Hot damn, what a funky cat. She’s got a mystique that’s riveting—something in those dull green eyes. They sorta catch you off guard when she glances up from under her lashes. It almost seems as if she forgot there was a world going on around her outside of her own head. It’s sweltering outside; however, she’s covered her limbs in all black. A black baggy sweater covers her curvy frame, black skinnies grabbing at her thighs for dear life, black combats just begging for a rude individual to get in the way of her swaying power walk. She passes by people, weaving through the crowd on the way to her endeavor. Sweat beads down her forehead. It makes for a radiant glow, but of course that’s not something she would ever identify when looking in the mirror. Her book bag draped over her shoulder is filled to the brim with essentials: Hemingway, offbeat dystopian novels, collage materials, dozens and dozens of pages of typewritten prose that she has written in the soul blood, that distinctive, abstract energy that all artists cling to when it slaps them in the face.

She’s headed to a corner downtown, an alley that is a shortcut for kids walking around town. When she arrives, she flings off her bag in one smooth, careless motion and gets to work. Her precut magazine pieces are methodically arranged on the wall, glued in an overlapping fashion. Colors tangle, shapes morph, a message slowly forms. It’s a riveting thing to watch, if anyone was actually watching. “Listen up—rebellion is an untamable beast.” This is the sentence that is formed in all her fragments of glossy paper. She has formed scenes in each letter, a story being told up close if only anyone would open their eyes. A student sits in a desk, the center of the head cut out and waves replacing the shape while other students sit up straight in their desks. One letter consists of a man with his hands up sporting a “Don’t shoot” red T-shirt. Every letter tells a story, progressively formulating a whole.

Once she’s completed the work, she glazes it with clear sealing paint, capturing the story in the old brick. She picks up her bag, her supplies, anxiously glances over her shoulder. This is her expression. This is her activism. She’s done one of these every month for almost a year. A few have caught the attention of the local newspaper. They spent the whole story trying to decipher if she was a villain or a leader, and unnamed vigilante or an unnamed criminal vandalizing the dark alleyways of a dull town.

No one would ever guess it was her. This invoked a sense of power. She moved on from the alley, rounded the corner, stopping at a local junior high, taping her typewriter pieces to the windows, rows upon rows of them. “Your spark cannot be put out by a systemized environment such as this school. Let it flare up. You’re a forest fire, and that’s OK. Sometimes things need to burn to be born again, to expand.”

She fancied herself a collective mess of expression. There was no one to listen, so she made people listen. There was no one to talk to, so she talked to herself. There wasn’t anyone who wanted to be a part of her peculiar little world, her favorite little patterns, so she spoke without her voice box. No one would ever guess she was a modern genius. But then again, people don’t tend to ever look up from their toes, do they?

—By Faith N., 16, Arkansas