分类： 赛事资讯

I never kissed the boy I liked behind the schoolyard fence that one March morning. I never had dinner with Katy Perry or lived in Kiev for two months either, but I still told my entire fourth-grade class I did.

The words slipped through my teeth effortlessly. With one flick of my tongue, I was, for all anybody knew, twenty-third in line for the throne of Monaco. “Actually?” the girls on the swings beside me would ask, wide eyes blinking with a childlike naivety. I nodded as they whispered under their breath how incredible my fable was. So incredible they bought into it without a second thought.

I lied purely for the ecstasy of it. It was narcotic. With my fabrications, I became the captain of the ship, not just a wistful passer-by, breath fogging the pane of glass that stood between me and the girls I venerated. No longer could I only see, not touch; a lie was a bullet, and the barrier shattered. My mere presence demanded attention — after all, I was the one who got a valentine from Jason, not them.

This way I became more than just the tomboyish band geek who finished her multiplication tables embarrassingly fast. My name tumbled out of their mouths and I manifested in the center of their linoleum lunch table. I became, at least temporarily, the fulcrum their world revolved around.

Not only did I lie religiously and unabashedly — I was good at it. The tedium of my everyday life vanished; I instead marched through the gates of my alcazar, strode up the steps of my concepts, and resided in my throne of deceit. I believed if I took off my fraudulent robe, I would become plebeian. The same aristocracy that finally held me in high regard would boot me out of my palace. To strip naked and exclaim, “Here’s the real me, take a look!” would lead my new circle to redraw their lines — they would take back their compliments, sit at the table with six seats instead of eight, giggle in the back of the class when I asked a question. I therefore adjusted my counterfeit diadem and continued to praise a Broadway show I had never seen.

Yet finally lounging in a lavender bedroom one long-sought-after day, after absently digesting chatter about shows I didn’t watch and boys I didn’t know, I started processing the floating conversations. One girl, who I had idolized for always having her heavy hair perfectly curled, casually shared how her parents couldn’t afford to go on their yearly trip the coming summer. I drew in an expectant breath, but nobody scoffed. Nobody exchanged a secret criticizing glance. Instead, another girl took her spoon of vanilla frosting out of her cheek and with the same air of indifference revealed how her family wasn’t traveling either. Promptly, my spun stories about swimming in crystal pools under Moroccan sun seemed to be in vain.

The following Monday, the girls on the bus to school still shared handfuls of chocolate-coated sunflower seeds with her. At lunch, she wasn’t shunned, wasn’t compelled to sit at a forgotten corner table. For that hour, instead of weaving incessant fantasies, I listened. I listened to the girls nonchalantly talk about yesterday’s soccer game where they couldn’t score a single goal. Listened about their parent’s layoff they couldn’t yet understand the significance of. I listened and I watched them listen, accepting and uncritical of one another no matter how relatively vapid their story. I then too began to talk, beginning by admitting that I wasn’t actually related to Britney Spears.

优胜者

Daniella Canseco, age 17, St. Mary’s Hall, San Antonio: “Lips or Slug?”

Ruhani Chhabra, age 16, Mission San Jose High School, Fremont, Calif.: “T.S.A. and Cinnamon Buns”

Marion Cook, age 14, The Wheeler School, Providence, R.I.: “The Bluff”

Blanche Li, age 13, Diablo Vista Middle School, Danville, Calif.: “The Best Friend Question”

Lyat Melese, age 16, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Alexandria, Va.: “Guilted”

Elise Spenner, age 15, Burlingame High School, Burlingame, Calif.: “504 Hours”

Lillian Sun, age 17, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Alexandria, Va.: “Purple Corn”

Ellen Xu, age 16, Del Norte High School, San Diego: “Autocorrect”

_________

亚军

Bailee Cook, age 17, Hanford High School, Richland, Wash.: “To Cry”

Esther Lee, age 16, St. Paul Preparatory, Seoul: “Warmth Behind Unfamiliarity”

Anjanette Lin, age 14 Groton School, Groton, Mass.: “Orange Nikes”

Jimmy Lin, age 17, BASIS International Park Lane Harbor, Huizhou, Guangdong, China: “The Front Seat”

Robin Linden, age 13, The Wheeler School, Providence, R.I.: “Goodnight, Mom”

Sybellah Kidd-Shugart, age 15, Sprayberry High School, Marietta, Ga.: “A Watch Wound Back Seven Years”

Sim Khanuja, age 17, Kirkwood High School, Kirkwood, Mo.: “An Angel’s Eyes”

Maximus Masucci, Harmony Middle School, Purcellville, Va.: “How I Learned to Break Out of My Shell: An Autistic Boy’s Perspective on Communication”

Pranav Moudgalya, age 17, University High School, Irvine, Calif.: “Talking Turkey”

Jack Quach, age 17, St. Ignatius High School, San Francisco: “A Mighty Pen”

Sum Yu Tian, age 15, The Hockaday School, Dallas: “The Ever-Moving Train”

Ryan Thomas, age 16, Hinsdale Central High School, Hinsdale, Ill.: “The Pyrotechnician”

Yihan (Laura) Wang, age 13, Shrewsbury International School Bangkok Riverside, Bangkok: “Confession”

Elizabeth Warren, age 17, The Hockaday School, Dallas: “El Xbox”

Stella Wu, age 16, Taipei American School, Taipei, Taiwan: “Anonymous”

Jerry Xu, age 16, Sacred Heart Schools Atherton, Atherton, Calif.: “What’s in a Name?”

