Dave, known disaster bisexual, is in love with Marie. But Marie is dating Dean, the handsomest guy in town.
After being gifted a magical bracelet, Dave gains the ability to transform into a totally different person...Jade, a beautiful, alluring al...
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Once they came back up for air after sucking on each other's faces, Marie and Dean offered to drive me back. But I ended up declining their invitation.
"Are you sure?" Dean asked, confused. "How are you going to get back home? There's no public transport here." He was right about that.
I shrugged. "I'll take an Uber," I replied. Marie and I lived fairly close to each other. It would be a pretty quick trip.
Soon, my ride arrived. As I climbed into the passenger's seat, Marie hung around Dean's side with a bit of an anxious air about her. I avoided making eye contact with her. Despite our efforts to reconcile, there was still a bit of an awkward tension between us.
"It was nice seeing you again," I said.
Marie smiled, and I felt my spine tremble slightly.
"It was good to see you too," she replied quietly.
The pair of them stood in the driveway, waving to me. Marie clung with one hand onto Dean's right sleeve, holding onto him tightly. Dean towered over her, wrapping an arm around her slender shoulders protectively. They looked beautiful together. A six foot three white man and his gorgeous Asian girlfriend. Who wouldn't want to be them?
I forced myself to turn away and focus on the road in front of me, even if I wasn't driving.
"Candy?" My Uber driver asked hesitantly, holding a dish with some HiChews that looked like they had seen better days. He was a thin, balding white man with glasses and the nervous energy of a Shih Tzu. Not wanting to be impolite, I quietly accepted and placed the stale confection on my tongue. As we drove back towards my childhood home, my mouth filled with the sweet taste of Asian melon. The same taste as the plain green candies I used to buy from the Korean store near Marie's house when we were children.
When we pulled up at the front, I could see that Mom's garden was going into hibernation for the winter. I could also hear the telltale barks of Bup excitedly announcing our presence. Within minutes, Mom's face appeared in the window, pulling back the old lace curtains that were so broken that Dad and I finally gave up and directly duct-taped them to the window frame. I smiled and waved to her, rolling down the window. She did not wave back, only hurried away to unlock the front door. I dropped my smile and thanked Dennis (my Uber Driver), before carefully stepping out of the car. Taking care not to tread on any of Mom's vegetable patch, I made my way over to the front door where Mom was waiting for me with a blank expression on her face.
"Hey," I said. "Where's Dad?"
Mom just shook her head. At first, I took that to mean he was not spending the holidays with us, but her expression said otherwise. "He's inside," she said. "Waiting to say hi to you."
"Oh, okay." I had been expecting a slightly more enthusiastic welcome. To be fair, it was quite late though. I reached down and hugged her awkwardly, trying to remember how to act like a good son. When she let go, I tried not to pay attention to how much thinner and frailer she felt. Mom had always been skinny, insisting that the best way to live a healthy life was by eating only home-grown vegetables. The path to salvation, she would lecture me after coming back from the Korean church, was by starting from within. I didn't have the heart to inform her that I would be going to hell for multiple reasons (not limited to the fact that I still eat meat), nor did I point out the irony of going to a majority-Korean church when we both knew she did not know a single word of Korean. Still, I figured that maybe it was comforting to her to spend time with the other Asian American Christian families. Regardless, there were no Vietnamese-speaking churches near us.
