THIRD WRITING PRIZE WINNER –
WINTER 2020 – 2021
is HAILEY JU
of LANGLEY, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA
The Sky and I
By Hailey Ju
It was chaotic. I tried to drown out the endless shouting between my parents by listening to the quiet hum of our old car. Lying down and occupying the completely empty backseat, I laid with my eyes closed. But then how could I ignore what they were saying to each other?
“I’m so sick of this! Nothing has changed!”
“Drop it, Jen!”
“Why? Can you even call us ‘happily’ married?”
“Seriously, drop it!”
“Your mom was right – you are such a coward!”
“And you are such a –”
At first, I only tried to ignore the contents of their argument. I counted up to one hundred in French and plugged my ears. After some time, though, the strained, muffled voices were enough to make me want to jump out of the car onto the highway.
Giving up, I sighed and turned to the window for distractions. It’s awfully sunny out. That’s annoying, I thought.
I looked up at the sky, and something in it caught me off guard. There was one weird-looking cloud that looked so much like a momma duck and her babies. The three baby chicks swimming behind their mom in the sea of the blue sky made me chuckle. My eyes drifted to the right and a delighted dog of fluffy white dashed across the sky. It was tirelessly chasing after a hotdog. Giggling, I decided to give the dog a name: Jeff. Hi, Jeff. How’s that hotdog chase going? I asked. Suddenly, he turned back and declared; this hotdog is going to be mine, Elly. Just you wait!
We started a conversation, and before I knew it, the slam of our car door and the muffled mumbling of my mom as she reached the gas machine made me realize that we had stopped at a gas station. I asked my dad,
“Were you and mom talking the past few minutes?”
“Talking? Wasn’t it more like a shouting match?” he replied.
I hadn’t heard anything for the past twenty minutes.
“Hey, how you holding up back there? Isn’t it boring? You want daddy to tell you a funny story?”
I didn’t reply.
***
The new place we had moved to was really boring. It was somewhere up north, but I never really bothered to check where our trip had ended. The new school was fine, I guess. It was the same as all the other schools I’d been to.
So, what was new?
The only great distinction that I found was that this school had so many annoying kids. All of them were so annoyingly intrusive.
On the first day, there was this one really stupid kid who wouldn’t stop talking to me. My silence should’ve clearly given away that I was not interested in his name, but the boy wouldn’t stop saying it. To drown him out, I turned to my personal movie screen, the window frame, in hopes that I would make another new friend.
But then, the stupid boy made it impossible for me to ignore him:
“Hey, my name’s Aaron. What was your name again?”
Just go away.
“Hey, I wasn’t sure if you heard me the first time, what’s your name?”
Go away!
“Hey, are you deaf?”
No, I just don’t like you. Leave me alone!
He eventually waved his hand in front of my face. It was infuriatingly close. So close that I wanted to bite it off of his stupid arm. Then he was doing a full dance and blocking my entire view of the window. My face turned bright red. That’s it.
I stood up and looked at him dead in the eyes. I showed him that I was my parents’ daughter.
“Everyone was right – you are the most annoying kid in the whole world!”
Even though it didn’t make any sense, Aaron was left with absolute horror on his face. He slowly shrunk back to his seat, turning away from me and crying. Everyone rushed to him and told him that it was going to be alright.
Finally, all the attention is off of me, I thought. There was no regret or remorse in the way I made that boy cry.
As I returned my attention back out of the window and up to the sky, I saw that Jeff was bounding towards me with a massive crown on his head. The crown opened its eyes and whispered, “Let me tell you tales of the King of Clouds. How he conquered the Sunrise Dragon to protect his people and how he braved the Forest of Skulls to rescue his daughter from a terrible fate…”
As he told his stories, images floated in and out of my vision.
When the crown decided it needed to take a break to get polished, I noticed that the seat in front of me, Aaron’s previous seat, became empty. Sweet, more room for me, I thought as I kicked my feet on it.
By the end of the day, I’d learned nothing of long division and everything about the kingdom of clouds.
***
The sweet cotton candy blue sky didn’t last much longer. That was fine, though. The rosy pinks and yellows of the autumn sky were great for meeting magical beings like the Crystal-Horned Unicorns and Prince Dionne, one of the King of Clouds’ daughters. But with the blink of an eye, they all disappeared.
On one November night, I couldn’t stop waking up and falling asleep, constantly falling in and out of consciousness. The darkness impaired my vision to see what kept waking me up. It happened at least five times. What’s bothering me so much? I usually sleep so soundly.
