––Where do you think this ribbon or certificate is today?

Beller: I know exactly where it is, in the top drawer of a desk at my mother's house, my old desk, where I have a bunch of other childhood memorabilia. I'm glad I still have it. It's a fair, sea-gray shade of blue, a hopeful color.

Furst:  In a Phillips cigar box, along with my childhood bottle cap collection, somewhere in my mother’s unfinished attic.

Graver: I’d like to say I have no idea, that it’s been lost in the detritus of the past, replaced by more substantial honors, or by my ability to transcend the need for them.  In fact, it’s on the mantelpiece in my study.  For years, it was in a drawer in my parents’ house, but recently I found it and took it home, sort of as a joke and sort of because . . . why?  Well, it’s hard to keep writing when the economy is collapsing and Americans don’t read fiction and you’ve made the mistake of joining Facebook and can sit at your computer reading about what 150 of your so-called friends are doing right now.   It’s a framed certificate with my name in very nice calligraphy.  Inside the glass of the frame is a little bookmark with an embroidered poem on it called “Little Things,” by Grace Haines.  The prize is sweet and kitschy and, because of the story behind the story, complicated—all of which I like.

King: Can we please stop talking about the darn prize? That’s not the point! Because after that humiliation, everything changed for me. I wrote no more fiction, and I put on weight. I didn’t learn my multiplication tables for another decade or so, and my mother’s drinking escalated. I didn’t get into Yale. I traveled across country and worked in a factory, loitered around the men’s rooms of public parks and took acid and smoked pot. The one thing I can say is that I worked on my people skills, since it seemed that getting others to like me was my one ace in the hole. And I did fall in love. But even now, I trace every disappointment and failure I’ve experienced—all those nights I drank too much or too little, my tendency toward malapropisms and Freudian slips and misguided fashion choices, my failed painting career and a stammer I developed between 1996 and 1999, even the bouts of erectile dysfunction I may or may not from time to time experience—I blame all of it on the deep moral shame of October 31, 1963, and I’m still working through it. With the help of my therapist I’ve begun to acknowledge that the teacher may not have cared that an eight-year-old borrowed a plot point. That perhaps she gave me that prize because she liked the writing or the characters or the symbolism or the mise-en-scène; or because my story was the most ambitious that third grade class produced. I struggle to believe that, and I thank all the loved ones who support me in that belief. But it was only after my novel—invented, thankfully, out of my own head—won a commendation or two that I began really to heal. If, indeed, I have begun to heal.

Kirshenbaum: Indelibly etched in memory and being worked out on the analyst's couch? When I was getting ready to go to college, my mother gave me a box filled with my grade school memorabilia. I sifted  through my report cards, finger painting from kindergarten, a poem a wrote in third grade, and then there was the program for the Winter Pageant: Snowflakes by Binnie Kirshenbaum. I sort of laughed and sort of didn't, and I threw it all in the garbage. So unless someone else from my fifth grade class saved their Winter Pageant program, it long ago biodegraded in a landfill somewhere.


_{Jaime Clarke is the author of the novel WE’RE SO FAMOUS, editor of DON’T YOU FORGET ABOUT ME: CONTEMPORARY WRITERS ON THE FILMS OF JOHN HUGHES, and co-founder of POST ROAD, a national literary magazine based out of New York and Boston}