the massive door, I saw the flowers beginning to grow. Then, the oddest, most unexpected, extraordinary thing happened to me. I started to float into the air with my old, chipped yellow boots of lace and velvet. I floated and floated. I flew and flew up into the sky. Luckily, a plane zoomed by, so when the wing passed by, I grabbed it. I suddenly realized that if I jumped off the plane, my shoes could make a soft impact into a sea of yellow. So that’s what I did. I jumped and landed in my mom’s arms. It hurt. But at least I was safe and sound. In my mother’s yellow arms. Ella Kate Starzyk, 11Denver, CO Adele Stamenov, 10Bethel Park, PA

A blue cookie jar helps Elsie get through her days Elsie was obsessed with her cookie jar. It hadn’t started that way. At first, it was practically useless, merely a vehicle for her beloved chocolate chip cookies. But then, even after each cookie had gone, annihilated by the impatient and hungry parents and siblings who shared them, the jar remained. Elsie found it comforting, in a metaphoric sense. In place of a stuffed animal, or something more commonplace to carry around for a girl her age, she even began to bring it around with her, in spite of its excessive weight. She felt that she was sending a clear message to the jar: she appreciated its loyalty, and this was her way of paying it back. Of course, she couldn’t show it to her friends. First of all, they wouldn’t understand. And second of all, even beyond the realm of being unable to comprehend her immense attachment to this jar of porcelain, they would make fun of her for it. It’s not that they were mean-spirited; they just had a tendency to act without regard for the feelings of the owners of said jars of porcelain. So, instead of foolishly carrying it around in broad daylight, Elsie kept her jar in her mint-green duffel bag. So as not to arouse suspicion, she put everyday items in there as well: a generously sized water bottle, a keychain to her old house, a keychain to her current house, and the thick cookbook she used to pore over before realizing that the true gift lay not in the cookie but in its jar. For three years—ages eight to eleven— her system had worked seamlessly. That was, it had worked seamlessly until May 5, 2020. Stuck at home with her careless, lazy siblings during the quarantine, Elsie never quite realized how much school had offered an escape from home just as much as home had offered an escape from school. But it wasn’t all bad. For one thing, she didn’t even have to worry about being separated from her cookie jar, and for another, she didn’t have to worry about her friends reacting negatively to said cookie jar. Until May 5, she hadn’t even bothered to go outside. Well, she had gone outside. She’d gone out for walks, and to ride her bicycle. She just hadn’t gone outside with her family, nor had she gone outside to a place that wasn’t her neighborhood. It would have grated on her much more if it hadn’t meant a surplus of time with her cookie jar. It was peculiar, because she had presumed that the endless amount of time with the jar would cause a rift between them. After all, she’d only gone off M&Ms after her mom had bought her an endless supply, and only seemed to get bored of The Office after she’d seen a whole season in a night (thanks to her cookie-jar-judging friends—they could sometimes be cool). It seemed to Elsie that the more accessible something was, the less enticing it subsequently became. To her luck, though, it never seemed that way with her cookie jar. She found that she contained the capacity to stare at it for hours upon hours, doing nothing other than pondering its unique existence and inherent kindness (in spite of being an inanimate object). Sometimes, she felt herself choking up when she thought about how it just held all kinds of cookies, no matter their size, quality, or type. The cookie jar did not show a preference for the fancily decorated yet tasteless Christmas cookies her brother insisted on making every year, nor the chocolate chip cookies her little sister liked to bake just as the family ran out of chocolate chips (so, really, they were no-chocolate-chip cookies). It regarded them all as the same. The thought made Elsie feel especially grateful for her beautiful, non-judgmental jar. It seemed to Elsie that the more accessible something was, the less enticing it subsequently became. Anyway, on May 5, the family had received masks, two months after they had been ordered. Her parents, delighted they had finally come, decided that they should do something exciting to differentiate the day from others. Elsie’s eighth-grade brother, Tom, who was convinced that the coronavirus was simply a conspiracy theory made up by an army of shapeshifting reptiles led by Bill Gates, suggested they forget the masks altogether and go to SkyZone (its closure, he added, was simply propaganda that the reptilian army had promoted). Elsie herself was in favor of staying home and admiring her cookie jar, though her parents quickly vetoed this idea just as it had begun to get traction from her equally apathetic siblings. Her eight-year-old sister, Marsha, had the winning proposal to go to the beach, stating that she thought seashells would make perfectly tasty replacements for chocolate chips. “Come on now, Elsie. Don’t you think you’ve had enough time with your jar? It’ll still be there when you get back,” her mother insisted. Elsie frowned. “Every moment without it is a moment wasted. I’ll bring it.” Her mother reluctantly agreed. In another family, Elsie’s compulsive cookie-jar watching would have drawn more attention from her parents, but given the state of her siblings, she was by far the easiest child. The beach was beautiful, in spite of the lack of people. It struck Elsie as abnormal, even in such an abnormal time, that there should be nobody else at the beach. She supposed she should consider herself lucky, as her parents hadn’t really thought to avoid the crowd; it had just happened that way. But it still felt odd. Beaches weren’t meant to be empty, at least not on gorgeous spring days. They were meant to be full of grumbling parents and their wayward children, who begged them to swim with them in the ocean. They were meant to be full of unthoughtful adults who willingly got sunburnt in hopes of a tan, and lifeguards scanning the water