Helm 2015

HELM Revolution

Volume 16 // Spring 2015

Harker’s Eclectic Literary Magazine Member of the Columbia Scholastic Press Association

HELM

Harker’s Eclectic Literary Magazine

Volume 16 Spring 2015 Member of the Columbia Scholastic Press Association Gold Medalist 2012

1

2

Letter from the Editors Dear Readers, We are absolutely thrilled to finally be able to share Volume 16 of Harker’s Eclectic Literary Magazine with our fellow peers and faculty! Our staff has worked for months with enthusiasm and vigor to bring you the best of the Harker community, and we hope you enjoy the issue as much as we do.

This year’s issue introduces a new element to the HELM landscape: a single, unifying theme. After an extensive voting process involving the entire staff at the beginning of the school year, HELM: Revolution was born. This year’s issue explores the different ways that rebellion, independence, and the free spirit can manifest themselves in daily life. Our goal was to shine a light on the seemingly mundane, showcasing moments of power and strength in even the most bleak situations. We hope that our culled collection of exemplary literary and artistic works inspires you, whether it be to speak out against injustice or accept yourself for who you are.

Although each individual piece in this year’s issue coalesces to form a greater, revolutionary whole, the diversity of approaches to the theme from our student body was a delight to encounter. HELM: Revolution features a variety of works, each exemplifying a different perspective on our theme.

As our parting issue, HELM: Revolution holds a special importance to us. Working on the publication staff throughout our time in high school has been a truly educational, enjoyable, and essential experience for the both of us, and although saying goodbye to our wonderful staff is a bittersweet moment, we have the utmost faith in their ability to create even more beautiful and well-constructed issues. We hope that Volume 16 is just a stepping stone to carry HELM’s legacy into the future.

Juhi Gupta and Juhi Muthal (Editors-in-Chief)

3

table of contents

Writing

One of Three . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Emily Chen

Clean

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

. . . . 9

Elisabeth Siegel

Sarafem(ale Assault) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Maya Nandakumar

Babel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Andrew Rule

Signed, Ink . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Priscilla Pan

“A” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Elisabeth Siegel

Differentiating Equations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Meilan Steimle

The English Teacher to the Student . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Sophia Luo

Farewell the Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Meilan Steimle

If Feminism is for Ugly Girls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Kaity Gee

Peter and Joshua . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Andrew Rule

You Are Home and I Am Sick of It . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Elisabeth Siegel

Bonheur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Kacey Fang

Collections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Sahana Rangarajan

Searching for Strongly Regular Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Suzy Lou

4

Visual Art

Through the Mist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Shannon Hong

Untitled

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

. . . . 8

Shay Lari-Hosain

My Last . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Sophia Luo

Supervixi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Alexis Gauba

Pursuit of Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Sophia Luo

Thinly Veiled. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 May Gao

Some Homes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

24

Ethan Ma

My English Teacher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Sophia Luo

Anglys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Alexis Gauba

Untitled . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Serena Lu

Untitled . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Shay Lari-Hosain

iWorld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Kevin Ke

Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Shay Lari-Hosain

Ardens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Alexis Gauba

Missed Connections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Natasha Mayor

A Strongly Regular Graph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Suzy Lou

Hands Up Don’t Shoot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Shannon Hong

5

Through the Mist Shannon Hong Grade 11

6

One of Three Emily Chen Grade 9

butterfly blues she drowned in sugared coffee under early morning haze, a lazy pull at her cigarette; curls of smoke to the sky. indigo crescents circle her eyes, the hangover glaze remains.

4.4 GPA. young boy gun clutched between fingers pale as the moon the rhythm of his breath staccato and soft shirt tattooed with dried wine-colored blood. “listen close, my lad, and perhaps you will survive. you will kill or be killed trying to stay alive.” veined eyelids shut out faint marionettes of times long gone; a mother’s touch to cornsilk hair, a smiling pat on the back. drug-induced adrenaline pressed him on through violet nights and dark red days. blue sky? what’s that? slim arms patterned with hatred’s shadow curved back scarred with imperial scowls: “you will get your revenge; wait for your time. our sun will dawn on a day worth this backbreaking climb.” value earned through dead bodies, how many bloodshot eyes filled with naive hope will you close for eternity? mooncake circle, circle, pi, pi clockwise, counter, back again– everything returns to dust. silver crowns tumble to brass lions weep beneath gray willows twelve dead in Paris shooting everything returns to dust.

7

Shay Lari-Hosain Grade 11

8

Clean Elisabeth Siegel Grade 11

A young person that Marcia had never seen before entered the bookstore. The bell on the door announced his arrival to the two other people inside. The sleepy cashier did not look up from his tattered Paz novel. Marcia locked eyes with the newcomer before turning her back, deciding that his pale-as-paper skin made him bad news.

Marcia darted a glance over the shelf of cookbooks to see whatever it was that had caught the young person’s eye as he had entered to make him stop so abruptly in his tracks. Ah, the new Gaiman release, she noted. Typical.

Still, a newcomer was a newcomer. No use in needlessly scaring him from the shop. Marcia would have gladly given anyone else a piece of her mind if they had dared stop in front of Gaiman first.

She bent back over the bottom panel of the wooden wall in front of her and added the last touches to her still life. Movement behind her made her look back out of the corner of her eye. The newcomer—no, the cashier—stood at her left side. She straightened.

“Your shit is sad,” he said. Latino like her, his accent reminded Marcia of her brother Stefano—Steven, now—before he decided to gun for Wall Street over in America and gagged himself, forcing his rebellious tongue to lie flat and motionless with each “r.”

“Not everything is a fuckin’ tragedy, chica,” the cashier continued. His whiskers engulfed his chin from ear to ear, the line neatly maintained. Short-lensed glasses sat on the bridge of his nose, while one eyebrow sat perpetually higher on the forehead than other.

Marcia’s cheeks burned in spite of herself. She heard the newcomer edging closer across the store, too, to get a better look at what she was painting. “So why are you still paying me?”

The cashier shrugged. “It’s good.” He walked back to his desk.

9

The newcomer dared to step closer. Marcia felt her top lip rise and flatten back against her teeth to slide her expression into a sneer. I swear to god, she thought. If he even says a word…

“It’s pretty depressing. Lots of blues,” he said like he thought he was being helpful. The newcomer had some Californian abomination of an American accent. He smiled in the direction of the cashier, looking up and down like he was checking him out.

Marcia concentrated on filling in the sketch on the next panel of the wall with the first coat of paint. “Did I ask this goddamn gringo?” She demanded of the cashier in Spanish. The cashier made a sympathetic noise, turning the page in his novel. Good man, she thought. I should probably learn his name sometime. Afonso kept the cashiers on a rotating schedule, and Marcia didn’t bother to keep their names straight in her head. Men and their names didn’t concern her. She took every effort to surround herself with good books and people, but never men.

The door opened again and three white girls flitted in, their eyes darting over the spines on the shelf nearest the door. “Hey, Rick!” sang the redhead in the middle. The three girls had neon colored point-and-shoot cameras hung around their freckled wrists.

They couldn’t have been older than nineteen.

“Yo, ‘sup,” Rick said. “I’m just in here looking around. Where are the rest of the guys?”

“Back at the bus. We’re almost outta here.”

“Alright. Just give me a few more minutes.” Rick’s eyes darted toward the cashier again. Marcia didn’t see the appeal of either two men, if she was honest.

“We’ll look around too,” chirped the blonde girl on the right side of the redhead.

“No biggie. This place is super clean compared to the rest of the neighborhood.”

“Guys, be nice—” Rick started.

“How will you buy anything here?” demanded the redhead. Marcia felt her eyes boring into the back of her skull. “Your Spanish is crap.”