_________

荣誉奖

Jayda Brain, age 15, Illawarra Christian School, Albion Park, Australia: “The Viking Revenge Flume”

Claire Beeli, age 15, Woodrow Wilson High School, Long Beach, Calif.: “When Airplanes and Rocket-Copters Were Stars”

Tony Cai, age 17, Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, N.H.: “A Coin Never Delivered”

Czarina Datiles, age 16, Academy of Our Lady of Peace, San Diego: “Bystander”

Jinane Ejjed, age 13, The Seven Hills School, Walnut Creek, Calif: “The Flying Turtle”

Elena Green, age 17, Washington-Liberty, Arlington, Va.: “Modern Education”

Viona Huang, age 16, Diamond Bar High School, Diamond Bar, Calif: “Born a Crime”

Chloe Jacobs, age 17, Choate Rosemary Hall, Wallingford, Conn.: “Heart Hearth”

Yoo Jin Cho, age 16, Presbyterian Ladies’ College, Sydney: “Lost Your Voice?”

Eve Kaplan, age 16, Community High School, Ann Arbor, Mich.: “Boy Crazy”

Liana Kim, age 15, W. T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, Va.: “Echoes of My Blood”

Gwen McNulty, age 14, Lincoln High Schoo, Lincoln, R.I.: “You Don’t Dry Them”

Asher Mehr, age 17, De Toledo High School, West Hills, Calif.: “I Remember August”

Atena Mori, age 16, Iolani School, Honolulu: “Not Throwing Away Any Soup”

Eojin P.: “Withering Cards”

Anya Pan, age 14, International School of Beijing, Beijing: “White Rabbit Under the Sun”

Raymond Pan, age 17, Aurora High School, Aurora, Ontario: “10,000 Kilometers”

Stewart Payne, age 16, Western Albemarle High School, Crozet, Va.: “Playing Games”

Arian Salamat, age 17, Branham High School, San Jose, Calif.: “Boneco”

Alexander Sayette, age 16, Winchester Thurston School, Pittsburgh, Pa.: “400 Meters”

Lauren Strauch, age 18, St. Mary’s Hall, San Antonio: “Two Women Baking”

Cheyenne Toma, age 17, Leonardtown High School, Leonardtown, Md.: “Mourning the Dad I Never Had in Nine Innings”

Paul Wallace, age 16, Glenbrook North High School, Northbrook, Ill.: “Unholy Night”

Madison Xu, age 17, Horace Mann School, Bronx, N.Y.: “Table for Three”

_________

第四轮决赛入围者

A PDF of all the winn所有获奖者的PDF和154个精彩的叙述进入了第4轮。

Thirty feet below me and the quivering gray of the diving board, the ocean howled its lonely tune. It whispered and wept like a child lost at the market. It was restless. The wind blew to the same beat at which my heart quickened. It thumped almost audibly despite the shouts of encouragement from strangers, their presence adding a touch of surrealness to my already fraught situation.

I wonder how many people I disappointed that day. I wonder if they remembered my face as I disappeared into the lottery of daily life.

Slowly, my cousins began to run off the sharp angle of the board. I watched some of them fall; there was always this flutter of panic before they all resurfaced, laughing.

I wanted to, too. I wanted to be like them. They said it felt like flying. I remembered thinking that I wanted to know what it felt like to have wings.

The concept of voluntary risk leaked from my brain in the same way water leaks through one’s cupped hands. I think I blame cancer. My mom was diagnosed. Skin cancer. On her head. Not like one surgery and it’s gone type cancer, like fighting for more time type cancer. I was nine years old. Instead of worrying about what to wear to school, I worried about whether or not my mom would wake up in the morning. And how I wouldn’t know until later because a hospital bed cradled her arms and IV bags hugged her, instead of me.

I didn’t really think about my partially broken urge to take on fear because I was too busy with school and birthday parties and the full-time occupation of being the kid of a sick person.

So I didn’t. For years I would come back. Sometimes I would watch my cousins or strangers fall and just say that I didn’t feel like it or that I had just dried off or that the water was too cold. The ocean didn’t judge me, and the sky didn’t care.

