Asta could feel the eyes of her classmates boring into her as she stood at the front of the room. Her palms felt sweaty, and her mouth felt dry. Beside her on the table was the model of her course design, the final project for Mx. Parsons’s class. The presentation before hers had been constructed from all-white resin components, tricked out with real illusions that sparkled as Kyle and Tassos explained how they had implemented the various theories Parsons had drilled into them that semester: challenge, entertainment, momentum, proportion, and safety.
Asta didn’t know where a person would even buy the model parts the other groups had used, but it hardly mattered. She wouldn’t have been able to afford it anyway. She had decided to make her model out of the kinds of toys she’d used to build racecourses in her room when she was a kid. It had seemed like a cute idea at the time. She’d spent the past week awash in nostalgia, gluing together plastic bricks and placing dragon figurines, purchased from a thrift store in town, into her little scene.
Now, seeing what the other students had done, Asta fought the urge to throw her tacky little racecourse out the window and take the failing grade. She could feel herself blushing from the crown of her head down to her toes.
‘Tell us about your design, Asta,’ Mx. Parsons said. They got up from their desk and bent over Asta’s miniature racecourse. ‘I love how colorful it is.’
This was meant sincerely– Ulli Parsons was the kind of teacher who saw the good in every effort and praised their students with earnest appreciation.
Pikki, who was sitting in the second row, made an incredulous face at the teacher’s compliment and leaned over to whisper something into the ear of her friend. They both smirked at Asta’s model, then, running their eyes over her frumpy T-shirt and jeans, at Asta herself. As if Pikki was one to judge. She dressed like a mom with a job at the yarn store.
‘Why don’t you start with the narrative?’ Parsons prompted, retaking their seat at the desk and picking up a clipboard with a blank rubric on it. They crossed their legs and rearranged the fabric of their wide-legged pants so that it did not bunch between their knees.
‘So, the narrative I thought of for this course is “Lost and Found”,’ Asta said.
Pikki scrunched her face at that. ‘What does that even mean?’ Her whisper was not so quiet this time.
‘Pikki, don’t do that,’ Parsons said. ‘Asta listened respectfully to your presentation. You will do the same for her.’
Pikki gave her pastel floral vest a disdainful tug. ‘I thought we weresupposedto be critiquing.’
‘It’s not critique if you pan the idea before Asta has had a chance to explain it.’
Asta appreciated Mx. Parsons’s appeal to reason, but she knew it wouldn’t do any good. Pikki was a jealous, petty asshole who wanted to see Asta fail. That alone restored Asta’s will to nail the presentation. She straightened her shoulders.
‘The Lost and Found narrative begins with an illusion. Just before the flag drops, a woman appears wearing a diamond necklace. She is greeted by a doe, who bows before her.’
Asta placed a small figurine of a milkmaid, along with a toy horse with a somewhat matted mane of plastic hair, near the start.
‘The woman places the necklace around the doe’s neck, and it takes off running, and that’s when the race starts.’
With one hand, Asta moved the toy horse around the first turn, into the terrain, and on to the mountain scramble. With the other, she chased the horse with a plastic dragon figurine.
‘At the peak of the mountain, the deer fragments into twelve doves, which go flying to their positions.’
Asta removed the horse and pointed, one by one, to the twelve positions where she had already glued the little hot pink birds to the model.
‘That’s where the race beacons are, obviously.’
Several of the other students leaned forward to see where Asta had placed them, genuinely interested. Pikki looked as if someone was describing to her the consequences of untreated toenail fungus.
‘The momentum coming off the scramble is utilized through three back-to-back jumps: a three-bar fence, a two-bar fence, and then a fire hedge.’
She ran her toy dragon along the course. There were a few giggles about the fire hedge, the flames of which were represented by the neon orange hair of two beheaded fashion dolls teased upward with hairspray.
‘This is so badass,’ someone said.
‘Is that beacon at thebottomof the trench?’ someone else asked, pointing to a bird under blue cellophane.
‘Yeah,’ Asta said.
The class groaned and exclaimed. Everyone hated dives.
Asta kept going, pointing out the ladders and plateaus, each with their unique challenges.
‘At the top of this scramble, the race goes airborne,’ Asta said. ‘But there’s a twist.’ More groans, a few fascinated murmurs. ‘As soon as the first team passes this beacon, the illusion dove self-replicates, and each team has to chase their own, specific dove through the buoys in a randomized pattern.’
‘Wait, what are the doves again?’ someone at the back of the class asked.
