Sunday, December 19, 2004
High School Crush Pt. 1
Today I finally busted out of the house I've been hiding in since I got back here. I took the car and drove over the mighty, frozen Mississippi, past two highways, downtown and the capitol. Tucked a few miles behind the big city, I found the house of my old friend from high school. When I got there, she was standing outside in the 3 degrees Fahrenheit weather in nothing more than pants and a long sleeve shirt.
"Youa," I shouted as I slammed the car door shut and felt the bitter cold pinch my face, "aren't you freezing?!?" I seem to have my own way of saying hello.
She invited me inside, where I had been once before. The house was old and dirty and run-down. I remembered as I saw for the second time, that these are the conditions truly poor people live in. There were dozens of old shoes piled up by the entrance. There was very little furniture: a tiny old couch that hardly sat two people, a wooden stool, and an armchair. Youa pulled up a chair from behind the door, an old one you could imagine having to sit in uncomfortably for hours in school.
Across the room, I spotted her grandma whose body concealed the only armchair. She sat there and looked at me without revealing any expression on her face. I tried to smile towards her, but her expression remained nondescript and unchanged. Her grandma's arm was all red, like a vein popped in her body and you could see the blood rushing up to the surface of the skin. An IV-tube made its way out of her arm, and at the other end of the IV was a bottle with medication sitting by her side.
"We just have to change her tube," Youa told me. I smiled and said that it would be no problem. I looked around the house, but there wasn't much to plant my eyes on. Her mom sat across from me cutting a cube of tofu into the thinnest slices I've ever seen. Her sister, father, and cousin were all huddling around grandma as they cleaned her tubes and switched them.
It's been exactly a year since I've seen Youa. And it was probably half a year since I saw her the time before that. We go back a long way, five and a half years, to my freshman year in high school. Being the nerd that I am, as a first semester freshman, I found myself in Precalculus with all the juniors, Youa included.
Precalculus was the first class in the morning. While most of the students were out socializing by their lockers until the end of the bell forced them into class, I used to head right to class in the mornings. It was a yet another new school for me. I knew no one, and I sure wasn't going to find friends hanging out by locker gossiping about who made out with who over the weekend.
Morning upon morning, I used to see Youa in the classroom, too. Sometimes her head was planted on the desk, covered by the hoodie of her jacket, sometimes she was working on homework, other times she just smiled to me as I walked in. Always, her short legs dangled from the chair seat. Never did they reach the floor.
Youa had big glasses, and the biggest cheeks I'd ever seen. She had stringy black bangs, and hair that could reach far lower than her dangling feet when she sat down. Even though her eyes slanted much more than mine, I thought to myself that maybe with her serious, studious, reserved demeanor she was the closest thing to a friend I could find in this strange America. With time I learned that her family fled the Far East during the Vietnam War and somehow ended up in the whitewashed upper Midwest.
"Youa," I shouted as I slammed the car door shut and felt the bitter cold pinch my face, "aren't you freezing?!?" I seem to have my own way of saying hello.
She invited me inside, where I had been once before. The house was old and dirty and run-down. I remembered as I saw for the second time, that these are the conditions truly poor people live in. There were dozens of old shoes piled up by the entrance. There was very little furniture: a tiny old couch that hardly sat two people, a wooden stool, and an armchair. Youa pulled up a chair from behind the door, an old one you could imagine having to sit in uncomfortably for hours in school.
Across the room, I spotted her grandma whose body concealed the only armchair. She sat there and looked at me without revealing any expression on her face. I tried to smile towards her, but her expression remained nondescript and unchanged. Her grandma's arm was all red, like a vein popped in her body and you could see the blood rushing up to the surface of the skin. An IV-tube made its way out of her arm, and at the other end of the IV was a bottle with medication sitting by her side.
"We just have to change her tube," Youa told me. I smiled and said that it would be no problem. I looked around the house, but there wasn't much to plant my eyes on. Her mom sat across from me cutting a cube of tofu into the thinnest slices I've ever seen. Her sister, father, and cousin were all huddling around grandma as they cleaned her tubes and switched them.
It's been exactly a year since I've seen Youa. And it was probably half a year since I saw her the time before that. We go back a long way, five and a half years, to my freshman year in high school. Being the nerd that I am, as a first semester freshman, I found myself in Precalculus with all the juniors, Youa included.
Precalculus was the first class in the morning. While most of the students were out socializing by their lockers until the end of the bell forced them into class, I used to head right to class in the mornings. It was a yet another new school for me. I knew no one, and I sure wasn't going to find friends hanging out by locker gossiping about who made out with who over the weekend.
Morning upon morning, I used to see Youa in the classroom, too. Sometimes her head was planted on the desk, covered by the hoodie of her jacket, sometimes she was working on homework, other times she just smiled to me as I walked in. Always, her short legs dangled from the chair seat. Never did they reach the floor.
Youa had big glasses, and the biggest cheeks I'd ever seen. She had stringy black bangs, and hair that could reach far lower than her dangling feet when she sat down. Even though her eyes slanted much more than mine, I thought to myself that maybe with her serious, studious, reserved demeanor she was the closest thing to a friend I could find in this strange America. With time I learned that her family fled the Far East during the Vietnam War and somehow ended up in the whitewashed upper Midwest.
