Welcome to the second week of our Gold Medal Portfolio series! This week we’re highlighting students Drew Conrad and Sam Bowden. Drew uses a variety of sculptures that vary in form and style to address the feelings of discomfort and conflict that can arise in life. Sam’s writing experiments with a wide swath of narratives, genres, and topics that all have one common theme: the universal effects of death and how it shapes the living.

Drew Conrad

“I am deeply interested in the concept of discomfort and challenging myself to investigate how to represent this idea in clay; a material that first exists as a wet moldable form, which is then transformed into a rock through heat, pressure, and stress…my hope is that each piece I have created suggests a sense of discomfort; a punch, gasp for breath, confusion, and then ultimately regrowth.”

Sam Bowden

“I tried to present a wide swath of styles in this portfolio…Part of this, I’ve realized, is an attempt to grasp the sweeping, universal effects of death, and how it impacts everyone…For me, the best writing I can hope to produce is the kind which makes a reader think, which makes them laugh at the insanity on the page, or cry, or have trouble falling asleep later at night. Possibly all three in one piece. This portfolio captures little bits of everything I find important in writing and unites them.”

His Hearth
Short Story, Grade 12, Wyoming High School, Wyoming, OH. Scholastic Inc. Writing Portfolio

You have a twin brother named Thaddeus, apparently. When you heard the knocking on your door you assumed it was the Girl Scouts—it was, after all, cookie season. You were sitting in your Lay-Z-Boy watching a History Channel documentary about Eddie Rickenbacker; the front door, wooden and peeling, was a room’s length away. You told the Scouts to piss off through the door. You live alone. You cannot cook for yourself and the Girl Scouts seem to know this because they keep knocking and offering sweets. The TV goes off just as the trenches become clotted with grainy mustard gas. You cross the dry and crusted shag barefoot. Your toe strikes an old Bud Light can you didn’t see. You wince in pain. You almost walk away but then the knocking comes back. You’ve gotten this far, and you feel a little embarrassed now, so you open the door.

It is not a Girl Scout. Your eyes were tilted down, expecting some pigtailed and skirted blonde. You are now staring at the crotch of a man in weathered black dress pants. He greets you by name. You look up. He looks like you without the beard. He’s smiling. His teeth are white and straight. He says his name is Thaddeus, that he heard about Mom dying, that he’s very sorry and he’d like to come in. You aren’t sure if he’s bullshitting you or not. You watched this show from your Lay-Z-Boy once about people who go door-to-door and try to get reactions out of people. You thought it was a little funny but mostly disturbing. There is no cameraman over Thaddeus’s shoulder. You ask him—cautiously, though—if he likes the History Channel.

You sit across from each other in the living room, which you’re now beginning to realize smells like beer and smoke. The blinds are drawn. The light is pale green. You ask Thaddeus if he wants a Bud Light. Thaddeus tells you he doesn’t drink. He’s looking around the living room like a small boy at a zoo. There’s a photo of Mom sitting on the TV stand. He points to it and asks if it’s her. You don’t say anything.

Listen, Thaddeus says, I understand perfectly if you don’t want to tell me, so I have the birth certificates in the car. Yours and mine both.

You don’t buy it. You grill him. You ask him Mom’s full name—he answers, correctly. You think for a second, then ask him what her full name was before Ellis Island, her Swiss name, before the Americans cut the name down so it would fit through the gates. He gives you the full six-syllable family name without missing a beat. You purse your lips.

Thaddeus tells you Mom didn’t have the money for twins so she put him up for adoption. He thinks Dad flipped a coin to decide which boy to keep and which to send away—how else but by chance, that impartial god, could they decide? Thaddeus talks like that a lot. You notice he likes big words and talking with his hands. You’re looking at his perfect teeth again. A rich British family took him and raised him in the Hyde Park Residential. He has been surrounded by money and pristine trash all his life. You ask him if he shits into golden toilet bowls and gets his feet rubbed by French maids. He sighs. No, he says, I don’t. Most of them are from Puerto Rico.

He goes on to say he’s been keeping checks on his birth family. He uses the word hearth a lot, as if you and this cruddy-looking living room somehow represent something to him. As he says this he starts to seem more familiar. Have you seen this guy before? Have you passed him on the street? You thought the man who delivered your pizza Friday kind of looked like you too. And the taxi driver who took you to the A.A. meeting on Saturday. Suddenly Thaddeus has become every person you’ve interacted with for the past few weeks, and you’re so lost in this idea that you almost miss what he’s saying: that he tells you that he read about Mom in the obits in the newspaper, that he couldn’t make it to the funeral because of a business trip. He turns away from the picture of Mom and stares at you and for just a second you get the feeling that Thaddeus is deeply, deeply sad, and not just because of Mom, but because he’s seeing what he could’ve become in you.

