Good Enough By Rachel Vail

The short story, “Good enough” by Rachel Vail, speaks about the main character Dori and how she starts as what the poem, “Identity” by Julio Noboa Polanco would say as a flower but transform into a weed at the end. Dori tries to impress or fit in with the popular girls by getting an Orion shirt they all wear for Dori’s birthday. However, Dori’s family is not in the best financial situation, so this makes it really hard on the parents to get this. On Dori’s birthday she opens a present to find that her mom has given her a fake, which hurts her, but she does not tell her parents, so they do not feel bad. When Dori wears it to school the next day one of the popular girls goes up to her and taunts her about it, Dori ends up crying but catches herself and remembers that even though its fake her mom had so much love behind it and did her best which makes Dori get over it and know that it's okay to not be in the popular group or be different. In “Identity,” it talks about how “flowers” are respected, admired, and guarded but grow in clumps and are held to a pot of soil, but how “weeds” are okay by themselves, and experience stuff flowers will never and standalone strong. Dori starts out as a

“These tears are what I should be ashamed of, I realized, not the shirt, not the hearts instead of stars,” (Vail, Pg. 6 lines 4-6) This is when Dori does her transformation to a weed, Dori stands strong by realizing how embarrassing this looks for her as well as seeing how she does not have to be friends with them. Dori also truly realizes how much trouble her mom went through to get her a shirt that would make her a big thing or even fit in. Dori standing strong and free but also alone is exactly how a weed is described in “Identity” saying, “If I could stand alone, strong and free, I’d rather be a tall, ugly