Jessie Fales
Head down. Three deep breaths. One. “This is just another round,” I thought to myself. Two. “Give it all you got.” Three. This could be any ordinary performance at any ordinary forensics tournament. At the same time, though, there was nothing ordinary about it: it was, to this day, the most important performance of my life. It was the day that I would morph into the character of Auggie Pullman from R.J. Palacio’s Wonder, which was a marked moment for me because I, like Auggie, was born with a facial abnormality.