In English, we were assigned to write a flash fiction, a short story that describes a key moment in our character's life. From that flash fiction we adapted a graphic novel, hand-drawn, that illustrated the story in hand-drawn comic panels.

Here's an audio recording of me reading my flash fiction, my graphic novel, and my full-length flash fiction upon which the graphic novel was based on:

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Cracks

Amy stood in front of the bathroom mirror adjusting her dull brown hair, but no matter how she braided or twisted it, it would never be perfect enough. Her palms dropped to her sides in frustration, and she gave up, accepting that she would never be happy with her hair. But those pores!  Her face literally resembled a greasy pizza, as oily as the fluorescent liquid oozing from each slice; something needed to be done.

She barged into a stall, plucking a toilet seat cover from its dispenser on the wall, ready to blot her face to smooth, matte perfection, when she saw something peculiar in the adjacent stall. She spotted a pair of the new Steve Madden boots attached to two legs, wrapped in $120 jeans, that were kneeling in the direction of the toilet. Amy’s eyes widened and her heart stopped; dropping her makeshift blotting sheet, she bolted out of her own stall and began knocking vigorously on the other door.

“Go away!” the voice from the other side of the stainless steel partition echoed off the tile walls.

“Just let me in.” Amy pleaded desperately, continuing to rap her knuckles against the wall that was keeping her from saving someone who was unknowingly sinking, and with time would drown in an ocean of pain and disappointment.

When she was met with silent refusal, Amy was forced to take matters into her own hands. She dropped to her hands and knees, squirming her way through the narrow space between the door and the floor. The girl finally turned around; her mascara-streaked eyes and tear-stained cheeks collaborated to create an expression of pure hopelessness. It was Stacy Young, the epitome of perfection in Amy’s eyes. But this girl seemed to be a completely different person. Her usual bouncy golden waves hung lifeless and dry, framing her face which was now devoid of any light or life. Her bright green eyes had been drained of their electricity, her gaze now vacant and empty.

“I…I…” Stacy choked, but couldn’t manage to get any words out.

“Shh, shh, you’ll be okay.” Amy wrapped her arms around Stacy’s delicate frame, and at that moment, she wasn’t holding the sparkling social butterfly that she occasionally passed in the hallways, the one girl who had the right to be the most confident girl in the world. Crying into her chest was the lost soul inside every one of us, with cracks like the tiles on the bathroom wall, held together with chewed-up gum and zebra-print duct tape.

Amy lifted Stacy’s arm to rest over her shoulder and together they stood, both incredibly fragile but one miraculously finding the strength to support the other. One day, she thought, those tiles would be fixed, the cracks filled in with a extra-strength cement and then glossed over until the crevices were almost invisible.  But for now, all Amy could do was attempt to hold the pieces together. Everyone is broken inside - Stacy had just been the first to fall apart.

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Overall, the Narrative experience in English taught me a lot about how to tell stories effectively using few words, and in the case of the graphic novels, few images. At first, I found it difficult to explain so much about a person in less than 500 words, and to tell a complete story in less than 4 pages, but I realized that the brevity of the story and graphic novel made it all the more significant. I ended up really understanding my character and her motives, almost as if she was a real person.