“It’s here!”
I felt my heart drop into my stomach. I ran down the stairs and into the kitchen as fast as my legs could take me. And then I stopped. There it was - the white envelope that, when opened, would determine the rest of my life.

Thoughts of her past plagued her mind and took over her thoughts, filling her with fear. She recalled an image of three young girls. One looked particularly familiar. The girl was beautiful, and she remembered this girl with admiration, but something was strange. They were in the bathroom of a school building, leaning up against the mirrors. They wreaked of cigarettes, and smoke filled the room as they all smeared on the same shade of red lipstick. She felt frightened, not because of what they were doing, but because of who that girl was. She was afraid, because she knew that girl was her sister.

She wasn’t afraid of her sister. She was afraid of becoming her. After all, her father had conditioned her to believe that all girls go crazy at the age of fourteen. Even as they sat around the table on her twelfth birthday, while all the parents and children were laughing and enjoying the night, she stared into the light of the candles and concentrated on them as though she could bend time to her favor. “Two more years” she thought, “two more years” until she could become her own person, and not just the projection of her sister's past.

She remembered her sister scrambling to get up from the kitchen floor as the police officers pulled the knife away from her clenched fists, trying desperately to get to my father. Her sister had wanted to go to a party that night, as she was wearing her infamous blue dress that night, but their father prohibited her from going. Little did he know that his little girl knew how to wield a butcher knife.

She sobbed, feeling her face grow hot from a combination of anger and terror. She remembered her father and her sister’s mother signed the forms that would allow her sister to be kept in a mental facility until she “got better.” She saw the lifeless form that was her sister being dragged, in a heavily sedated state, into her room. She ran to the small circular window that separated her sister from her, and didn’t know whether to try and help or to run away as fast as possible. As her sister laid on the bed, she felt it was almost as if she could see her sister smirking at her, teasing her about what would inevitably come for her, too.

She felt as though her feet were nailed to the hospital floor, and all she could do was look at her sister - but it wasn’t her sister that she saw anymore, it was a reflection of herself in her sister’s place.

“No,” she thought, “No!” She remembered pacing around her room, desperately thinking of ways to differentiate herself from her sister. Then, she thought of a brilliant plan. At that moment, she decided she would seek out every opportunity to further herself in her studies. She would work the extra hour, read the extra chapter, all in an attempt to further herself from her sister’s fate. But what scared her most was the way that her father looked at her - like a ticking time bomb just waiting for the right time to explode. He desperately wanted to keep her from the world, as did she, so that he would never look at her like that again. She wanted him to be proud of her, and to acknowledge that she had made it.

She set out on going the extra mile, whether it be in school or at home. Every free moment she had, she spent working. First, she tried writing a novel. Then, she tried making films. She did whatever she felt necessary to keep herself afloat. But despite her best efforts, she never quite reached the standard she had dreamt of. Nothing she ever achieved on her own was good enough for her. And so, the little girl fell into a state of depression.

“Take a look at this.” She remembered her eighth grade teacher saying, as she passed her a little yellow sheet. It was an application form for a magnet program. The little girl had found her chance, and the dull nothingness that clouded her mind was replaced with fireworks. She had finally found the motivation she so craved. She had no doubts in her mind about getting in, so the girl worked herself to the bone to shape herself into the perfect candidate. She had gone to the best tutors and academic camps in the county. She was given the chance she needed, and she did not hesitate to take it.

I took a deep breath, and ripped the letter open. I pulled out the thin piece of paper that laid inside, and held it up to my eyes.

“Waitlisted.”