About the Young Writers Project
YWP, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, Vermont, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power and to gain confidence and skills for the workplace and life. YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in newspapers across Vermont, on Vermont Public Radio and in YWP’s monthly digital magazine, The Voice. Since 2006, it has offered young people a place to write, explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org, which has only one rule: Be respectful. For more information, please contact YWP executive director Geoffrey Gevalt at ggevalt@youngwritersproject.org.
Rory Belle Carrara wrote this piece during the past school year when she was in eighth grade at Christ the King School in Rutland. She was responding to a Young Writers Project prompt to write about an injustice witnessed or experienced.
Unjust
By Rory Belle Carrara
[H]e sits alone
in the middle of the lunch room,
just him, at the pink allergy table.
And God only knows
there must be someone without peanut butter.
But both God and I know
no one will sit with him.
He might be annoying,
mean,
unlikable,
and the list seems never-ending.
But
if that was any other person,
there would have been 10 people getting up and joining him.
In this little Catholic school,
I can’t be the only one to have the heart,
to see him,
to feel bad.
This injustice must be stopped.
So I sit with him,
just Johnny and me.
But unfortunately, that’s the only “just” thing about this situation.
