Afterparties: Stories

by Anthony Veasna So

Fuck everyone else, I want to say, for burdening the two of us with all their baggage. Let’s go back to minding our own business, anything but this. Who cares about our family? What have they ever done but keep us alive only to make us feel like shit?

And they imagined aloud all the nice things they could do together. They imagined a future severed from their past mistakes, the history they inherited, a world in which—with no questions asked, no hesitation felt—they completed the simple actions they thought, discussed, and dreamed.

Equipping teenagers to sniff out the nonsense of society, I told myself, that was the logic behind this new curriculum. I wanted my students to understand the doomed nature of Ahab’s hunt for Moby Dick, the profound calm of Ishmael’s aimless wandering, the difference between having “purpose,” like Ahab, and finding “meaning,” like Ishmael. I thought my students should learn the best ways to be lost.