The fifth time, it was daylight, but without the warmth of the sun. Blaming the unusual grayness of my room on my horrible night of rest, I barely dragged my aching body out of my bed to open the blinds. With every step closer to the window, a heavy, cold dread washed over me. Soon, I realized that the heavy, cold dread was not something in my head, but a physical change in my body. I was getting goosebumps. Something’s wrong… With the dramatic opening of the blinds, the dread revealed itself as-
“Snow!” my mom gasped as she passed by my bedroom.
“Oh, no.” the reality slapped me in the face.
Everything. Was. White.
The falling snowflakes were a beautiful, refreshing sight for my mother, but all my eyes could focus on was the bleak nothingness of the sky. Oh, no. the blanked-out sky brought tears to my eyes. I frantically pressed my body closer to the icy window to get a better view of the disappointing blankness of the sky. The horizon perfectly blanketed in at least six inches of pure white snow seemed to taunt me, cruelly insisting on reminding me of my cloud friends that I could no longer see.
“Mom! When does it stop?” I rushed out of my bedroom to ask.
“Well, honey, I’m sorry, but I don’t think it’s going to last a week,” It’s not surprising that my mother doesn’t understand why I am asking, “It’s such a shame, I wish it would last long-”
As the sound of my heart-shattering reverberated throughout my body, I couldn’t hear the rest of what she had to say. A week? How could I last a week without King of Clouds and his daughters, Jeff and his hotdogs, or any of the fantastic and kind creatures I had befriended?
Sighing, I left my mom to babble on about the old days when she actually got to have fun. Sulkily, I traced my steps back to my grayly lit room and gazed upon my window. What once felt like a showing of a beautiful movie now seemed like a cruel barricade between me and another stinging reality that I wasn’t ready for.
***
I was definitely not ready for the wait. Whichever weather forecast my mother had gotten her information from was completely wrong. It snowed on for MONTHS. Every morning was dreadfully cold, and I was met with the same bareness of figureless skies. I wasn’t used to this amount of snow, but without wasting a second more, kids started to grab their sleds, skates, skis, you name it.
Meanwhile, I couldn’t be bothered going frolicking in the snow without my friends. I hated loud playgrounds and sports anyways. The thought of working together with a bunch of people was so boring to me. Besides, everything that they were doing was nothing compared to the tales of Prince Harlow’s adventures with his flying beasts in cloud kingdom. Instead of building snowmen or making snow angels, I stayed inside, still staring at the windows in hopes that the wretched snowing would stop.
At school, most kids were too scared to ask me to go play with them. And the small percentage of kids who did ask me were all met with dead silence. I didn’t even know what their faces looked like because I feared that I would miss the split second where one of my friends would come out and say hi. These cold days went on what seemed like forever, until one day, a strange thing happened.
One day, a small gift appeared on my desk when I came back from the bathroom. It was a small cup of hot chocolate with a note on it. In rushed handwriting, it said, “You seemed so cold by the window all by yourself,” and nothing more. It was true what the note had said. I was honestly freezing because this corner of the room wasn’t reached by the heaters.
Looking around my classroom for what seemed like the first time, I didn’t recognize anybody’s name or face. Why would anybody want to give me hot chocolate? There were probably not many people that I treated well enough to get a hot chocolate from them. I sat down without much further thought and drank it. Oddly enough, it was one of the best cups of hot cocoa that I’d tasted before. It was the kind of drink that made all of your insides warm, then reaches all the edges of your body, your toes, your fingers, the tip of your nose. Thankful for the cup, I left a note on the whiteboard in front of our classroom.
The next day, I got another, then another, then another almost every day. And each day, another note would come with it, all compliments and sweet sentiments like, “I like your jacket today” or “Your hair looks so cool.” In return, I always wrote something on the whiteboard, “Thanks” or “Thank you.”
Unexpectedly, during Mid-February, I walked into the classroom and saw the seat in front of me no longer empty. Instead, a girl with long black hair and the darkest eyes I’d ever seen sat in Aaron’s old place. She greeted me with a smile and a wave. Puzzled by this new attention, I stood there without a smile or nod or even any sign that I saw her smile. But her smile was sweet, the kind that was so sincere, you would think that you had accomplished something. As I sat down, she turned around and handed me the cup of hot cocoa wordlessly and turned her gaze to the sky. I smiled, sipped the warm cup, and looked up to the still completely white sky. The wait became a bit more bearable with the warmth of company.
***
Through the notes on the cups, I learned that her name was Sarah. Although we didn’t have long conversations, I would say some words in response to questions.
“What’s your name?”
“Elly.”
“Do you have any pets?”
“No.”
“What’s your favorite animal?”
“Dragons.”
“Cool!”