“I heard them speaking English a moment ago—” “Yeah, right. Well. I’ll just have to order for you, hmm?” The redhead plastered a smile on her face and turned to the cashier. “Ho-la. May yah-mo Bella. Ee too?”

10

The cashier turned another page and called out to Marcia in Portuguese, “I hate tour season.”

“You and I both,” Marcia muttered. She turned around, dropping the brush she was using into the mason jar at her side. “I have three panels left. I’ll begin again tomorrow.”

Across the store, Rick plucked the Gaiman book from the table and strode for the cashier’s table. “This, please,” he said. Marcia could practically taste the saccharine in his voice. “Thanks. I’m Rick, by the way.”

The cashier manually typed the ISBN number into the old PC next to him. “So I’ve heard,” he replied, surprising Marcia to such a degree that she dropped the brush she was cleaning. “I’m Octavio.”

Octavio glanced toward the back wall at Marcia, noting her expression. “What can I say? He’s cute,” he said in Portuguese.

“You have such a soft spot for gringos.” Marcia threw up her arms in the air, though humor tinged her words. “Afonso is gonna come back in ten minutes, and I’m gonna tell him that you chatted one up.”

“Hopefully more than chat up,” was all Octavio said. Now Marcia did roll her eyes in disgust.

He counted out coins from the register. “There’s your change,” he informed Rick.

Rick didn’t walk away from the register. The three white girls that had entered left the shop. “Don’t be too long. You’ll miss the bus!” The redhead called. “You’ll end up in some brothel if you stick around for too long,” added the blonde nastily, eyeing Rick and Octavio one last time before leaving.

Marcia grabbed her mason jar of cloudy water and her spare brushes and headed for the back room. She set the jar down into the tiny, grimy sink that sat to the far right in the room and headed for the lone armchair in the center. Here, there was a single lamp on a bucket that she turned on, grabbing her book from the cushion where she had laid it down when she’d first started her work that morning.

She dug her mind into the Spanish translation of Plath deeply enough that she didn’t pay any mind to the bell on the door hinge when it rang once again. It was only the shouting afterward that brought her out of her chair and back into the main room of the bookstore.

11

Her eyes first went to Afonso, as they always did whenever Afonso was in the room. Afonso commanded that kind of attention, demanded that kind of regard. His bald, bulbous head sat on a thick neck, thick shoulders and barreled chest. He was cleanshaven, dressed in pale blue jeans and a white t-shirt that strained at its seams. His eyes, usually wide and open and happy, were now narrowed and set deep into his face, his bushy eyebrows practically colliding with each other in his fury. He stood back with his arms crossed in front of his chest.

“Why are you here?” When he did these kinds of things, he kept his questions short and to the point. Afonso spoke the best, smoothest English out of all of them, without clumsiness and with barely an accent. He could have passed for an American native.

He addressed Rick, who was currently held up by two young adults on either side of his body. They held his arms back with each of his two hands.

“T-tour group,” stammered Rick, craning his neck wildly to look for Octavio.

Rick happened to be shirtless already, with small purple markings blooming along his neck. Damn it, Octavio, Marcia thought with some exasperation.

“Tour group?” Afonso’s voice became dangerously uninflected, the proverbial calm before the verbal storm. “Where are you from?”

“California. Please, sir, I’ll leave—” Afonso whirled around to face Octavio, switching to a rapid-fire hybrid of Spanish and Portuguese. “It’s not homosexuality I have a problem with, monte de merda.

Screw whomever you want, but you work for me in my establishment and you decide to screw this goddamn gringo? And you’re going to look at my face and tell me that it was only going to be a, how do they say it in English, one-night stand—” Afonso momentarily switched into English to mock, and Rick paled even further upon hearing these words, “—but I know you, Octavio, and there’s a good chance that it won’t be. This goddamn gringo will stay here and there’ll be another goddamn gringo living in Rio, another goddamn thorn in my side—” he broke himself off to turn back toward Rick and spit at his feet. “These gringos move in and it’s like the world stops, the world stops and restarts to revolve around them and their bourgeois bullshit. They buy out my people. They buy out you and me, Octavio, they buy out our lives. Screwing them, interacting with them—it all turns out the same, Octavio.

“This one’s nice,” Octavio whined.

12

“That’s not good enough,” Afonso’s voice was rising steadily until it seemed as if the windows were rattling in their frames, the books minutely quivering in their shelves. “One nice one, one good one, several nice ones, even if most were nice ones, that wouldn’t matter. They’re always gonna get advantages…” Afonso rubbed his head with the knuckles of his left hand. “He sticks around here, maybe he invites friends to come stay. Maybe he invites his family. You never know. You can never know. All of it will hurt.”

Something in Octavio’s face must have displeased Afonso. Marcia blinked and missed it, but she heard the crack all the same. Octavio’s lip bled now, dripping out from the corner of his mouth and onto his black t-shirt. Afonso’s arms looked like they hadn’t even moved.

“Savages,” Rick burst out, tears leaking out from his eyes. All heads in the room swiveled back to where he was still held in the hands of Afonso’s men. “You’re all a bunch of uncivilized fucking savages! Octavio, you can come back with m—” Afonso didn’t even have to take a step himself before the two men at Rick’s sides set on him with roars of their own. They pummeled his chest and his face, laying into his lower body with kicks from their thick work boots. “For the streets,” they snarled. “For Rio!” Octavio, Afonso, and Marcia stood still. Marcia looked at the three men rolling on the floor, looked at Rick scrabbling for his life on the bookshelves. This, she thought, this I can paint. And Octavio can shut up for good about how sad my art is, because this one will be the truth.

13

The Last Sophia Luo Grade 11

Maya Nandakumar Grade 12

14

Sarafem(ale assault) Maya Nandakumar Grade 12

I remember waking up to the scent of dried bloodstains and used alcohol swabs.

Then doctors analyzing rapid eye movement

they’re meant to stifle all these damned tears.

Prevent me from ending up here, half dead on a hospital bed drenched in blood smears

charts with medical school undergrads, who had seen one too many cadavers, commented that my dreams were fraught with frauds

dressed in pale blouses stained with ink and lead from writing too many suicide notes that will probably be, in time, misread.

who in mellifluous tones had lathered me in pain pulled straight out of my consciousness.

And like sentinels armed with vitriolic daggers,

His name has been tattooed inside my throat by remnants of wedding cake and champagne.

His name has been carved into all my notes,

freed inhibitors from their fortresses and let them destroy my serotonin.

Gobble it up like miners, profitless,

impressed upon my great cerebral vein.

For thirteen years I nursed a broken soul– if only that was all you broke. I blame

receiving their first chance at gold waiting on banks of unexplored tributaries.

Someone inquired after my epinephrine

that one defective pack of birth control and then I was popping out placentas of stillborns we couldn’t afford to hold

levels. For it seemed that the synergies had mutually failed at maintaining those careful chemical stabilities.

onto anyway. Now I am a mass of hemoglobin clots and dried skin glue, semi-alive, breathing oxygen gas,

Worthless neurotransmitters rendering me insane, useless the entire year.

A handful of pills crowns every morning–

monitored by a vigilant hospital crew seeping blood through lacerations from you.

Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Regional Silver Medal Winner

15

Supervixi Alexis Gauba Grade 10

16

Babel Andrew Rule Grade 10

They say the tallest tower ever built punctured the sky gashed the clouds blocked the sun from noon till dusk and tyrannized the horizon until it dropped I’ll bet it took hours for the top floor to fall to the ground, and when it did you could hear it from the center of the earth and you could feel the whole planet rear back and wince They say it broke the world into a hundred thousand pieces I’ll bet its remains are still jutting from the ground— fingers of stone prodding, jabbing at the sky That day a chunk of scaffolding thudded down in the Pyrenees and rent the lands of France and Spain in two, while a fallen wall between China and Japan made a barrier airplanes couldn’t cross

17

By sunset window shards ten feet tall were still raining from the African skies until the continent was shattered and re-shattered—neighbors’ cries rendered meaningless by the rubble that’s been there ever since That day the world lost a unity we can never restore By sunset the tower’s wreckage had made it a new planet— an age of oneness had lived and now had died Some brave souls have learned to scale the walls and after years of training have caught a glimpse of what the world was before languages ripped it into shreds, and through their efforts have softened the blow of our species’ greatest loss And yet the towering ugly slabs of rubble still loom between nations, between cultures, between families The price to scale them: three years, maybe more, of study, and with so much to go through just to communicate, the laziest among us aren’t convinced Some brave scholars have learned to cross the ultimate barrier and yet the rest of us are still blocked from the rest of the world— the would-be allies, teachers, classmates, friends on the other side

18

Signed, ink Priscilla Pan Grade 12

A diagonal. A moving constant.

The graphite tears down my skin a screeching, metallic roar leaves behind deposits. silver specks, fine as dust broken off piled on.

Sometimes, it’s wet—sticky even— I feel it pool as the piercing eyes avoid me No movement.

I wait.

Drowning in the drops that puddle out From the pointy tip of abandonment The black tears of being inked then yanked out of me dryeyed, but not of sadness Tainted.

19

Pressure builds I feel my darkened surface smear unwelcomely How they have no respect.

I reach out my sapling crepe-limbs for the residue of what brains have crafted out the imprints on my soul The inklings, thoughts, the life I can only experience but never glimpse Silence yellows my skin I wait.

20

Pursuit of Knowledge Sophia Luo Grade 11

21

Thinly Veiled May Gao Grade 10

22

“A” Elisabeth Siegel Grade 11

She is a project, the priests say, in sore need of finishing. Tulips for ears and shrinking violets for lips, mottled with bruises, shaking her way apart— so what if she has painted over all of her appendages & is halfway through devouring herself.

She is a projector, smeared blindness & shadow on canvas of light. Doctrine warned against her fanning eyelashes of rice paper, sticky cobweb smiles, teeth that grew only sharper with age, a marble tongue that cleaves through refuse like the tines of a fork through holy water.

She is a projectile lodged in the heart of God. She is not to be prayed for.

Her throat rattles, bare rosary beads scraped along asphalt.

Her haloed speech sings like scrawled blasphemy on a cracked wall, tastes of woolen robes pooling at the floor.

Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Regional Silver Medal Winner

23

Some Homes Ethan Ma Grade 12

24

Differentiating Equations Meilan Steimle Grade 10

Reflexive property: Meilan = Wasian (White + Asian) Kid Pretty self-explanatory.

German-Irish Dad + Cantonese Mom = Wasian Kid In the Chinese zodiac calendar, each year is assigned a different animal in a twelve-year cycle, and according to Chinese astrology, each animal confers specific personality characteristics on those born in that year. My family is hardly superstitious, but we still identify with our animal, whether it be dragon or ox, albeit with the same seriousness that most Americans regard their horoscopes.

On February 3, 1999, my family gathers at Hunan Garden restaurant for my Red Egg and Ginger party, a celebration of the one-month anniversary of my birth. Since I am born in early January, before Chinese New Year, a problem presents itself: following the American calendar, I should be a rabbit, but according to the Chinese lunar calendar, I am a tiger. Consequently, the zodiac-themed gifts, which are piled in vibrant, satin pouches on the cake table, are a hodgepodge of tiger and rabbit jewelry, fiery orange stripes lying next to the soft grays and taupes of the rabbit. Where the tiger is ferocious and independent, the rabbit is gentle and centered on social harmony. So, which am I, a tiger or a rabbit? I’m one month old and already having an identity crisis.

At the party, a good time is had by all. My father’s side of the family is less familiar with Hunan cuisine, but they love the copious amounts of sodium. There’s a picture from the party that I look at from time to time. My paternal grandmother holds me, eyeing the German chocolate cake to her left, the fuzzy auburn halo of her hair clashing with the red painted eggs in the background. *** I first become conscious of my biracial ethnicity in pre-kindergarten when we sit in a circle and share our cultural heritages. “I’m Chinese,” I say, when it is my turn.

The teachers look skeptically at my brown hair and pinkish skin. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure,” I say, frowning. My mother is Chinese and most everyone else in the class is Chinese. How could I not be?

Property of inequality: Meilan + math < success It turns out that Chinese blood doesn’t necessarily equal brilliance in math.

“Meilan is having some trouble with simple multiplication,” my math teacher says.

From the throne of her desk, gray fingernails tapping a sonata on the brown veneer, she is

25

queen. I am flanked by my parents, giants squeezed awkwardly into the constraints of thirdgrade furniture. My teacher raises an eyebrow at me through silvery glasses, and I gulp and shift my gaze sideways, where fanciful, pastel Easter bunnies frolic across the slate walls.

She continues to explain my various shortcomings with simple calculations, and heat smolders behind my eyes and spreads to my nose, where it burns. I lower my head into my hands, squeezing my eyes shut, and my teacher’s nasal voice is muted by my new mantra: I am not good at math.

Simplifying polynomials: find the greatest common factor In 1994, Crystal Children’s Choir was founded by a small group of immigrants with nothing in common but their love of music and their Taiwanese heritage. Fifteen years later, the only thing that’s changed is the number of choristers.

Being one of the only Wasians in a choir that’s often mistaken for a Chinese tour group has its perks; I usually show up on the website (Crystal Choir welcomes diversity!), and teachers remember my name (the white girl!) before most of my friends’. Still, it can be annoying when one of the teachers tells a story in Chinglish and all I observe are flamboyant hand gestures and the occasional squawk about eating at “Mac-uh-dah-no’s.” Sometimes, when I have to ask yet again for a translation of the conductor’s stage directions, a little resentment settles in my stomach. I’m not Chinese enough for this choir.

During one late night rehearsal, the unseasonable humidity seeps into my cheeks and neck, reducing a perky ponytail into the drooping ear of a basset hound. I race around the courtyard, chasing my friends, hearing the squishing in my shoes with every damp step.

As I sprint ahead and tag a boy, my 10-year-old lungs and equally mature sense of social propriety dovetail in a bellowing scream of “YOU’RE IT!” There is silence for a moment as my friends wince at the echoes of my shriek, and then everyone begins to laugh.

“That’s her white part coming out,” quips the boy I just tagged.

Our giggles and breathless energy intermingle in the evening air, and I laugh the hardest.

At this moment I recall my mother’s stories of her childhood in Los Angeles: the oppressive summer heat pooling into sweat stains on her T-shirt and the insensitive white classmates in their saddle shoes and Keds who jeered “Ching Chong Chinaman” across the tanbark. She had recounted how she and her siblings would frustrate them by pretending not to hear their taunts, later laughing at their ignorance.

Tonight’s revelry is so different from the sweltering afternoons of my mother’s childhood. I know I have great pipes; why else would I have been chosen for the solo in “Hot Cross Buns”?

26

Less is More: when 90% > 100% “And don’t forget to use the finger!” my mom calls across the house as I head upstairs to start my math homework.

