The Door Is Open by Hena Khan

Author:Hena Khan [KHAN, HENA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2024-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

HOW TO SPELL “DISASTER”

by Supriya Kelkar

IF YOU’VE EVER WATCHED THE SCRIPPS NATIONAL Spelling Bee, you know it’s a big deal. It’s, like, the Super Bowl of spelling bees, the Oscars for spellers, the Olympics for words. You get the point. It’s major. And the kids in it are basically celebrities. They even have little videos in between the competition, showing the famous spellers memorizing tons of words in different kinds of dictionaries, their parents proudly beaming at them.

That’s pretty much my life all the time. Except I’m not the kid the parents are proud of. Nope. That’s my little sister, Nisha.

She started spelling at twenty-two months old. The local news even did a story on her when she was four, where a reporter and camerawoman followed us around for a whole day, filming Nisha as she practiced with her spelling coach in our kitchen and read a giant dictionary on the swing in our backyard. And now, at age six, she’s pretty much a shoo-in for Scripps. And our entire life is about spelling.

I can’t tell you how many spelling bees I’ve been to. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched kids onstage ask judges for the language of origin for a word they have to spell. Or ask the judge to use it in a sentence.

Usually that kid is Nisha. She has so many words memorized, so many languages of origin, so many practice sentences, I’ve lost count. She is the reigning under-15 spelling bee champ of our state this year, and the Maple Grove Dispatch has done tons of stories about her over the past few months.

I don’t mind her getting all the attention. I’m proud of her, too. But I kind of wish part of my life got to be more about another eight-letter word that starts with “s” and ends with “ing”: swimming. I’m practically like a fish in the water. Well, not a flying gurnard, which would rather walk on the seafloor than swim. But like other fish. The ones who love swimming. Because I love swimming. I love being in the water. I love helping other people in the water. It’s my thing. This Friday evening, though, instead of getting to go to my Junior Lifeguard class on the far side of town, I have to go to something that will probably end up in a video at Scripps this summer, just a part of Nisha’s backstory.

Why make waves when you can just go with the flow, I guess?

“I’m sorry you have to miss your class,” Nisha says to me from her car seat, about to chew the end of one of her curls in a pre-bee jitters habit, before I cringe and shake my head to stop her.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter, shona,” Aai says to her from the driver’s seat of our car, as she turns the wheel and we enter the community center parking lot. She glances at me. “You’ll have fun playing basketball with the other kids, Sanjay.”

I sigh, watching Aai’s red, crescent-shaped tikli on her forehead in the rearview mirror.

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