Preview: The New Girl

“What’s your name?”

“Ashley,” she says, cooly. 

“What’s your major?”

“Dance.” She adds, “You don’t have to do this. There’s no point in becoming friends.”

She’s committed to maintaining a distance that would keep her unknown, the new girl. My newfound confidence leaves me undeterred. I sense, if I were to scratch the surface of her steely facade, I would find something similar to what I felt at my old school: invisible to the cool kids and underestimated by the teachers until you believe the narrative you’re not worth anything. I could understand her strategy—

Keep your standards low, and you won’t be disappointed. 

Keep yourself at a distance, and you won’t become a disappointment.

But I want her to know that here, anything is possible.

“We’re friends now,” I insist. 

She remains skeptical, but there is no use. We have too much in common—a particular sensibility (part artistic, part geeky, part just plain absurd), the eccentric ways we were raised (my parents are kung fu teachers, hers were clowns), and a shared sense of humor.

Neither of us have spent any time with another mixed race person, other than our siblings. It’s the first time we see ourselves reflected in a friend. We become each other’s witness, someone who understands without words. To suddenly be seen, when we have always been misunderstood, leaves us punch drunk. 

Any moment that would have become a source of shame or embarrassment—the times we are late for school or awkward encounters on the T or rules we tried (and failed) to break—becomes a story that begins, “You won’t believe what just happened.”

We draw in sketchbooks until our classmates assume that we’re Visual Arts Majors. We share Zebra Cakes from the school vending machine, cut with our T passes when we can’t find a knife. We dance to Daft Punk as the Green Line lurches through tunnels. We sing as we hit golf balls at the driving range. We run, wherever we go, shouting the vocals from the Run Lola Run soundtrack. We feed each other the pickles off our plates at Deli Haus, hoping the bartenders will notice and give us free drinks (They don’t). We eat the bananas packed in our lunches and strategically place the peels like cartoon gimmicks on the sidewalk. We dip our feet in the fountain in Copley Square. 

We know we are different, and being different in the year 2000 means you are strange, so we turn ourselves into a punchline we shout before anyone else can point it out. We become our most captive audience. 

We discover we both have to navigate the “What are you?” conversation, and turn it into a challenge.  

When someone asks us, “What are you?”

We stop answering with our parents’ ethnicities, (“My mom is white, my dad is Chinese”). Instead, we ask, “What do you think I am?”

The counter-question surprises our classmates. Maybe they take as much pleasure in an unexpected guessing game as we get in not having to yield another answer. 

They think Ashley is Cape Verdean, Puerto Rican, Brazilian.

They think I’m Hawaiian, Alaskan, an anime character. 

We both collect Russian. 

We both collect Mexican.

We collect countries like pins in a map, with a small bit of pride, even though we have never been to these places. We wear the possibility—the exoticism of our ambiguity—like a beauty pageant sash. 

I don’t yet consider the lasting impact of letting other people define who you are. I don’t yet know I’ll slowly start to feel like who I am pales in comparison to all the ways I could be. Reality can’t compete with the appeal of the new girl—mysterious, unknown—who can be whatever the beholder wants to imagine. I keep letting others label me until I feel like no one at all. 

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