LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Scholastic Art & Writing Awards: Silver Keys and Honorable Mentions; Presidential Scholarship for The King’s College; Leadership Scholarship for The King’s College
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: Vegan donuts. Rainbow-colored string lights. The smell of coffee and—you guessed it—the smell of vegan donuts. In the background, a faux jukebox plays quirky, old-timer tunes. “I love women, ahhhhhh,” screeches the ancient singer. Kathleen and I exchange glances, stifling our laughs at the bizarre tunes. You see, she and I have the utmost respect for that music, the scents in the air, and the out-of-the-season lights, because to us, this is what it feels like to be a writer, an artist, a New Yorker, and yes: this is what it feels like to be part of Girls Write Now.
KATHLEEN SCHEINER
YEARS AS MENTOR: 6
OCCUPATION: Freelance editor and writer
BORN: Biloxi, MS
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: New York State of Fright anthology (2017)
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: As Laura prepares for college, we’ve been laser-focused during our sessions, working on writing essays for various scholarships, preparing for presentations, and rehearsing speeches. We sit at a table in Dun-Well Doughnuts, a laptop between us, checking edits, but we always have time to joke—“Adverbs are weak!”—and rhapsodize about our favorite punctuation marks. Laura says, “The umlaut is now a thing in my life,” while I like the dramatic gesture of an em dash.
My piece focuses on the insecurities that lie within the state of change, especially when such shifts polarize oneself. In this piece, I discuss my battle between Christianity and homosexuality.
“I love you. God bless you. Good night.” A quick kiss on the cheek, adjusting my blanket so that I was properly tucked in, before she smiled, turning away and exiting the room. This simple sentence of eight words has always been the staple of my mother’s bedtime departure. It was as if she was so afraid that I would somehow slip away so deeply into a slumber that, for whatever reason, I would never awake again, and this blessing was the only way to guard against such a tragedy. I could not recall a single night in my life that this blessing was absent from our goodnights to each other. Even in the swells of our most stormy arguments, we would always manage to momentarily hold our anger beneath the rippled waters long enough to gaze upon each other and whisper the final words of the evening:
“I love you. God bless you. Good night.”
Always, without fail, until one day, the angers suffocating within the waters beneath us rose above my mother, choking her with such fury that she was, for the first time, unable to deliver her faithful blessing, and I was alone, unprotected in the night.
Although I wasn’t entirely alone. There was a man, or at least the image of a man—as the scripture goes—who had, for my entire life, followed me, shadowing my every move. This figure was God. Our relationship was like that of a boat in rugged waters. Sometimes, like when I was just a little girl, I was sure he was there behind me, serving as my protector and guide. However, as I began to mature in my teenage years, my faith wavered.
I recall laying on my bed when I was only twelve years old, my body curled into a C-shape as I held my pillow near my chest. I was in bed later than I should have been, all because I had just wrapped up a near six-hour conversation with a friend at my middle school. Even though we were no longer on the phone together, I wondered why her voice still echoed through my mind, preventing me from sleep.
I began reminiscing about all the moments we had shared up to this point. The first time I spoke to her was when she dropped her sharpener on the ground and I, feeling compelled to help her, crawled on all fours across the classroom tiles to retrieve it for her. She would message me during class, despite the fact that she sat only a few rows away from me, and I would respond without hesitation or thought. Once I plucked a flower from its stem in the botanical hall of the Bronx Zoo to present to her as a makeshift present, only to flee the zoo in screams as a bee I disturbed vowed revenge on me. I remembered all this and more, and it played in my mind like a projector, almost mockingly, laminating my many failed attempts to capture her attention. My affection poured like a pipe that had been busted and was spewing water, except this pipe was more like an artery streamlining from my heart, and the liquid was nothing but love, and that’s when I realized: I was in love with her.
Such a simple thought sent my mind awry. How could I love someone of the same sex? How could God let this happen to me? At the very least, Eve had the choice of choosing the apple, but here I was, performing for an operating theater, strapped to a medical table, the apple of lust gagged in my mouth, while the devil grinned above me, wasting no time in bringing his surgical knife down, extracting God from my heart and my heart from my God.
The hole carved within me by Satan burned with passion. I set out to fill the void with love—or was it lust? What did I care at this point? Like a bride on her wedding day, the scriptures abandoned me, left me in solitude at the altar with nothing but the vows of the Bible to accompany me, except now the parchment was just a painful reminder of what we could have been together. So I averted my attention to the bridesmaid. Every girl that encircled me was a target that I could thrust my naïveté upon, desperately trying to claw some sense of my sexuality out from the fog of rejection and denial. Yet no matter how much I thirsted for attention, the hole within me did not sprout with life. It seemed the rains of sorrow made no good fertilizer, and the flames of desire did little to quell its cold. So I sat at that altar, wondering where was my groom, wondering why my parents didn’t walk me down this aisle of pity, but most of all, wondering why my mother no longer uttered:
“I love you. God bless you. Goodnight.”
A Godly Woman
KATHLEEN SCHEINER
Mental illness runs in my family, but it’s always been treated like a dirty secret. Nobody wants to talk about it much, maybe thinking the problem will go away if they ignore it.
The sun beat down—high noon in Missouri—and all the flowers had been arranged along with the Precious Moments figurines into an impromptu serenity garden for the memorial. We were fanned out across the yard in lawn chairs, and I made sure to face the fire pit where my uncle, aunt, and cousins burned their trash rather than paying the city to cart it away. I could see empty plastic two-liter bottles that used to hold soda fused together in strange clear sculptures, along with mattress coils and broken flower pots. I remember Grandma always having a bottle of Pepsi tucked under one batwing arm. She loved her sweets.
My uncle starts out the service, talking about the godly woman that Marjorie Billings was. I’m surprised to see everybody nodding and hearing the Amens coming out of them.
I remember Grandma running down the street naked to get a newspaper from the Wawa, talking to terrorists through her geranium, and telling me about how different aunts and uncles were conceived after a drink too many. Godly, I don’t remember. Well, there was that one time she thought she was the Virgin Mary and all the children in the world were hers.
We call it the family illness—it runs heavy in the females on my mom’s side, and my grandmother got a heavy dose of it. We never had a name for it until the 1980s—bipolar disorder. But every year Grandma had to go to the mental hospital—the longest time for a year after my Uncle Charlie was born, the kid she liked the least. “Just never cottoned to him,” she said. They tried