SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Your 17-year-old self walks into a room and sits down in front of a microphone. Someone you've never met before asks you about your life. What would you say? That is the premise of "Small True Things." Audio producer Samantha Brown interviews high-school students about, well, the small true things in their lives - the breakups, the bullies, the budding hopes and dreams. Today, we bring you a few of these portraits for our weekly segment of short-form audio documentaries.
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SHA-KING: What do I love about football? I feel like it's just the fact that it's the only sport where you can get a, like - you really get away with hitting someone. I can hit you for free and talk trash doing it. If someone's running at me, I'm like, let's go. Like, I'm happy. Like, my turn to make a tackle.
If you shy away from the moment, that's how you get hurt. That's how you get hurt, you get trucked, you get embarrassed. No, I go full speed, and I'm coming as hard as I can. I'm a very skinny guy. I don't think I can just, like, grab someone. Just - so, like, I just chop. Like, I run full speed, like, and just clip the legs.
Being on your edge during a football game is the craziest thing ever. Like, may - not knowing if you're going to win the game is the craziest thing - while you're playing is the craziest thing ever. There's nothing more exciting, not that I faced yet. My name is Sha-King, 18.
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GABRIEL: My name is Gabriel. I like to explore a lot, like, abandoned buildings and stuff. And I feel like a lot of people don't know that that's, like, a hobby, like, that's a thing at all. Every single time I go into a building, I am afraid I'm going to get caught. A lot of times, there are security in these places despite them being abandoned. But you just kind of push through that, and that gives you kind of, like, this adrenaline rush.
At the same time, you're kind of, like, excited to, like, see what this place once was. Oftentimes, I like to explore with my best friend. And a lot of the times we just look around and we're like, ooh, the boss probably sat here one day. We just like to make scenarios out of what could have happened or, like, what the building was.
When we go into buildings, we try to not damage the place because that's just disrespectful and rude. People can reuse the buildings. Buildings can be used for whole other purposes. So to damage them is - you're just making sure that people will never be able to go back there again. We just kind of want people to be there again.
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SARDOINE: I first realized I was a writer in preschool when I took some pages, and I cut them up, and I put them into a tiny little paper book, and I wrote "The Black Rapunzel." Yeah. My name is Sardoine. I'm 15 years old. I watched "Rapunzel," and I was like, oh, my goodness, wouldn't this be so great if it was a book, but it was me instead of Rapunzel, and I drew my afro super long, and it had all the world inside of it? And I loved it.
Like, I'm planning on writing 43 different books because I have 43 writing plans in my notebooks. If I had 50, I would write 50. I like to write fantasy, and I like to write mystery. But the one that I'm currently writing is basically about this character who is living the day over and over and over again on a loop, like, kind of like - if you've ever heard of "Groundhog Day" or stories like that.
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SARDOINE: To be able to say that I'm a writer means to me that it's, like, my, like, calling or, like, my passion. I think that's what people say when they find something that is really important to them that they could see themselves doing for the rest of their lives.
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DEREK: I love romance. I love watching, like, K-dramas. I love reading romance books. I love - I love love. Love is amazing. My name is Derek. I am 16 years old. For me, what makes a good romance story is an unlikable main character. They're not perfect when they start out in the book. But through the challenges they overcome with this person, they realize, I'm a better person when I'm with this person, and I love being around them. I want to change more.
My relationship with, like, liking romance - I have had, like, times where I have shared that to the wrong people, and they have made fun of me for it. But I really hope that in the future, some guy or myself will find the bravery to write a romance book for all those guys that truly need it and that it becomes something big, to - so people can realize romance isn't just for girls. Guys like it, too. We like romance. We like being hopeless romantics. We want to hear these stories and relate to it. And yeah, no one can deny that love is the thing that we need most of on Earth. With love, anything can happen. Love is amazing.
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IZZY: I know how to change a tire - not only change it, but I know how to take the rim off a tire and put a new tire on it. I know how to fill a tire. I know what connects the brakes, what to do in an emergency - so if your brakes stop working.
My name is Izzy. I love working on cars. Like, if you know me, you know that, but if you don't, you look at me, you don't see that. My step-dad's an auto mechanic. And he used to take me with him to work sometimes. And I was always so fascinated, like, what do they do in there? Like, a car goes in broken, and it comes out fixed. How do you do that? And my mom would go or my sister would go to get her oil changed, and I'm like - I started asking him questions. Like, why do you have to change the oil in the car? What do you do when your engine light turns on? What do you check first? Like, I was asking questions like that.
And then one day he was working on a car, and I went down with him, and he was explaining stuff to me. I can't remember exactly what, but that's what, like, sparked it. Like, so I love doing that with my step-dad. I love like, working on cars because I do want to be an auto mechanic.
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JOSE: My name is Jose. I am currently a senior. As far as me as a person, I'm usually just keeping to myself. It's not that I don't like to talk to people. I just - I tend to get awkward with social interaction, so I just tend to avoid it. In school, it was not exactly great. I was kind of seen - at least in elementary, I was kind of seen as the stereotypical weird kid. A lot of my peers just kind of stayed away from me. And whenever they did interact with me, it was usually at my expense. For the most part, I would just try to ignore it, and that didn't really help.
Throughout all of this, I never told my mom or anybody else about how bad it was. And I think it was last year that I finally had a heartfelt conversation with my mom. It was hard because I had had it all boiling there for a while. But it was also relieving when I finally expressed how the whole experience made me feel. As a kid, I tended to just ignore my own needs. And if I had to go back and tell my younger self something, it'd be, stand up for yourself because you matter just as much as anybody else.
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DETROW: That was Jose Ayala, Izzy Fuentes, Derek Matas Huertas, Sardoine Kapenga Ngibu, Gabriel Viar and Sha-King Lovett (ph). They spoke with audio producer Samantha Brown for her project "Small True Things." You can hear more of these portraits as smalltruethings.org.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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