Shortly after the conference with my math teacher, my mother takes it upon herself, with all the ferocious resolve of a Chinese matriarch, to mold me into a mathematical superstar. Once she has determined that my troubles lay in the details of arithmetic (seeing “13” where the problem reads “12,” forgetting to carry the “1”), she devises a brilliant plan to remedy them: the finger. What starts as a simple method of running my index finger along the numbers so as not to lose track of them becomes my mother’s mantra, countering mine: “use the finger,” as if every utterance will add another percent to my grade.

Over time, I begin to despise “the finger,” the phrase losing its meaning through overuse. Pretest: “Remember to use the finger!” Posttest: “Did you use the finger?” Bad grade: “I thought I told you to use the finger!” Good grade: “See what happens when you use the finger!” *** It is a balmy, California afternoon, and I sit alone, puzzling through algebraic word problems.

The jaw is one of the most powerful muscles in the human body, the passage reads, as if including background facts in the word problem will distract from how inherently frightening algebra is. Under the right circumstances, humans can bite off their own tongues! If Daniel takes two bites to chew through a banana, and an apple is three times as tough to chew, how many bites does it take Daniel to chew the apple? I daydream about gnawing off “the finger” to a bloody stump and presenting it, wrapped in graph paper and decorated with pieces of protractor, to my mother.

I take a break, and, on a whim, google “Wasian.” What comes up is a slew of articles, forums, and websites lauding the general attractiveness of my ethnicity. Half-Asians are the most attractive ethnicity, professes a (in retrospect, extremely creepy) message board with an album of bikini-clad Wasian women, some with bunny ears, posted below. Cute Asian faces with curvy bodies? writes one commenter. Count me in!

I smile as my self-esteem rises. I am not just a mathematically-challenged middle schooler, I am part of the Half-Asian Master Race, as one commenter eloquently puts it. For the first time, being Wasian seems like something special. I’ll always be considered pretty, I think with a smirk. With or without five fingers on each hand.

Inductive reasoning: from specific to general

27

Fox News would have me believe that New York, like my native California, is a melting pot encouraging cultural awareness and political correctness. This is not the case at Riverside Country Day School.

When my choir class travels to New York to perform at a music festival, we stop at a local middle school, and I gape at the utter… whiteness of the student body. Cackling voices echo around the auditorium where we are waiting to perform. I look out at the roiling sea of ruddy skin and freckles, yellow and brown curly hair, and feel utterly foreign.

For context, I attend a school that is 40% Indian, 40% East Asian, and 20% other (that’s where I am). Consequently, though I have been to several Diwali festivals and K-pop dominates my iTunes library, I’ve never been to a football game where the players were any bulkier than the flutists in the marching band.

“I’ve never seen so many blondes together in my life,” I whisper to my roommate, Tiffany.

We watch in silence as a chubby, towheaded boy yawns, his chin gathering in rolls at his neck like fondant folding over itself.

“Behold,” says Tiffany in mock wonder. “It’s your people.”

I glance around at my fellow choristers, who are giggling loudly amongst themselves in a mass of glossy black heads and uniform yellow shirts, and I let the ecumenical brown of my hair fall in a veil around me.

“Hey!” I turn to see a boy with a complexion similar to uncooked dough squinting at me through my curtain of hair. “Where in China are you guys from?”

I blink blankly at him. “We’re from California.” I’m not sure what I am supposed to feel: amusement as his mouth gapes open like he is trying to swallow his embarrassment, annoyance that he assumes every group of Asians is from China, happiness that he lumps me in as Chinese, or sadness that he lumps me in as Chinese. How can he and Tiffany both see me as different from themselves?

Inverse logic: “If p, then q.” “If not p, then not q”?

“Ni hao ma, Mei-Lan?” asks Simon, the aging owner of Hunan Gardens, his skin lined and wrinkled like the crumpled graph paper in my backpack.

“Wo hao,” I say clumsily. I’m sure my accent is abysmal, but Simon doesn’t mention it. To him, it probably sounds like the Chinese equivalent of “Mac-uh-dah-no’s.” “Why are you at the front desk today? Don’t you usually work in the kitchen?”

28

“Jarvis is taking care of it.” Simon’s smile stretches across his face when he mentions his son. “He’s growing up. I wanted him to go to college, but he didn’t like it. He’s really good in the kitchen, maybe better than me.”

As a thirteen-year-old, I don’t quite relate to Simon’s parental pride, but when I watch Jarvis emerge from the kitchen, balancing two circular platters tangentially on his arm, I think I understand.

Pan-fried noodles, wavy like sine curves, sizzle and pop like it’s Independence Day. I crunch on them with my cousin, six-year-old Chen Li, who was adopted from China. “We should go to China,” she says while gesturing with a piece of orange chicken perpendicularly impaled with her chopstick. “So the whole family can see where our ancestors lived!”

“Not everyone in our family is Chinese,” I remind her.

“Who isn’t?” asks Chen incredulously. The restaurant lights glint and reflect off of her hair, shining in orange streaks down her back.

“What about your dad?”

I find great amusement in the way Chen Li’s face slacks with shock. “Really?” She looks disbelievingly at her ethnically British dad, with his sandy hair and narrow nose. It has never occurred to Chen that her father is different from her. She wasn’t taught specifically about race, so she didn’t give it any more thought than variations in eye-color.

When we prepare to leave later that evening, I hear Simon conversing with a young boy in fluent Mandarin. Someone must have studied hard at Chinese School, I think sourly, remembering miserable afternoons in front of a chalkboard more gray than green with a teacher who taught entirely in Chinese. When I turn around, I’m stunned to see that Simon is talking to a Caucasian boy wearing a Tigers baseball cap.

“How long did you live in China?” asks Simon, switching to English.

“My whole life,” the boy replies. “We just moved back this year. I went to an international school, but I’m pretty culturally Chinese.”

Embarrassingly and irrationally, a part of me is jealous of this boy I’ve never met.

How is even he more Chinese than I am? If this white boy can unapologetically identify with being Chinese, why can’t I? Three points determine a plane Heat steams off of the worn steps of Tiananmen Square and condenses on the lateral faces of my tangerine parasol. People shimmer and flicker through the Forbidden City like holograms, wavy and insubstantial, there one minute, ghosts the next. The dizzy haze

29

rises through layers of stone and history and coils around us like the spiraling tails of the dragon statues decorating the compound. Here, in the mist of human discomfort, tourists and natives alike blur together. To distract myself from the burn of my shoulders, I think of a beautiful site we had toured earlier in the day. The Temple of Heaven, which was constructed completely without nails, is perfectly balanced, both graceful and architecturally sound, a transcendent example of art and math combined.

“Excuse me!” The Chinese girl who is squinting through blue contact lenses calls out to me in English as broken as her peroxide-blond hair tips. “Can I take a picture with you?” After I’ve nodded awkwardly, she hands her phone, ensconced in a tiger iPhone case, to my mom. “Halfies are always so cute!” she says as my mom snaps the picture. *** “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” says a casual friend, shaking her hands in shock after I recount the story in Crystal Choir. “You’re Wasian?! I thought you were just white.” I nod, and she grins. “That’s so cool! Can I, like, be your best friend?”

Isosceles triangle: two equal sides on a stable base Sometime in my eighth grade quest for “self-definition,” I stumble on a blog about people of color in the media. Am I a woman of color? I send a question to the moderator of the blog. A few hours later, I receive a response.

“If you can pass as white, then no, because you have white privilege,” she has written.

What follows is thirty minutes of scrutinizing my nose in the mirror until my breath fogs up the glass. Can I “pass”? It is obvious that I look more white than Asian, but could I not be a woman of color just because of how I appear? To me, the words “woman of color” evoke thoughts of my mother and Rosa Parks: strong, successful women triumphing over adversity. The words “white privilege” conjure up images of bullying and separate water fountains. Staring at my blurry face, I scowl. How can it be fair that half my heritage be denied based on my skin tone?

