Girl at War by Sara Novic Page B

beginning, adults operating somewhere between concern and nosiness had asked questions about the war, and I spoke truthfully about the things I’d seen. But my descriptionswere often met with an uncomfortable shifting of eyes, as if they were waiting for me to take things back, to say that war or genocide was actually no big deal. They’d offer their condolences, as they’d been taught, then wade through a polite amount of time before presenting an excuse to end the conversation.
    Their musings about how and why people stayed in a country under such terrible conditions were what I hated most. I knew it was ignorance, not insight that prompted these questions. They asked because they hadn’t smelled the air raid smoke or the scent of singed flesh on their own balconies; they couldn’t fathom that such a dangerous place could still harbor all the feelings of home. Soon I changed my approach, handpicking anecdotes like the Great Ding-Dong Ditch affront on the Serbian man’s flat, or the games we invented in the shelters, until I’d painted Zagreb with the lighthearted strokes of some carnival fun house. The version of things they ended up with was nonthreatening, even funny. But to create a palatable war was tiring and painful, so one day, I stopped completely. I grew and my accent faded. For years I didn’t reveal anything at all. I passed as an American. It was easier that way—for them—I told myself.
    But the UN delegates, now making their way to their seats, knew who I’d been a decade ago. They would be thirsty for gore. I wasn’t sure what to tell them. I’d stayed up late thinking of what to say, had tried to organize things into an outline, but all these years later I still had no narrative tomake sense of what had happened. Across the room two teenage black boys shuffled into the front row and slumped low in their chairs. Africa, I thought. Lost Boys, or RUF child soldiers. I wondered whether Sharon had recruited them, too, or if they were someone else’s project.
    Sharon stood and gave an introduction while the projector blinked a big red NO SIGNAL on the screen. I watched an intern jiggle the connection wires. After a second reset the slide show appeared—“Children in Combat” in 3-D Word Art autofocusing overhead.
    “Presenting first is Ana Jurić,” Sharon said. “Ana is a survivor from the Yugoslavian Civil War.” The slide exhibited before-and-after maps of Yugoslavia and its subsequent color-coded divisions. “At age ten, she was also involved in rebel combat missions against Serb paramilitary forces.” A quiet murmur floated across the tables at this. “I’ll let her introduce herself more fully though,” Sharon said, which I took as my cue to stand.
    Unsure applause rippled through the room, and I walked to the spot where Sharon had been standing. The auditorium felt much bigger from the front. I pulled the folded index cards from my pocket, but the bullet points now seemed useless. I coughed, and it echoed across the chamber. A memory of my father resurfaced. I had been nervous about performing a solo part in my third-grade Christmas concert.
Just sing loud
, he had said.
If you’re loud, everyone will believe you got it exactly right
.
    “I’m Ana,” I said. “I’m twenty and in my third year at NYU, studying literature.” There was a time when I would have been afraid of this room, of the dignitaries and their stiff, suited language, but now I felt more weary than scared. I’d grown out of fear like my childhood clothes, and after the initial adrenaline subsided my voice settled.
    “There’s no such thing as a child soldier in Croatia,” I declared as the next slide flashed—two teenage girls sporting camouflage and scuff-marked assault rifles. “There is only a child with a gun.” It was a semantic argument, and bullshit at that, and just like in the lecture halls at university they were eating it up.
    The girls in the picture were strangers, but they could have just