Winner of the Nantucket Book Festival Young Writer Award th The little box of tears – 12 ​ Grade ​ Camille Dubois My name is Camille I’m a girl like any other. I was born in a country far away, a tiny little kingdom of just over 11 million people, between a mom and a dad like any other. I spent my first three years recklessly in a nice house with a little garden full of the laughs of my brother and me. I loved that childhood. Dad tinkering around the house and Mom making pancakes and baking cookies, all with a smile. And then one day, Dad no longer came to kiss us and Mom never laughed again. He worked a lot mom told us with a shaky voice. "Do not worry, children, daddy loves you, but he has a lot of work." But we were still worried because, even though mom tried to keep on smiling, I could see how tired and sad she looked. It had been six months since the last time he’d come home and mom couldn’t afford the rent alone anymore. We had to leave, so I cried, a lot. I think mom lied, dad was not just gone to work, he was just ... gone. At the beginning, I also cried a lot because I wanted him to come kiss me good night and Mom didn’t have the word to comfort us, my brother and I. When I started crying, he always followed right away and, sometimes, I would wake up at night and hear Mom sobbing too. So I decided to stop crying all the time. The pain and sadness were still there, inside, I had just hidden them in a little box at the bottom of my child's heart. I continued to grow, the best I could. Mom was raising us alone. Sometimes it was very difficult and we had the hardest time understanding why biscuits had become too expensive, when all our friends had them or why we couldn’t go to the zoo like all the children. But even if we did not have much money, we had a lot of love. Half the parents does not necessarily mean half the love. Of course, there were terrible moments like Father's Day. In Belgium, it is a time during which children create their own gift at school and learn a little poem to celebrate their dad. So, sometimes I was offering the gift to my mom but it always reminded me of the pain of having been abandoned, and, each year, I added more tears to the little box at the bottom of my heart. Every forgotten birthday, every Christmas, every meeting where I saw my friends with both their parents added tears to the box hidden inside me. At school, I was growing wiser and wiser. I wanted to be the best so my dad would be proud of me and come back, maybe, try to know me but it was not enough, I always had to aim higher. So, I studied and studied. Mom couldn’t understand why I studied so much, I already had good grades. She often suggested I took a break but I wanted to study more, relentlessly. How could I ever explain to Mom, without hurting her that I wanted to attract the admiration of the man who had left us without looking back? I would hurt her, she had always loved me for who I was, against all odds. Then again, I kept everything to myself and filled my box ... which was becoming harder and harder to keep shut. This is how, as a young teen, I had another idea, the worst of my life, a quirky idea. Helping my grandmother as a volunteer in a hospital, I saw a whole family gather around a young girl. That day, I thought that if I was very ill, my dad would HAVE to come to my bedside to support me. So I went for it. I was young and unconscious. When mom went shopping, I picked some tablet boxes marked with the "danger" sign. But I was so wrong. I did not want to die, I just wanted to be sick enough to bring my father back. The rest I lived it in a fog, with mom's screams and doctor’s questions. Then, finally the quiet ... with still mom's hand caressing mine. When I woke up, they told me they had called my father but he chose not to move and it was a shock for me. I've lived this episode of my life as a dismal failure because, even hospitalized, I could not gain his attention. It was a terrible experience. He even suspected me of having invented this only to annoy him, which I thought was really cruel and my heart broke again. I finally understood I meant nothing to him. The three days that followed allowed me to empty the little box I had kept down there at the bottom of my heart and I let go of all the tears I had kept for so many years. I slept, I cried, and slept and cried ... for three whole days. A feeling of bitter failure stuck to my skin. So I failed in my desperate attempts to get his attention? Yes, I did, but it made me grow because I learned a lot. The lesson I learned is that I have to stop looking in other people’s lives, in that of those who reject me, to discover who I am. The answer lies in myself and only there. I am what I build for myself, every day, while trying to become a better person, doing my best, not just to be loved but because I finally learned to love myself. And because of that, my little box down there, at the bottom of my heart, has totally dried and is now filled with smiles and happiness. Thanks life! Finalist for the Nantucket Book Festival Young Writer Award Failure is Not Fatal ­ Grade 9 Lucille Bresette My sixth­grade self stood shaking in her cleats on the lacrosse field sidelines, grinding the spikes into the earth as if it could swallow her whole. It certainly would have been a better alternative: her nerves were spiking with each tense moment before the whistle began her first lacrosse game, and she wasn’t even anywhere near the starting lineup. Memories have a strange habit of becoming increasingly prominent the more cringe­worthy they are, so of course this one resides crystal­clear in my brain. Under what some would call the “recommendation” of my parents, but what I referred to as “order,” I had grudgingly taken up lacrosse. Tossed blindly into chaos, I spent the first weeks of practice holding a foreign object in my hand as I dizzily concentrated on the frustratingly tiny ball. By the time I had more or less determined how to hold my stick, I found myself watching the start of a game I was apparently expected to play in, with only a vague understanding of my position. Observing that only the most skilled players participated the majority of the time, I calmed down and reassured myself that my coach would never be crazy enough to let me on the field. Imagine my surprise when she turned to me and said, “you’re in”. Needless to say, it was a disaster. I remained planted on one end of the field the entire time, not brave enough to venture across the alien lines. Once again, my confidence was almost restored, but I made the mistake of deciding to pay attention to the game and was almost run over by a stampede rushing towards the goal. Too late to pretend I wasn’t open, all of a sudden the ball sailed toward me, then just as suddenly sailed completely past my stick and rolled right to an awaiting member of the opposite team. I could have sworn that for the rest of the short five minutes I played, my fellow team members seemed to go out of their way not to allow the ball near me again, and while I should have been delighted, it was a humiliated, shameful feeling I took home with me that day. Lacrosse was obviously not one of my strengths. I carried the shame of that first game with me, that feeling of failure, until I was almost driven to the point of quitting. I hated the look of hesitation crossing a player’s face when weighing how much damage could come from passing to me, and I hated being the cause of it. I had failed. About a month into the season, after the initial sting of disappointment had faded, I looked up and saw that while I had been dwelling on an insignificant moment of failure, the season had moved on without me. Players who started the same time I did, who I thought could be my empathetic companions as we struggled to complete the season, had drastically improved. While I was focusing on my mistake, I failed again to grow from it. I started working harder than ever, and before I knew it, the stick felt comfortable in my hand and I could throw and catch the ball with growing ease. A little less than a year after ending the season on what I considered I positive, productive note, the time came for spring sport sign­ups again, and to my surprise, my name made its way back on the lacrosse list.