15 I’m sitting by the window in a red leather armchair, boxy and comfortable. Its cushion is soft enough to let me relax, yet firm enough that I’m not afraid it might swallow me. What’s perfect about it is that I can either sit up, a laptop on my knees, or recline, my legs thrown over one arm with my head resting on the other, or maybe with my feet propped up on the footstool that matches both the chair and its partner, which sits on the other side of a small red-mahogany coffee table. Right now I’m reclining, my knees drawn up nearly to my chest, in order to balance the book that’s open across them. Light slants through the floor-to-ceiling window, hitting the table and the carpet but avoiding my book. <strong>The</strong> canopy of trees, green with summer, numbs some of the light so that it’s not blinding and it doesn’t reflect off the 1st Place white of the pages into my eyes. I reach over and take a sip of the hot chocolate that I’m drinking despite the fact that it’s summer. I can’t help it; something about the hot drink calms me. It doesn’t really matter. <strong>The</strong>re’s nobody here to care, anyway. I set it back down, my eyes never leaving the page in front of me. I hardly notice the gentle chirping of the birds outside, or the slightly musty smell of the room around me, or even the room itself. I notice nothing but the book in front of me and its ever-approaching ending. Finally, I turn the last page, read the last word. Slowly closing the book, I hold it in my hands and gaze into space, contemplating what I’ve just read. After a few moments, I sigh softly and shift my legs back around to stand up. I pick up my mug in one hand and, ignoring the stack of about ten books sitting beside it, endeavor to return the one tucked into the crook of my arm. I’m careful not to move the armchair, knowing that if I do, it will reveal the deep imprints it’s left in the thick carpet, and I will have to align it perfectly again, or it will bother me. <strong>The</strong> carpet, a pale yellow with a patterned design in the same red as the chairs and footstool, stretches throughout the whole room, and I know if I were to take out all the furniture, there would be deep, long ridges left by the red-mahogany bookshelves that take up most of the room. Each bookcase reaches ten shelves high, well over my head yet still not quite tall enough to brush the chandeliers that will illuminate the room once the sun goes down and the windows spanning one wall aren’t enough. I walk past a few shelves then head down a row. All of the bookcases are unmarked, partially because I think they look better that way and partially because I don’t need to mark them. I know where everything is. I know where to find every single book in this room, even the ones that I haven’t read. I haven’t read most of them, actually. <strong>The</strong>re’s a lifetime of books in here; I’m only sixteen. But I’m working on it. What I do know is that these shelves are full of adventures. <strong>The</strong>re are those books that are so old they’re still bound in cloth and look as though they might simply crumble into a pile of dust if I open them; there are brand-new hardcover books whose jackets don’t have so much as a tear or wrinkle; there are old paperbacks with broken spines and dog-eared pages, the kind that might look abused at first glance but are in fact the most loved of all. And each and every one of them holds a brand new tale, a shining new world that I can dive into. From Seuss to Rowling to Shakespeare to Dickens and everything in between: I have it all. I sip my hot chocolate and run my finger along the shelf, knowing that there will be no dust there. When I stop, my finger is pointing at an empty spot between two books, one that I’ve read and one that I haven’t. I gently slide my just-finished book in the space between them and leave it. Maybe I’ll miss it and return to it another day, maybe I’ll be too caught up in another book. I keep going to the end of the row, idly scanning titles. I know if I get to the end I’ll see my little nook, tucked into an alcove reached by three carpeted steps, and inside will be my desk, mahogany to match the shelves, with a red leather swivel chair. Inside, I know, are my notebooks, and sitting on top, beside my cup of pens and pencils, are both my laptop, for quicker, cleaner typing, and an old typewriter, for when I prefer the sharp smell of ink and the clackety-clack of keys that give me a sense of accomplishment with every letter I write. I know that I could mount those three stairs and settle down to write, delving into my own new world, or return to my armchair and pile of unread books, visiting somebody else’s creation. I do neither of these things. Instead, I take a deep breath and open my eyes. <strong>The</strong> shelves, the carpet, the hot chocolate, and the books all vanish before me, and are replaced with my bedroom, small and messy and real. I stretch and get up, rubbing my eyes. I’m done meditating: the room has done its work. I’m relaxed enough now to go to bed so that I can get up for school in the morning. I reflect back on the room. My library doesn’t exist. Not yet. But I know, instinctively, that someday it will. Someday I will walk between its shelves, read in its armchair, write on its old typewriter. And someday it will be full not of books that I intend to read, but books that I have read. And once I close the last cover of the last book and return it to its shelf, I will open the door, step out into the world, and go find more. A Lifetime’s Worth // Tessa Kadar
Griffin Kay // Snow She sits down crying, fat tears streaming down her face, dripping off the bridge of her nose, falling silently onto the ice below her wobbly skates. Sitting there in a puddle of tears, she has a look in her sad, watery eyes that says everything. It says she is sick of trying, sick of trying and failing. She is only five, and her helmeted head barely reaches my hip. She no longer cares that every mother and every father is staring at her with disapproving looks, each thinking to themselves how glad they are that they didn’t raise a quitter. But she’s not a quitter, she’s only five and no matter how hard she tries, she falls, and no matter how many times she gets up, the world seems to slip out from under her feet. “It’s too slippery,” she whispers to me, as she lies sprawled out on her back in her pink snowsuit. I lay down next to her, “is it too slippery to make snow angels” I ask quietly. She sits up and looks at me, eyes wide and full of life, the first time I’ve seen her happy, “is it allowed” she asks, still looking bewildered. I nod my head, and we lay there, in the middle of the rink, making snow angels. We ignore the longing looks of the other children skating and the begrudging looks from their parents because they will never understand the beauty in the simplicity of making a snow angel in the ice. Phoebe Melnick // Ice Angels // 2nd Place 16
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