But I still felt regretful whenever I walked away. Slowly, I remembered that I had still wanted to know what it felt like to fly.

All of life is temporary and like a dream in the sense that when it will end is as obscure as the already forgotten beginning. Perhaps the greatest people are those who understand that risk is what makes life count. You can be alive for lifetimes without ever really living at all. Sometimes fear is what makes existence tangible as we crisscross our strings of consciousness, floating haphazardly in the void.

I remembered this. I think, to some degree at least, it saved me in a way. I ran off the board. Partially because heights and I are not compatible, and partially because life’s too short to spend time hesitating.

And I did fall. I think I screamed. The whole ordeal happened as spontaneously as the disease that had engulfed my mother. It was over faster, though. And hurt less than radiation and needles and drugs sometimes did. My mom was there that day. Despite relapses and tumors, by the time I was 14, she was extraordinarily cancer-free. The ocean consumed me. I felt small again, like a kid, like I had traveled back to before the Big Bang, and everything forever was silence and the bubbles caused by the air escaping my lungs. And then I resurfaced. I was OK.

I was going to be OK.

When I was younger, I romanticized the thought of my first kiss. I thought it would be the most extravagant thing I would experience with the most handsome boy ever. I wanted the whole shebang: a Zac Efron look-a-like, roses, candles. When I did have my first kiss, was it like this? Nope. My first kiss was in a church parking lot after a musty dinner at the local food court. Just like everyone else, I remember the experience vividly, even though I try to forget.

The first red flag with this guy should’ve been the fact that when my mother Googled him, a picture of my last failed attempt at a relationship came up. They knew each other. Why didn’t I bail that very moment? Well, I was so desperate for even a hue of male validation that I put my blinders on for all red flags. I even ignored the fact that he had shirtless mirror pictures on his Instagram. How I cringe.

In my blue Mazda with the sticker “Let me see your kitties” on the back, I drove into the desolate Mission City Church parking lot, not knowing what fate awaited me. For about 30 minutes this guy showed me his entire music library, which consisted of subpar rap songs that his ex-girlfriend had introduced him to, and his entire camera roll, which was all pictures of him shirtless in front of a mirror, except for two, which were, surprisingly, shirtless pictures of him not in front of a mirror. So unpredictable!

A heavy rain started and, with each drop of water smacking my car, a loud slap would reverberate inside and inhibit our ability to hear one another. This unfortunate turn of events resulted in a conversation where the question “WHAT?” was said every other statement. We made small talk by screaming (well, him just screaming about himself at me) for about 10 minutes until the atmosphere in the car thickened with anticipation.

“Have you ever been kissed before?” he asked, breaking the silence.

“WHAT?!”

“HAVE YOU EVER BEEN KISSED BEFORE?!” he howled at me.

Taken aback by this overwhelming question, I felt heat rush to my face as my body tinged with panic: Will he think I’m weird if I say no? Should I lie? I shouldn’t have eaten that Greek salad with onions.

“It’s OK if you haven’t.”

I pulled out my metaphorical white flag of surrender and admitted to my lack of achievement of this milestone. Suddenly, I saw his body lean over the dashboard that separated us; his hand reached for my cheek and, just like that, he started kissing me. The fumes of hot onion breath were shared between us as his wet lips slid against mine like a slug. This went on for a good three seconds, which really felt like a good three years, until I pushed him away, overwhelmed by the discomfort I had just experienced. My hand lunged for my cup of water as I attempted to wash down the dissatisfaction of something I had yearned for for years.

“Oh, are you OK?” he questioned, as I violently gulped down my water.

“WHAT?!”

“ARE!? YOU!? OK!?”

“OH! YEAH, I-I JUST NEED TO GET BACK.”

I drove him back to his house, the only sounds the ending of the once violent storm and his ex-girlfriend’s rap music playlist. The awkward end-of-date goodbye ensued, and I drove back home in silence rethinking what happened, my lofty expectations deflated. Most of life’s presumptions will not be close to reality, but that’s just how things work.

By Ruhani Chhabra, age 16, Mission San Jose High School, Fremont, Calif.

It felt like there was no air in the room. Mom sat on the mint green chair in the corner. The white exam paper crinkled under me as I gripped my knees to my chest and rocked back and forth. My tears blurred the cheery posters on human anatomy, balanced eating and mask etiquette into a mosh pit of swirling words and colors. The doctor’s words were garbled, blocked out by a rushing storm of shame.

“Hospital … patient care … check if they have beds.”

