The Gummy Octopus

Our teacher sat in her big red comfy chair, and we sat on the floor. We looked up at her. She held something in her hand. A clear tub with a bunch of colors inside.

She said, in Vietnamese, “Do you know what this is?” she lifted the tub up.

I tried to see more inside of it, but there was a really big fat sticker covering the front part of it.

A student raised his hand, and the teacher called on him. He said, “I think the label says... gummy...oc-to-...”

“Gummy octopuses!” she smiled. “It’s the second week of first grade, and we just had our first English spelling test last Friday. Every week, I’m going to award each student who gets an eighty percent or better on his test with a gummy octopus.”

Gummy octopus! Eighty percent or better! I scooted up to the front and smiled really big. She smiled back and read a list of names. They got the gummy octopuses. I listened for my name.

She read: “Tuan, Alexis, Ly, Qui, Ben, Bao, Joanna, Trang, Phuc, and Daisy.” They all got up to get their gummy octopuses. I waited for my teacher to say more names.

They all sat down, and I still waited. She put the lid back on the tub and put it away, and she told us to go back to our seats. No more gummy octopuses for today.

I stopped smiling and felt sad. I wanted to say something but I didn’t know what to say. I must of got a seventy-nine percent. But I thought I did really good! One of the spelling words was ‘turkey,’ and I put ‘red’ instead because I thought that was a more better word. Maybe next week, I’ll get a gummy octopus.



The clock ticked 1 AM when I sat down on the floor in the middle among twenty other dancers. Tired, sweaty, and hungry, we had just danced our way through an intense four and a half hours, and now we all wanted to leave, go eat, and go back home. But now we all waited anxiously as our captains reviewed all their notes and made their final decisions about who they would cast in which of our set’s seven pieces.

I had been taking dance classes five days a week all throughout June. I drove to Covina for classes at Stylz Studio Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays, and on Tuesday and Thursday I drove to La Habra for a one-month long session of dance camp from Team Millenia. The classes at Stylz were no more than classes, but the choreography that I learned with Team Millenia would actually be put together in a performance for a big showcase of all the TM dance camp sessions at the end of the summer, like the Funksters Summer Intensive dance camp I took (and whined about a lot) last summer. Throughout the month we had been auditioning for each piece, and tonight, we auditioned for our last two. The captains had waited until the very end of the session to tell us which pieces we were chosen for, and now, they were going to reveal who got into what piece.

My friend Angela sat down next to me. “What pieces do you think you’ll get into?”

I shrugged. “I dunno. We’ll see. I don’t wanna get my hopes up.” Secretly though, I knew I’d be disappointed if I didn’t get into like at least two because then I would feel like I didn’t improve at all since last summer.

Then I learned that by default, each dancer got into at least three pieces. So I’d be disappointed if I didn’t get four or more.

Our two captains stood up in the front with their lists, ready to read us names. “Alright, so we’re going to go through each piece and read the ones who got casted in them. Ready? We’re starting with TL’s piece, so listen for your name.”

They went through the names in alphabetical order, so when they read “Brent” followed by “Cameron,” I sighed and dropped my shoulders a little. Then they went through the list for the next piece. Again, they skipped from “Binh” to “Carly.”

“...and Randy. That’s it for CJ’s piece. Now we’re going to read names for Will’s contemporary piece. We only chose thirteen dancers for this one. Congratulations to Adriana...”

When I auditioned for this the previous week, the judges told me that I really, really surprised them in a great way. I wasn’t too sure if I could believe them, because my body was made too awkwardly and too inflexibly for contemporary. So, I didn’t get my hopes up for this one.

“...Ben, Brian—”

My eyes widened.

“OOOOOH SHIT!” my friends all turned toward me with their high-five hands already raised.

“Congrats dude,” Alfonso patted me on the back. I shrugged. I had yet to get my default number of pieces, so I didn’t want to think much of getting into this one piece, yet.

Then I got into the next piece. Alright, I was in two.

The captains started on the list for a piece that we auditioned just today and only had two days to practice. Maybe no one else practiced it really thoroughly, because I got into that one too.

There were two more pieces left that I might’ve been casted in. I wondered if I was in at least one of them. That one more would mean a lot. If I didn’t get it, then I’d have trouble convincing myself that I didn’t just get relegated to my three current pieces by sympathetic default. But if I did get that fourth piece, then I could turn my interpretations completely around and think that it was not the captains, but me who put in the time and effort to place myself in the pieces.

I didn’t get the second to the last one. Instead, I got the outro, my fourth piece. I closed my eyes and breathed a sigh of relief. Once the captains finished reading their lists, all the dancers around me erupted into chatter about what pieces they got into. My friends were still congratulating me about managing to get into the contemporary piece, but now, at this point I just wanted to go eat and then sleep.

My friends and I did eat, but then we all got invited to party/have a kickback with the other TM dance camp dancers, but what ensued was a totally different story.