WHAT SHE WANTED TO SHOW YOU
tai dong huai
When you are fifteen, a girl in your Spanish class named Sophie Rogers says she wants to show you something. She found it out from her brother, and to see it you'll have to sneak into the first floor boys' room when nobody else is around.
You finally get up your nerve and one afternoon, as the busses are being called, you see it. It's in the middle stall, written in black permanent marker, and it refers to you: LEAH YAO JANETTI GIVES GOOD HEAD.
At home, you're silent and sleepless. Finally, you can't bear it any longer. You make up your mind to go back in there and, if you can't erase it, at least change the letters: EBAH YAQ JAWBTTL GIVES GOOD READ. Anything.
So you sneak back early one morning with Formula 409, paper towels, and a black Magic Marker. But someone has beaten you there. Under the original words, carved in the very metal of the stall itself, someone has written bullshit.
From them until the time you graduate, you entertain an unlikely fantasy. One in which a guy, someone who wears a different face every night in your dreams, steps from the crowded school hallway and says, "You are Leah Yao Janetti and you are not anyone to be taken lightly."
Tai Dong Huai
taidonghuai@gmail.com
Hollywood and Hardwood
Tricia Bauer