Me, smart? I was so overcome to hear myself called smart by a genius like Peter that I just stared at him.
He had to repeat himself. “Figure it out, Angela!”
I tried to concentrate. Why was Peter looking so amused? The light finally dawned. “Got it,” I said slowly. “I’m the one who wrote the story.”
“The winning story is your own, Angela, because that’s the one that won.”
My head began to go around and around. “But where did the original idea for the story come from?”
“What made the plot so good?” asked Peter. His voice sounded unsteady.
“Well, in my story, my character used a time machine to go forward in time …”
“Okay, whose idea was it to use a time machine?”
“It was mine,” I said slowly. I remembered the moment when the idea had hit me with a boing.
“So you s-stole f-from yourself!” sputtered Peter. He started to roar with laughter. I had never seen him break down like that. At this rate, he might wind up being human.
When he could talk again, he asked me to read my story to him.
I began. “‘In movies, geniuses have frizzy white hair, right? They wear thick glasses and have names like Dr. Zweistein …’”
Lensey Namioka visiting Beijing, China, 1992.
Although Lensey Namioka (1929– ) studied to be a mathematician, telling stories was what she enjoyed doing the most. When she was eight years old, she wrote her first story about a woman warrior. Many of her stories describe experiences of children and young adults learning new languages and moving to new countries.