After dinner, we walk across the street and get an outdoor table at this fancy place called Straits Café, and sip six-dollar lemonades for the next forty-five minutes, much to our waiter’s irritation. Hanh and Reggie try to order a cocktail, and he doesn’t even bother to ask for ID—just stares at them, shakes his head, and walks away. “Asshole,” grumbles Hanh. The night crowd is starting to come out now, and I feel so grown-up, surrounded by adults. The place is flooded with Asians—mostly techies, judging by the snippets of conversation we can hear, and Hanh starts to get nervous that she might be seen by someone who knows her family, so we pay up and leave.
When they drop me off at home, I’m about to get out of the car with my Hollister shopping bag when Elaine grabs me. “Stop! You can’t take that in the house! Are you crazy?”
“Why?”
“What the hell are you going to tell your mom when she sees what you got?” says Hanh. “Do you think she’d let you keep it?”
“Good point.”
“Right? Pack it with your overnight stuff next week, leave the house in something else, and we’ll all change at school. Here—” She takes my super-cute, fifty-percent-off, scarlet, low-backed halter top out of the Hollister bag, grabs my purse, and stuffs the top inside. “That’s better.”
“Hanh Le, master of deception,” intones Reggie.
Hanh shrugs and grins. “Learn from the best.”
13
WE’RE FINISHING UP THE SCARLET LETTER FOR English. It would be a cool book if it weren’t such a depressing slog to read. I mean, a Puritan girl named Hester gets married to an ugly old man and has a love child with her hot Puritan minister while her husband is away, and then the ugly old husband comes back in disguise to get revenge—sounds fun, right? Except that most of the book is written in horrible, torturously long sentences about how horrible and tortured everyone feels. Because no one knows it’s the minister’s child, Hester is the only one who gets punished, and she has to go around wearing a big red A for Adultery on her chest while the minister gets off scot-free. Except he’s supposedly suffering silently and being eaten away by guilt on the inside, which I think is a load of BS, and he should just man up and tell everyone he loves her.
Actually, I was a little like Hester when I lived in Wisconsin. I got labeled just like her: A for Asian. Except I couldn’t help being Asian, while Hester could have prevented herself from cheating. I say this to Reggie, Elaine, and Hanh at lunch a few days after our shopping spree.
“A for Asian?” says Reggie. “That’s awesome.”
“A for Awesome Asians,” quips Elaine. “We should get T-shirts!”
“Yeah—it would be like when Hester put gold thread on her A, like she didn’t care about what people thought, you know?”
“Yeah, like she was proud of it, like she refused to feel ashamed! Just like us, right?” Elaine is getting excited. “Maybe if there was a group of girls like Hester, like with As on their chests, maybe if they all stuck together, maybe they could have changed things. You know, friends, community, power!”
I love California. I love my new friends.
“Yeah, or maybe they all would have been burned at the stake for being witches,” says Jamie.
A week later, Jamie and I are sitting on the floor in my bedroom after practice, drafting analytical essays on The Scarlet Letter. Jamie’s been coming over to do homework regularly, pretty much every day except Thursdays, when we have meets.
“Anyway, Hester put gold thread on the A to make herself feel worse, not better. She was just as fucked up as the rest of them,” says Jamie.
“Aw, don’t say that. You just ruined it.”
“A for Asian. You think being in a group changes what people think about you? Try wearing an M for Mexican. That’s like Hester. It doesn’t give you more power. It doesn’t change people’s minds. It just makes people judge all of you together. They stop seeing you as an individual.”
“That’s not true.” I think about how much more myself I feel with my Asian friends than with my white friends.
“It is. Think about Christina. Eight kids applied to work at the school store, three white, four Asian, and one Mexican. How come only Christina had to get extra letters of rec? She gets good grades. It’s not like she’s a criminal. It’s because she’s wearing an M for Mexican.”
“Yeah . . .” It’s plausible. But how can anyone really know for sure? I remember what Hanh said a while back. “What about . . . I mean, I heard that Lowell likes kids to brownnose. Maybe Christina . . . I mean, I’m sure she’s nice and everything. But like that day with the Emily Dickinson book. She comes off kind of . . .”
“Bitchy?”
Well, yes. But I’m not going to say that, am I? “Maybe. Kind of.”
Jamie grimaces. “I know. I mean, that day. It was . . . well. She’s had a hard year and she was worried about getting the job. And when she’s worried it sometimes comes out as anger, you know? Like kind of a defense mechanism. It’s not personal.”
I doubt that. It felt very personal. And about as defensive as a punch in the nose.
“But I bet you’re right,” Jamie continues. “She probably got upset with Lowell because she was worried about not getting a spot. But I know for a fact that no one else got asked for extra letters. Not Janet, and Christina says she’s late all the time. Not even Jason Cole, and he’s an asshole, even to teachers.”
“Yeah, but Jason’s like, the smartest kid in our class.”
“It shouldn’t matter. If Lowell was being fair, she should’ve made him and Janet get extra references, too. But she didn’t. Christina might’ve been a bitch to Lowell, but mostly she got screwed because she’s Mexican, and she didn’t want to play Lowell’s game. Because she’s part of a group that Lowell doesn’t trust.”
When she puts it that way, I guess it makes sense. “Okay, you’re right. I get it. But I still think that having friends who are like you is better than being the only one. It’s better than being alone.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Jamie wraps her arms around her knees and rests her chin on top. “So was that what it was like for you in Wisconsin? Did you feel alone?”
“Yeah.”
“But not anymore, huh.”
“It’s different here. I have friends who get where I’m coming from, you know? And I have you.” Oops. Too far? I look away, because somehow it feels like looking somewhere else will separate me from what I just said.
But Jamie seems pleased. “Aww, really? Thanks.”
“Even if you are a nerd.”
She laughs and says, “Actually I’m glad I got you, too. I mean, I got my friends and everything, but . . .” She nudges me with her shoulder. “I feel like I can really be myself around you. I can relax.”