• From the Editor's Desk (which is actually my bed)
• The Unofficial First Day Survival Guide  by Bea
• FICTION: "Combination"  by Marcus
• Poetry Corner  by Hannah & Ximena
• RANT: My Mom vs. Y2K  by Bea (again, she had a lot to say)
• The Screening Room: The Sixth Sense (NO SPOILERS)
• Mailbag

Hey everybody,

Welcome to Issue #10!!! TEN. When Bea and I started LOOSE LEAF last December it was just us and one poem each and a background that made your eyes hurt (sorry). Now we get about a dozen submissions a month from all over, including one from Manitoba, which Bea had to look up. The counter at the bottom says over eleven thousand. We are not sure how that happened but THANK YOU.

This is the back to school issue, which is sort of a sad thing to celebrate, but whatever. I'm a junior now. Everyone keeps saying junior year is the one that counts, so I plan to spend it worrying. Bea is a sophomore and she has a locker on the top row for the first time, which she says is a promotion.

Big news: starting next month we're doing a Halloween issue, so send us your scary stories and creepy poems (keep it PG, my little brother reads this). See the submissions page for the rules. The deadline is Monday, September 27, because we have school and a life, sort of.

Okay, enough. Read Marcus's story. It's the best thing we've ever gotten.

~ Anjali, 16, New Jersey
editor-in-chief / webmaster / person who fixes the broken image links

by Bea, 15, Pennsylvania (co-editor, layout, the colors are her fault)

1. Practice your locker combination at home. Write it on your hand if you have to. Do not write it on your hand in pen if you also have gym.
2. New shoes are a trap. Break them in over the summer or bring Band-Aids. I learned this in seventh grade and I still think about it.
3. Find the second-closest bathroom. Everybody uses the closest one between classes. The second-closest one is always empty.
4. Bring a pen that works AND a backup pen. Somebody will ask to borrow one. Give them the backup. You'll never see it again and that's fine, that's what it's for.
5. Do not buy all your binders before you get the teacher lists. Every teacher wants a different color and a different size and one of them will want a composition book and you'll have to go back to the store anyway.
6. Sit in the second row. The first row gets called on. The back row gets watched. The second row is invisible.
7. Say hi to the new kid. You were the new kid once, or you will be. See also: Marcus's story below.
8. Lunch is 23 minutes long. Eat first, talk later. I have never finished a lunch in my life.

by Marcus, 15, Georgia

My locker was number 614 and I could not open it.

The lady in the front office gave me a little slip of paper with the numbers on it, 28-4-17, and I went down to the science hall and did what you're supposed to do. Right three times, left to four, right to seventeen. Nothing. I did it again. Nothing. The bell rang and I carried everything to first period, my binder and my gym bag and the lunch my mom packed like I was nine.

I didn't go back to the office. You have to understand, we moved in July, and I didn't know anybody, and the only thing worse than being the new kid is being the new kid who can't work a locker. So I just carried everything. All day. The next day too.

By Thursday I had a system. Binder in my left arm, gym bag over my right shoulder, lunch in the gym bag, books in the backpack, and I walked like a mule going up a hill. My shoulder hurt. People looked at me in the hall but people look at the new kid anyway, so I figured it was about even.

The girl with the locker next to mine was named Inez. I knew that because it was written on a sticker on her binder in silver marker. She had the kind of locker people have in movies, with a mirror and pictures and a little magnet shaped like a strawberry. Every morning she opened it in about one second, flick flick flick, like she wasn't even trying. Every morning I stood next to her and spun my dial and pulled and nothing happened, and then I acted like I'd just been checking it.

On the second Monday, she shut her locker and didn't leave.

"You have to go past the second number," she said.

"What?"

"The second number. You go left all the way around once, past it, and then you stop on it. Everybody messes that up their first week." She said it to the hallway, not to me, like she was reading it off a sign.

I did it. Right three times to twenty-eight. Left, all the way around past four, then stop on four. Right to seventeen. The door came open so fast it banged into her strawberry magnet.

"Sorry," I said.

"It's okay. It's a strong magnet." She looked at my gym bag and my binder and my backpack. "You've been carrying all that since last week."

