By Emily S. Deibel
Any minute Ms. Morris will call the girls up on stage. The cattle call. You certainly feel like a large heifer standing under the hot lights with Ms. Morris telling everyone to turn right, then left. This time you suck in your stomach and hold your breath because all the boys in the drama class [...]
Fiction
In the Spotlight
Fiction
Fire Escape and Q&A with Mitali Perkins
Asha hurried through the aisle of pulsating washers and whirling dryers. The machines sang like a choir of middle-aged American ladies, but she ignored them. She was headed for the table marked “Give-Aways.”
The laundry room could have been a refuge if it hadn’t been for the other, darker [...]
Fiction
Ruby Riding Hood
By Hanna C. Howard
Like everything else, the nickname Red was my grandmother’s fault. My mother had a similar idea upon first seeing my wild, apple-red hair, but the name she christened me was slightly more distinguished: Ruby Gretel Ridingood [...]
Fiction
The Flipside Part 2
by Tina Ferraro
Tiffany and Amber won the scavenger hunt. Parker and I—with another late start—never made it past “More than you, but less than double you,” which turned out to be “vee,” as in the V-shaped split of the Chu’s front yard oak tree. So another team got the glory and the gift cards [...]
Fiction
Elle, Part 2
By Jennifer DeMotta
Part 2
At sixteen, I still didn’t have my driver’s license, but I’d driven before. Sometimes at night, when my mother was tired and we had to keep driving to put distance between us and him, she let me drive. Only on those long, flat high ways in places like Iowa[...]
Fiction
Elle
By Jennifer DeMotta
Part 1
Last year on my fifteenth birthday, I stood before my birthday cake, my face warm and lit up by fifteen pastel candles. Pink letters spelled out “Happy Birthday Elle.” I took a deep breath, anxiously thinking of wishes. Before I settled on a wish, my mother hung up the phone she’d been cradling on her shoulder and jumped up from the table.[...]
Fiction
The Flipside
By Tina Ferraro
If you read 11:34 upside-down, it spells “hell.”
I learned this in the inky darkness of a Minnesota backyard, where I–Rebecca Benvenuto–sat in a patio chair, playing with my illuminated, digital wristwatch, pushing buttons, turning it around, doing what I could to keep from spontaneously [...]
Fiction
The Weather
By Giulia Caterini
It’s debatable whether or not he is aware that he’s doing it, but it’s so glaringly obvious. He makes you want to scream laughter into his face so hard that it would make the white, soft skin flap behind his head. You’d turn him into a Looney Toon, but with all the pain of real life.
“Sit, sit,” he says [...]
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