Lucky Lip
PHOTO COURTESY OF
WRITING-WRONGS.ORG
BY ADAM AHMAD
P
hilip wakes up exhausted
with an extreme headache. It
seems as if he can never sleep his tiredness
away. With no motivation he gets out of bed
and climbs down the ladder. His brother,
Mark, was already awake lying on the bottom
bunk, just staring up emotionless. Philip had
20 minutes to get ready to face the world. He
looks in the fridge to find nothing but milk
and frozen waffles. With a sigh he grabs both
and quickly makes himself breakfast.
After eating, he puts on his boots and
jacket and leaves. While leaving, he sees his
best friend Skylar, who walks with him to
school every day. Skylar greets him as Lip,
which is what he prefers to be called since
his father's name is Phillip, and he resents
him. Skylar, as he does every day, automatically urges Lip to apply for college. Lip is a
senior in high school, with a 4.6 GPA; it is
very rare for someone to be smart in the ghettos of Detroit. He is brilliant in school and
puts little to no effort, often he gets paid to
take the SATs for others and achieves high
scores. However, annoyed, he rejects Skylar's
advice as he often does.
When coming home from school, he
finds an MIT representative on his doorstep.
Lip tells him it is a mistake and that he never
applied to MIT, but the representative pulls
out the application as evidence. Frustrated,
Lip realizes that his best friend is the one that
applied for him. The representative tells Lip
his application essay was plagiarized, and
Lip explains to him what happened. The representative begins to grow very interested in
Lip because of his careless attitude, especially when getting a chance to attend MIT. He
persuades Lip to write an essay by telling
him he most likely would not get in. Lip accepts it as a challenge and writes it in under
an hour. When Lip hands the essay to the representative, he is very impressed and says he
got in with flying colors. Lip vindictively
smiles as the representative leaves his phone
number on the coffee table and leaves. He
then carelessly lights up a cigarette and relaxes on the sofa.
That night, Lip exhaustingly climbs up
the ladder to his bunk, and he reflects on his
life and daily struggles. How he can never
maintain a relationship with anyone because
he sees reality as it is, and he sees through
people's lies and deceptions. He has never
met anyone like himself, anyone equal to
him. In a way, his brilliance is making him
terribly unhappy. After hours his thoughts
haunt him into depression and he falls asleep.
That night he has a bizarre dream. He finds
himself standing alone in a white room. Tired
and clouded, he hears a deep voice, which
asks him to make a wish. Confused, he does
not respond. The voice asks again. Lip then
sees himself forcefully wish to stop being so
intelligent; to be normal like everyone else.
Slowly, everything disappears and Lip wakes
up on his front yard. Overwhelmed, he runs
inside and stares at himself in the bathroom
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