WHEN THE STRIPPER STRUTTED INTO THE LIBRARY, SHE COULDN’T hide her dismay.
Probably, she and her bodyguard expected a bachelor party or investment bankers celebrating a big deal at the mansion overlooking the Newport Coast.
She wouldn’t have anticipated a pack of teenagers gathered to celebrate Faraz’s 16th birthday. All told, more than a hundred of us waited in the library, which felt old and grand, the kind of place where kings signed treaties. Her burly, bald bodyguard threw open his arms. “Get back, get back!”
The stripper was Chinese like me, or at least half. I could tell by the tilt of her eyes and the duskiness of her skin, which glittered like she’d been dipped in diamond dust. When she glanced at me, something flashed across her face. She must have danced for Asian customers, plenty of times, but I might have reminded her of her kid brother, a cousin, or someone in her extended family she’d sat across from at a Chinese banquet.
She looked away so quickly, I wondered if I’d imagined it.
A camera flash went off. “No pictures!” her bodyguard shouted. With a meaty hand, he grabbed the phone, deleting the photo before returning it to its owner.
Even from yards away, the stripper was the closest I’d ever been to someone about to get
almost naked. Tiny, she perched on clear plastic heels that must have felt like walking on stilts.
I wasn’t naïve; I knew Asians could grow up to be strippers and porn stars. Yet each time I watched the Jasmines, Jades, and Alexxxas online—and I know this sounds weird—I felt if people ever saw me and the actress standing near each other in line, they’d assume we were related. Not together, like dating, but as if we were brother and sister.
Despite the bodyguard’s warning, my friend, Nick, began filming, shooting from hip level. He was always pushing it, though I suppose we both had crashed the party, which was mostly juniors and seniors and a few lucky sophomores like us. In the cafeteria, Faraz had issued an invitation to some friends, and we’d been in the vicinity.
Our high school had a handful of Chinese and Koreans, Indians and Pakistanis too. In the AP and honors classes, you might think you were in Irvine or Fullerton, with an occasional white guy, but there was only one other person like me that afternoon at Faraz’s: the stripper.
The air was swampy with body spray and deodorant. We weren’t the most enlightened bunch. Last spring, the seniors had run a prom draft, ranking the hottest girls in school and asking them out in the order of their draft numbers. Afterward, every male student had been required to attend sexual harassment training. Clearly, it hadn’t worked.
Nick pocketed his phone. “What’s your stripper name?” he asked.
“Stripper name?” I asked.
“The name of your first pet and the first street where you lived. I’m Kit Van Tappen.”
My parents didn’t allow us to have pets, but I used to cuddle a stuffed panda bear. “Oreo Arroyo.”
“What do you think her name is? Rainbow? Star?” Nick asked. “‘Me so horny. Me love you long time.’” He was quoting from that Vietnam War movie.
He’d noticed she might be Asian too, which made me feel defensive and possessive all at once.
“Yo, Rossi,” Boyle called out and fist-bumped Nick. He didn’t say anything to me.
My family had moved here when I was in the eighth grade, while
