10 YEARS AGO

When Will Langford drags his pen over each line of my poem, slowly, as if to not miss a single word, I feel the movement scraped over my legs.

He’s the kind of student Mrs. Lincoln’s creative writing elective was made for. The class is a big deal to get into. You had to apply with a short story or three poems, and there’s only room for ten students, to create an intimate feel. As one of the only two juniors selected, I feel a need to prove why I’m here.

But Will doesn’t. He’s a senior, the president of the Rowan School Literary Club, the editor in chief of Expressions, our student literary journal, and next semester, he’s graduating and going to Middlebury to study English. Will wants to be a writer when he grows up, and if you know him, you know that.

I want to be a writer, too. In middle school, I won all sorts of local writing competitions. I scribbled short stories under a timer in drafty auditoriums and felt like a pop star when my name was called hours later, accepting gold plastic and certificates like they were Grammys. I liked the way they glinted along my bookshelf’s edges, obfuscating the actual books behind them. I wasn’t the most popular or the prettiest, but I did write Cuyahoga County’s third-best short story for a seventh grader.

Writing’s my escape. As an only child, I never grew up playing house or doctor or any of the other games siblings play together. Instead, I made things up, just for me. And now, while other kids are first-kissing and kicking soccer balls over summer break, I go to creative writing camps, exchanging poems with braces-clad boys who look at me like I’m the kind of girl who knows how beer tastes.

In a poem, I can be whoever I want to be, even if it’s just for six stanzas.