They weren’t nice, I wasn’t fed enough, I was emotionally neglected and seeking love from everywhere else, for the rest of middle school—Big drop, very fast, seemingly never-ending.
High school starts with my sights set on new beginnings and graduating early—Nothing can stop me I’m all the way up!
Guidance counselor tells me that’s not possible at my school—Wow and here we go again.
Dad gets a new girl and she cooks! AMAZINGLY!—Okay, we’re going up …
I started seeing and taking care of my little sister more often—Oh, we’re going pretty high …
Sophomore year, realize I’m actually a talented writer—OOOO!
Remember nightly that my whole family isn’t there to witness my growth—Yup, now it’s starting make sense, leveling out.
Sifting through friend after friend and girlfriend after girlfriend to find someone who just clicks with me and can fill that space I need—Now the loopty loop, it’s fun, but repetitive and I can’t breathe.
I move in with my mom—The ride’s slowing down.
My granny on my dad’s side dies—Never mind, full force downhill.
Senior year, the gateway to college, the opportunity to gain the freedom I’ve yearned for, and the ability to finally control my own life—The ride levels out, but now I can’t guess where it’ll go. Will it go up, where I get accepted to a college that I can regard as my dream school, with a full ride? Will it go down, where I never find a school for me? Or a loop where, I’ll find one and be up for a scholarship but not get it, leaving me to drown in debt like my mom?
My life is just a never-ending cycle of checks and balances.
So what more could I expect from an opportunity to reach a dream that seemed too good to be true. Exactly as much as I did: nothing. Every time a teacher at my school would congratulate me, I’d shrug it off. What good is getting excited over something that’s bound to cause disappointment?
But in the final interview, everyone else was being honest with themselves and they were phenomenal. How would I be chosen if it didn’t seem like this is what I wanted? So I decided to get vulnerable and be honest with myself—and it only got scarier. I stumbled over my words, I shook, I blanked.
I got home that night, worried.
And then I got the call: “Would you like to be a part of Wheaton Posse Twenty?”
Did I get that scholarship because I had a change of heart? Who knows. But getting that scholarship made me think more about how I approach things I care about.
A writing teacher of mine who was talking to me about submitting my pieces for publication said something along the lines of: “You don’t want to be denied for compromising yourself to write in a way you thought they’d like. Because then it feels like you lost twice. You wrote this differently from how you’d write for them and they still didn’t like it. You might as well have been yourself and found out the true results.”
And he’s right. I was myself for Posse and I got it. I’m not saying a change in attitude will guarantee this ride is always on the up and up. But I am saying if I can’t control the direction of this roller coaster at least I can control how I enjoy the ride.
Dedicated
JULIA CARPENTER
There are stories hidden inside so many of our favorite stories. Not quite hidden, but right there, staring back at us from the very first pages. I explore some of my favorites in this piece.
“Lucy, I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books.” —C. S. Lewis, in his Narnia series
“To my mother and father, who taught me how to fight.” —Alexander Chee in How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
“To Dr. John Sharpe of London, who in 1957, a decade before physicians in England could legally perform an abortion for any reason other than the health of the woman, took the considerable risk of referring for an abortion a twenty-two-year-old American on her way to India.” —Gloria Steinem in My Life on the Road
As a teen, I was captivated by the cryptic dedication in Janet Fitch’s White Oleander: “to the man from council bluffs.” We never even learn his name. It’s like a private note Fitch left for herself, and we catch only a glimpse.
Then take a book like Lolita. To whom could you possibly dedicate Lolita? But Nabokov writes it is “to Véra,” his devoted wife of fifty-two years, the woman many credit with polishing her husband’s writing to its absolute best. Now, biographers discuss Véra’s life and her contributions to Vladimir’s work. But before all that, when he was writing Lolita, Vladimir wanted us to remember that this book was for her. Like F. Scott wrote before The Great Gatsby: “Once again, to Zelda.”
Contemplating these famous ones, I fantasize about my own dedication decision. To my parents? Girlfriend? Friends? Do you treat each book like an Oscars acceptance speech, making up for the people omitted in the last? Should I thank my first reader, because without those eyes, a work can’t even make it out of the Google Drive?
Or do I zoom out from my own life entirely, instead dedicating what I’ve written to something bigger? To the one reader held in my mind’s eye as I wrote the damn thing to begin with? Like Lois Lowry, in the opening pages to The Giver: “For all the children, to whom we entrust the future.” Like those famous Agatha Christie lines: “To all those who lead monotonous lives, in the hope that they may experience at second hand the delights and dangers of adventure …”
There’s so much story here, all before the bigger story even begins.
That one little page can mean a lot, in the end. To you.