I couldn’t think of anything more to say, so I just smiled weakly and continued to gaze out the window. Sarah turned and gazed out the window with me. She also seemed to be waiting for something, maybe another friend in the sky. Though I was curious, I never asked until one day we had an actual conversation.
The note that day asked, “Why are you looking up at the sky all the time?”
“I’m waiting for a friend,” I replied. This time, instead of leaving it at that, I asked her back, “Why are you always looking up at the sky?” Her face lightened up at the question. She looked so thrilled to answer it.
“I’m waiting for a friend too,” she replied. There was no way she knew about the Cloud Kingdom. There were no other people to see it.
“Who’s your friend?” I inquired. Now my attention was off the window and all on Sarah.
“It’s you!” she chuckled. “I’ve wanted to be your friend for a long time. Ever since you got here, actually.”
I was confused. I had been nothing but horrible to the kids in my classroom.
“I don’t really have a reason. I just thought that you could use some hot chocolate.” She knew what I had been thinking.
I was taken aback. Suddenly, her words punched my guts with the queasiest feeling. I couldn’t bear to look at Sarah’s face without that awful feeling in my stomach. I stared at the sky and couldn’t talk to her for the rest of the day.
Throughout the months, I talked to her a little bit more every day. From one question to two, then three, then four, which eventually led to full-blown conversations during recess or lunch. With every note, came one more line of conversation. At one point, we got comfortable enough for me to tell her the tales that I’d heard. Upon hearing the story of the slain dragon, Sarah’s eyes widened. She listened with so much attention that her entire body seemed to lean forward with all her weight. After finishing the story, her eyes were so wide with curiosity that I almost felt sorry to end the story.
“Wow, that is so cool.” She said in awe.
“Really? You don’t think I’m crazy?” I replied.
“Are you kidding? Your friends are the most interesting people I’ve ever heard about. When your friends come out again, you should invite me to talk to them too.”
Disregarding the fact that she probably wouldn’t be able to hear them, her excitement made me so happy that I said yes.
“I know a really nice place.”
***
I woke to the bright warm sunlight beaming on my face. It seemed to smile at me. Stretching and yawning, I felt like sleeping for just 10 minutes more, but I couldn’t. Today was the day I finally introduce Sarah to my friends. Walking up to the window, I stared out into the beautiful painting laid out before me. Clouds lazily rolling, the sky a lighthearted blue draped over the clean greens of spring. The sight was almost too bright after months in the dim gray that the winter had shrouded my world with. Finally, I was reunited with my true friends.
When I looked out the window, there was nothing there. There were clouds, for sure, all very pretty and with many shapes. But the Cloud King or his crown wasn’t there. Princess Dionne wasn’t there. Even Jeff wasn’t there. Maybe they just decided to take a day off, I thought. But I knew that wasn’t the case. In fact, I wouldn’t be seeing them for a long time. Being a little bit disappointed, I turned around. I was already late to meet Sarah. I guess they’ve abandoned me after all these months of not seeing each other.
Suddenly, a familiar voice stopped me in my tracks. I’ll miss you, Elly. Turning around, I saw Jeff. He was so much smaller than I remembered. I could barely make him out. Sadly smiling, I told him, I hope you get that hotdog and waved goodbye. His tiny fluffy ears, tail, and eyes all faded into the sky.
***
“Hey Elly, took you long enough. Let’s go!” Sarah had already been waiting in front of my porch. She furrowed her brows. “Why did you bring your bike? You said it wasn’t far, just a five-minute walk.”
I was beaming, I couldn’t stop smiling at her. “Sarah, I don’t really know how to tell you this but…my friends won’t talk to me anymore. So, I’m really sorry but I don’t think you can meet them.”
At this news, Sarah was neither happy nor sad, just confused. She started, but I quickly cut her off.
“You know what? I’m just happy to see you. And since our plan got kind of canceled, let’s just go on an adventure. What do you think? Oh, and I brought you cookies.” I was beaming like an idiot. I could feel it on my face.
“Elly, are you okay? You’ve waited so long for the right weather to meet your friends. Are you sure you want to go somewhere and actually, uh, do something?” Sarah inquired as she graciously took my cookie.
“Sarah, I’m just glad you’re here,” I replied. It followed a long silence in which Sarah wondered whether I’d hit my head somewhere or I just really wanted to play with her.
“Where do you even want to go?” She finally asked.
Without much thought, I thought of the first fun thing in my mind.
“Let’s go play in the park, with the other kids.”
-30-
About the author:
I am a high school student living in Canada. I’ve always had a fondness for writing. Maybe, one day, I’ll become a writer. : ) Thank you for this opportunity to share my story. ~Hailey Ju
