I listened, bored, to my English teacher explaining the homework assignment. I wished we didn’t have to wait until the bell rang to leave class… maybe then I could get in some serious time with my makeup. I already knew the assignment. We had to write an essay on who we are. Not like my name is Jessica Livingston. I am 15.983 years old. I will drive a BMW when I turn 16 next week. Not like that. More like Jessica is a popular girl. She has lots of friends and has been on too many dates to count. But who is she really? She’s a punk girl with an entire drawer full of Linkin Park junk. Not really.

I should probably introduce myself so you don’t get confused. My name is Jessica Livingston. I am 15.983 years old. Next week I will turn 16 and be the first girl in my year to own a car when I sign the order form for a new BMW convertible. Oh yeah, my life is perfect. I have a boyfriend named Larry (I hate his name but he is a HUNK and so sweet you can barely believe he’s real). I am a worker at the Coldstone’s counter and I am earning $10 an hour. Therefore, I can pay for gas.

To the right you can see a picture of me applying lip gloss. My friend Kayla took the picture and made me put it in my journal, even though I didn’t want to. I have MUCH better pictures of me. Under the picture of me is a picture of my best friend Kayla. I couldn’t find any bad pictures of her, so you will just have to make do. We do EVERYTHING together. We both cheer (of course, I got squad captain) we both work at Coldstone’s, and we go shopping together. Plus she lives right next door. How great is that? We even started our own little music group…nobody at school knows about it. We do it to relieve stress and express ourselves. But we know it is SO geeky so we swore not to tell anyone.

Kayla is piano and I am acoustic guitar. We sing our own songs with our own beats. Kayla keeps saying we should take ourselves to an agent, and get recorded in Hollywood. I say that this is a stress relief exercise, not our ticket to fame. Besides, what would the people at school say if they found out? Yeesh. We have our own CD, with our picture on it. We are NOT going to send it to an agent.

I realized that class was over and I was the only one still in the room. I quickly packed up my books and walked out. Today was Tuesday…practice day! I had to get to my house before Kayla did so I could get my room set up. I biked home as fast as I could and set up my room. Just in time, too. Kayla had gotten snacks from her mom and come over. She put the snacks on the folding table in my room. “Oo, muffins. Thanks, Kay!” I said.

“Mom was baking and she had extra. These are blueberry, these are banana nut, and these are chocolate chip” she said, pointing to three kinds of muffin.

“Cool,” I said, grabbing a chocolate chip muffin. “Which song should we do first?”

“I’m in a sweet kind of mood,” she said. “How about Gummi Gals?”

“That old thing? It’s STUPID!”

“Fine, then. See’s Sweetheart.”

“All right.”

We started playing. As we played a few short chords, we readied our voices to sing.

As the chorus kicked into full swing a wave of sadness suddenly whacked into me. It was like, now I’m happy, and now I’m not. Weird, huh? There wasn’t any reason at all. I thumped my guitar as a cue to stop. “Kayla, I’m not in the mood. How about No More?”

She looked confused. “Okay, I guess.”

I started the chords on my guitar. This one was my solo song. She didn’t sing at all. She didn’t want to. It depressed her too much.

I discovered then how easily my body could function without my brain. I kept singing the song, and my hands kept playing guitar, but my brain ceased to function. A dark curtain closed in my mind, and I didn’t notice anything happening. The dark curtain opened, on another world.

A little girl squeezed my hand, screaming for me to protect her. “Help me, mommy! I don’ wanna die! I don’ wan them to take me awaaaaaayy!”

I was in a straw hut held together by mud. It was small. It held three occupants. Myself, the little girl, and a man. It had one small cot and two pads on the floor. A small fire pit held a miniature spit, about large enough to roast a chicken thigh. I was hunkered down beneath a hole in the wall designed as a window. I took the opportunity to peek out the window.

Hundreds of soldiers in blue armor crowded the streets of a dusty city. There was something unusual about the armor, but I couldn’t tell what in the five seconds it took for a soldier to spot me and open fire through my window. I quickly ducked down and took the little girl in my lap. “There, there.” I comforted her. “It’s all going to be all right.”

Just then, a crowd of soldiers came bursting through the door. They leveled what seemed to be some kind of rifle, with light strips down the sides at me and my family. I suppose that’s what they were. My family I mean. One soldier began to pull the trigger on his rifle…

And I snapped back to reality. I was surprised to find my mouth still singing the lyrics to “No More”. My hands were even playing the well-known guitar chords. Kayla didn’t seem to have noticed anything wrong. Her hands were drifting over the piano keys in the same dreamy way they always did when she played the song. We finished calmly and sadly. I played the last chord on my guitar, and when I looked up, Kayla was smiling. “What is it, Kay?” I asked. “You’re usually practically in tears by the time we finish that song.”

“I finally did it. I recorded you singing that song and added it to the CD. And that was the best run-through we have EVER had of that song. El is FINALLY going to accept us.”

“Who in the world is El?” I asked. “Oh…you didn’t!”

“Why yes I did! In twenty seconds I am going to seal that CD inside a paper envelope and send it to Elizabeth Amathen, Agent for emerging stars. You and I are going to be famous and you are NOT about to stop me.”

I stared, frozen and gaping, as she dashed around the room as quickly as she could to get the CD in the envelope. I mentally slapped myself awake and began the dash after her just as she was running out of my room. She got on her bike a second before I got on mine and she was off to the post office! I tried to catch her but I just couldn’t. She was WAY too fast! I sighed and headed back to my room. It sounded like she’d been trying to get this agent’s attention for a while now. It would be a miracle if she was accepted just because of a particularly good run-through of a song.

I started to think about the vision that I had had. There were so many questions. I thought that maybe I should talk it through with my parents. Sometimes they were really cool about things like this, but sometimes…well let’s just say it isn’t pretty. I decided I’d talk it over with them, but I should draw a few of the things that I had seen first. The first thing I drew was a sketch of the hut. I didn’t have time to do the soldier before my parents came home. It was black and white, but I figured Mom and Dad could handle it. I couldn’t resist drawing the little girl - something about her made me want to remember her. I drew her in black and white too, except for her eyes. Her eyes had something in them that made me want to show the world their color, and beauty. Her face pleaded to have its story told, and my parents were going to hear that story later. A ringing at the front door took me out of my stupor and sent me to go greet my parents.