The summer before my ninth grade year, I spent a month at the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, also known as CTY. When I arrived, I was reluctant to make friends; after all, I was there to write meandering personal essays and read my fraying copy of Little Women, pages riddled with dog-ears and greasy fingerprints, for the fifth time. I was especially hesitant to make friends with the opposite gender, a bunch I had been desperately trying to avoid since I got rejected by my seventh grade crush, a lanky boy with ashy blonde hair and knobbly red knees. Of course, that was until I met Alex Yann.
Alex Yann was a mess of contradictions. He was stocky, six foot two, ridiculously muscular, and yet fiercely smart in an in-your-face, obvious, “I got a 1600 on my SATs in the eighth grade and you didn’t” kind of way. He was from Hong Kong, but spoke in a lilting, upper-crust British accent from his years spent at an international school. Every morning he tucked a basketball under his arm and walked across campus to the courts, but I often caught him half an hour later sitting cross-legged against the chain link fence, scribbling furiously into his black leather-bound notebook with a chewed-up number two pencil.
Alex Yann sat next to me in class. He grinned at me when the professor, a woman in a constant state of harried urgency, spilled coffee over her peony-dotted blouse in her rush to exit the lecture hall. He passed me notes on jagged pieces of lined paper he ripped out of his notebook, quips about the girl in the corner of the class drooling out of her gaping mouth, head collapsed into her folded hands, the boy with both his shoes off picking at a hole in his dirt-crusted sock, the incessant fan rattling in the corner of the room. He talked to me about the stack of books I kept in the corner of my desk, asked me questions about the authors and the prose and the plot; he followed up my comments in class, about Eula Biss’s telephone poles and Foster Wallace’s lobsters, with effusive, unnecessary compliments. He told me about Hong Kong, about the street markets and the cheap sushi and the crystal-clear lakes just outside of the city, described how the towering buildings lit up at night in vibrant shades of neon; how you couldn’t see the stars but you could watch those glittering lights blink in and out of focus from his apartment building’s rooftop, and that when you squinted, the lights bled from red to blue to blazing magenta until all you could see was a swirling explosion of color.
On a particularly beautiful afternoon, when the sun spilled through the leafy summer oak trees and left buttery pools of light on the sidewalks, and crowds of students laid out on the quad like they did on the glossy pages of the campus brochures, and a woman stood next to the library passing out sticky frozen grape popsicles, Alex Yann taught me the value of respect.
We were sitting in the cafeteria, a sun-soaked room with windows lining its entire left side and giant posters covered in encouraging statements plastered across the wooden walls, things like, “Apply to Hopkins- we want talented youth!” and “Hopkins values your ideas!” printed in chunky blue and black block letters, when Alex Yann decided that he couldn’t see any Wasian people in the room- that was, except for me.
He looks at me with a curious, unsettling expression. “You know,” he starts, picking at the mound of chicken on his plate with a flimsy white plastic fork. “I think you’re the only Wasian here.” I look around. Sure enough, there is no one among the throng of textbook-toting Chinese boys and glasses-wearing Korean girls that looks anything like me.
He straightens up onto his elbows and lifts his dark eyes to mine, his usual good-natured smile spread across his face. “You’re so lucky you’re Wasian,” he says, nodding slightly and smiling like he’s letting me in on a secret.
“What?” I laugh, leaning into him across the table like maybe I didn’t hear him quite right.
“I just mean…” He pauses. He takes another, contemplating, bite of his chicken. He takes a breath. “Wasians are so hot,” he finally exclaims.
Bewildered, I set down my own white plastic fork on the grainy faux-wood table. “What?” I repeat.
“You’re so lucky you’re Wasian,” he insists for the second time, leaning further into his elbows and closer to me. “I wish I was Wasian,” he continues, widening his eyes laced with an incontestable secret meaning. “Wasians are just, so, hot.” His shoulders tense. I push away from the table with my hands, disturbed by the pressing look in his eyes. My chair makes an aggressive screech against the hardwood floor.
“Alex,” I scoff, disbelieving. “What are you talking about?” He doesn’t say anything, just stares intensely at me through his mop of shaggy black hair. He’s so tense now I can see his whole body trembling. His chest heaves underneath his black t-shirt. His smile falls from his face.
“Sometimes I wonder…” he trails off after a lengthy pause. “What this whole thing would be like if I didn’t have a girlfriend.” My heart starts to beat faster, thrumming oh no, oh no, oh no, inside my chest. His eyes slip down to my gold-plated necklace, burning jagged, white-hot lines into my skin; then further, to the lacy neckline of my low-cut white tank. “What I would be doing,” he exhales, reaching under the table to set his large, heavy hand on my thigh. Oh God, oh no. I can feel his next words sticky on my skin, like the feeling in the air before a rainstorm, like a greasy sludge clinging to the frizzy ends of my dyed-blonde hair. I can feel his eyes slide down further, boring into my skin, my chest.
“You know.” he says, low in his throat. “...Who, I would be doing.”
I wonder if he can see my heart breaking underneath my freckled skin.
I try to reconcile the Alex Yann I knew, the boy who asked me about my cozy hometown cafes, my folders of tear-stained sheet music, my beloved meditation of putting pen to paper, my dog-eared copy of Little Women, with the Alex now sitting across from me running his sweaty hand up my thigh underneath the cafeteria table, but I can’t. I can’t move. I’m frozen. I’m frozen, and I sit with his hand sliding higher up my thigh, and all I can do is look around me at the posters on the walls, at the Indian boy absentmindedly pressing his overflowing styrofoam cup against the soda dispenser, at the pack of black fluffy dogs bounding across the quad outside the window to my left, at the shards of glass raining down on Alex and me, the ones from the shattered illusion of our friendship. They catch the light streaming through the windows and throw vibrant neon rainbows, rainbows that remind me of the dazzling lights of Hong Kong, all over the walls.
Alex Yann taught me the value of respect. Alex Yann, and Liam Burk, and Jaksen Vargas, and every other teenage boy who has ever made me feel like I was nothing. They have taught me that to deny someone respect is to deny them of their right to feel human; they have shown me that every time a teenage boy looks at a girl with lust in his eyes, a girl who looks at them and sees a friend, a confidant, a person with whom to share passing thoughts and trivial secrets and the last M&M at the bottom of her crinkled brown paper wrapper with, he chips away at the thing she holds near and dear to her heart with her pink-painted nails: self-worth. Before them, she thinks she is funny. Before them, she thinks she is kind and good-hearted and sweet. Before them, she thinks she is interesting not because she has wide, “exotic” eyes, not because she has soft lips, not because she has a big chest, but because she keeps piles of books stacked under her bed; because she listens to Cat Power every time it rains; because she has a scar on her left knee from a second-grade fall off of a jungle gym, because she bakes her best friends cookies on the weekends, because she keeps her memories tied up in braided friendship bracelets and rusting charm necklaces and kitschy, overflowing diaries.
Respect: to be a teenage boy and look at a teenage girl and not look at her chest, and want to be her friend not because she is a teenage girl with a chest, but because she is a person.
Kassidy Marks is a high school sophomore with not nearly enough time on her hands; what little free time she can scrounge up, she spends reading. And when you can’t find her with her nose buried in a fantasy novel, she’s probably assembling a four-tiered wedding cake that’s seconds away from toppling over. She currently lives in Massachusetts with her parents, sister, and adorably chubby cockapoo.