KAITLYN YANG
YEARS AS MENTEE: 2
GRADE: Sophomore
HIGH SCHOOL: Hunter College High School
BORN: New York, NY
LIVES: New York, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Scholastic Art & Writing Awards: Gold Key, Silver Key
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: Meghann has always encouraged me to share my work, and together we delve deeper into the minds of our narrators. She has taught me so much about building compelling worlds and characters and shown me how to approach my writing both intuitively and conceptually. We have worked on building conflicts by observing the environments around us, which has helped me to be more aware of how the influences in my own life can impact my writing. With her help, my work became more developed and nuanced, and my own understanding of myself as a writer has grown incredibly.
MEGHANN FOYE
YEARS AS MENTOR: 2
OCCUPATION: Digital Content Director, Parade.com
BORN: Lynn, MA
LIVES: Jersey City, NJ
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Published in Brit + Co, The Plunge, and FoodNetwork.com
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: Kaitlyn and I have been working together for two years now, and seeing her work on her own first novel—a fantasy epic—has inspired me to go out of my writing comfort zone and try new formats, including screenwriting. I’ve been sharing what I’ve been learning, and together we’ve worked on creating compelling conflict, determining essential context, and building organic dialogue. Kaitlyn’s such a natural at it! I’ve been so inspired by her ability to dive in and try to use all the tools, and am continually amazed by the creative, inventive scenes she comes up with.
The Day the Nothings Came
KAITLYN YANG
To me, Ctrl+ B is about how we relate to the world around us and how we hold ourselves in conflicts. Meg and I tapped into this theme this year by exploring conflicts on the page and all the ways characters respond using whatever resources they have available to them.
When I was seven, I thought I caught a firefly, but it shone too brightly in the dusty mason jar. Mama bought Miss Susan’s homemade granola from the farmer’s market every week just to collect the blue glass jars they came in, even though she always said she was allergic to the oats inside. Mama had a long list of allergies that waxed and waned with the seasons, but she always washed the jars out and, after drying them with a
paper towel, stacked the empty jars in piles in the far-right corner of her studio, behind the cardboard cartons from Mr. Cho’s Oriental Buffet. Usually, she would have noticed if I took one as soon as she entered the room, so I wouldn’t have dared, but she was lying down upstairs with another migraine, so I jumped on the chance.
Just five minutes earlier, Billy had yelled through the phone, “The fireflies are out!” and before I remembered that I was supposed to be afraid of the Nothings, I leaped from the kitchen stool out the creaky back door. Billy and I used to watch the fireflies together, but ever since Mama’s “outburst” three months ago, his mama didn’t allow him to visit my house anymore. Mama wasn’t too good at keeping her teeth clenched when someone did something that bothered her, so she put things where she thought they belonged with her bare hands and force. Apparently, Billy’s mama didn’t agree with Mama’s ways.
Mama then put her foot down and said I couldn’t go play with someone whose mama thought they were too good for us. Billy and I made do with seeing each other at school during the year and phone calls during the summer, as best friends do. I had just finished second grade and I thought I could puzzle out any problem, even facing the Nothings alone, without Billy or Mama to hold my hand. The dark hid the Nothings well that night, but the fireflies made the chance of facing a Nothing worth it. I didn’t really know what a Nothing looked like at the time, but I figured it was one of those things I’d know when I saw it. Billy had never even heard of Nothings until I had told him the stories Mama had repeated to me for as long as I could remember, and, ever since then, we’d kept watch for them together. They brought chaos with them, she warned, and disaster can’t help but follow. I thought I had seen a pair once last year, piling fallen flower petals onto Miss Lucy’s curly white hair as she napped in the rocking chair on her porch across the street. I had wanted to laugh when she woke up and shuffled inside with her flower crown still intact, but was afraid the Nothings would hear me and target Mama next. She always told me the same story, pressing her thin hand against her chest and saying, “Do you know what we have here? We have hearts that beat and bleed and bear our burdens. Do you know what they have here? Nothing.”
I knew I wasn’t supposed to be trapping these fireflies anyway. Mama warned me what had happened to the last kid who had tried to bring the wild indoors, upsetting the order of things—grass turning to thorns and raindrops to stones were only the beginning of the horrors—but they looked so beautiful, I couldn’t help myself. I must have gotten that from Mama, that wanting beauty to have and hold for myself. But Mama never saw beauty outside, hated finding a lost butterfly on the mailbox or a lone clover in the middle of our lawn. She only saw it in her orderly stacks of jars and cartons, lined up and stagnant, the rows in the back covered with a thin film of dust, but never out of place. She warned that the Nothings were outside, but I was so excited about having caught a firefly for the first time, I scampered back inside before Mama could catch me from her bedroom window. I smuggled the jar into my room wrapped in my old blue T-shirt and placed it on the wooden crate Mama made into a desk for me. But when I turned on the lights to see it better, it began glowing blue. I had never seen a firefly do that before.
“Let me go,” it said crossly. I screamed. I had brought a Nothing inside the house.
Breaking the Chain
MEGHANN FOYE
Kaitlyn and I have been working on creating compelling conflict this year and finding ways to have our female protagonists deviate from stereotypical or expected narratives. In one of our free-writes, I was thinking of ways a main character could be thrown off by another character and then regain her stride. Its essence felt right in line with Ctrl + B.
