Andy Zhang

A teenage girl rests alone in her Virginia dormitory, protected from the bullets of snow outside. Her skin, dirtied brown with constant slander, sinks heavily in bed against white linen, an innocently final resting place. Four beige walls enclose her. It’s a coffin plastered with the dead American iconography she once so fervently believed in. 

The night before, she had feasted on a last supper of mezze, messy platters of tabbouleh and hummus inauthentic to her childhood spread graciously on the long cafeteria table downstairs. Twelve friends sat around her, skin protected, hair swaddled in soft cloth while her black curls ran free in open defiance of God.

Upstairs in her dormitory corner, her Sunday best awaits: an angrily white silk dress strewn on a fallen chair, high heels lonely from touch for at least a month. She had not gone to church last week, and would not again.

She wonders if her friends had gone to pray the Friday before.

Her laptop lay open, a once peaceful screen of white filled with evil Latin characters invading her mind left to right, messages of hate forcing her back to her childhood.

Long live the American Dream, she thought, as she closed her eyes for the last time…