Sage Tyrtle

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I’m crouching on the forest floor studying a rock while Rachel tells the other kids that my nose is too big and my mouth is too big and my waist is too big, or I’m pretending to study a rock, really I’m looking at the rock and wishing I was the kind of person who picks up a rock and smashes it into a tiny, exactly the right size nose, someone who bloodies blonde hair, but I’m the kind of person who looks at a rock really hard, so hard that when Mr. Kieler calls for the class to gather at the redwood grove I miss it, and when I look up the whole class is gone and I walk from the rock the way I think they went but no one’s there so I go back to the rock again and again until there’s a starburst of footprints in the dirt starting from the rock and that’s when I hear, far away, too far away, the sound of the school bus, and I already ate my granola bar and I don’t have any water and on the bus they’re all singing On Top Of Spaghetti, on the bus there’s an empty seat in the back but I always sit there by myself, so there’s no one to see that I’m gone, no one to say, turn this bus around.

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Sage Tyrtle‘s stories have been featured on NPR, CBC, and PBS. She is a Moth GrandSLAM winner. When she was five she wanted to be a princess until her dad explained that princesses live in a dystopian patriarchy, so she switched to being a writer instead. Find her on Twitter (@sagetyrtle).