Thaddeus asks if you’d like to come with him to the cemetery a few miles away. Mom is fresh in the ground there, in a tiny cardboard box. You cremated her because it was cheaper. He offers to drive. He looks a little guilty.

You aren’t quite sure what to think of all this. It’s a bit much and like you always do when confronted with something a bit much you shut down and withdraw yourself. You imagine all the nasty things Thaddeus is thinking about you. Thaddeus asks to go to Mom’s grave together again. Maybe you didn’t hear him the first time?

In the end, you submit and climb into Thaddeus’s car. It is a Mercedes. That gets you thinking about the guy at the A.A. meeting who told everyone a few meetings back he was driving his Mercedes drunk and totaled it on the side of the highway and hit and killed a whole van of Girl Scouts. The Girl Scouts were on their way to a campsite. There were five of them in the car and a Mom and you think the Mom died too but you aren’t sure. It was this big, horrible thing, all over the news for a day or two. All you can think of as you slide into the front seat is the dead Girl Scouts and the Mercedes. You feel like you’re dirtying the cream-leather seats, the dash, but when Thaddeus takes his seat beside you he says it doesn’t matter. He’s just so happy to see someone from his hearth again. Oh, this wonderful day.

You ask him a lot of questions in the car, but these questions are less about trying to prove Thaddeus is who he says he is and more about Thaddeus himself. Yes, he is some kind of actor or something. He won something called a BAFTA, which you think is like an Oscar but you won’t ask in case you’ll look stupid. Thaddeus has two kids, both girls, adopted like him. He has a husband. He is a queer. You think this is strange, but he’s family too—hearth, you think, feeling strange—so you act comfortable. Thaddeus can probably tell how you really feel anyway. The Mercedes growls under your legs like Eddie Rickenbacker’s SPAD XIII. You like the smell of the seats. You watch Thaddeus start to make a wrong turn, then correct him, reaching over.

As the two of you pull into the cemetery through rusted, open gates, Thaddeus starts asking his own questions. Mostly they’re about Mom and what she was like and how she did after Dad ran off with some high-school girl he met at his janitorial job. You answer each question slowly and carefully, trying hard to remember; you don’t want to get anything wrong. Thaddeus stops the car. There are polished gravestones that shine with dew spectating the Mercedes silently. You tell him that this is the place, that she’s right there, right on the top of that hill ahead.

Thaddeus doesn’t speak again until you’re both out of the Mercedes and approaching the hillcrest. He asks how you’re handling it all. The death, he means. You’re the last one left in the family. You did not marry because women were too much, too scary, too different from Mom. You have been alone for sixty-odd years—at least, that’s what you told yourself. But now Mom is gone and you’re truly alone and god dammit it hurts to imagine. You tell this stranger-family-brother Thaddeus some of these things but not all. Thaddeus says you’re not alone. Thaddeus says he’s there for you and yes he knows you probably hate him for just showing up out of the blue like this and yes he knows you have every reason not to consider him a part of your family but still he says he’s there. You do not have to be alone. I want to know my family again, he says, hands in his pockets. If you’re all I have left? Then you’re all I need to know.

You arrive at the top of the hill. A little heap of reddish dirt is clumped beside your feet. Mom’s name—Americanized—stares up at you and Thaddeus from the ground. You paid an extra fifty dollars to put Beloved Mother under her death date.

So, Thaddeus says, this is her. Yeah, you mumble, it is. Thaddeus has no flowers, nothing to lay at her stone. He just stares at her name and the back half of it that used to be his. He’s doing that thing where he purses his lips again. His hands are balled up in his pockets. So are yours. You two stand in the exact same way, one fused shoulder hunched, eyes on the ground. All of this like two sides of a mirror, one side dirtied and greased and still a little drunk. Thaddeus is in a black suit. You wear sweatpants and a fraying yellow tank top that was white when Mom was alive. His hair is clean. Yours touches the back of your neck.

Thaddeus tells you to come over to his house at Hyde Park. Dinner, tonight. His husband makes the most fantastic beef roast. Please. He wants to get to know you better.

You open your mouth but don’t quite respond. Mom is watching from under your feet. You realize Thaddeus has her eyes.

Thaddeus asks if you heard what he said. You say yes. Yes, and you would love to come for dinner. You’d like to get to know him too. You’re nervous as you say it but you mean it, don’t you? How come you’ve always been afraid? Of change, of something new? You raise your head up from the grave and see with half-weeping eyes across the cemetery a group of Girl Scouts knelt at a row of five fresh gravestones, leaving decorated cookie boxes stuffed with flowers.

To see more Gold Medal Portfolio recipients, past and present, visit our Eyes on the Prize series.