POV Reinterpretation
She walked out to the field and as she walked on, we all wondered why we even showed up to practice today. She was the star, the best dancer, and the soloist for every single competition. She had a new outfit every day and the only makeup she had to wear on her fair skin was blush, to give herself the smallest bit of color, a hint of happiness to her face. She scurried through the halls every day, never talking with her friends in the hallway. Straight to class, then straight to dance. The coaches adored her and the teachers favored her so really, why would we need to be at practice? She was perfect from the way she threw her blonde hair over her shoulder to the way her nails were always perfectly manicured. But as we were watching her put her bag down we asked each other, “Do any of us actually know a thing about this girl?”
None of us had ever talked to her because we all despised her but really, we all wanted to be her. She had a few thousand followers on Instagram for no reason other than her looks and she caught the eyes of every boy when she walked by. But with all this desire to be her, we really didn’t know anything about her. What was her family like? Where had she come from? What does she do for fun? As we were realizing how little we knew about her, the coaches hushed us and immediately she ran out crying. The coaches started giving a speech and all of our minds went blank. We weren’t here to find out that she was going to get another solo or be the focus in the upcoming competition.
“Ella’s mother passed away last night from breast cancer.”
All of our faces immediately went blank and the room silenced.
“As I assume most of y’all know, her father left many years ago and she’s moved here with her aunt and uncle last year. As a community and as a team we need to rally around her during this time as we also know Ella was working hard at the diner to help pay for her mother’s treatments…”
This poor poor girl. And none of us even knew it. She didn’t have friends, she was too busy working to socialize. We took a closer look at her nails and realized it wasn’t the work of a manicurist, it was the work of a paint pen and some rubbing alcohol from the art room. We never even bothered. We all thought, she has to have her life together but she didn’t and now more than ever she needed someone. So there we were feeling sorry for her but we had another chance and we would not waste this one.
Artistic Statement: I chose to redo the piece “Varsity” by Brock Kingsley and I chose this piece because of the unique and challenging POV. The POV in this piece was in the first person but of a group of people rather than the normal, singular person. I thought this would be a good challenge for me because I’ve never written like this. “Varsity” was from the POV of a basketball team focused mainly on a special needs student who never really seemed to fit in and my piece was from the POV of a dance team that focused on a girl they all disliked because they thought she was better than all of them. The main challenge I faced was flipping “Varsity” into my own piece. It was very hard for me to come up with an original storyline because the original is the only piece I had to compare mine to and the original already fits the criteria so well. I tried to flip the story to make it my own but I think with a more specific prompt I could create a more original piece and I could figure out how to get it in this POV. I think I learned a lot from this project because experimenting with this new writing style was very exciting for me to try and play with.
