Personal Narrative: I Am The Messenger

Using a favorite quotation from an essay or book you have read in the last three years as a starting point, tell us about an event or experience that helped you define one of your values or changed how you approach the world. Please write the quotation, title and author at the beginning of your essay.

“It 's not a big thing, but I guess it 's true — big things are often just small things that are noticed.”
― Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger
I don’t know his name.
I don’t really know what he looked like.
But I do know he wore a lot of gel in his hair. Because when he laughed at my math team partner, Joseph, the gel’s residue shone under the classroom’s fluorescent lights.
“Just pick a number,” I had whispered moments earlier, scratching my go-to numbers (18, 21, 47) down on a blank sheet of paper.
And I already could see Joseph’s whisper rising by the

I was at a state math team competition, a place where I could’ve taken a stand. I want to be a reporter with hard-hitting exposées. I want to defend the little guy. I want to be a part of the big moment where walls are torn down, corrupt politicians overthrown, and greedy bankers exposed, but, when faced with the opportunity, I couldn’t bring myself to defend my partner.
Instead, I mumbled, “It’s okay. We don’t need to guess.”
And we waited until the proctor’s phone alarm blared before we raised our folded sheet with a blank line in the air.
I sat numb through the rest of the competition. I did my part of the problems without meeting Joseph’s eyes, and, when his mom greeted us with a smile and a snack at the door, I avoided her as well. For some reason, I thought that moments of injustice would be bigger. They would be blatant. They would be irredeemable. They would be wrong.
But maybe they were just small moments that had happened often enough to be noticed.
And when faced with them, I had to do more than notice. I had to act — and that decision isn’t a guessing