I'll Stop the World

by Lauren Thoman

giant scholarship the county gives out every year, always to the same type of kid: honor roll, student council, lots of extracurriculars, community service, blah blah blah. The type of kid who doesn’t really need a leg up, because they’ve already got so many, but they keep sprouting more anyway, like some sort of overachieving mutant spider.

I don’t think fate causes things to happen, but once they do happen, they have significance.

Yet faith in God wasn’t something she remembered deciding to have; faith simply felt like something that had always been inside her. She knew some people found it hard to believe in something they couldn’t see or prove, but for Rose, it was impossible not to.