Hope Nation by Rose Brock & Rose Brock (ed)

Author:Rose Brock & Rose Brock (ed)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2018-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

DAVID LEVITHAN LIBBA BRAY ANGIE THOMAS ALLY CONDIE MARIE LU JEFF ZENTNER NICOLA YOON KATE HART GAYLE FORMAN CHRISTINA DIAZ GONZALEZ ATIA ABAWI ALEX LONDON HOWARD BRYANT ALLY CARTER ROMINA GARBER RENÉE AHDIEH AISHA SAEED JENNY TORRES SANCHEZ NIC STONE JULIE MURPHY I. W. GREGORIO JAMES DASHNER JASON REYNOLDS BRENDAN KIELY

ATIA ABAWI

Don’t Listen to the A**holes

IT WAS ONE OF MY last days of twelfth grade. The spring roses were in bloom, and I was high on life. High school was coming to an end, and the transition into the new, exciting journey of university life was about to begin. I was becoming an adult. Ready to start on a path that would lead to an unknown future with the pursuit of my admittedly far-fetched dreams. Going away to college was also going to give me a freedom I longed for after growing up in a household that was fairly strict, compared with those of my friends. This was going to be a journey into a new world, and I couldn’t wait to see what lay ahead.

Nothing could get in the way of my happiness, or so I naively thought.

I had already been accepted into the university I wanted to attend and had picked my major, whereas most of my friends were still undecided. Like most high school seniors who had received their college acceptance letters and begun the enrollment process, I let my schoolwork slide and gave priority to my social time. My last hurrah with my high school friends.

I wasn’t suffering from the stress of trying to decide what I wanted to study. I knew from a very young age I wanted to be a journalist. When I was seven, I even had a small notebook in which I would tape my classmates’ school pictures and write short news stories of the famous people they would become. The kids loved it as much as I did, and gave me more pictures to write more stories.

Another driving force for my journalistic dream inadvertently came from home. I had grown up watching television network news every day. This was before cable news became a thing—cable was more of a luxury back then. We’d flip back and forth between the major networks’ nightly news programs in the hope of catching a glimpse of my parents’ homeland, which was falling apart. As much as they focused on shielding their children from the real world, they couldn’t, not really. Our mere existence made it difficult to do so. We were refugees of war. That meant my parents’ comfortable, happy lives had been ripped away from them in an instant and their existence had become that of pure survival—not so much for themselves as for their children.

My family was originally from Afghanistan. My parents grew up in the bustling capital city of what was then a very peaceful country. They were always surrounded by family, love, and comfort. But all that changed in 1979, when the Soviet Union gained a foothold in the land and a deadly war began.

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