In the ninth grade, I was in close competition with two students for our class's number one spot. The first kid was a quiet korean girl named Ai whose face has faded beneath the crush of the thirteen schools I attended and the thousands of students who attended them. The second was a Japanese boy named Joo who was my first real crush. Him I can still see clearly--four inches shorter than me in highwaters, his blue bookbag always wrinkling the shoulders of his neatly pressed polo shirts.
Despite true love (or perhaps because of it), I took this competition very seriously. Nothing is so important to a nerd as the battle for supremacy with other nerds. It's absolute gravity, however, was undercut by my mother's reaction when I informed her, with every bit of my teenage solemnity, of the bitter struggle.
"With who, dear?"
"Me, Joo and Ai."
No comments:
Post a Comment