Seventeen
By Alexis M Yang
M
y mother said that you never feel as strongly as you do at seventeen. I never found that to be true until I walked home alone after junior prom, exhausted and dateless. I had spent the night in the corners of the gymnasium, drinking fruit punch and watching couples slow dance to all the year’s hits. Now I walked down a dark, tree-lined suburban street, my tie half undone and my suit rumpled. I had never felt so alone in my life.
In the weeks leading up to the dance, I’d allowed myself to think that I could take Susan Bridges. Every day in biology, we worked together and I tried to muster up the courage to ask her. When I finally began to ask, I never got the chance to finish. Brian Reed, the all-American quarterback, slung his arm around Susan and pulled her to him. He stared me down with his ice blue eyes, and that was that. Susan wound up slow dancing with six-foot-two, blond-haired Brian Reed. Maybe I could have gone with Susan Bridges in another world, but it was the mid- eighties. The American Midwest. If you were Chinese in that sleepy small town, you could never fit in. I used to think that you could. I plastered my bedroom wall with American rock and movie posters. I dressed in blue jeans and striped t-shirts. I ate cereal every day for breakfast and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich every day for lunch. But when I looked in the mirror, I still saw my black hair and honey-colored skin. That night after junior prom, I imagined Brian Reed walking Susan Bridges home, and I kicked a rock down the street, sending it skittering down the asphalt. I wished somebody had spiked the fruit punch. I wanted to let the world fall away and forget my parents waiting at home, forget my upcoming applications to Harvard and Princeton and Yale, forget my final exams, forget my tennis tournament the next weekend. As I walked down the street, an intuitive suspicion emerged in the back of my mind. Somebody was following me. I paused and glanced over my shoulder. In the yellow glow of the streetlamps, I made out the figure of a boy. I recognized him instantly: Brian Reed. Brian had tormented me since the beginning of time, to the point where fear shot through my body whenever I spotted him. I could see the outline of his football player build. Although I biked and played tennis, I was barely five-feet-six and scrawny as a twig. He could beat me up in an instant. “Hey, Lam,” Brian called. My body tensed at his voice. I began to walk faster. “Julian. Julian Lam.” I shivered as I kept walking, wondering why Brian wasn’t with Susan, why he hadn’t invited her over for dinner. If I had taken her to prom, I wouldn’t have ditched her after the dance. We would’ve sat down at my mother’s table to Chinese food, and then we’d talk and play a board game and I’d walk her home. She’d thank me and we’d wave goodbye. “Julian,” Brian’s voice came again, and then suddenly he was right behind me. His hand clamped on my
32 ASIAN OUTLOOK
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