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First off, this is an epic piece. Seriously. It's written very differently and very creatively, rather with the poetic flair of "The Sight"--but different.

And now I will hack it to shreds.

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I love the way you marry history and passion; sketching faces of fear onto American soldiers, casting a cigarette yellow sky over a black-blue ocean. I love the way your hands paint watercolors of Iwo Jima onto the sun-dust air. You sit at the front of the room and rock your three-legged stool back and forth, and I love the way you’re so close to falling and smacking your (precious) head against the white-board. (You-never-do.)

I even love the way your eyes scrunch up when I tell you I didn’t do the homework. I never do the homework, Mr. Calloway. History without you is boring.

I’ve noticed that the back of your neck is so young, with its little downy hairs and the pebbly bumps of your spine sticking out of your shirt. You look so vulnerable when you bow your head.

Do-you-know I have these visions at night; I’m sitting in your living room with my feet in your lap, lamps casting gold-leafed shadows across our faces. You are smoking and saying, "Rap isn’t real music." Mozart ice-skates across the walls, and I shake my head and say, "But it symbolizes exactly what our culture’s all about--sex, drugs, and violence--and artists are brilliant for bottling up all that I.D. into a shouted melody." You exhale dragon breath and drag the tips of your fingers across the blue scars torn beneath my (sun-starved) flesh, and say, "Well, if you bring Freudian theory into it." I cat-smile and you blow smoke into my face.

I hope you know that I would never assume to tie my name to yours, especially not in between the trite blue lines of my History notebook; but I am not above writing your name over and over again in the fog that blurs my reflection in the bathroom mirror.

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I might be wrong in some of these edits, namely because I wasn't sure if "id" wasn't a typo or not, or whether you wanted those few phrases attached with hyphens or if you didn't know how to properly use hyphens (something I doubt). I hope I did not squelch your creativity.

I'm sorry I didn't bold what I fixed, but I assume you'll know what I changed. (Putting things in bold makes me cringe; sorry. And so do inserting notes in prose. I'm odd like that.)

Anyway, it is a very interesting piece on student-teacher relationships and the descriptions are beautiful (I will continue to say this, yeah).

Finally, I hope you continue writing and you do well in that contest!

Hey again Kaitlin! Ever since reading your story, "The Taste of Blue", I've been dying to read some more of your work! So here I am, ready to review on this second half of review day.

Description and Writing Style

As with your other story, I don't have much to say here. I absolutely love your description, and it does a perfect job illustrating everything. One of my favourite phrases is this one, where you use personification to just draw the reader in and captivate us.

I love the way you marry history and passion, sketching faces of fear onto American soldiers, casting a cigarette yellow sky over a black-blue ocean.

Absolutely beautiful! Great job, Kaitlin!

Character Development

As for this, I don't really have much to say either. This story isn't really focused on developing your character, as it is extremely short and concise; but after reading it I still can imagine this girl as a real person, a real character, not at all 2D or anything like that. Great job here as well!

Nit-Picks

There's not much here I can talk about since your grammar is pretty much perfect. I'd just like to to mention a couple things that I found a bit odd in your formatting, though.

First, you put words into brackets quite a bit, which can be a bit distracting for the readers. For example, let's take a look at this:

and I love the way you’re so close to falling and smacking your (precious)head against the whiteboard. (you-never-do.)

You really don't need to have your descriptive words in brackets, since it would work just as well to just have it as a part of the sentence.

I also noticed that you use hyphens quite a bit as well. Cspr touched on this a bit as well, but I would just suggest that you go through it again and make sure that it actually is helpful and important to your story to have those words hyphenated together. Otherwise, just take out the hyphens, as long as it's not a poetic technique or something.

You look so vulnerable, when you bow your head.

You don't need a comma here.

You are smoking and saying, Rap isn’t real music. Mozart ice-skates across the walls, and I shake my head and say, But it symbolizes exactly what our culture’s all about, sex-drugs-violence, and artists are brilliant for bottling up all that id into a shouted melody.

Always remember to put the lines that your characters are speaking into quotation marks so we can tell whether it's description or dialogue.

Also, I'm not sure what "id" is, possibly a typo? Maybe just take it out, the sentence works fine without it.

That's it for nit-picks!

Overall

Overall, I think that this is a pretty solid short story, and I sincerely hope you win the contest! I loved how it had a sort of poetic type feel to it, which made it really stand out from all the other stories that you see on here. Good luck!

Anyways, I hope that this helps, and as I said, good luck in the contest! See you around, and I'll keep an eye out for more of your writing to take a look at!

Rip to shreds.

Of this, I am physically incapable.


Please write more often.