Where Is Dee?
by Sunday Evelyn Temitope
Short Story
Five missed calls between 3:00 and 3:15 a.m. A short story about the friend who was watching Netflix, told entirely from the side left behind.
Where it scored
- Clarity and Structure
- Highest structural score on the shortlist.
- Relevance to Theme
- Prevention written from the bystander's side.
- Originality
- 410 steps, counted once as a joke.
The performance
What the piece does
Where Is Dee? opens with an ambulance parked outside a building where an ambulance has no business being, and then does something structurally clever: it withholds. Ifedayo walks toward her friend's house through a gathering crowd, calling a phone that will not be answered, mentally rehearsing the snack she bought as a surprise. The reader works out what has happened several pages before the narrator allows herself to.
Dee is an orphan who has lived fourteen years alone in the same house. She laughs too hard when conversations get close. She withdraws for months at a time. She pushes away a hug. None of this was invisible — it was all witnessed, and all explained away.
Why it placed second
This is the prevention story told from the one angle that implicates the reader: not the person in crisis, but the person who nearly answered the phone. Five calls came in between 3:00 and 3:15 a.m. The narrator missed them because she was finishing an episode of Stranger Things and did not want to disturb her network connection. The story makes no attempt to soften that, and the panel valued it precisely for refusing to.
Its most quietly devastating device is the staircase. Four hundred and ten steps, counted together once as a joke — I was curious, not suicidal — and now unbearable to think about. A shared memory turned into evidence after the fact. The judges also noted the texture of the setting: the Agbado Road crowd, Mama Fati's bubu gown, the chorus of neighbours diagnosing a girl they never spoke to. The grief is specific and Nigerian, not borrowed.
What readers should take from it
The story's thesis sits in its most honest sentence: Maybe I wouldn't have magically known what to say. Maybe I wouldn't have been able to fix anything. But I could have listened. Nobody is asking you to be a clinician. The entry point is lower than most people think — and the story makes an unanswered call feel exactly as heavy as it sometimes is.
How it impressed the judges
Entries are judged blind against four weighted criteria. Judges receive only the title and the text — never the author's identity.
Relevance to Theme — 40%
Addresses prevention from the bystander's position, which almost no other entry attempted. The words that mattered here are the ones never said: the conversation not had, the referral not made, the call not picked up. A strong, uncomfortable reading of the theme.
Originality — 30%
The withheld reveal is well judged, and the 410-step staircase is an original and durable image for retrospective grief. The crowd-as-chorus — neighbours diagnosing a girl none of them ever spoke to — is sharply observed.
Clarity and Structure — 20%
The highest-scoring entry on structure. Three clean movements — the walk, the hospital, the week after — with the five missed calls planted early and detonated late. The final phone call, answered with "Hello. Dee?", lands because the structure earned it.
Emotional Impact — 10%
Judges flagged the ending as the most quoted passage of the shortlist.
How judging works · Maximum score 100 across Relevance to Theme, Originality, Clarity and Structure, Emotional Impact.
Excerpts
The passages that do the work.
Quoted from Where Is Dee? with the author's permission. The commentary beneath each passage is the Society's, not the author's.
She'd laughed. Quite too hysterically, like she'd always done whenever I said something that made her uncomfortable, as though warning me to cease my talking.
Why this passageDeflection, described precisely. The laugh that arrives too loud and too fast is one of the most commonly missed signals there is — and one of the easiest to name out loud. “Leave me alone to dwell and die in my prison and just go. That's all it is to you, isn't it? Just a prison that I've willingly walked into, right?”
Why this passageBeing pushed away is not the same as not being needed. The story asks what you do with the months of silence that follow a sentence like this. I stared at the five calls from her I had received. All between 3:00 a.m. and 3:15 a.m. I had missed all, not because I was sleeping, but because… I was binging the last episode of Stranger Things on Netflix, and picking up the call might have messed with my MTN network.
Why this passageThe whole story turns on fifteen minutes and a streaming service. Nothing dramatic stood between these two friends — just ordinary distraction, which is what usually does. I knew she'd always liked to shut down and withdraw into isolation for weeks and even months… But what did I do? I allowed her to continue. I normalized her strange behaviour over and over. I discarded the thought of allowing her to see a psychologist, knowing fully well her behaviours weren't normal at all. I told myself she'd come around.
Why this passageNormalising is the quiet failure this story is really about — the decision, made repeatedly and almost unconsciously, that a friend's withdrawal is simply who they are. Maybe I wouldn't have magically known what to say. Maybe I wouldn't have been able to fix anything. But I could have listened. I could have told her that whatever she was going through, she didn't have to go through it alone. I could have reminded her that she had me.
Why this passageThe most useful paragraph in this year's competition. The bar for helping someone is not expertise. It is picking up. Five floors. 410 steps. And no Dee.
Why this passageA building the narrator always hated, reduced to arithmetic. Grief recounting what it used to joke about.
The excerpts above are a fraction of the piece. The complete entry is published here exactly as Sunday Evelyn Temitope submitted it.
Download PDF · 11 pagesCopyright remains with the author. Free to quote with attribution and to use in educational and advocacy settings.
Published 4 October 2026 · JMHS National Writing Competition 2026 · Using the Power of Words to Promote Mental Health and Prevent Suicide
