Hometown Nightmare

Kayla Carlisle, 10th Grade
Golden Sierra High School, Garden Valley, CA
Sacramento Area

Green smoke pours into a pale sky from some distant point beyond the horizon. The flames of a small, typical summer wildfire may be out of sight, but you can smell them and feel them burning beneath your melting flip flops as you stand in a cracked, vacant parking lot doubling as a basketball court.

You can feel the flames burning inside your skull as you stare through the warbling haze of heat drifting through the summer air. Even the yellow grasses seem to burn. The atmosphere is like an oven; still and suffocating. The sun is subjecting you to some strange, fevered sub-life, which is the sub-life of a teenager living in a small country town in northern California. Dejected, with nowhere else to go to entertain yourselves or hang out with friends, you slip back inside of your house just to escape the heat.

But you haven't really escaped. There's no escaping a small town if you don't have a college education, and a college education requires lots of money. In a small town with few jobs for youths, the only way to get money is through scholarships, which is why California leaders should save us, the adolescents of these towns, a spot in college.

As a teenager in a small town, you possess a certain inherent desperation as you look towards the future and realize that if you don't find a way out of your own Hometown you're on the path to becoming one of those 'Good Old Boys' or 'Good Old Girls' haunting the front of the local drug store. These are people who have lived their entire lives in the town, and whose greatest accomplishments occurred back in high school and involved stealing their folk's car and starting a bonfire on Homecoming nigh. You wish desperately not to become one of them, and pray for a single chance to break from this suffocating, tight-knit community.

Maybe you want to be a doctor, a politician or an astronaut, or maybe you just want to escape, but without a college education you're trapped. You see yourself in the older peoples' faces and you shudder when they're not looking. But how can you ever afford a college with some prestige to make you competitive for jobs in a a failing economy?

We, the teenage inhabitants of small towns everywhere, need leaders from across California to become benefactors, and by distributing us scholarships, to save us a spot in college. Please help us escape this Hometown nightmare.