Later, I semi-jokingly lament to my mom about how I have to admit to having white privilege. She looks at me like she should know me but doesn’t.

“Well, of course you do,” she says. “Would you rather be discriminated against for how you look?”

I deflate, and I realize that I’ve just done what all the minority-rights bloggers say is the worst crime a white person can commit: whine about the tribulations of being white. I look white, so I have white privilege. I look white, so I am not a woman of color. I look white,

30

so I am not Chinese. Heat gathers behind my eyes, and then I feel hot all over, like the oppressive summers in Los Angeles and the sizzling noodles at Simon’s and the steaming steps of Tiananmen Square. Hot like shame.

But to my surprise, my mother goes on.

“I was teased in elementary school for being Chinese,” she says. “But when I went to college, people said that I wasn’t Chinese enough.”

I stare at her. My mother, the full-blooded Chinese woman, wasn’t Chinese enough?

She continues. “I don’t speak Chinese. I don’t eat Chinese food, and I didn’t marry someone Chinese, so people would say I’m not that Chinese because I don’t ‘act Chinese.’”

She pauses. “Who you are isn’t about labels or behavior. It’s something inside of you. I don’t need to use chopsticks to prove I’m Chinese.”

A smile begins to creep onto my face.

“Besides,” she says, “forks are faster.” sin x / x: Meilan approaching 1 At the end of my freshman year, my family gathers once again at Hunan Garden.

It’s changed a lot since I celebrated my Red Egg and Ginger Party here more than 15 years ago. Simon, who still asks me “ni hao ma?” has crumpled into an old man with a sloped back, his hair streaked with white.

A few weeks earlier, my family, dedicated patrons that we are, received a flier informing us that Hunan Garden was being replaced by Mandarin Roots, a Chinese-Californian fusion restaurant run by Jarvis. So here we are at the opening, sampling pork quesadillas with mango kimchee emulsion and beef sliders with Laotian chili aioli.

The decor is also different; the traditional, circular tables with spinning lazy Susans have been replaced by sleek rectangular ones, and new chairs are covered in tiger-print upholstery. Simon scurries around the restaurant, grinning, chatting with diners, and bragging about Jarvis’ culinary training at famous restaurants throughout the U.S. I suppose that some may contend that Asian culture has been lost; a once purely Chinese restaurant has shed tradition for the 21st Century. But I look at Simon and I know that there’s nothing politically incorrect about happiness.

It’s funny, but math is my best subject now. Somehow, in the seven years from third grade to now, the seemingly impossible happened: I changed. I was just too wrapped up in who I thought I was to realize it.

31

My English Teacher Sophia Luo Grade 11

32

The English Teacher to the Student Sophia Luo Grade 11

The Teacher: “Annotating is Writing In the margins Of a literary piece Or text, inscribing Your thoughts

Your feelings Your emotions Your analysis Or your understanding of The Author’s Writing and Work.”

The Student [aside]: “After we finished, I was going to sell my book…”

33

Anguis Alexis Gauba Grade 10

34

Farewell the Years Meilan Steimle Grade 10

She did her best, but she was young.

Her mother told her to buy milk, so the girl clutched the crumpled five-dollar bill with her untrimmed fingers, feeling its creases fold against her small, damp palm. In their front yard she navigated between the tufts of weeds like an elf through a forest and drew her thumb across their dusty sedan window. After she leapt off the curb, a truck screeched to a halt next to her, skidding gravel over her toes. The girl dashed to the opposite sidewalk, but a question gnawed at her: Didn’t we buy milk yesterday?

“Hey, hon,” said the cashier, her widened eyes darting to the store manager.

“Is your mom here?” Pausing, she congratulated the girl: “You’re my fifth customer this hour, so you win a prize,” sliding a crinkly package of frosted animal crackers across the counter.

“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” said the girl.

The cashier curled her lips into themselves and stashed the cookies under her register next to a teddy bear. Grasping the milk with her two hands, the girl scuttled out the door.

The girl believed that you left fragments of yourself wherever you went.

Sometimes, when she felt like the world was too big and she was too small, the girl would crawl into her mother’s closet and breathe in the heady scent of old perfume that had settled on the sundresses and stained cream pumps. She found a scrap of herself there, the little girl whose dimpled legs would pound up the stairs and disappear into the closet, cocooned in the maroon safety of an old sweater, searching for warmth in a cold house.

They weren’t the current her, these pieces of herself that she spotted around the house. When her eyes focused on the shard of her that was on the swing in the backyard, she frowned and cocked her head, strands of hair spilling in a veil before her. This past self’s outstretched legs, ensconced in itchy polka-dotted tights, scraped at the air for purchase as they swung back and forth, yearning to touch the clouds. The girl on the swing was no more the girl she was now than the snakeskin she found beneath the swing was a snake.

She was young, but she wasn’t blind.

35

The screen door, with prickly edges along its jagged tear, creaked open and slammed shut behind her. After she deposited the milk next to the two other half-gallons misting under the fluorescent beams of the fridge, she wove across the buckling vinyl floor through a maze of forgotten boxes and unwashed clothes. The girl saw the white powder on her mother’s nostrils.

“I got the milk.”

“Thank you,” said her mother through lips like neoprene that had lost its shape.

She rubbed the chalky dust off her nose like a dog pawing at itself drunkenly, then combed her fingers through her yellow hair with umber roots. Her mother’s pockmarked skin glistened of fryer oil and perspiration, while smudged streaks of mascara rimmed her watery eyes.

As her mother showered later that afternoon, the girl picked through the leftover food on the dinette table, noticing an open envelope, half-hidden by a discarded restaurant uniform. The girl pressed her slim fingers to the sides of the envelope and removed a note, which read “Thought you might want this,” and a photograph, its sheen dulled by fingerprints. In the snapshot, her mother’s eyes gazed at the man next to her, his arms encircling her pregnant torso, his face buried in her tousled hair. She gripped his arm with white knuckles and smiled wide enough to show her gums. Then the girl squinted at the bottom of the photograph and recognized the shoes.

The girl scurried upstairs, retreating into the closet. There, in the silk and cotton folds of memory, she found a remnant of her mother inside the scuffed cream pumps. The woman in the picture was no more her mother than the person on the swing was the girl.

The girl felt a shred of herself slide off like a soft, flannel nightgown and curl up next to her toddler self.

She wasn’t blind, but sometimes she wished she were.

36

Serena Lu Grade 9

37

Shay Lari-Hosain Grade 11

38

If Feminism is for Ugly Girls Kaity Gee Grade 11

If feminism is for ugly girls, Let me be ugly.

Let my face be covered in boils and sores.

Let my teeth rot into pieces.

If all you desire is a pretty face, a woman who sits silent and nods to coarse words, Make me screaming and savage Make me the woman yelling Louder than a freight train.

If all a woman is an object, let me be the Medusa whose head of snakes will turn you to stone.

Let me be righteously terrible Let me be scar-faced, for I will bear my trauma Terrifyingly where it is plain to see.

Let me be untouchable, undesirable; Let the other women laugh at my crooked nose and jagged teeth.

Tell me, man With my hair of snakes and rotted smileâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Do I terrify?

Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Regional Gold Medal Winner

39

iWorld Kevin Ke Grade 11

40

Peter and Joshua Andrew Rule Grade 10

In my line of business, it’s easy to forget that people are more than lines of type on bills and official documents. I mean the real estate business, but I hear it’s the same elsewhere, too. Arnie two cubicles down, he came from law, and he said lawyers think of their own mothers in terms of numbers and figures. Spend too much time looking at wills and testaments and things, Arnie said, and it’ll mess with your head.

