You Are Here by Ellen Oh

Author:Ellen Oh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

8

Henry

There were only two people from Henry Yun’s family traveling to New Jersey that day, and it would have been unremarkable that Henry himself was the calmer of the two, if not for the fact that he was twelve years old, and the other person was his father. Henry hadn’t always been the more calm one, but then again, Henry’s parents hadn’t always been divorced. “The only constant in life is change,” Henry’s mom liked to say. Henry knew that was true, but he also knew being true didn’t stop it from being a giant pain in the butt.

The thing Henry had heard back in the security line didn’t help, either. It’d been several minutes since Henry’s ears had been assailed by the sound of someone talking in an insultingly fake Asian accent, real “ching chong” kind of stuff. And even though he and his dad had put their belts and shoes on the conveyor belt and were about to walk through the body scanner, he was still pretty agitated about it. To be fair, everyone in the airport was pretty agitated by then, since whatever had gone on in the security line had been bad enough to make TSA shut one line down entirely.

“You hanging in there, buddy?” asked James Yun, the less calm of the two Yuns (by just a little bit, to be fair), as they put their shoes back on and started toward their gate. James was an academic librarian who often went to conferences—he served on committees and the like—and so spent a lot of time in airports. The committee work sounded like the most boring thing on the planet to Henry, but he liked that his dad always brought home a bunch of free books that hadn’t been officially published yet—advanced promotional copies, the publishers called them. Henry liked books more than almost anything, except maybe cats and donuts.

What Henry didn’t like was his dad getting upset, so he was relieved to be the only one who’d noticed what had happened back at security—it would have set his dad off, for sure, and Henry wasn’t about to tell him what he’d missed—but he also felt a little ashamed about not having done anything, because wasn’t racism something people should stop? But what if “people” meant him, Henry, who’d never met a fight he wasn’t willing to run away from? His aikido sensei always talked about walking away from fights unless they were unavoidable. That made sense to Henry, but he’d actually started taking aikido classes to learn how to fight, because bullies were everywhere, and he was tired of being afraid of them, and anyway, he wasn’t even sure there was a connection between keeping secrets from his dad and walking away from a fight in the first place.

Ugh. Life is complicated.

“I’m okay, Dad—I bet this trip’s less stressful than when I was four and we flew to Washington, DC, right?” Henry said. It was a blatant attempt to change the subject, but Henry

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.