Mary writes tiny, with pimples-with pencils and I can't hardly see the letters and everyone wants it dark around this keyboard. I'll try to make no mistakes.
aqwsaz   That was Junior's two cents there.




                   Untitled 1

A lot of people called her a freek. She didn't really call herself anything but Margaret. Alyssa Shields was the first to call her that. She was a very thin junior who had her navel pierced and always wore short shorts. At lunch time she would sit inside with her wolf pack and throw insults at anyone with braces.
Like Margaret.
Before Alyssa transferred there, Bill Heartt was the most popular kid ar Feldon High School. Though too busy with his fan club to ever say it to her face, he called Margaret a-
"Slut. You can tell by the way she looks at people--and I noticed her only 'friends' are guys."
It didn't really matter that all his friends were girls.
On the first day of her freshman year, Agatha Parks called her a poser, with the argument that she was wearing all black. And no matter how many times Margaret said it was her favorite color, Agatha would come up with another mockery in  an uncomprehensible language.Margaret walked away before a fight could break out.
That gave Richard Keith the excuse to call her a coward. Thinking it was too easy, he cornerd her in the cafeteria and told her to hand over all the money she had, which was forty dollars.
Margaret realized that fighting was inevitable.
On his way to the nurse's office, Richard spread the word that Margaret Cline was a karate maniac.
From there , things got so that everyone thought she was bi.
Then athiest.
Then a morphodite.
But Margaret was the only one who saw herself for what she was :Margaret. The sophmore   who, even  when they made it so obvious who they wanted to be, never put people in groups. For her, there was no such thing as a prep, or a jock, or a gothic.
Maybe it was because nobody deserved to be labeled., except maybe in restraurants, smokers and non.
DEAR MARY,,
I don't see you trying real hard to express the unexpressable in the past few stories and poems you've written as a creative writing high school major.I see instead, element of some of your peers' styles, conventions, and immaturitiesthings thy've expressed   and wonder if perhaps the poetry readings demanded of you seasonally to pass the class might not be well-thought out.Pupils seem to be writing for that event rather than because a story  has to be told and only they can tell it, or because they want to take the craft full sail.. Since the major is a four-year course of studies, 16 and 17-yearold girls who if they are still virgins are ashamed by now to admit it, are reading their fantasies about living with boys in college aloud to high school freshmen in the same field.. At your last required poetry reading, there were tworeadings  from young writers' stories, and in each, the girl  matter-of factly was enjoying a boyfriend on a bed: in a closed -off upstairs bedroom at a party,  in a motel room as they arranged to return to school after she ran away from home and he came out and brought her back In one, she sees he has a shaver-it announces their differenceness. That she doesn't know it's his baby sister he's mad about being raped in the room next to them makes it seem she jumped into bed with someone she didn't even crush on, hadn't ferreted out all the info on., hadn't studied, even . Henry on the Orient Express style.. . The beginning of intimacies, the begininng of private relationships--aptly recorded, as, like in real life, the young novelist 's characters ad lib a more smart-alecky,, hip  sophistication then they are feeling. winging it through their first mature situations.. . But there are other explorations in the teen brain. Penderings on your new aloneness  that you actually cherish, or on a romance you can't fix or fathom, have been your classe's collective voice for 4 months now.. What about evoking feeling in others for other kinds of plights beside the teen falling for a guy plight? And the teen as an involving, evolving  thing even sittig still plight?
You have stayed out of that ring so far but your poetry is growing long in the teeth about those comforting oak boughs and  you tucking in with your private feelings protected.
As for fiction, you were great as a humourist but never went on with that,Serious stories take plausible settings and situations. No one at Borders keeps a table empty in case a teen skipping school comes by that day. There are always empty tables at Borders too. It would not make sense of your protagonist to ask the clone to move because she's at her special place.She would indeed be being unreasonably childish and the reader would not care about her outcome.At some finer restaurants where you make reservations, the maitre-de or owner may keep a favored table  reserved for a star--it didn't go over real good as a plot on Everwood last week, either, You have to be reasonable  with others.
So, bad premise weakened the tale before it got air under its wings .I think you should try to write about something that was especially meaningful to you such as the death of a little kitty. Something you went through.That was plausible because you saw the intricicaicies of how it worked. And because it worked. Tke something you know can happen--not a Border;s manager saving a table for someone he shouldn't ought to be talking to, she's a minor--something like  Being lost at Adventure Island the whole day of your birthday. The feeling when Maxine had pizza while you played games at her party.alone and she didn;t come find you at Chuck E Cheese for the dinner, just left you alone.You didn;t want to play the games alone to begin with but she had brought you there, then ignored you for her new friends.I am sure you can write with great sensitivity of such things in a teens' life and how soccer helps, the running makes you feel "you". etc. Try not to keep on going on about the poetry in droopy trees and promising moons and shadows and jewels of sunshine.; don't look at something and write a poem about it, but see the poem in something complex,.Don't try to write more like your classmates but unlike anything they do at all. Be you, having your ball.Remeber when you experienced strong emotions--awesomeness, fearfulness, drained, refreshed, shocked, torn? If you write of these things honestly, everyone will see thier lives intersect with yours, will understand exactly what you're saying, will want to read more of you.because you jog memories in them, make them feel and think of things they've been through.where they felt just like you. The honesty is what makes it impossible to throw out the manuscript, everytime. It makes the reader uncomfortable.
You could have some young thief distributing someone's rare wheatie penny collection like pennies, to give a new generation the thrill of accumulating them. And around the corner, a sloppy bag-kind-of lady, throwing 4 pennies in her garbage---like, it was so easy to see the folly in his idea, but he wasn't looking around the corner.How close we must come to clues we miss, sometimes! You can do it, Mary. I know there's a lot in there, and a talent to share it. Irony is you!