So it’s the same in real estate. When I was just getting started with the company they had me in customer service, because nobody wants to be the one fending off calls from homeowners who are trying to get out of paying their bills so they give the job to the rookies. I moved out of there pretty quick, but it was still long enough for me to start thinking of the houses as our clients, not the people. When I saw the notification that the woman at 104 Mahogany died last week, it didn’t occur to me we’d just lost a client—just that we’d have a tough time reselling a house in that part of town. Arnie says don’t worry about it, leave the feelings to the guys in communications and keep on looking for buyers. Arnie taught me everything I know when I came here last year so I figure he knows the drill better than I do.

Dehumanization comes with the job, just like the monthly paycheck and the insurance plan and the stale sandwiches they serve in the canteen.

I was eating a stale sandwich from the canteen when Sandra from the next row up said she needed someone to run to the suburbs south of downtown to check on a tenant who hadn’t kept up with his bills for months. Guy’s been renting the house for something like sixty years, Sandra said. Maybe he’s dead.

I’d take it if I wasn’t so behind from the flu last week, Arnie said.

I don’t know my way around that part of town, said Phil, who sits by the elevators.

Normally I’d say I had a call coming in and we’d pass the job down to one of the rookies who just graduated from customer service, but my parents lived south of downtown and I’d meant to visit them for a few weeks, and anyway I’d been tracing little circles with my fingernail on the surface of my desk since I’d finished my write-up twenty minutes earlier.

I’ll take it, I told Sandra, and she handed me a folder with the details and said Be gentle with the client, if he’s not dead yet he’s got to be pretty damn close.

Phil was hiding a smirk under his collar as I walked past, because I grew up in that neighborhood and he knew it. Could tell from my accent. The south was the part of town with cracked sidewalks and peeling paint, and kids who kicked stray cats because they were cheaper than soccer balls. The south was for the day laborers, for the food-stamp collectors, for the penniless newcomers looking for a fresh start. In seventh grade when my parents brought me here from Ukraine the south was our only option.

41

I wove the minivan-size bulk of the company car out of the parking garage and into the thick haze of silence that always fell on downtown at three on summer weekdays. Lunch was over and the commute was still hours away and the sun had chased all the pedestrians back into their apartments, but the stoplights still blazed away on red like it was rush hour on Christmas Eve. The long row of red lights that lined the empty main street depressed me so I took out the file from Sandra and opened it on the dashboard. She’d written out the general information on the first page in big blue loopy letters.

Joshua A. Kent, I read aloud, and listened hard.

Joshua A. Kent, I said, and tasted the shape of the words in my mouth.

First transaction October 1949, I said to the folder and the company car and the red stoplight. Rent ten months overdue, and no telephone number on file, I told them.

The folder and the company car ignored me. The light turned.

Joshua A. Kent, I said as I approached the next intersection. It was in the j I heard it most—a bent sound, too harsh, too Slavic. Joshua A. Kent, again, and this time the k rasped in my throat as though I’d never learned English in the first place.

I glanced at the company ID pinned to my front. Peter Bellman. I had an American name.

I was running errands in a Ford minivan to deliver federally-approved paperwork to an American retiree living in a suburb in the Midwest. I had this job thanks to my American education at an American college and later when I saw my parents I was going to speak to them in English over cans of Boston baked beans.

And yet my k’s still rasped in my throat.

When the car lumbered through the last empty intersection before the south side of town I stopped practicing, because every time I heard myself say the name a new imperfection would assault me—the three vowels in the middle blended together and the t was too aspirated and I was worried I’d crash the car if I kept distracting myself with my accent.

I turned off the main street onto Almond and headed past my old middle school. I wondered what I would do if Joshua A. Kent opened the door. Whether he’d close the door in my face when he saw my corporate uniform or point to a NO SOLICITING sticker over his doorbell. Or whether he’d slam it shut when I told him I’d been sent to find out if he was dead yet. Or if he’d turn away when he heard from my accent that I was just another southside immigrant.

42

Once I’d left Almond Street behind I pulled up next to the sidewalk and compared the address on Sandra’s file with the house in front of me. The one in the photo had fewer missing roof tiles and more grass on the lawn than the one facing me, but since this was the only address on the street that reeked of age and neglect I knew I was in the right place.

As I approached the house’s torn screen door I massaged the roof of my mouth with my tongue, trying to rid my speech of its accent—the hard k’s and bent j’s and slurred vowels that still set me apart after eleven years of English fluency. Joshua A. Kent, I whispered to myself, and cringed at the mangled noise that came out.

The doorbell emitted an apologetic click under my fingertip, so I rapped on the side of the house instead.

I mouthed the name again, to practice.

The man who appeared behind the screen door had enough skin for a person twice his size and half his age: it sagged from his arms, it draped down his cheeks, it rolled from his corded neck in dry mottled folds. Brown speckles littered the sheets of skin like sand, small and faint under his chin, black and blotchy on the trembling hands. The crown was bare aside from the wispy hairs that clung above his eyes and behind his ears. The eyes were black.

Those black eyes, the only sign of life in this swaying pile of skin and bone, found mine through the closed doorscreen and rested there. Not on my company-issued uniform or company-regulated clipboard, or the company logo emblazoned on the side of the car behind me. They just settled on my own eyes and stared until, swallowing hard, I flicked my gaze to the side.

I’m here to see—Joshua A. Kent, I said through the screen door, hearing the accent, hating it.

The man parted his cracked lips and said, Nobody’s asked to see him for a long time.

I’m Peter Bellman, I said, from the real estate office. Does Mr. Kent still rent this house?

That’s an excellent question, said the man at the door.

The black eyes remained locked onto mine in profound stillness.

Say my name again, Peter Bellman, he said, his voice water on sand.

43

Kent, I said, and tried in vain to swallow my accent. Joshua A. Kent.

When the old man smiled he did it with his entire body. The gentle twitch of the mouth sent a slow ripple through the sagging skin of his cheek his neck like a drop of wax rolling toward down its candle. The knees straightened, the shoulders unhunched. You’re not from America, he observed.

No, I said, almost apologetic. No, sir. “Sir” had never been in my vocabulary growing up, had always been a title I associated with Deep Southern etiquette and Knights of the Round Table. But I felt like a child forced to admit a dark secret, and only “sir” fit. No, sir, I’m from Ukraine, I said.

Ah. I realized he wasn’t going to say anything else, that he was content to face me from behind his screen door with that smile dancing across his body and those dark eyes glinting into mine. Looking into his time-wizened, time-wisened eyes was almost unbearable. To break the silence I continued my confession, searching his gaze for the hard edge of scorn.

I was Pietr before we left, I said, and spelled it for him. My father was Georgs. We all changed our names when we immigrated. You’ll get a lot further in America as a Peter.

The old man nodded, too knowingly.

To stop now would be to invite the silence back onto our shoulders, so I told him, We left our mother tongue behind when we boarded the plane. Even before we could make whole sentences my father made us use English. He said fluency was a baseline. He said we hadn’t even started the race yet, but that English would take us to the starting line.

The screen door between us rattled as the old man shifted his weight behind it.

My father said he’d do whatever it took to get us out of the south part of town, I said before I could stop myself, and cringed. But he just shook his head in silent laughter, sending shudders of skin cascading toward his shoulders.

When I bought this house at twenty-five, he said, I was happy to have broken into the suburbs at all. South side or no south side.

I echoed him. Ah. I was Joshua A. Kent when I was your age, he said. That’s the name I signed the bill under. English fluency and reaching the starting line were all I thought about, too. But I wasn’t born in America, either. A good sight closer to America than Ukraine, maybe, but still a couple of worlds away.

