Well that was fast, I thought inside my own mind. Having found Li Huang almost right away seemed too good to be true. I had to confirm it, so I stepped forward, no matter how much Tori was annoyingly tugging at my arm. She desperately wanted to leave, but I ignored that for now and asked the boy standing a couple of paces in front of me, “Hey, um, are you Li Huang? Oh, or do you prefer to be called Leon?” I had remembered that little detail.
“What’s it to ya?” the boy questioned me, blunt and harsh. His eyebrows furrowed and his frown deepened a bit. He was trying to look tough, but I could tell he was really just feeling me out to figure out what my intentions were.
I decided to match his vibe in my own way and spared no more seconds in this awkward tension. “Let’s just say our new homeroom teacher, Mrs. Johnson, sent me to find you. Also, she gave me an extra copy of tonight’s homework to give to you. Not everyone has given up on you, you know,” I tried to make that last part sound inspiring.
“Who says anyone’s given up on me?” he asked in a tone that sounded like this was his first time hearing such news.
“Uh, only almost every teacher at our school?” I said sarcastically. “And from what I’ve heard today, most of the students think you’re a delinquent. But not Mrs. Johnson and, for what it’s worth, myself. So take your homework already. It’s mostly for history class, FYI,” I stretched out my arm that wasn’t clutched in Tori’s scared grip and tried handing him the papers. I gave them a little wave at him so that they fluttered up and down as a gesture for him to take them right now.
He looked at the papers in my hand for like less than a second before making eye contact with Tori then me and flat-out said, “You’re wrong. Someone like you has no business with me.” Immediately he turned to his left and started walking in that direction, looking back down at his phone as he strolled.
Taken aback by that, I called out to him before he got even ten paces away. “Hey, at least take your homework and think it over. We’ll be waiting for you at school tomorrow. And for the record, I’m not doing your homework for you!”
“I don’t need school right now,” he said, still walking away.
“Well, uh, you are only in eleventh grade, so,” Tori suddenly said like she was thinking out loud without realizing it, but then I think she caught herself and shut her mouth instantly when Leon stopped in his tracks again and threw a mean death glare in our direction.
I wasn’t about to be swayed or spooked this easily, though. The compensation was still too grand, and I felt it slipping through my fingers with every step farther away Leon took.
Huffing a sigh, I rushed after him, unintentionally dragging Tori along with me. She stumbled forward after only three steps and nearly took me down with her. “Maybe this is for the best. There’s got to be other options on how you can get into archeology, and no one has to know we were here at all,” she tried to persuade me out of this, which was starting to get bothersome.
“Not when I’m this close.”
“Yeah, close to getting mugged or killed or gangbanged!” Her overexaggeration wasn’t completely wrong, I’d admit. We were still receiving stares from the locals here who looked whatever word is more than sketchy but less than evil.
“No one is even approaching us. And you said you called your dad’s friend, that Officer Roger guy, and convinced him to be on standby, so it’s fine,” I wanted to reassure her, but I felt like I also needed a bit of that myself due to how hard my heart was pounding in my chest.
“Um, about that,” Tori started, “I didn’t actually…call him, not yet.”
“Are you serious?”
“I was going to during study period. I really truly was, but the librarian caught me and she took my phone away. Must’ve thought I was playing a mobile game or somethin’ and said I’d get it back sometime next week.”
Knowing our school’s librarian, that must have been the truth, but I still couldn't help but tremble in both anger and fear. My hands shook violently, and I heard a group of men who looked like straight-up gangsters laugh at me behind my back. I thought I had good reason to be safe in a place like this, and I’d usually been able to rely on Tori. But in a fit of rage and insecurity, I yanked my arm out of Tori’s grasp in one swift motion and told her, “You should go home. Now.”
“But Mim-Min,” she tried to convince me otherwise.
“Now!” I yelled in her face and pointed my index finger toward what I thought was the nearest exit of the Chinatown district, gesturing for her to leave in that direction.
Tears welled up in her eyes again, and she took a few steps back but soon did as I told her to do, running as fast as she possibly could until I she disappeared over the skyline and was out of my view. I was furious, sure, and I figured it would be fine if my own recklessness came at the cost of my own safety, but not Tori’s safety. I’d never forgive myself if that happened.
