The Shine Journal
Exceptional Flash, Poetry, Art and Photography!
Her Flag
by
Jeremy Trimble
They’d instant message and he’d type that she’s pretty. With a fourteen-year-old’s passion, he’d write that she was the most beautiful girl in their class. And she’d shoot back coy emoticons. Blushing, smiling, grinning, everything innocent and enticing and always noncommittal.
They’d chat online because she spent her lunch period with her friends. He read or drew, lost in everything that could be. She never told anyone about how they’d chat, about the way he wrote to her. She saw him in the halls, and he knew better than to wave. But that didn’t matter, because that night he’d get the chance to see her words again, and hope is the best pillow to smother common sense.Then he was in class and doodling in the back of class.
He called it doodling because he’d spent four years learning, always practicing between the equations and grammar lessons he knew he’d never need. Pen held with a samurai’s precision, he drew the same way he dreamed. Every line was unintentional and perfect from practice. He improvised every motion, jumping to patterns he wouldn’t expect. But that day he was lost, lost thinking about her. He drew the curls of hair, the curve of her nose, the round gentleness of her cheeks, and that smile. He drew her with a quarter smile, that flirt of motion. He drew her the way artists draw angels and sirens.
Another student strode by and spotted his work. Chuckling, this other boy grabbed the picture, shouting for everyone to look. The guys laughed and that stung as he chased the thief, running to get his wrinkled art back. But the girls didn’t say anything, each a little jealous that one of their own could inspire that kind of art.
And she saw it, a flag to her brilliance.
That’s why she said he could ask her out.
Bio: Jeremy is an editor from
Motivation: "Her Flag" is about the dark aspects of young teen love. When I was fourteen, I remember how much power a girl could have and how I'd do anything to please her. This story is an offshoot of the politics that emerge between kids discovering love.