Fresh Ink: "One Voice: A Something In-Between Story" by Melissa de la Cruz

A big middle finger and a particularly shocking phrase smack in the middle of my Monday morning, reminding me that—even at what you thought was your prestigious cosmopolitan university, the one you had worked so hard to attend—someone will try to make you feel like you’re an imposter.

I’ll give the tagger this much credit: he or she was bold, choosing this spot, knowing so many students passed through the quad.

“It’s so awful,” Yen-Yen said, passing me the pipette.

I placed a drop of the diluted solution onto a Petrifilm plate. We had to wait for the gel to form so we could count bacteria colonies and determine the level of water impurity.

“It’s a fungal spore that embeds in your lungs.”

I’d already been through so much the last year: discovering my family wasn’t documented, winning a national scholarship I wasn’t able to accept because of my status, fighting through deportation proceedings.

We even talked about getting married so I could get a green card and be naturalized, but I didn’t want to put that pressure on our relationship.

Everything about college life—like fighting with your roommate about over-borrowing her flip-flops, or figuring out whose room is the best place to watch TV—seemed trivial.

I got up from where I was sprawled across the bed.

“They spray-painted her entire car with racial slurs,” one girl said.

Maybe I was being sensitive, but I felt gross when I heard a few students in the dorms making jokes about the hate speech. My stomach churned when a meme started circulating.

“Before you start acting so overprotective, maybe you should consider what it’s like to be me when stupid, shallow guys talk about how they only want to date Asian girls. Or how I feel when someone tells me we all look the same, or how frustrating it is because we’re all born to lose. Try playing second banana to the pretty-white-girl standard.”

You know how those close to you tend to get the brunt of your worst feelings?

Hundreds of students flooded the quad, all to reclaim the space the graffiti briefly tried to inhabit.

We were taking back the air, Jordan Hall, the negativity, the oppressive residue that scared so many of us to walk faster with our heads down.