“Kat! Time for dinner!” “Coming!” Kat had come home from a long day—a very long day—at Hearst Middle School. She wasn’t hungry, she was mad. “Kat, it’s getting cold!” She sighed, closed her homework book, still ignoring her phone, and headed downstairs. “Did you have a good day?” asked her mom as she was scooping pasta onto the dinner plates. Kat’s brother, Finn, was already eating the Italian bread and getting crumbs everywhere. Kat sat down and grabbed a piece of bread. Maybe she was hungrier than she thought. “Kat? Did you hear me?” “Yeah.” “So how was your day?” “Good.” But Kat had really had the opposite of a good day at school. Faith, her best friend, had dumped her over a boy neither one of them really even liked, then she was bullied by Becca, the most popular girl at school. Again. And she’d lost all her math homework for the year. Or maybe she hadn’t lost it; maybe someone had taken it. She wasn’t sure, and she wasn’t sure if she was ever going to be sure. Three huge problems, no huge solutions. Ugh. Kat ate her dinner and ruminated quietly about the day’s events while Finn, Mom, and Dad yapped about some football game or something. Every once in a while they tried to include her in the conversation, but she just shrugged, sighed, or rolled her eyes. * * * The next day when she got to school, before any classes started, she bought a cup of hot chocolate in the cafeteria. She went back outside to sit on the bench and wait for the first bell for homeroom. She was sitting there, thinking about what she could have done with her math homework and how to explain to Faith that she really didn’t have any interest in Brian, when she heard someone cry out. That’s when she saw the self-appointed popular girls—the Sassies, as some people called them, but never to their faces— bullying a girl named Samantha in front of the school. “Hey, stop it!” said Samantha as they pushed her to the ground. “Let her go,” yelled Kat. “What are you going to do about it?” mocked Becca, the leader of the gang. “You want me to let her go? Say please!” Her group laughed. Samantha was trying to pull away, but Becca was too strong. Right then and there, without planning or knowing what she was doing, Kat spilled her hot chocolate all over Becca’s satin dress. “Please,” Kat said in her sweetest voice. “Oops.” “Hey! My dress!” Becca cried. “That’s what I’ll do about it, bully. I guess that chocolate wasn’t so hot after all. Come on, Samantha. Let’s go to homeroom.” Kat and Samantha hurried away from the gang, who were all still stunned at what Kat had done to Becca. * * * Later, after third period, Kat thought she was in the clear. She’d made it through gym and the Sassies hadn’t bothered her at all. She thought they were done with her, or maybe even a little scared of her. Big mistake. On the way to the cafeteria after fourth period, she turned a corner and came face to face with Becca and her group. They swarmed around her. “You’ll be sorry for what you did to me,” said Becca. Kat knew from experience that when Becca said someone was going to be sorry for what they had done, they really were going to be sorry. Becca had beaten up two girls in the fifth grade for daring to talk back to her. Becca didn’t look scared of her, that’s for sure. * * * At lunch, Samantha thanked Kat for standing up for her this morning. “Thank you, Kat. That was really nice. And really brave.” “Oh, it was nothing.” “No, it wasn’t nothing. Becca is the meanest girl in the whole school.” “I guess so.” “Please,” Kat said in her sweetest voice. “Oops.” Because she’d stuck up for Samantha and stood up to Becca and the Sassies, Kat thought she should feel good about herself. But she had butterflies in her stomach because she didn’t know what Becca was going to do. * * * That night, she couldn’t sleep. Her phone kept beeping because she was getting mean texts that said things like, “Is Crybaby going to cry because she can’t stand up for herself?” Which didn’t make any sense because she had stood up to them, not for herself but for someone else. Then again, where is it written that bullies and their dumb texts have to make sense? Kat turned the volume down to zero and went to sleep, but she had some pretty rough dreams. In one, Becca was an evil witch who was trying to turn her into a cricket! * * * On the bus the next morning, Becca and her group were convincing people that Kat had bullied her and that Kat was mean for doing that. It was all a lie. Of course, Samantha didn’t believe it because she was there when it actually happened! Still, in every period Samantha was the only one who didn’t ignore her. Everyone else believed Becca, maybe because they were afraid not to. Even Faith, her supposed best friend, was mean to her, “Gosh, Kat, you have some nerve to bully Becca.” “I didn’t bully her!” cried Kat. “She was beating up Samantha and I stopped her!” “Stop lying. Liar.” “I’m not lying, and if you weren’t so mad about this Brian thing, which isn’t a thing at all, you would trust me and believe me like you always do.” “Wait,” said Faith, “why is the thing with Brian not a thing?” “Because he likes you, not me!” “Then why were you talking to him the other day in gym?” “Because, silly, he was asking me about you!” “Oh. Really? He likes me?” “Really. Now can you do me a favor and help me find my math homework?” Faith
September/October 2016
Irises
