“Perhaps children of the early 2000s should be grateful for tamer coming-of-age protagonists who dealt with school bullies, boogers, and cursed slices of cheese within the vacuum of endless middle school.”
“They probably thought Evan just smelled like that: nauseatingly floral like Katie Levi-Moretti, the first girl in his high school class to discover perfume and, therefore, the last person everybody wanted to sit next to at assembly.”
“The chunks of Amie’s life were too insignificant to be measured in Christ or Common Era. Even her birthdays seemed an inaccurate measurement of the passage of time.”
“Regardless, an aquiline parasite lived inside me, compelling me violently with its bald-eagle talons to wage psychological Revolutionary Warfare against my own best friend.”
“More than a few miles from home, I conclude this first sliver of college convinced of the notion that I’m more fiction than fact. Now more than ever, I feel like a character, and not a good one.”
To telescope, we begin with 300 words, then slice the word count in half for each successive section. We stop when the numbers stop dividing evenly. Looking around and beyond us, this week we telescope “space.”
“He wouldn’t have taken it normally, but there was a girl at Lincoln’s shoulder, a fiber science major who kept touching his button-down to inspect the weave, and he couldn’t tell afterwards whether she’d only kissed him because it was 100% cotton.”
“I was never the kid to get tangled up in chatroom relationships and online communities like many of my friends in middle and high school. I repent now, for the way I invalidated, even in my own head, the authenticity of their attachments. Laughter over Zoom is still laughter.”
Since the beginning of time, editors at the Nassau Weekly have taken their pens to each other’s Common Application Essays. And yes, the Nassau Weekly has been around since the beginning of time.
