I wrote this story and won first place. We were told to pull a phrase out of a hat, and then write a story that used that phrase within an hour. I wrote Tommy, which is still one of my favorite stories. It is suggestive, but not creepy. I think it captures most eloquently the innocence of youth through the fears I had in grade 7 and 8, and of my feelings of insecurity and fragility as I learned that the world was not perfect, and that we are the product of a society gone wrong.

The snow fell in a thick flurry, covering housetops and sidewalks in a light powder. The sun was hidden behind a puffy, grey cloud and the little light it let through was doing it’s best to brighten up the world. The crickets had been gone for over a month, from even before the first snow and wouldn’t be seen until late spring. A sparrow lighted on top of its frozen birdbath and poked a hole in the thin layer of ice, shivering and chirping quietly to itself as it drank the cold water. A stray cat wandered by, quivering beneath its heavy coat, and staggered into an alley.

Then an ear-piercing wail rose through the air, scaring the sparrow into a frost-bitten tree and malting the tomcat dive for the protection of a parked car.

School was out.

It was lunchtime and as soon as that bell rang the kids rushed out of the school doors and hurried home, frozen or not. They were all ecstatic to be out of school, though some more than others.

Then there was Tommy.

Nobody liked Tommy. He was always being laughed at because he did things wrong sometimes. But he didn’t mean to. God knows he didn’t. He tried to do the right thing but it never seemed to work. So Tommy didn’t talk to anybody anymore. He just walked around quietly, keeping everything to himself, and kicked rocks.

Today, Tommy wanted to go somewhere. He wanted to get even with all those mean kids but he didn’t know how to. He got in lots of fights but they never seemed to help; they only made things worse. But today Tommy was going to go into the woods.

Nobody was allowed in the woods.

Nobody. Not even big Gabriel Marquez, and he was cool. He was in grade six. If you were caught in the woods you would be sent to the principal’s office.

But Tommy didn’t care anymore. He wanted to prove it to himself that he could be like the other kids. He wanted to do something for himself and he would.

So at lunch Tommy walked over to the woods, his boots crunching across the snow and the legs of his snow pants sliding against each other, making an irritating slithery sound. He looked back at the school and saw hundreds of kids playing happily on the park and in the snow. He whipped his head around, causing a newly shed tear to bury itself in the snow. Then he wiped his face with his mittened hands, instantly freezing the water to it.

“I can’t cry now,” he muttered, ‘I can’t cry ‘cause everyone will call me a baby. They’ll all say I’m a crybaby and I’ll cry even more then.” And he smeared a few more tears against his skin.

Now the woods loomed in front of him, the trees casting ominous black shadows onto the snow. Tommy sat in the snow and slid down a small slope, taking one last glance at the red-bricked school behind him. He was feeling a bit better now, knowing that he could be just like everyone else. Knowing that he could go into the woods all by himself and not get caught, not even get scared.

But it was getting dark now. It was getting darker and darker as the sun crept deeper and deeper behind the clouds, and Tommy was getting scared. He hated the kids at school but he hated the dark even more.

Because you couldn’t see in it. And as Tommy stepped through that boundary, into the woods, the world got even darker, just for him. But he kept on plodding through the snow, leaving a trail of glistening footprints behind him.

Tommy stopped, whirling about in his tracks. “Who said that? Who said that! “ he whispered urgently, his fingers trembling slightly in their mittens. His eyes were big and frightened and he was now genuinely scared, more scared than he ever had been before.

He could see his mother sitting him down to her Creole cooking, warning him about the killings. The... his mind fumbled for the right word... the sex crimes. He could hear his principal on the intercom at school telling the students to be in their homes before 7:00 every night. His mind drew pictures of the posters - plain black letters on the white cardboard paper with their simple, straight forward caution:

And where else would be the ideal place for a murderer to hide but in a condemned forest?

As all of these thoughts were flying around in his head he put his right foot on the barbed-wire fence and lifted himself over. He landed in a patch of ice and slipped, pin wheeling his arms to try and keep his balance. He landed flat on his butt and could feel a crackling pain jolt up his spine. Fresh tears sprang from his eyes but he wiped them away as he stood up, stumbling to the nearest tree.

He looked straight ahead of him, down a winding, over-grown path and found that he could see clearly for about fifty feet. Then the hazy light gave way to the dark, nocturnal world. He ached all over from that fall and, mixed with the terror he was hiding, felt on the verge of nausea.

The snow was thinner in there and as he got past the outer boundary of trees, it almost felt like summer, give or take a few degrees. He looked above him and could see old, deserted nests, kept hidden away in the branching leaves of the pine trees.

But he kept on walking.

There was a sharp crack from under his feet and he jumped into the air, letting out a whimper through his chapped lips. When he looked down he noticed nothing strange - except that there were only dead leaves and pine needles covering the ground. It was almost to dark to see a thing but Tommy knew that the woods weren’t that big. He could walk around them in less than ten minutes so he should be in about the middle now. He squinted and finally let his eyes rest on a clearing in front of him.

He was getting warmer, from walking and from the excessive clothing that his mom made him wear to school. His legs were feeling very tired so Tommy decided to take a small break. He sat down in the middle of the pathway, letting his snow pants shield his throbbing butt. The wind whistled through the branches high above his head and sparrows huddled in their nests, praying for summer.

It was all too peaceful to be true.