Small Surprises 1 Traversing the hardscrabble hillside, scattered shale makes empty promises beneath your feet, rock over boulder, beige over brown. The day leans long toward the west and monotony clings to you like dust, spattered in your sweat. Below, sage and bitterbrush smear to the far horizon. You tire of the sameness. And you wonder if God has grown tired, too. In answer, at your feet, a sudden spray of scarlet—Indian paintbrush, rooted in sandstone. 2 Surfing waves of high meadow wasteland, your boots trample the blackened grass, lift a memory of smoke‐strangled skies, wind, coughing cinders, and the cries of those who fled. At the perimeters, scorched cadavers—Jeffrey pine and juniper—bear intimate testimony to the arrogance of man, careless keeper of the flame. Humbled in the face of such destruction, you stumble to find, midst charcoal and ashes, a solitary green seedling. Nearby, a thrush begins to sing. 3 With a tweak of the faucet, steam rises to transform the temperate space behind your shower curtain. You enter your porcelain rainforest, step on a blue plastic tugboat. A curse foams up into your throat, but before it can bubble out, you consider existence minus blue plastic tugboats, wooden trains and Hot Wheels cars. This child, thrust into your ordered life, has roiled it into chaos and cluttered your neat, neutral rooms with tissue paper collages, lopsided dream catchers and crayoned I love you’s—small surprises of great magnitude.

Ellen Hopkins shares her work on Wattpad in honor of Banned Books Week.

Ellen Hopkins shares her work on Wattpad in honor of Banned Books Week.

Everyone has something, someone, somewhere else that they’d rather be. For four high-school seniors, their goals of perfection are just as different as the paths they take to get there. Cara’s parents’ unrealistic expectations have already sent her twin brother Conner spiraling toward suicide. For her, perfect means rejecting their ideals to take a chance on a new kind of love. Kendra covets the perfect face and body—no matter what surgeries and drugs she needs to get there. To score his perfect home run—on the field and off—Sean will sacrifice more than he can ever win back. And Andre realizes that to follow his heart and achieve his perfect performance, he’ll be living a life his ancestors would never have understood. Everyone wants to be perfect, but when perfection loses its meaning, how far will you go? What would you give up to be perfect? A riveting and startling companion to the bestselling Impulse, Ellen Hopkins’s Perfect exposes the harsh truths about what it takes to grow up and grow into our own skins, our own selves. ***Listen to the attached videos to hear the characters read an audio version of "Perfect", voiced by various actors.***