Mallory, hunched over her desk, felt deeply enraged at her own incompetence. As she studied the wall in front of her, covered in photos of the evolving big smiles and crinkled noses of previous Mallorys, a lukewarm sense of emptiness seemed to scream her name from the echoing depths of her soul.

Only sixteen years old, Mallory felt wise, yet dumb. She burned up inside at the ignorance of others and longed to write down all that she felt in a flowing stream of passion. She wished that she could simply pour the contents of her heart onto paper and watch the bubbling liquid materialize into ideas that others could understand. Her constant thoughts were like morning dew drops, evaporating into nothingness soon after they formed.

The other kids were robotic and empty inside, but they could speak and write clearly with ease! Mallory could not. How she dreamed of being a writer, an unending flow of creativity! But right now, as she sat at her desk alone, she wanted to scream madly and destroy things. She wanted to punch a pillow, a wall, a person. Her frustration thickened and she abhorred herself for existing this way. Perhaps she was just as untalented as everyone she criticized so harshly. Perhaps she had nothing to say worth hearing and nothing to write worth reading. Perhaps her silent existence was completely irrelevant after all.