Once I was alone, I turned back to find that Leon was almost completely out of my view, too. I hurried down the street after him, my backpack slamming against my back with each step due to all the new heavy textbooks in there. To my surprise, I caught up to him in a minute, and we were walking side by side. But as soon as he noticed me, Leon hastened his steps, as did I. He did it again, and so did I. My bag was weighing on me, and it took more energy from me to keep pace with Leon, and he had the advantage of “no backpack, no heavy baggage”.
It got to the extent where I was sweating badly from my forehead, out of my armpits, and under my breasts, despite it being a cool evening. A part of me prayed that he wouldn’t notice the sweat stains starting to form on my light white sweater.
We eventually passed a public circular clock that stood atop what looked like black ceramic light post that was about three quarters of the usual height of the regular streetlamps. The time read was 4:45 p.m., and my family always had dinner at 5:35 sharp. A tradition that was passed down in our bloodline ever since the first of us set foot on American soils almost a hundred years ago. If I was late, my whole cover would be blown. My plan would fail. I’d have to tell the truth, the whole truth. Then give up my archeology dream and be grounded to Dad’s glass-blowing shop, forced to get used to the accidental yet constant burns on my hands like Dad.
It wasn’t a game of cat-and-mouse between Leon and I anymore. More like a race, a race against time.
Despite my sweating, I soon had to speed up to a small run, and it made my backpack slam even harder. Leon was still faster than me, though, and he suddenly took a sharp right turn across the road, passing other pedestrians, most of them elderly, bumping into them and almost knocking them over. That right turn led him into an alley, which I figured he thought I’d be too frightened to keep following him. He was dead wrong.
I too passed by those same elderly pedestrians, but I at least had the courtesy to say, “excuse me” and “sorry” as I did so, and I entered the same alley. It was darkening as I got deeper in, and the sound of a metal garbage bin crashing against the wall because someone had thrown it (or something like that) ricocheted and bounced throughout the alley. Loud enough to make me wet my pets just a teeny tiny bit, and I whipped my head around to find no one there.
I still hadn’t found Leon yet, but I tried to remain confident and brave for the sake of my safety. Couldn’t stop my hands and wrists from trembling, though, and they made the homework papers that I was still clenching make a wavy rattling noise, the kind that paper made when someone wiggled it around.
The next thing I knew, a shadow darted in the corner of my eye, across the farthest end of the alley to a different spot as though it was trying to sneak passed me toward the alley’s exit. A pile of full black trash bags rustled in that corner, and I thought it was Leon, getting closer to escaping me. I’d had enough with these games, so I quietly and cautiously approached the trash bags pile to try and ambush him. But once I was about two feet away, my toes practically touching the stink it was emitting, a stray orange tabby cat suddenly leapt out from behind that pile and scared the living crap out of me as it meowed angrily.
I got so scared I lost my footing as I stepped back to avoid getting clawed by the animal and I feel backwards onto my ass. It felt like the back of my tailbone (not sure it that was correct, I didn’t know human anatomy very well) hit the cold hard concrete because a jolt of pain shot up from my butt and into my spine. Then it started to throb, and I felt my own eyes began to get teary from the pain and shock.
As I rubbed my tailbone, I suddenly heard Leon’s voice burst out laughing from behind me. I spun my head and upper body back to see that he was hiding there in the shadows the whole time, and he was laughing at me. He was laughing at my clumsiness and embarrassment. Humiliated, I shouted at him to shut up and tried to pin all the blame on him.
“Yeah, that’s what most people say when they’ve just done something so stupid,” he said as brutal as before.
I quickly learned that this was the kind of person Li Huang was, and I wanted no part of him. Not as a seat neighbor. Not as a classmate. Not as a school friend. Not even as a means to get myself into a good college. Not anymore.
Trying to stand up, I felt another surge of throbbing pain shoot up through my ass and I winced. I eventually pushed myself into a steep crouching position and then used my leg muscles to lift up the rest of my body till I was standing and satisfied. But that didn’t last half a minute because I felt a wetness at my crotch. Looking down, I realized I had completely peed my pants when the cat scared me. Immediately, I covered my crotch with Leon’s homework still in my hands, but I didn’t dare turn around to face the jerk.