                  















                   Untitled 2

I know this person.
Well, technically, she should ve been just one more sixteen-year-old with her hair dyed lavender and her ears pirced in three places,playing hard rock in her ear , wearing a black tee-shirt that says "Fear Me."
But to me, she should have been even less. I mean, I hadn'rt even seen her since  I was born.
Late for school and so not botherng with it that day  , I was checking out Borders, like usual.
She was sitting in my chair, the one Mr. Grable, store manager , always had  for me. Her hair was unnaturally a few shades lighter than my long  golden blond mane.She was reading some manga, Tenshi maybe. I was more interested in how she happened to look exactly like me. At first, I'd thought I had to be looking into one very strange mirror.I do read manga, and all.
She looked up. "Can I help you?"
She didn't notice it. Well, what do you do when your clone doesn't know she's a clone? Be as rude as you can, hope you never see her again? Actually, being rude was probably a fear reaction. I stared in shock.
""Well?" she asked.
"Yeah. That's my seat."
"I don't see your name on it."
"That's mature."
"So is claiming a chair in a public store."
"Where's Mr. Gables? He'll tell you."
The girl smiled."He's not here today. I'm filling in for him."
Then she gasped.
Took long enough.But I couldn't help other people's problems.
"Hey. I know you."

Her name was Rebecca . She moved to NY from San Francisco last year with her father., step-mother, and 3-year-old brother. As far as she knew she had never been adopted.
"What about kidnapped?Maybe you ran off as a baby and your parents found you and kept you."
"Coffee's cheaper next door," the girl said. " I just got off work. Let's talk there."So we  sauntered into Starbucks and got mochas.
"I wasn't kidnapped.I look just like my dad,"Rebecca said, consuming her whipped cream first.
"He's an alien?" I guessed. "He took some automatic face changer--"
Rebecca emptied her mouthful of liquid  into her cup. " Too hot. Honey. for someone who's almost as old as I am. you really think quite--   childlike."
                              
Beginings of short stories by Mary Myers, 14, Blake High School of the Arts.