I can tell when you wear lipstick, not because the color of your lips is any different (you despise gaudy colors), but because you smile wider. You hold your head higher. On the first Saturday of every December, you wear lipstick, and you take me to the mall. It's only a 20-minute drive, Ma, but each year you pop your favorite CD into the ancient console, saying you’re tired of not knowing the words to any of the songs...

“Thank you,” the email read. Two hundred sixty-one cases. Stacks upon stacks of oral argument transcripts, opinion papers, findings and precedent analysis that I was to compile into a neat, student-friendly database of landmark rulings. Two hundred sixty-one cases. Corporal punishment to dress code, walkouts to book censorship. Two years of highlighting, condensing, summarizing, and highlighting again to create an activist toolkit of students’ rights cases that could empower students across the country to not only recognize when their rights...

NOTE: names redacted for privacy reasons. Two summers ago, inspired by the Great British Bake Off, I decided to make a pithivier---from scratch. It wasn’t exactly a success. It was a complete disaster, actually---but I wasn’t going to give up. While continuing my pithivier pursuits, I taught singing classes weekly and I was building a students’ rights activist toolkit, researching decades of legal precedent. I was serving on a war-crimes-advocacy board for Amnesty International, and I was organizing...

NOTE: names redacted for privacy reasons. “The flowers I know now by name: magnolias, asters, poppies, marigolds, baby’s breaths - all of it, every shade equalized by dusk. What are we if not what the light says we are?” - Ocean Vuong, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous *** The kids in my caseload came in folders. Eight piles of folders for eight countries: Nigeria, Mali, Haiti, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Bhutan, Burma, Democratic Republic of Congo. Within the stacks, each folder...