Shockingly, he put his right hand on my left shoulder as he finally stopped laughing and said, “Hey, hey, look. I’m sorry, alright? Anyone would laugh at anyone who did what you just did. Haha, hell, could’ve been old home video footage of AFV, ya know?”
This was supposed to make me feel better?
“You know what? I don’t need your sympathy or your sadistic idea of a joke,” I told him off, wanting to walk away and leave Chinatown for good, but Leon’s grip on my shoulder was too strong. It kept me in one place, making me wondering if he did some kind of daily regimen of hand and wrist exercises.
“I’m just trying to apologize to you.” He sounded sincere, but I was too angry to care.
“Then you should’ve done it sooner, before the alley part!” Without even looking at him and withy my eyes closed for a second or two, I took one hand off the papers held horizontally at my crotch and pinched the back of his hand with my thumb and index finger hard enough to make him let go.
As soon as he pulled his hand back, I started making a B-line for the alley’s exit, running with the papers still covering my crotch. What I didn’t expect was for Leon to take three gigantic steps after me and grabbed both my backpack and one of my forearms to pull me back towards him. But that was when my ankle twisted a little, not enough to hurt, but rather flung me in the direction I was heading for instead. This time I didn’t feel much pain when we landed, but it caused the fates of the universe to align, I supposed, because we both fell forward and Leon landed on top of me as though we were going to actually do it down and dirty. From a bystander’s point of view, it looked as though I would have had my first time in a filthy alley with the one upside it being so dark that no one else would see us from beyond its entrance.
I didn’t even realize he had me pinned down with both my wrists in his grasp and they were next to my head on the concrete ground. Our eyes remained locked on each other as I continued to feel where the rest of my body parts had landed and to make sure I hadn’t somehow injured myself in the process. Nothing else was hurting, but my pants were still wet, and I thought about kicking Leon down in his manhood just to get away before he noticed.
How could this possibly get any worse?
Then all of a sudden, Leon took the homework papers from me as they had been crinkled up my right hand this whole time. He graciously got off of me while trying to avoid hurting me but also holding one of my wrists tightly to ensure I couldn’t leave easily. I could have sworn I saw a slight flush of red blushing in his face as he did this, but I didn’t think much of it.
He sat on his knees, then he offered his hand to me to help me sit up, which I was reluctant to accept but did it anyway. I didn’t know what had come over me. Maybe it was the loss of bodily fluids, or had I hit my head too hard on the ground when I fell? But this time when I looked at Leon, he seemed more…genuinely empathetic.
“Listen, I got a friend who lives near here. He’s got a good place and I’m sure he’ll let you use his bathroom to freshen up and maybe, you know, uh…wash your pants.” He said with a lot more sympathy before I realized what he was talking about.
I looked down at my clothes. Sweat stains littered the collar of my shirt, in my armpits and under boobs. Worse, the wet spot on my crotch was totally visible from how I was sitting, and I immediately covered it with my hands and closed my legs together.
“Don’t worry, it’s not like it’s the end of the world,” he assured calmly as he got back on his feet. “I’ll be taking this homework, and I’ll consider your request and help you, just this once, if you do a favor for me later,” Whatever that meant, it couldn’t be good, but I felt I was in no position to decline his help. “Can you stand up?”
I stood up on my own, and then I followed Leon out of the alley closely behind him, trying not to make it too obvious that I had wet myself in public. He even went out of his way to help block any noticeability towards my now dampened crotch and inner thighs. Together we made our way through the throngs of people in Chinatown with Leon taking the lead.
Was I about to trust this guy? No.
If I ever did choose to trust him, would I end up regretting it? Perhaps.
Though time flows on, as they say.
I couldn’t think of a single reason not to doubt Leon, even though he was supposedly guiding me to a safe haven belonging to his so-called friend. (Jeez, now that I’d said it to myself, the logic in there is flawed.) God only knows what was going on in that head of his. First he was hesitant and vacant of me; then he was rude to me; then he laughed at me like I was the biggest joke in all of creation; then he became sympathetic of me; and now he was trying to make up for his vulgar attitude earlier by helping me hide my shame?
Here I thought only a deity as high as God Himself would have behaviors as varying as Leon Huang. Li Huang? Whichever it was, I just wanted to get cleaned up and get the hell out of Hell. (Haha, that was kind of funny, right?)