That was the part that got me. She'd noticed. She'd noticed for a whole week, and she hadn't said anything, and I couldn't decide if that was mean or nice.

"Why didn't you tell me before?" I asked.

She thought about it. "I didn't know if you wanted anybody to know," she said. "Some people don't."

I put my gym bag in the locker. It felt like putting down a piano. Then I put in my binder, and my lunch, and a book I didn't need until sixth period, and then I stood there looking at all that empty space I'd been carrying around.

"You should get a magnet," Inez said, and went to class.

I did get one, later. It's shaped like a fish. It isn't as strong as hers.

I still go past the second number twice, every morning, just to be sure. I know once is enough. I just like to be sure.

~ the end ~

Editor's note: Marcus says this is "about 60 percent true." He won't tell us which 60. ~A.

6:52 A.M.
by Hannah, 14, Oregon

The bus stop is a corner of the world
where nobody talks yet.
Seven of us, breathing little ghosts,
holding our backpacks like we're waiting
to be picked for a team.
The sky can't decide on a color.
The streetlight clicks off
like it's embarrassed to be seen.
Somebody's dog barks twice, then thinks better of it.
We all look down the road at the same time,
the way birds on a wire
all turn their heads,
and there it is, yellow and slow,
the whole day folded up inside it.

What My Abuela Keeps in Her Purse
by Ximena, 17, Texas

One peppermint, soft from the heat.
A rosary with a bead missing,
so she says one prayer extra fast to make up for it.
Coupons for things she doesn't buy.
A photo of my grandfather at twenty,
squinting like the sun was his fault.
Tissues, folded into little squares,
enough for a whole funeral.
A safety pin. Another safety pin.
My school picture from second grade
with the tooth missing,
which she shows to strangers at the bank
like it's news.

by Bea

There are forty gallons of water in our basement. FORTY. I counted. They are next to twelve cans of tuna, a camp stove, and a box of batteries so big it has a handle.

My mom read an article in July about how the computers might think it's 1900 on New Year's and now we are Prepared. I tried to explain that the bank is not going to forget we exist and the toaster does not know what year it is. She said "you don't know that," which, okay, technically I don't. My dad says the power company has been working on it for two years and it's going to be fine. My mom says that's what they'd say.

Here is my actual problem. I want to go to Jenna's New Year's party (her parents will be home, MOM) and my mom says nobody is going anywhere at midnight in case the traffic lights go out. So my big plan for the most important New Year's of the century is to sit in the basement with the tuna.

If you have a parent like this, e-mail us and we'll print the best stories next issue. Support group.

(Anjali wants me to add that her dad says the year 2000 is not technically the start of the new millennium. Nobody asked, Anjali's dad.)

by Anjali. Rated PG-13. NO SPOILERS, I PROMISE, I would never.

Okay so everyone has already seen this, but I finally went last weekend with my cousin, and I have to talk about it or I'll explode. Bruce Willis plays a child psychologist and Haley Joel Osment plays a little boy named Cole who is scared of everything and has a very good reason. Toni Collette plays his mom and she's so good you want to hug her through the screen.

It's not a gross scary movie. It's a quiet scary movie. Most of the time nothing is happening and you're still holding your breath. The kid is amazing. He's like eleven and he acts better than half the adults on TV.

And the ending. I'm not saying anything about the ending. I will only say that when the lights came up nobody in the theater moved, and my cousin said a word I can't print here, and we sat in the car in the parking lot for ten minutes going back over the whole movie.

Rating: 5 out of 5 lockers. Go see it before somebody at school ruins it for you. If somebody at school already ruined it for you, go anyway, it's still good.

"I read the poem about the fireflies in the August issue to my little sister and she made me read it four times. Please tell Jonah."
— Kelsey, 15, Missouri
We told him. He said "cool," which for Jonah is basically crying.

"Your background in Issue #3 gave me a headache. This one is better."
— Andre, 16, Michigan
Everybody says this. We know. It was the purple swirls. We were young.

"Can boys send in poems too or is this a girl zine?"
— Sam, 14, Arizona
Anybody can! Marcus is a boy! Read the submissions page and send it!