I rushed up to my room to finish the art submission that Sierra had reminded me about. I dumped my backpack on my bed and headed into the little side room attached to my bedroom. We live in an old house, and Mom says the little room might have been some kind of baby nursery when the house was built. But with lots of windows letting in bright light, it made the perfect customization space for me.

Some people might call it a “craft room,” but I prefer to call it a customization space, because I am not making macaroni picture frames like some kind of summer camper. I am creating and customizing things—like, I’ll turn a torn pair of jeans into a cute denim purse, or I’ll decoupage a lampshade with pages from manga to decorate my bedroom with.

The customization room is turquoise with white trim, and all my tools and materials are stored in jars and plastic bins. My main workspace is a big metal folding table that I picked up from the curb. It holds my grandma’s vintage sewing machine and still leaves room for me to create.

Right now the table was covered with stuff I was using for my art submission. The Bayville Monthly was a magazine that talked about all the things to do and places to go in our little beach town. When tourists come to visit, they use it as a guidebook, and any businesses featured in it usually get more traffic.

Every year they hold the Bayville County Youth Arts Contest, where they invited artists up to age eighteen to submit art about their favorite thing about Bayville. I figured that a lot of people would be submitting photos, or drawing pictures of typical stuff, like ocean waves or the boardwalk. But lately I’d been working in collage art, and as the (unofficial) social media director of Molly’s Ice Cream, I knew how amazing it would be to get the ice cream shop on the cover.

So I’d started making a Molly’s Ice Cream–themed collage. First I’d printed out some of my favorite photos: the vintage metal letters that spelled out “ice cream” that hung on the wall, a jar of rainbow sprinkles, Allie’s little brother eating an ice cream cone. Then I’d collected paper stuff from the shop, like a napkin with the shop logo and one of the paper menus that we keep by the register. I’d started arranging them all on a piece of cardstock, and then to fill in the gaps I’d searched through my supplies to find some fun additions. A scrap of fabric with rainbow-colored polka dots reminded me of the sprinkles, glitter cardstock added some sparkle, and cut-out pictures of ice cream from some old kiddie magazines from Japan looked really cute.