The sun sets behind the rolling hills, the smell of wet grass and sand permeates every inch of air around me, only being broken by the sweet aroma of sizzling barbecue. Cool droplets fall from my hair and into the warm, blue towel I drape over my shoulders. It's the first time we have gone to a lake in years, but the blissfulness of the towering trees, the cool air, and the laughter of my family brings me back to the nostalgia of my childhood. I smile and take a crisp breath. This is pure happiness. I am truly happy.

“Vrooooom!” I push my toy stroller through the house: around the couch, through the hallway, across the room, next to the table! The tires click as I narrowly avoid walls and chairs. My mother shouts and stops me in a fit of annoyance. I throw myself on the living room couch, heaving. Woofies, my most prized friend and stuffed playmate, stares back at me blankly, his brown ears unevenly flopped over his tilted head after the ride. “You deserve a treat for this!” I manage between hurried breaths, but no plastic bone or fancy ensemble from Toys “R” Us awaits. My parents won’t invest in this clearly vital resource. Instead, I use cardboard for stability, white duct tape for shape, and a black sharpie for design to fabricate my own bone. His outfit is next. Scissors in hand, I pull out a J.C. Penny baby onesie and begin tailoring: two holes at the top for his legs and one at the back for the comfort of his tail. When will we find a solution to the shortage of fashionable stuffed dog wear? I wonder as I snip the thick blue cloth. Five years later, Woofies rests patiently on my sister’s bed while I stand at the front of my eighth-grade engineering classroom, peering excitedly into the first product I designed: my own foam cooler. Its neat walls are built of foam; its shiny interior is the aluminum Philly cheesesteak wrapping I borrowed from my uncle’s restaurant. Even though it was built for my STEM class, I wonder if it's powerful enough to keep my family’s Coca-Colas cold for a full day on our next trip to the lake. I wonder if my creations will be useful to people outside my classroom. I challenge my doubts, watching as an ice cube melts — an odd but exhilarating form of entertainment for a 13-year-old. “Only 25% melted in 40 minutes,” I write proudly in my lab report. Now, Woofies rides around the house with my little sister, dressed in an oversized doll dress, my bursts of creation remain the same, though now, I wonder how they’ll impact my community. My most important creation is yet to come. I lay in my bed after a ritual dive into the kidnapping crime documentaries that puzzle me, wondering how cases could be solved faster. How could they be avoided by the tracking of a possible victim’s location? Suddenly, my bare feet slap the floor as they sprint down my home’s dark hallway. My hand clutches a light switch and thrusts it up, catching my dad in a gaze of astonishment. He stares at me, bewildered and unprepared for the avalanche of thoughts that soon unleashes: What if there was an app that tracks where you’re going? For college women! You send a ping to a friend with the name of your acquaintance and a GPS records your path until you return! Ugh, but what if an aggressor turns it off?! Oh, it should have an expiration date so a record still exists... As the words keep pouring out, my chest heaves for air, and my feet find their way back to my room. I quickly grasp the teal notebook that harbors two years worth of ideas, my heart tingling excitedly as I write “GPS tracker” under a list of other midnight bombardments I long to create. I push to understand how gender, environmental, economic, and racial discrimination continue at all class levels, especially within my immigrant community. A website will rate inclusivity in workplaces to avoid discriminatory environments, a bilingual employment platform will annihilate language barrier issues in stores, and my dad’s panic attacks will be de-escalated through an app. My mind swims with ideas as I hope to impact my community positively, to achieve to help many with future creations that come from my imagination and experiences and that I know many can relate to. As I keep shooting ideas at my dad, I see Woofies, now sitting in my sister’s new pink stroller by our bedroom door, occasionally being stolen to lay with me at the foot of my bed. There are many big issues to tackle in this world; however, there is always one major question left to answer and solve: When will we find a solution to the shortage of fashionable stuffed dog wear? Woofies is yet to know, but as I leave for my first year at Stanford to master the art of creation, I keep him constantly in mind.

"I am saving that spot for when you graduate college, para tu diploma," my mother whispers, smiling as she resumes her monotonous sweeping. I lean against the counter, listening as the bristles graze across the kitchen floor with my mother’s gentle movements. Her words pull my eyes to our pear-green wall. Dangling clay pots and ceramic red chiles hug a set of four black frames that house my 4th-grade honor roll certificates. These accolades border an empty middle space; a thin nail covered in green marks where my diploma will be pridefully hung. The bare space on the wall watches me as I work through the nights, sitting alone under the kitchen light’s isolated gleam. My diploma’s future home feels the air stiffen as I walk into the kitchen. I take my seat at the dinner table, but a thick silence fills the room. My father’s nervous laugh slices through the air. “We can’t fully pay rent,” he tells my mom. My parents lean against the counter, staring at the floor. I sit in silence with them, but my eyes aren’t glued to the water-stained flower tiles: they are on my mother’s furrowed brows. My eyes fixate on where the kitchen’s fifth frame will lie. Gazing at the nail on the wall, I imagine my dad burying his nose in a computer of his own construct, enthralled in what he loves rather than waiting by the phone, hoping to find loads to haul in his truck. Instead, I stand by his kneeled figure as he fixes another one of our run-down ovens, car motors, or washing machines that have ceased to work. I lean over his shoulder and feel his excitement radiate as he dissects our broken Samsung refrigerator. He found it on a Garage Sale Facebook page, but he knows he can fix it and instills in me a passion for engineering. My dad transforms the kitchen into a battlefield of tubes, voltmeters, and screwdrivers that I tiptoe over to get a snack. Smiling, I ask, “¿qué estas haciendo pa?” The next morning, the jingle of his keys floats into my room, his figure fleeting past the vigilant frames as he leaves to lug palettes in his truck. That morning, every test, every assignment means so much more. I fight tirelessly in school so my parents can finally rest. My figure sits alone in parent meetings in lieu of my own and I shiver in the crisp morning air an hour before school, waiting to ask my burning chemistry questions. When I am home, the hanging frames tremble as I run to my parents. Bouncing with excitement, I tell them I passed the interview round for the Summer Math and Science Honors Academy at Stanford. A confused, “¿el que?” erupts from the table. I continue to search for any opportunity I can grasp. My glowing laptop screen lights my half-eaten dinner as Questbridge becomes a newly uncovered gem, as my email reaches headquarters in Hong Kong for the 24 Hour Race to fight human trafficking. My parents joke, “we'll always see your ghost haunting your spot at the table,” deciphering work in the afternoons. On days that I fight my drooping eyes, I pull them up to face the nail on the wall. In the outline of my future diploma, I see a broken fridge lining our cramped kitchen and two tired figures gripping their backs as they rest on the couch. Because of them, I know the space won’t be empty for much longer; because of them, I won’t hang the missing frame on my own.