The Gods of Song and Poetry

Chapter 0 - Cuddles

Chapter 0 - Cuddles

The auditorium was hardly packed, but it still felt like a lot of people. Analee sat with her classmates towards the back, wearing her "Sunday best," as her mom called it. Her white dress and white shoes were both accented with pink ribbons. They matched her pink hair band, which in turn held her honey blonde hair in place.

When her mom had picked out the outfit, Analee uselessly tried to rebel.

"It makes me look like a little girl!" she protested. Since she was starting high school in less than a month, she thought she should look more mature.

"You are a little girl," her mother countered flatly, and Analee knew she was going to lose this battle.

"That's alright," she thought. "Maybe today will change things."

She looked to her left and right to see what her classmates were wearing. She was so nervous, she hadn't paid attention as they entered. It appeared that their parents were equally merciless with clothing choices. The girls all wore dresses or skirts, and the boys had on nice pants and shirts. Some were even tugging at awkward, clip-on ties.

The small school she attended offered a few summer classes, and her parents had signed her up for a poetry class. It was worth half an English credit. Since four English credits were required to graduate, her parents thought she might as well get a head start, and maybe free up time for more electives.

She had gotten to know some new students over the summer. They came from surrounding towns that took advantage of her school's summer program. Nearly half her classmates, though, were friends she had shared her educational career with since kindergarten. She knew them, and they knew her, nearly as well as brothers and sisters would. That's just how it works in small town schools.

Tonight's presentation was their final grade. They had to read an original poem at a small recital. Their poem was picked over and revised during the last two weeks of class. It was to be peer-reviewed, teacher approved, and graded long before the recital. It was then printed and glued to small sheets of colored poster board to make it less flimsy for holding on stage, and so that Mr. Parker could hang the poems on his classroom walls when school started. Analee's poem was long, so she needed six different pieces of poster board to contain it all. She took advantage of that fact. As she thought about it, she checked the order of her sheets, making sure the red one was on bottom so that the audience would see it first.

Mr. Parker insisted that poetry is about speaking what is in your heart publicly and bravely. Therefore, he said, we needed a public forum to display our work. The "public," it turned out, was just the kids in the class, at least one parent for each kid, whatever siblings got dragged along (which meant some older and younger students from the school were here), and, at least for Analee, one set of grandparents. There were also a few teachers here that Mr. Parker had probably guilted into attending. They were social and pleasant, but Analee would be surprised if they weren't at least a little perturbed about having to give up a Friday night in the middle of their summer break. All in all, not much more than a hundred people were in the auditorium.

One by one, as their names were called, the eighteen students in the class walked up on stage to the little podium, and rigidly read their works. Most poems were about nature or family...typical early adolescent attempts at poetry. Applause was polite and brief. Analee was third from last, and was getting steadily more nervous as time went on. She had forced herself to leave her decoy poem, the one she worked on in Mr. Parker's class, at home so that she couldn't chicken out. She was going to read "Cuddles," or nothing at all.

The classmate ahead of her, a boy named Ryan, just finished his poem about patriotism. He got the biggest applause yet. It was a pretty good poem, she thought. Then Mr. Parker walked up on stage, bent over to speak into the microphone which was set to a comfortable height for the kids, and announced, "Next we have 'Stars Through The Winter Pine tree Canopy,' by Analee Jennings." He pronounced her name carefully, knowing she didn't like it when people pronounced it "Anna" instead of "Ah-na."