Within minutes we arrived at an apartment complex with a total of three floors and below it all was a small convenience store and its title was in Chinese characters I didn’t understand. There were two separate doors on either side of the front face of the building, one of which led straight into the store that was still open as it was indicated by the sign on the door’s top window. I could tell because the OPEN part was spelled in English.
We walked past this door, and as I peeked inside through the big window along the front wall, there was a middle-aged man with his silver hair receding to the back of his head standing behind the cashier counter, but he looked like he was dozing off the way his eyelids drooped and his head kept dipping forward.
Leon pulled me along as I slowed down a bit, and he led me to the building’s other front door. I expected him to ring the worn out doorbell that was no longer fully white and had dirt stains all over it. Instead he pounded his fist on the door itself like five times, so hard that it shook in and out and I thought it might either come off of its hinges or he’d break open a hole in the wood. “Was that really necessary?” I asked.
“For someone like Kun Lang, yes. He’s usually napping around this time and he sleeps like a rock,” he said glancing over his shoulder just to look at me shortly before turning back to the door as though it was about to be answered any second now. He continued, “And if you want me to keep helping you like a good boy, I suggest you stop asking too many questions and start being a little more grateful.”
Jesus. Attitude again.
He pounded on the door again two more times before we both heard footsteps scurrying down the stairs like a rat’s claws scrabbling across a tile floor. “Who is it?” a teen boy’s voice called out from behind the door.
“It’s me Leon! Got a bit of an emergency here, open up!”
I heard three different locks unlock on the other side before the door opened a crack big enough to jam in a grown man’s toes and I realized there was a chained lock on the door as a final set of security. In the crack, there was another Chinese teenage boy peeking through, which I would have guessed was enough confirmation to let his friend and a guest inside, but I was dead wrong.
He said something in Chinese that went along the lines of, “Nǐ de chéngnuò shì shénme?”
Leon responded also in Chinese, “Xīn suì.”
Then the other boy said this time in English, “Who’s the girl?”
“She’s the emergency. Personal reasons. Let us in,” Leon kept it short and sweet.
The boy said one more thing that went like, “Méi wèntí, zhǎngguān.,” before he closed the door almost the rest of the way in order to unlock the fourth and final lock on the door.
Once the door was open, I got a better look at Leon’s friend. He had black hair like me yet he didn’t bother with colored hair dye, it was shoulder-length, and the style was unnaturally wavy as though he used a curling iron every morning. His mud brown eyes scanned me up and down my body like he was trying to drink me in, or at least what he could see of me because Leon was still covering mostly my lower half by spreading his hands out while keeping his arms mostly at his sides. I stayed behind Leon as we both sidestepped inside to the landing at the bottom of the stairs ascending to the apartments. Introductions were made and Leon then told his friend Kun Lang to close his eyes until he said it was okay, which Kun was reluctant to at first. “Why do I have to do that? With this shǎngxīnyuèmù dì kě'ài xiǎo wányì in my house?”
“Um…?” I said without thinking but also wondering if he’d just insulted me in Chinese.
“He called you a ‘cute piece of eye candy’,” Leon clarified to me before telling Kun, “I told you already, it’s personal.”
“Oooooooohh…” Kun smirked at Leon, “Nǐmen liǎ yào gǎo ma?”
I don’t know what he said, but it was enough to make Leon gut punch Kun so hard that he slumped over holding his stomach, and Leon was blushing even more than earlier (if he really was, but I still wasn’t sure).
While Kun was hunched in pain, Leon told me to head up the stairs to the second floor above the convenience store. Step by step, the floorboards creaked with dignified age, almost proud of how old and rundown is was getting to be. Leon followed me just one meager step behind. By the time Kun straightened his back and followed after us, we were already up halfway there.
It was an open floor plan at the second level above the store. A hallway was parallel to the staircase, and Kun shouted up to me that the living room and his bedroom were at the front face of the building, but that wasn’t what I needed.
“Please, where’s your bathroom?” I asked as politely as I possibly could, considering all the crap going on. I’d never forget my manners as a guest in someone else’s home, and especially my own home in Little Saigon, but today’s events were wearing my patience thin.
“Go towards the back of the apartment, turn left, and it’s the door at the end of the hall next to the kitchen. Can’t miss it,” Kun sure sounded cheery.
ns216.73.216.141da2
and then Add to home screen.