Every day I am reborn as something new. I am a prim cherry blossom, a sleek flying fish, a youthful scholar I am everything all at once; a savory dash of powdery cinnamon, a sprig of scorched chard. I am the pulse of the air I inhale, I am one of seven billion Homo sapiens. But no matter what or who I am, I will always gaze at our world of infinity from behind the same gleaming obsidian pupils, the same shining chestnut irises. Caroline Smyth, 12Raleigh, North Carolina
Rainstorm
The hot, arid California air that is usually scorching in the middle of July has—for some odd, outlandish reason—quieted down. It is like a rain forest: wet and hot with great clouds like the feathers of an African gray parrot that ooze languidly along the horizon. It is like the South; the air is saturated with lazy banks of humidity. The hay that the Smiths have purchased (it’s sitting on their pristine lawn, ugly and out of place as a baby swan in a duck’s family) is steaming. Literally steaming. Wisps like ghostly hands rise from it, trailing their lacy tendrils in the swampy air. The air smells of storm. We sit on the old couch and sniff the air rapturously, like hounds pausing in pursuit of a fox. Nothing is more satisfying than sitting at the big living room window with a friend and watching with relish as the rain floods the uneven backyard. If only the lights would go out! We shiver with the sheer excitement of it all. It is truly delicious. The wind has picked up, wailing like a lost toddler, tossing leaf handkerchiefs in the gray sky. Trees rustle, whispering half-heard rumors to one another, swapping gossip, passing tales back and forth. When a human picks one up on the wind, all the truth will be swept away into history, leaving nothing but a faux shell of fabrication. Lunch? No. Mom leaves the room. No time for idle chewing and chomping: important things are happening. The first raindrops begin to fall. They are too small to make a difference, but to us they are like gold coins falling from the heavens. We count them. There is one. Plip. Did you see that one fall on the chair? Plop. There are too many! Pitter-patter. We can’t possibly count them all. We shiver with the sheer excitement of it all The intervals between the drops become shorter and shorter, until they vanish altogether. They speckle the patio and slide down the windows, creating tiny rivers, swirled with rivulets and eddies that channel the course of these miniature streams. And then we can hear it. The melodious symphony of a thousand raindrops, falling from the endless Above. And the roiling sky: it is like the angry sea and it seethes and churns and it is a lion, ready to destroy. And we laugh and it is like the jingling of keys and it eggs the storm on. But we are ready as the lightning flashes. And it lights the room for a mere second in an eerie bluish spike of electricity. Lights, can you please go out! “Why don’t you just turn them off?” suggests practical Mom, so calm, so maddeningly oblivious to necessity. “It’s the same in the end.” Nuh-uh. No way. That defeats the whole purpose. And then we jump as the booming of thunder rends the air like a gong. And the house shakes as we land on the couch again and shudder and shiver and realize that more will follow. And we gaze out at the rain and wind and the blinding sheets of droplets pelting at our house like it is a mere tin can, forlorn and meek and quiet in an empty alleyway. And the grass looks greener than before and we wish it would grow in the browning parts. And then Sister screams as lightning strikes again and the lights go out! We cheer and high-five and Sister’s textbook is on the floor and one of the pages has scribbles from where the pencil marked it when she dropped it. But then the lights come back on and it was just a flicker and we whine and yawn and boredom has returned. But then it hasn’t because the light flickers and it is fun to watch and the storm still rages on and the patio is drenched and flooded with puddles. And we itch to go and jump and step in them until we are all wet and we can dry off and put on clean clothes. But Mom says no, you might get struck by lightning. And we whine but we know in our hearts she is right and anyway, who wants to be outside when you could get electrocuted? Not us. The backyard trees are wet and drooping from the excess of rain. Little droplets of silver fall from their somber black trunks and onto the soaked earth. Maybe our unassuming backyard will become a rain forest and we can have monkeys for pets! Sister says we’re crazy, but who cares if we are. And then, crash bang boom! Lightning and thunder rising to a crescendo, creating a duet in the sky of blue and gray that pulses like a heart. The lights have to go out for real now! But they still don’t and we are battling the storm and the house is now nothing but a tepee or a lean-to. We must fight for survival in the cold, wet, roiling blackness. Mom is saying something about going to the grocery store and we don’t listen to her until we remember that the gutters will have overflowed. We plead to Mom to bring us along too; there is nothing better to do at this moment. And she complies and tells us to put on our jackets and boots. We oblige and walk out the door in bright colors and face the rain. We taste the adventure, craning our necks up to the gray sky and sticking our tongues out to feel the sweet fizz of excitement bubble in our mouths like a sugary soda. And then we see the gutter, the streaming gutter, torrents and all, cascading down the curb in a cataract of currents and eddies, ebb and flow. We long to wet our feet inside our snug Wellington boots and feel droplets explode around us. Mom says no. Of course she does. We get in the car and rain slides down the curved windows and