His full-body smile and the laugh in his eyes still hadn’t died away. He spoke not

44

apologetically, but proudly, as though being born behind the starting line had been the greatest blessing of his life.

At my birth, my parents named me Ashkii, he said. That’s a Navajo name. Not many can pronounce it.

Ashkii, I repeated. My tongue fit comfortably around the hard k and the rolled vowels.

That’s very good, Pietr, he said. That’s exactly right. Who would have guessed?

But we both knew he had guessed, and guessed right, as soon as he had heard me say the name Joshua A. Kent. The dark eyes, deep-set in his drooping face, flashed at me through the screen door.

Thank you for stopping by, Pietr, he said, moving to close the door. I don’t think you still need me to tell you whether Joshua A. Kent rents this house anymore.

The latch clicked shut.

I returned to the company-owned car and set the company-issued clipboard, unused, onto the scratched seat. I unclipped the standard company nametag—Peter Bellman—from my standard company uniform and tucked it into my pocket. When Arnie asked me where my ID was, I could tell him I was applying for a new one.

As I pulled onto Almond Street and set course for my parents’, I took one last look at the clipboard by my side. Joshua A. Kent, I said, reveling in the bent j, the hard k. Joshua Ashkii Kent.

I hoped my parents still remembered how to speak Ukrainian. I murmured to myself in the language as I approached their house and its torn screen door, practicing familiar phrases, trying to shake off the American accent. Sorry it’s been so long, I said to myself in Ukrainian. I’m home now.

45

Perspective Shay Lari-Hosain Grade 11

46

You Are Home and I Am Sick of It Elisabeth Siegel Grade 11

Grass left impressions on my face & your arms those indented memories, so saccharine. Your smile could grate my skin to the bone over the course of an hour.

Neither of us have an hour to give.

We—the pyrrhic victory— We—the time bomb— LET’S GO, YOU AND I RIGHT NOW, INTO THE ANIMALISTIC YELLOW FOG & WINDING STREETS THAT ARE A HEAVY-HANDED METAPHOR FOR MY INDECISIVENESS I scrape the memories off collarbones, a bear tearing bark from the fir tree, forgetting that I can’t forget; I blink your fuselit appendages in & out of my view like bad airwaves, your bad airwaves five years from now bringing coffee to me in bed.

I don’t drink coffee. I don’t do beds.

Your mouth, bitter— Come closer— I like its burn— THOREAU USES NATURE TO MASK HIS FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN. WE MUST LIVE SIMPLY WITH DECADENCE.

47

Treat me the same, I can scream. Treat me the same, debate how you love me, even when you cannot. Swim in those paradoxes.

You, art & artist— Turned stone under my hands— MY “A” WOULD TURN BLACK WITH THE SMUDGES OF SLAP-YOU-IN-THE-FACE SYMBOLISM. I DON’T NEED A PRIEST, I NEED A PURPOSE. I can follow you through the ocean, balance stanzas and stanzas on the tip of your tongue; I can never touch you again; I can take artillery fire for you and shrapnel for you and bad test grades and passive aggression and venom and bruises and scratches and brimstone and disapproval and SHUT UP We have time— I see it in your face— PASSING ME IN THE HALLWAY Your eyes gape LIKE THE GATES OF TROY I see myself & the world in you, TWO THINGS I CAN’T KNOW sparks, thunder, lightning when we ricochet, THIS LIFE’S ON FIRE I’ll come back.

48

Ardens Alexis Gauba Grade 10

49

Bonheur Kacey Fang Grade 12

Une pomme de douche se met en marche: tant de gouttelettes criant ses sorties.

Quand elles frappent la peau elles forment individuellement les fleuves qui se rencontrent à la courbe du dos, aux genoux, aux pieds. Le cerveau s’en va avec elles. La substance suinte dans le drain. Mais elle va se réveiller dans l’océan, flottant sur les vagues réchauffées par lumière, où les dauphins oscillent et sautent et crient sur le bleu cassant, et les baleines lamentent avec du plancton débordant entre les dents. Le bol suspendu de mon crâne, vacillant sur les jambes, il imagine plus qu’il voit.

Parfois je pense à saluer le soleil avec les bras ouverts, et le cri que je ferais si je tombais.

50

A showerhead flips on: so many droplets screaming their way out.

When they hit my skin individually they form rivers that meet at the curve of my back, crooks of my knees, my feet. I wash my brain away with them. The stuff oozes down the drain. But it will wake in the ocean, drifting on light-warmed waves, where dolphins weave and jump and cry on breaking blue, and whales moan with plankton spilling through their teeth. Then it won’t miss the hanging bowl of my 5 foot 5 inch cranium, bobbing around on legs it imagines more than sees.

Sometimes I think of saluting the sun with open arms, the scream I should make should I drop.

Missed Connections Natasha Mayor Grade 11

51

Collections Sahana Rangarajan Grade 12

“Good afternoon, sir, have you been happy with your long-distance provider?”

“Yeah. Real happy. Real busy, too. Better get going, kid.”

“That’s quite fine, sir, here’s my card in case—“ The door shuts impossibly near my nose, but not before I catch a glimpse of my client. Tall, balding, middle-aged. Flannel shirt, flannel pants (do they make flannel suits? He’d be the one to buy them). In the safety of my car, a lackluster little sedan in that nondescript grey-green color of those sorts of cars, I pull out a cardboard-covered sketchpad and carefully recollect the details of his face—splotchy stubble dappling the sunken cheeks. Strangely mottled scalp, just visible beneath the sparse hairs curiously resembling tumbleweed. Thin eyebrows, straight across the forehead—no—where’s my eraser—slightly angled down over heavily hooded eyes. And the eyes, those eyes, specks of mud in a field of furrowed, dirty snow. Perfect for flannel-man. When I see him staring back at me from the rough paper, I sit back and sigh, contented.

When I was younger, 12, maybe 13, this kid —Ray, I think—moved in 3 houses down from me. I saw him sitting on the sidewalk with these cards in his hands, staring at them like they were his childhood sweetheart or something, so of course I went up to this kid I had never talked to before and asked him what was with the cards.

“These are postcards! Wanna see?”

I was a little surprised that my confrontation hadn’t at least startled him a little—I was pretty big for my age back then—but looked on, curious. Hello from Hawaii! and Missing you at the Space Needle! and even one Namaste! that featured a picture of the Taj Mahal.

“No way! You’ve visited all these places?”

He hesitated before responding that he hadn’t, but that his mom sent them to him from the places she saw through work. Ray’s dad died when he was a baby still, he explained, and to make ends meet, his mom used some old connections she had and worked as a flight attendant while he lived with his uncle.

“She didn’t want to,” Ray explained, “ever since I was born. She said she was sad to leave me alone, but she likes going to different places and meeting new people. ‘A thousand new places, a thousand new faces,’ she used to say.”

52

Ray couldn’t wait to grow up and turn 18.

“Then I can travel too, and I’ll collect all the postcards in the world!”

His eyes shone with enthusiasm. I noticed them then for the first time. His eyes were dark, so black they looked blue. They reminded me of a picture I saw of this drop-off in the ocean where you could see the water, inky black, going all the way down to the ocean floor. Looking at his eyes was like looking into those subsurface chasms. They made me want to memorize every detail of his face if only to serve as a landscape for those obsidian stones.

Ray and I became close after that. Something, I don’t know what, clicked. We were almost the same person, one being. His enthusiasm for life and thirst for adventure were infectious. I loved being with him. I used to just be some intimidating guy everyone would avoid. He made me an awestruck child in love with the world.

