Seventeen Alexis M Yang

Seventeen

By Alexis M Yang

My 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

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shoulder like steel. My breath stopped. I felt my heart pumping in my chest, rapid-fire. “I heard that you’ve been spending a lot of time with my girlfriend,” he said over my shoulder. I couldn’t let him know the truth. Couldn’t let him know about the flutters in my stomach, the seconds I managed to steal with Susan outside of classrooms, lockers, the heavy wooden doors of the school. The pink flush on my cheeks when I stared into the mirror at home, wishing that I could draw my cards again. Light skin and brown hair this time. Ace of spades. “We sit next to each other in biology,” I mustered. It was the only thing I could think to say. “No, that’s not all.” Brian’s voice cut like a knife, as if he was trying to pry some secret out of my heart. “I see you at school. Always making a move to talk to her. Trying to sit next to her in whatever class.” I shifted my shoulder, trying to wriggle out from underneath his hand. That same hand had shoved and punched and knocked me around since elementary school. It had also rested on Susan’s arm, in her hair, entwined with her fingers. Something like jealousy burned at the bottom of my heart, sticky and red-hot. “I’ve wanted to give you a piece of my mind for a long time now, Lam. Do you really think that Susan would ever want to be with you?” I squeezed my eyes shut, wishing I could be anywhere else. The first image that came to me was home: my mother wrapping wontons, my father reading a book in the living room; the TV droning on quietly, mingling with my parents’ soft-spoken Cantonese. Our insular world closed off from the rest of the Midwestern town. It surprised me that I wanted to see my parents out of all people. They expected more and more from me with every passing year, to the point where I didn’t know what belonged to me and what belonged to them. They’d stuffed so many of their dreams into me that I thought I might burst. In those moments, there was nothing to do but escape—but when I escaped from that house, I entered another hostile world. “You leave Susan alone,” Brian warned, his voice loud and harsh in my ear. “I won’t let you get near her, you c****.” I turned around slowly. The slur burrowed inside my chest and blossomed like a pool of dark red blood next to my heart. “You don’t understand,” I muttered. “I’ll make you understand, Lam. If you ever try to hit on Susan again, I’ll—” I stopped listening to him. More than anything, I wanted to ask him if he’d ever felt alone. If he’d ever been the single black head among all the brown and blond, the blemish on the class photo. If he’d ever felt like an impostor in his own country, like his American birth wasn’t enough to prove his validity. If he’d ever felt burning embarrassment rise in his cheeks when his classmates heard his parents’ foreign accents. If he’d ever felt like a foreigner in his own soul, like his Chinese and American sides were at war with each other. If he’d ever wished that he could just fit in. Susan Bridges always fit in. She was the only one of my classmates who truly saw me. For as long as I could remember, the rest of them looked through me like glass. Or even worse, they shot me a glance and then made it a point to ignore me. Brian first declared me an oddball in elementary school, when he shoved me into the schoolyard dirt and then pretended I didn’t exist. All the others followed suit. Susan was different. On the first day of biology class, she entered the room with two friends. She said “see you after school,” and “call me later,” all the typical phrases tossed around in high school. As she slid into the chair next to mine and began doodling in her notebook, I envied her ease. Her “see you after school’s” and “call me later’s.” The sureness with which she navigated her effortlessly American life. I wanted to ask her to prom because I thought she could see me. That when we spoke about schoolwork and music and movies, she didn’t look through me. Didn’t see the Chinese boy and nothing more.

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Brian was still talking, but I interrupted him. “Brian, why aren’t you with Susan right now?” He stopped, shocked and perplexed. “What did you say?”

“I asked why you aren’t with Susan. If I took her to prom, I’d invite her over for dinner and then I’d walk her home. That’s what I would’ve done.”

Our eyes had barely met when his fist sailed into my face. Pain exploded in my cheekbone and then I was lying on the asphalt and I realized that my body had cracked against the ground. I tried to get up, tried to land some punches on him, but I didn’t have the strength.

I gave up. Brian had stopped hitting me and now I was lying there on the asphalt, my vision blurring. I thought I had grown immune to his attacks, but as I lay on the ground, it hurt like the first time he had knocked me down. It hurt like I was a child in the dirt of the schoolyard again, knees scuffed, children laughing all around. It hurt like I was looking in the mirror and realizing for the first time that I was different.

Brian’s figure retreated down the street. I thought he was running, but it was hard to tell. The only thing I kept thinking about was playing a board game with Susan Bridges. I knew why I hadn’t put up much of a fight. It wasn’t because I was scrawny or just barely five-feet-six. It was because right after my body hit the asphalt, I realized that fighting back would have been no use. It was utterly plain to me now, no matter how much American music I listened to and how many American films I watched and how many American clothes I wore, the immutable fact of my appearance kept me from ever truly being American. The walk home was a hazy, excruciating blur. I planned to slip into the house quietly, but by the time I dragged myself home, I didn’t have the energy to tiptoe. As the door clicked shut, a light flicked on in the kitchen. My mother heard my footsteps and gasped when she saw me.