“Disordered eating … bradycardia … not enough blood to the heart …”

I didn’t need to listen to her. I already knew everything. I am a straight-A student. I have a solid grasp on cause and effect. Two plus two is four; not eating and exercising too much is an eating disorder. I’ve watched enough “Grey’s Anatomy” to know when doctors have bad news. I could tell by the way she walked into the room: the weary smile that screamed pity and heartache and the look that said, “I came into this profession to save lives, but that means I have to ruin yours.” I knew before that, when the nurse’s brow furrowed at the 42 on the heart rate monitor, and her icy fingers pressed my wrist to recalculate. I knew when I left that morning for my ritualistic five-mile run, leaving the remains of a breakfast pecked at and shuffled around on the plate. Of course I knew.

For a moment, as I listened and cried and the world swirled around me, I was relieved. Relieved that I could let go. That I wouldn’t have to think about what I ate or how fast I ran because my hands were being forcibly removed from the steering wheel.

But the world wouldn’t stay on hold until I was ready to start living again.

While I sat shellshocked, Mom canceled next week’s vacation to the bungalow rental by the beach. Dad sent a terse email to my soccer coach explaining why I would miss our first training camp in a year. For the next three weeks, I would participate in my summer courses from the four walls of a hospital room, with my computer angled to block out the nurse that would routinely flush my IV, the tangled mess of green and yellow wires that would tie me to a 24-hour heart rate monitor, and the makeshift sofa that one of my parents would sacrifice their back to sleep on each night. And two months later, my dad would open the mail to find a bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Enough to account for the 504 hours I would spend in a hospital room, the 126 meals and snacks I would eat over those 504 hours, and the nurses who would wait on me for every single one of those 504 hours.

As I rocked compulsively on the glaring, white exam paper, relief quickly gave way to guilt. Gnawing guilt that in my undying pursuit for some ideal, I had destroyed my parents, my relationships and my life. I thought the numbers on the scale were some test to be passed or game to be won, until winning left me in a hospital bed for the summer. My choices were real. And the consequences? They were even more real.

First, after I finished sobbing, I wanted to scream, “Why me?” Then I wanted to pray to a god I didn’t believe in to turn back the clock and rewrite my story. But finally, with my face still buried in my knees, all I could do was whisper “I’m sorry” over and over and over again.

The shrill sound of a whistle slices through the gym, slowly halting the bouncing basketballs, squeaking tennis shoes and background chatter. My P.E. teacher stands in the middle of the room, looking around in distaste at the disarray of basketballs, hula hoops, and volleyball nets. He asks for volunteers to help clear the gym.

Saanvi raises a lone hand into the air. Everybody else refuses to meet the teacher’s eyes, focusing on the floor, their hands or the ceiling.

I sigh as it strikes again.

Yilugnta

It is hard to define the Amharic word in English. It describes the feeling comprising a mishmash of extreme empathy and the inability to say “no.” It is a trait I see in my mother and, much to my annoyance, myself. While yilugnta makes me a kind and respectful daughter at home, it makes me a pushover susceptible to guilt-tripping at school.

I raise my hand, “I can do it.”

Saanvi and I collect all the balls and ropes, rolling the carts into the storage room.

We are alone when she suddenly stops and looks at me.

“Did you get accepted?” she asks, referring to the highly selective admission to the local STEM high school.

“Yeah,” I reply. “You?”

She looks away. Her hands fist at her sides as a frown is etched on her face.

I look down. “I’m sorry. I know how badly you wanted to go.”

“You don’t understand,” she spits out. “You obviously got in because you are Black.”

I don’t respond, focusing instead on the colorful hula hoops I am stacking in a pile: green, yellow, blue.

When we first moved to America, my parents went to great lengths to avoid the term “Black.” They instilled in me that I was not just Black, I was Ethiopian. I used to think it was because they didn’t want me to forget my culture. Now I think they were protecting me because the term “Black” shoulders the weight of history.

My Nigerian neighbor always grits his teeth and talks to himself when he watches Nigerian news. He blames Britain for forcing the tribes together. He says Nigeria should not have existed. Now, his wife hides the remote because his blood pressure grows too high.

My mom’s friend’s African-American partner goes to town halls and protests every week. He still waits for the day he will get the reparations his ancestors were owed.

My mom tells me that we are not like them. Our ancestors were not colonized or enslaved. Don’t carry the burden that is not yours.

In my head, I want to scream that I did not choose to carry anything. It was shoveled on top of my head. Much like my yilugnta, it is a trait I have to own, no matter how I wish otherwise.

The age of shackles and scramble for land has long passed, but the aftermath reverberates in our ears, whispering words like “victim,” “predator” and “diversity hire.”

Black is black is black.

I turn back to look at Saanvi.

“The admissions are race-blind,” I state.

“Everybody knows that’s not true,” she scoffs. “So few Black people apply, you are guaranteed a spot.”

She pushes past my shoulders and marches out of the room.

Her bag lies forgotten on the floor, a key chain with a colorful peace sign dangling from the front.

I stare at it, contemplating leaving it there.

Yilugnta

I pick up the straps and haul it over my shoulder, once more carrying the weight I do not own.

_________