If there was one thing that kept Mary from true happiness, it was her next-door neighbor, Mr. J. Every day, he made a point to pop into the hallway just as she was walking out of the brownstone apartment where they both lived. Every day at six fifteen in the morning. “Hello Mary, going for a run?” he’d casually toss out, like clockwork.
She tried everything to avoid him. She’d slowly, carefully, uncleat the top chain on her door so he wouldn’t hear. She’d tiptoe through her tiny studio so her creaky old floorboards wouldn’t call any extra attention to her movements. She even gave a passing thought to losing five pounds so she could glide like a ghost to the front door.
But no amount of work seemed to prevent the inevitable. As soon as she’d slip out, she’d hear his lock, then the scratches from his Havanese, Mitzie, and then the familiar greeting. She’d feel them both on her heels as she opened the inside and then the outside door to walk out, forcing her off her own stride in the most stress-inducing way.
After that, that was it. She’d start her run to the park. He’d go in the opposite direction with Mitzie. But why? Why did they have to appear in her wake every single day? It was as if they’d set up a meeting invite she’d never consented to. She resented having to be “on” in the ways all women are conditioned to. She resented having to smile, nod, be gracious, receptive so early in the morning. Couldn’t her shift start a little later? Like at eight in the morning? She just wanted to run.
So one day, a beautiful day in May when the sun was already filtering light into her window at six in the morning, she got up, pulled on her running clothes, and then set a new plan in motion.
She ran the blender extra-long—with ice. She blasted the weather report on the radio. Then, she threw off the chain with abandon and fired up her favorite playlist and began singing at the top of her lungs. She didn’t wait. She didn’t wonder.
Mr. J’s chain started to jangle. She sang louder. Mitzie was scratching. She kept singing. And then, just as she reached the door, she heard it. The chain went back into its lock. No Mr. J. No Mitzie. Six-seventeen a.m. She was free.
CLAIRE YU
YEARS AS MENTEE: 1
GRADE: Freshman
HIGH SCHOOL: Hunter College High School
BORN: New York, NY
LIVES: Queens, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Scholastic Art & Writing Awards: Gold Key, Honorable Mention
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: Meeting with Sara once a week has been something I look forward to every week. Sara has been incredibly encouraging and supportive, and inspires me to keep writing more often. Before meeting Sara, I felt like I could never begin to write anything without being absolutely sure how it will turn out. Now I definitely don’t hold myself back as much, and I’ve learned to enjoy the writing process more, even though it can be tiring and stressful. Having a mentor has brought so many more blessings than I expected, from life lessons to finding obscure cafés in my neighborhood.
SARA CHUIRAZZI
YEARS AS MENTOR: 1
OCCUPATION: Associate Publicist
BORN: Cincinnati, OH
LIVES: Queens, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Published in Vagabond City Literary Journal
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: Spending time with Claire is consistently a highlight of my week. She challenges me to slow down and consider things in new ways. For example, I tend to agonize over titles, and recently she very gently reminded me that sometimes leaving something untitled is a perfectly valid creative choice. It was so simple, yet so impacting. Not only have I found myself writing more since meeting Claire, but also feeling less self-conscious about sharing my work. I value her feedback and the accountability. I am beyond grateful for Claire’s friendship and feel so lucky to have met her.
You, She
CLAIRE YU
This poem was inspired by stories about bullying and the pain of loneliness. I started with the ending phrase “How can people stand so far away and still insist one star is brighter than the other,” which was stuck in my head for a while, and then wrote this poem around it.
You
who declare the world either good or bad. You
who told her people are either kind or evil. Pretty or ugly. You
who told her you were on one side of that spectr
um. And she
was on the other. And that no matter how much she tried, she would never join you.
She
Only wanted to be loved. To be
Exalted by the brightness of your eyes, or
The fading pink of your smile. She
Only wanted to learn to swim
So she knew she would never drown. She
Only wanted to know hot chocolate
Would wait for her on cold winter days
On a tray with marshmallows and a
Blanket and a seat on the couch.
You
Made her an outcast. You walked around with
Your troupe of friends that enclosed
You in a bubble just to let her know
The ugly duckling went to go live with its own kind
After all.
She
Used to have a sparkle in her eye that was like
All the skies heralding an angel. She
Used to run in the forest with the deer and
Talk to the trees and wake up
Embracing the world with her
Arms opened wide. She
Used to think that maybe you would
Run with her
someday
You
Said she didn’t wear makeup. You
Said she wasn’t like the rest of You
Laughed at her clothes and her
Hair and everything that
Made her special and
Took the flower she put behind her ear
And tore it to shreds.
She
Cried when you caught her putting lipstick
On her cheeks and she
Stopped coming to the forest and went to the
Store and bought paint
So she could color her nails like
You
Stuck your foot out when she
Passed in the hallways and
Laughed too loudly when
The paint washed off her nails with
Ctrl + B Page 33