“Julian, what happened?” she asked in English. I shrugged and mumbled something about heading up to my bedroom. Just as I began to turn for the stairs, she grabbed my shoulders and examined my face.

“Tell me the truth, son,” she said, her dark brown eyes searching mine and her forehead wrinkled in concern. “Who did this to you?” “Mom, I’m fine. Just let me—”

“No, no. Come here.” She took my arm and walked me a few paces to the kitchen, where she urged me into a wooden chair and began to blot napkins with rubbing alcohol. After a moment of silence, she asked, “Does it have to do with the dance?” “Mom.”

She knelt in front of me and dabbed a napkin against my cheekbone. Pain shot through my face and I winced. “You don’t have to lie to me, Julian,” she said.

I didn’t answer her for a long time. She kept tending to my face, her familiar silence oddly comforting. Her eyes were focused on my cheek; her eyes that had seen the old country, that distant land where she had been born, grown up, seen conflict, hunger, things I could not understand, things that created the ever-present wall between us. When I could finally speak, my voice broke, “Who am I supposed to be, Mom?”

She looked at me for a long time without answering. Tears began to well up in my eyes and I blinked them away. I could hear the TV droning on in the living room. Before my mother responded, I heard footsteps. My father. Both of us looked at him as he emerged in the threshold, his face weary as he gazed at me.

When my mother finally answered, she did so in Cantonese with her eyes meeting my father’s. “Your father and I want the best for you.”

I had let my father down. His only son was not supposed to get into fights. All my life, I had done exactly what he wanted. School, books, exams, tennis. Shut up, work hard, don’t complain. Slip up and pay for it. Tonight was my first mistake. But he only looked directly at me, more sad than chastising, as if he understood why I’d been beaten up. Then

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he turned and went away just as quietly as he’d come.

My mother continued to clean up my face. Her hands moved gently but surely, like she’d practiced these motions, like she had everything figured out. “Mom, I don’t know who I am.”

She placed the napkin down on the table. Without speaking, she reached out and smoothed down the front of my hair. She hadn’t done that since I was a little boy. “Julian,” she said, “you’re seventeen.”

I looked down at my lap and nodded. I didn’t understand my parents most of the time— their wishes and expectations, the weight of the past that they carried in their eyes. This time, I understood. “Did you dance with the girl that you like?” my mother asked. I blinked, shocked. “How do you know about Susan?” “I can tell that you like a girl. I’m not blind, you know.” “Well, I didn’t dance with her. Nobody would let me.”

If my mother didn’t know the cause of my injuries before, she understood now. She nodded and we didn’t speak for a long time. It occurred to me that my mother was seventeen before, too, that somewhere in a faraway country she did not know herself, did not yet understand the secrets of her heart, her soul. Just when I thought she was about to get up and leave, she said, “Go speak to that girl.”

“What?”

“Visit Susan. If nobody was there to judge, she would dance with you, no? So visit her.” “You mean right now?” “Yes, now. Before you get too old and think twice about it.”

My mother had never spoken to me so directly before. She’d ordered me around, told me what to study and what career to pursue, but we’d never understood each other as clearly as we did then. Everything I thought I knew about my mother went out the window, and with it went everything I’d assumed about myself.

She began to adjust my tie. The fabric rubbed against the back of my neck and it was comforting despite the pain in my cheek, despite the slur that had buried itself beside my heart. When she’d redone my tie, she gave me a tired smile. I knew that her face would soon become cryptic, the opaque curtain dropped between us, the generational divide insurmountable once again. I didn’t know much, but I knew I couldn’t let this moment slip away.

I gave my mother a small nod. A sign of appreciation. We stood and she placed her hands on my shoulders for a brief, precious moment. Already I could see the veil beginning to shroud her face. “Go on,” she urged me.

I stepped out into the warm night, the door clicking shut. Then I walked out onto the street, my mother standing in the illuminated window and my father reading in the living room and the TV still droning on.

I didn’t worry about running into Brian Reed again. When I reached Susan Bridges’ house, I stood for a few seconds in front of the porch steps, gazing at the yellow light emanating from the windows. I felt far away from the competitive pressure of high school, far away from the weighted history of home too, as I stood in this place that was neither here nor there. I didn’t formulate any greetings, didn’t decide what I’d do if she closed the door in my face. I only walked up to the front door and knocked.

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