Which brings us back to Danny’s First Critic. She taught me something. She taught me that I’m better off without the armor, because no matter how much I fortify it, no matter how well oiled the plates are, and no matter how tightly I weave the chain links, there’s no way it can really protect me. An arrow can always slip through; a swung club could always bruise. And that’s okay, really, because it is as much a part of my job to feel as it is to make others feel.
I’m glad I’d left the armor at home. If I’d prepared for battle, I don’t think I would have answered her in quite the same way, and I don’t think my answer, in turn, would have made her grim expression soften. I don’t think she would have done what she did next, which was pick up the advanced reader copy of the book and add it to the considerable pile she had already amassed. She didn’t go as far as to have me sign it, but she took the book.
“No,” I’d told her, “I’m the guy who writes about kids who’re trying to live.”
The Seed
by Lauren Kate
There is a girl in your seventh-grade class. She is not exceptionally pretty. She isn’t rich or all that great of a singer. She is no more or less popular than you. You are friends with each other’s friends, but you are not friends.
There are meaner girls than this one. Your school is teeming with them. Down every hallway lurk bigger snobs and scarier gossips. And yet, for some reason, ever since your elementary school and this girl’s elementary school flowed together into one great big middle school, this is the girl who makes you feel the most uncomfortable in your skin.
In the mornings, she and her friends stand outside the cul-de-sac where the bus drops off, handing out religious pamphlets. When you don’t take one—and you never take one—she is the girl who always asks, loudly enough for the whole bus full of kids to hear, why you want to burn in hell for all eternity. This is the worst, but not the last, of it. In gym, she flirts with the boys you have crushes on. In English, your favorite class, she challenges the things you say about the reading assignment to the point where you are dumbstruck, even though you know the answer. On the rare occasions when you and your friends are being mean girls—once, at a slumber party, after the first girl fell asleep, you and your friends soaked her extra underwear and put it in the freezer—this girl rolls over in her sleeping bag and catches you, singles you out, makes you feel worse than your own mother did when she heard about the incident.
This girl may not even know it, but she has perfected the art of making you feel as if everything you do, everything you say, and especially everything you don’t say is under her scrutiny, and wrong.
You are not good at comebacks. This isn’t something that will ever change, by the way, even twenty years down the road. The words that were nowhere near the tip of your tongue at the critical moment begin to haunt you. They keep you up at night. You lie in bed, replaying the dialogue that left you speechless earlier that day. The way this girl kept pressing you to talk about why you weren’t going to the school dance—in front of the boy you wish had asked you.
Here’s the difference: In your mind, you’re wearing cooler clothes. You visualize every detail, down to the way your socks are scrunched (this is Texas, after all). Your cheeks don’t turn bright red and your voice doesn’t shake and you don’t spit out a lame and unconvincing excuse about your grandparents coming into town. In your mind, you say something funny, really funny, that makes the boy who was pretending not to hear your conversation laugh out loud. Also, it shuts the girl up. For a change.
The fantasy of a perfect conversation becomes a nightly ritual. You don’t know it yet, but this is the beginning of your career as a writer. And this girl—the one you cannot stand—planted the seed in you. In your imagination, you are the smartest, funniest version of yourself. You are inventing the person you want to practice being, and she’s brilliant. So brilliant someone should write a book about her.
You grow up a little bit. Some things change and some don’t. The girl stops handing out those little blue copies of the New Testament, but she still makes you tongue-tied most of the time. At least the cute boy from gym class doesn’t do that anymore. It’s easy to say the thing that makes him laugh. Another dance is coming up. You have a date.
Years later, you leave home. In college, you meet people who remind you of this girl. The difference is you don’t let them get under your skin. All those nights, all those scenes you played out in your head—it’s as if they have given you wings. You’ve even started writing a few of them down. Before you know it, you’ve written a book. You call it The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove.
It Gets Better
Now
by Amy Reed
No.
Look.
I am not the timid little thing you remember. These are not the hallways that you owned. This is not the place where things worked backward, where feral children ruled the world.
You remember the girl who played possum. She went limp and you knew how to bend her, your puppet, your perfect soft thing. But maybe one day her muscles tensed. She opened her eyes and she saw you trying to hide in the shadows. But it was day, and you were exposed. It was day, and light favors goodness. She could see through the place where a heart should have been. She could see through you, and those veils and mirrors you thought indestructible ripped and shattered into a million pieces.
You remember. This was the day she stopped playing dead.
Was this it? Was this the thing that broke you, the insult that turned you rabid? Was she too much life for you to smother?
You tried. The way something rabid tries.
Now.
There are years and miles and heartbeats between us. There is a big, beautiful world and you are not in it. You live in a small place, and it is not here. It is the only place that will take you—locked away, dark. You are fighting the walls, thrashing around and trying to gain power. But you are the small one now. You are the tiny speck of a thing. You are a ghost, and ghosts are not solid. They are not flesh, not a thing that breathes, not my heart beating.
This is.
Take a good look at my life now, my heart beating. This is the world I have built and it is my own. This breath, this blood, this music—all mine. This is how things grow, how they reach toward the sun. You can have that little speck of yesterday, the place where ghosts roam, that broken, rotten thing. I do not need it anymore. There is tomorrow, and another tomorrow after that. There is today, and it is not yours.
Now.
Look at everything around me so solid. This is light, my beautiful thing. These are my hands and here are the things they touch. This is what gentle looks like. These are my eyes, wide and trusting. Look, my hands are not fists. They are open. This is what brave looks like.
Yes.
There are people with hearts all around me. Not holes. Not empty places to see through. Yes. Solid. I am reaching for them and they are reaching, too. Look. Light. This is love and it is stronger than you.
Standing Tall
by Dawn Metcalf
It started in kindergarten.
I was tall. Taller than all the kids in my class, taller than most kids in the next grade; in a few years, I’d be taller than my teachers, but at five years old, I was long haired, shy, gangly, and, above all, tall.