When we graduated high school, Ray told me he was leaving, hitchhiking across the country. I wasn’t surprised. He seemed increasingly distant the closer he came to adulthood, like a dog straining at its leash. We embraced, said our goodbyes, and he left. A week later, I realized how much I missed seeing him. The curve of his jaw, his broad forehead, his eyes.

His eyes, his eyes. More than him, I mourned the loss of those eyes in my life.

After Ray left, I also noticed how weak the connections I had in my hometown were. Spending so much time with him had left me with little desire to connect to my other peers. Ray and I, we were complements. He was my perfect friend, and, for some time I was sure, my soul mate. I was no one without him, a ghost. And I was free.

With nothing tying me to my home, I started drifting around a lot, working odd jobs to sustain myself, never too passionate about anything. I lost my identity and forgot my name. No one could ever find me; I never had the same address for more than a month.

I moved through life with emptiness. I didn’t miss Ray, but I hungered for his face, that shrine to his incredible eyes. I thought about the eyes more and more. I hardly even knew who Ray was anymore; thinking about our friendship was like remembering some book I had read years ago. But those eyes. That face. I started looking around more, noticing people around me, on the search for the new perfect face. I remembered vaguely something my old friend had told me, something about some relative saying they saw a lot of faces when they travelled. I needed a job that let me travel.

I worked as a travelling salesman for some time. Herbal remedies, internet, shampoo, briefcases, Bibles, whatever else anyone can think of. I never sold much and invariably lost the jobs. What I didn’t lose, though, were the new faces. I started collecting faces the

53

way a friend of mine had once collected postcards. I had a book of faces. Soon, I didn’t work for anyone, but just drove around different cities and towns and said I was selling things. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t—it wasn’t like anyone ever bought what I had to sell when I was actually a salesperson. I filled one, two, three sketchpads with faces, but I never found the perfect one. I wasn’t even sure what I looked for.

Driving away from flannel-man’s house while thus recollecting how I came to this journey through faces, I tell myself to persist, that it would be unfair to myself if I stop before I find the perfect face. I stop at the next cookie-cutter neighborhood and step out of the car, ready to go through another array of imperfect faces, and knock on the first door.

“Good afternoon, ma’am. How does half-price on today’s leading juicer/blender combo sound to you?”

Wavy brown hair tied low. Bold eyebrows. Button nose. Small, pink mouth. An intriguing dusting of freckles. The eyes, the eyes! Dark, but—not dark enough. The color of dark chocolate, but not the color of coal.

“Sure, but I’ll get my fiancée. He’s the health freak around here. If it were up to me, I’d just order takeout three meals a day!” She laughs lightly. Wrinkles by the eyes. Adorable. I smile back dispassionately, waiting for another face to emerge from inside the house. At this point, the houses start looking like faces, too.

Freckles comes back, leading a man with her. Dark hair. Bronze skin. A jawline likely carved by Michelangelo. Pale wire-rimmed glasses. Handsome, but not interesting.

They’ll both still make the book, though. I’ve seen blander faces.

“So, what’s this about a blender? Is it one of those new high-speed ones? And how about the juicer? Do the units come together?”

“Well, they—“ I freeze. He took off his glasses to polish them. He looks back up at me, waiting for me to finish my sentence. His eyes are momentarily naked, the glasses still in his hands.

Can fire be black? That’s what I saw in his eyes. Dark, but burning with intensity.

Not just intensity. Enthusiasm. Energy for living life. What had Tennyson said in that poem?

I cannot rest from travel; I will drink life to the lees.

“I—“

54

Who is he? Who are they? Who are the eyes?

He gasps. “I can’t believe it. You came! You’re here! How?” “You—who are you?”

The man with the eyes slaps my back and laughs boisterously. “You always knew how to joke with a guy, I’ll give you that! Come in! I’ll show you my postcard collection! Do you remember? Remember when we were kids? It’s grown, oh, dearest friend, it’s grown so much!”

I step back.

“I can’t stay.”

“Yes you can! We’re best friends!”

“No. I’m not him.”

He chuckles incredulously, and I can barely hear his next words: “Then who are you?”

I’m ready on my toes to flee.

“I’m no one! You can’t keep me here! I have no name, no identity, no friends! No love! I’m not yours anymore! I’m nobody’s!”

He’s yelling something after me, his wife-to-be’s pretty face clouded with confusion. I’m not listening, though. I’m running. Back to the car, with two new faces. Two new faces. Dark hair, smooth skin, fine jaw, the eyes.

The perfect face was mine at last. My life was full.

55

Suzy Lou Grade 12

56

Searching for Strongly Regular Graphs Suzy Lou Grade 12

These are the cities of my dream.

Their links a quiet diamond symmetry, dance of slender harmony. I travel through cityscapes alike, every perfect node gazing upon an equal number of paths; I wander these to other perfect nodes.

Mirrors; these cities are mirrors that beam.

A kaleidoscope of silver roads and I stand on one, count corners round my path, meander any other path to count and see twin triangle echoes all about, looking like mirrors all around reflect one view.

Come with me to see the horizon from this city.

Look to the distance, at those cities looming.

For each an equal number of cities passes through from there to this one city of my dream.

I know this because they lie beyond the paths that lead out from here; they lie beyond these roads.

Let us behold the wonder of these cities; these cities flawless balance their abode the views about nodes about paths the views horizon-ward all reflecting one kaleidoscope one cogent dream, these cities to tender equilibrium true.

Now I write these lines to transcribe this my dream.

I sketch these lines so each one draws a city.

I dream that between two lines lies a path to show they share a stanza or an ending.

That words might make my dream come true and trace in shorthand these elegant nodes.

So we find here now the cities of my dream.

But I know yet not which of my dreams may be-when we count the corners round a path, count all the paths that emanate from a node, count cities to the horizon leading, which outcomes could ever possibly be true?

Scholastic Art & Writing Awards National Gold Medal Winner

57

Hands Up Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Shoot Shannon Hong Grade 11

58

HELM Staff Editors-in-Chief: Juhi Gupta and Juhi Muthal Junior Co-editor: Elisabeth Siegel Chief Designer: Juhi Gupta Secretary: Nitya Mani Public Relations Managers: Meilan Steimle and May Gao Club Members Abhi Gupta, Chirag Aswani, Kacey Fang, Manthra Panchapakesan, Nathan Dalal, Sahana Rangarajan, Simran Singh, Tiara Bhatacharya, Vasudha Rengarajan, Aashika Balaji, Abhinav Khetinini, Belinda Yan, Cynthia Hao, David Jin, Doreen Kang, Jasmine Liu, Jason Lee, Kevin Ke, Maya Jeyendran, Richard Yi, Vivek Bharadwaj, Alexandra Gross, Catherine Huang, Hazal Gurcan, Irene Bashar, Judy Pan, Karan Walia, KJ Mulam, Marina Newman, Megan Swanson, Nikhil Manglik, Sana Aladin, Sandip Nirmal, Soham Khan, Derek Yen, Divija Bhimaraju, Gwyneth Chen, Kaitlin Hsu, Agata Sorotokin, Alice Wu, Allison Kiang, Andrew Rule, Connie Miao, Emily Chen, Evani Radiya-Dixit, Kailee Gifford, Kaitlyn Gee, Kevin Ke, Lavinia Ding, Liza Turchinsky, Maya Nandakumar, Natasha Mayor, Richard Yi, Sahana Narayanan, Shannon Hong, Tiffany Zhu

Special thanks to: Dr. Douglas, for her guidance during the entire process Nicole DeVelbiss, for her help with printing the publication The Administration, for funding our efforts The English Department, for its continual support of HELM

harkerhelm@gmail.com harkerhelm.wix.com/homepage

59