Good Fortune
Casey Kregeloh
I shuffle my papers back into place to shove into my backpack, when the pre-used Altoids tin hits the side of a cafeteria table, spilling its contents of nearly a hundred small slips of paper. You stop to laugh at the teenage girl hastily plucking each strip from the dirty linoleum flooring. Carefully, she places each paper one behind the other, ensuring that none of the pieces are damaged in the process.
They mustn’t get damaged.
They keep her safe.
Since the age of thirteen, I have collected every fortune I have ever gotten from a fortune cookie. Those small slips that you would throw away after a silent family dinner, after a conversation duller than that water in a glass sitting beside a plastic container of fried rice and chicken too sweet to tolerate. These fortunes are more than a fortune, but rather a prophecy. They guide me to who I am capable of becoming, who I can be, who I will be…
Growing up, socializing with others never came to me easily. Stuttering and stumbling over my words, my peers would always tilt their heads whenever I talked to them. My words didn’t always make sense, and subsequently, their vividly confused reactions did. I tried involving myself in as many extracurricular activities as possible throughout my years of early schooling, and somehow, I didn’t seem to feel like I fit in anywhere. In my ballet class, my relevés were never held as long as the other girls’, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much I strained my calves, no matter how high I held my arms, just trying to balance for a few seconds more. During my softball games, I always spent more time watching the game in the dugout than I ever did playing on the field with my teammates. In my orchestra concerts, my chubby child fingers could not move up and down the fingerboard of my violin as quickly as those of the other fourth graders. The music flowed out from the bellies of their instruments and into the air, weaving effortlessly into a concerto. The strings of my instrument screeched and scratched, and the notes that did find themselves interweaving among the rest of my classmates’ quivered as they came into contact with their in-tune notes. My bow, nor my notes, nor my mind moved succinctly with the rest of my peers’.
Seeking advice from adults never helped me understand the feelings of isolation within my child-like mind. My mother’s wisest words were to “ keep trying,” which always sufficed more than my father’s insistence on expressing how I was never truly trying my best. I spent my entire childhood feeling I’d never be “good enough.”
Never a good enough ballerina, never a good enough softball player, never a good enough violinist.
Never a good enough child.
In knowing the shame I’d feel in asking an adult to help understand my emotions, I began saving the tiny slips of paper I would find inside my fortune cookies. “Use your head, but live in your heart.” I inferred the words printed in blue ink on the crinkly piece of paper would get me much further in life than any further acknowledgment of an adult’s disapproval. The fortunes were continually changing, no two alike. The more I looked at these fortunes, the more worn in they became, the more the light-blue print began to smudge and fade away. However, for as long as my father’s unwavering dissatisfaction with his only daughter remains, there will always be more words of advice to collect from the tiny slips of paper inside the cookies I get for free with my takeout.
Casey Kregeloh (class of 2026) is a member of the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences Honors Program. She is from Edison, New Jersey, and is majoring in English with a double minor in Women’s & Gender Studies and Education. Aside from writing and reading, Casey spends much of her free time crocheting, golfing, and going on hikes with her friends. After graduation, she hopes to pursue a career in education.
Casey wrote this piece in course taught by Joanna Fuhrman, who selected this piece for inclusion in WHR.