Meet 2012 Portfolio Gold winners Felipe Di Poi and Haeyeon Cho of the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards:

Felipe, 18, is an aspiring artist and a senior at Conard High School in West Hartford, CT. He likes to work in a variety of mediums including graphic design, comic art, film, and painting.

“The only way”: Art to me is the substance of experience. Along with the sciences, art is the only way that human beings have of manipulating their environment and understanding their surroundings. For me, art is the only way, other than real human interaction, of feeling happiness, sadness, exhilaration, fear, etc.

Haeyeon, 17, attends Milton Academy in Milton, MA. She is both a writer and an artist. Haeyeon won a Portfolio Gold Medal for writing, but she also has an aptitude for drawing and painting.

“My hair-lifting need to write”: If my house were to set on fire, the one thing I would run out with is this portfolio. It is not to say that this collection of poems and scrawls has a sentimental value (it does not), but I see my writing as a record of myself—my observations, my reflections, my everything—that I must cherish forever. Perhaps it makes most sense for me to run out with my passport if my dormitory were to catch on fire. But I doubt I can ever escape from my tendency to find inspiration in almost anything, my inherent desire to observe and understand and change people by the core, my hair-lifting need to write. Every language serves to weave people together through the emotion it provokes.

Buoy

By Haeyeon Cho (2012 Gold Medal, Writing Portfolio)

Aaron was watching his father sleep when a bird swept in from the window. His father turned in his bed, but the sound of the sheets was muffled by the twitching of the black feathers as the creature settled onto the water pipe. Aaron was observing the neck of the bird turn when Mark muttered, “You are a little late.”

Aaron apologized.

“Or early now, I guess. The sun woke me up.” Mark motioned his son to prop up the bed. Aaron arched his body over the old man and turned the handle counterclockwise until the bed sat up at a right angle. “Was there an emergency?” Mark asked.

“Sort of,” Aaron said. A woman had fallen into a lake.

Mark smiled. “Well, you can tell me all about it while I take my bath.” Aaron closed the window and flicked on the television. He went to the bathroom and squat by the tap while his hand cut through the column of hot water. Through the sound of the water Aaron thought he heard his father humming to the national anthem.

“Look,” Mark said, pointing at the screen. Aaron returned to his father’s bed. “It’s the lake. That was years ago, wasn’t it? When we drove south for four hours for some dirty water because your mother got ideas in her head from a sailing magazine?”

“The boat was fun.”

“We shouldn’t have let you drive, Aaron, you almost flipped us over. But you and your sister had a hard time getting off in the end, didn’t you?”

Aaron answered yes.

“And your mother—where was she?”

“She was sitting next to you.”

“No, she was by the bank. I remember she was standing on that grass, waving her arms like crazy. It was so windy, she was scared.” Mark paused. “When did she say that she’d visit?”

“Tomorrow,” Aaron answered. Mark turned back to the television. The weight seemed to be leaving his body as his face dissolved into a blank stare. Aaron looked up to check on the bird. The creature sat crumbled in the corner of the ceiling, flinching.

“What are you looking at?” Mark asked. Mark never liked birds, detested their shrieks and red-eyed glares. Aaron decided to keep the bird to himself. He swiveled his father around like a niece in a sundress and carried the hairless body in both arms to the bathroom.

Both men looked away as Aaron unbuttoned Mark’s pajamas and slid the garment down his father’s back. Leg by leg he pulled down the sweat-stained bottoms. Neither of them spoke. Holding his breath, Aaron stood still with Mark’s arms around his shoulders as Mark dipped his knees into the water. For a moment, Aaron thought they were dancing.

“Look at me, I’m a peeled potato,” Mark said, looking at his bare torso. He was chuckling. “I thought it was the disease, but I realized that there is no problem. It’s the age.”

“There really is no problem.” Aaron said softly.

“Really? Ha, look at your hairline, Aaron. I thought it was the recession, but you’re aging, too, just like me.” Aaron watched Mark’s narrow feet swell in the water. “I remember you as a baby. Right after you were born, I was pretty sure you weren’t my child. Your mother and I both had this thick, black horsetail hair, and we thought you’d come out looking like Elvis.” He paused. “You know, that day your mother and I fought so much I wished her dead. But we never fought ever again. I loved her too much. Even when Cecilia came out with hair like yours, I said nothing.” He closed his eyes and rubbed the balls of his hands down his cheeks that were sunken and bruised as his dented buttocks. “We should go back to the lake sometime,” he muttered.

“When the water’s not too cold.”

“We can get that small boat again. Just you, me, your mother and your sister. Soon it’ll be warm enough so you can teach your mother how to swim.”

“Just you, me, and Cecilia.”

“I can steer the boat this time. I would let you, but remember the last time we went there, when your mother was on the bank waving her arms like crazy, and you couldn’t stop—”

“You, me, and Cecilia is enough,” Aaron said. He rested his head on the wall.

“Aaron, it’s not embarrassing that you’re bad at driving.” Mark smiled.

Aaron wrapped his hands around his face like a cornhusk. “Mom can’t be there,” he said.

“I mean, look at you. You’re going to be a doctor. That’s enough.”

“I never drove that boat. You didn’t let me.”

“Why don’t you meet some of Cecilia’s friends?”

“You never let me drive. It was an accident, dad. Mom didn’t know how to swim.”

Silence hit the water. Mark slowly lifted his chin, letting his ears sink and his toes rise to slit open the surface of the bath water. His fingers let go of the tub and he swelled along the waves like a buoy. Aaron left the bathroom to lie down on the crinkled sheets. He found the bird hunched over on the water pipe. Aaron never liked birds, either. On the day when the wind knocked the ribcage out of his father’s boat and his mother sank like an oilcloth, a field of blackbirds had scattered into the sky like his mother’s hair when her body was returned home.

The creature’s eyes met Aaron’s, and the bird stretched, unfolding its limbs as if it had woken up from a dream. Aaron watched as the bird tiptoed along the concrete pipe and plopped onto the windowsill. He looked at his watch. It was time, and like the spark of a television flicked on, Aaron sensed Mark’s eyelids opening.

“Aaron, is that you?” asked Mark.

Aaron answered yes.

“What time is it?”

He told his father the time.

“You’re late. An emergency?”

“Yes. An old man drowned,” Aaron said, as he watched the bird spring from its feet and fly out the window.