like the only college that would really let you find your own path.”
“I’m tired,” I say. Then, before she has a chance to broadcast one of her Embrace Life lectures, I jam the earbuds back in, shut my eyes, and think about how much easier it would be to be an Asian kid. If you are Asian, the deal with your parents is clear from day one: “You have to be exactly like me except better or I will hate you and the whole community will hate you. Even all the ancestors will hate you.”
There is none of this “find your own path” bullshit. Asian parents are right up front: “Be a grade-getting android. Crush everyone around you in academics, music—as long as it’s classical—and forget about sports, friends, and sex. Be valedictorian or here’s the sword to commit hara-kiri.” Clear. Simple. Honest.
It is misting when we get off the plane six hours later in Seattle. We pick up our rental car, a Dodge Microdot, maybe a Toyota Flea, some ridiculously tiny clown car that my mother has gotten a deal on, and head south. For the entire hour-long drive, she issues bulletins about how gorgeous everything is. Even though she’s pretty much claimed every admiration molecule available, how can I argue with giant evergreens, misty rain, and this soft light that makes all the colors so deep and saturated that looking at a petunia hurts your eyes?
At Peninsula, the visiting seniors and their parents are herded into a big, open meeting hall that is decorated with carvings of salmon and whales and has an immense totem pole planted right in the middle like we are going to spend four years learning how to chew deer hide to make our moccasins all nice and soft.
The president welcomes us. He is African American. I look around the room. If a bomb went off, there wouldn’t be a Phish fan left alive. Almost everyone is not just white, but phosphorescent, Scandinavian white. Seems the only way they can get a black person to come to Peninsula is to make him president of the college.
Which doesn’t stop him from going on about “Peninsula’s commitment to diversity.” Since there aren’t any actual races to get diverse about, the next speakers are from the Ps & Qs, Peninsula’s queer alliance, the Transgendered Students United, then the Feminist Majority. If I was actually interested, I would mostly want to hear about majors and teachers, but instead I get schooled about Peninsula’s zero tolerance for pretty much anything that would hurt anyone’s super-evolved feelings.
Then we all march in a big group across the quad and into the campus dining hall.
“Can you believe this?” Mom asks, loading up her tray with heirloom tomatoes and baby arugula grown in the student-tended organic garden. The vegetables are displayed behind lights like they are Broadway stars. “You would pay a fortune for produce like this at Whole Foods.”
My mom’s celebrity vegetation euphoria makes me crave a cheeseburger, and I go outside where a grill has been set up for sad outcast carnivores like me. I decide that the diversity group I’d organize would be dedicated to bacon. I imagine saying this to Tyler. Imagine him laughing.
Back inside, Mom waves at me in her insane way that causes every single person in the entire cafeteria to stare. She is sitting with the woman who stood in line in front of us when we bought our dinner tickets. Naturally, Mom bonded instantly with her.
“Aubrey, this is Julie and her daughter, Tinsley.” I nod, but Tinsley, who is wearing a lilac jacket identical to the one her mom has on, sticks her hand out and I have to shake it.
“Tinsley plays clarinet too!” Mom announces in her hectic, separated-at-birth way.
I nod and try very hard to keep Inner Bitch under control. “OK. I don’t. Play clarinet. Haven’t really since last year.”
“Aubrey got heatstroke—”
“Heat exhaustion. And it wasn’t that bad.”
“—from not wearing her hat at the beginning of the year and is sitting out for a little while. She’ll hate my saying this, but she’s been first chair for the past two years.”
Mom, did you forget to tell them about how you couldn’t potty-train me until I was three? And, seriously, they’re going to want to know all about the ringworm episode in second grade.
“Actually,” Tinsley says, light flickering across the silver ball stud in her tongue, “I play in my boyfriend’s band.”
Of course you do. And your boyfriend is Win Butler and his band