Hear Their Voices
With a simple, yet revealing lede, Haley Edwards of the Seattle Times introduces the main characters in "For Classmates Fighting Cancer, Life Isn't Over -- Just Different":
Three 12-year-old girls stand in the hallway outside their seventh-grade classroom. They slouch against the wall like James Dean in triplicate, playing with their plastic jewelry and rolling their eyes. They pretend to be all grown up, but their guileless, hiccuping laughter betrays them: They're all still kids. They're all preteen girls. They're also all cancer patients.
Edwards does a nice job throughout this heartening story, but especially memorable are the passages where she draws out the girls' inner thoughts, in their own voices:
Here's Emma: "So you're this normal kid and then you get sick and then you're not normal anymore. You just have to realize that everything in your life, even how long your life is going to be, is not up to you. You just have to say, OK, what's next?
"The whole 'Why me?' thing doesn't really make sense. It's no one's fault. Someone up there just shook up a big cage and all the bingo balls come rolling out and my number lined up."
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004029097_seattlegirls22m.html