Elaine Hsieh Chou wrote three different versions of her debut novel, Disorientation, a bitingly funny, searing indictment of the racism and whiteness of academia. “‘Interlude,’ Chou told Guernica, “is taken from the first version, which included four ‘interludes,’ written in a very different tone from the rest of the novel, that were extended flashbacks to a pivotal moment in each of the four main character’s lives. This was Ingrid’s.”

The compelling remnant depicts a painful and devastating episode of Ingrid’s life — and a fascinating window into the author’s creative process.

–Autumn Watts for Guernica

Anaheim, 1983

Ingrid Yang lost her virginity to Stephen Greene in the den of his parents’ house, on a puke-orange sofa with doilies on the arms. She wondered what exactly she was losing, since it did not feel like he was losing anything. She had an image of herself being eaten away, neat chomps taken out of her arms and thighs as above her, Stephen grew larger, more substantial. He was gaining something — but what?

To distract herself from the pain — pain that was raw and unrelenting and somehow, sour — she studied him. Stephen’s eyelashes were nothing like hers: overpopulated and sturdy, rather than sparse and thin. She had to resist reaching up to flick them. The freckles on his shoulders, too, were a source of unfamiliar fascination.

Adding to the surreal film that clung to everything was the situation she found herself in. The couch reeking of onion dip. The TV shouting an episode of Hill Street Blues. Stephen jerking his hips into her as his jeans slid down to pool around his ankles. The ceiling fan paddling the stale air like a silent admonishment.

As children, Stephen had only acknowledged Ingrid’s existence twice. Once when they were sitting in the back field during an earthquake drill, some boys started trading jokes to pass the time. Stephen glanced at her before telling the one about Chinese parents naming their children after pots and pans falling down the stairs.

But Ingrid was given her name after her parents had watched Casablanca and fallen in love with it. She didn’t tell him this.

Another time, Stephen found a broken friendship bracelet on the ground, a braid of multi-colored threads, and held it taut in front of Ingrid’s eyes, asking, “Can you still see?” He laughed and another boy laughed and Ingrid laughed, too, they were classmates after all. They navigated the jungle gym together, they huddled cross-legged on the nubby gray carpet, they placed their hands over their hearts every morning and pledged allegiance to the same country. She wanted everyone to know she laughed at the same things they laughed at. In this case, herself.

None of this was remarkable because it was just children playing. Winnie, Susan, and Lorrie played similar games all the time and they were her closest friends.

In middle school, when Ingrid had complained of her flat chest, Winnie had comforted her and explained that it was simply because she was Chinese, they were a flat people, straight up and down from their faces to their bottoms, it just couldn’t be helped, but the important thing to remember was that it wasn’t her fault. Before Ingrid could explain that she wasn’t Chinese, Winnie confessed she coveted her hairless legs, her ability to go bra-less. She was the lucky one, which Ingrid understood was a lie. A lie that Winnie understood, too. Winnie with her turquoise eyes that popped like plastic gems and her honey-colored hair that she brushed a hundred times a day until it swung like a plank of silk. Winnie who walked into a room and made it tilt on its axis. Ingrid loved her the same way that she had once loved her favorite doll, Malibu Barbie. It was a selfless, though uneven, love.

As they grew older, Ingrid watched the insides of Winnie and Susan and Lorrie spill into the waiting world. She witnessed them tangle themselves in the three-act drama of first base, second base, third base. Everyone’s body had transformed into a baseball field — a fittingly American analogy. Ingrid watched from the sidelines as her friends compared hickeys and bite marks, varsity jackets, other little tangible markers of love. All the while, she smiled and asked questions — sometimes hopefully, more often hopelessly. It wasn’t her fault, she heard Winnie’s voice repeat, wasn’t her fault that her body remained stunted and childish. Surely that was why boys overlooked her, even though Kimberly Cook had AA breasts and nothing hips, and she had a steady boyfriend.

And then, the summer before Ingrid’s last year of high school, she got her period. On the first day of school, in a new wool vest and corduroy pants, Ingrid felt her body swim through the hallways as though independent from her. Puberty at long last had sprung from its buried seed and expanded into all corners of herself. Her body had unfurled, gained density. She was not buxom and she certainly would not have been chosen to grace a centerfold. She was simply less narrow than she had been.

But to Ingrid, every change, however negligible, was an utter delight. For the first time in her life, she took tentative steps to draw attention to herself. She got a new haircut, a feathery mullet that crowned her face, and bought a brick-red lipstick from the drugstore.

Then she waited patiently for love to come knocking. And a transfer student from Philadelphia, William Kim, did look at her expectantly in the hallways, no doubt hoping to make a friend in this new town, but everyone joked that they were brother and sister, virtually indistinguishable from one another, was she sure they weren’t related?

Though William was Korean. Though his features were nothing like Ingrid’s.

She did not understand why all her friends crowded around her, breathing hotly in her face that she and William would make the perfect couple. One moment he was her brother, the next, her ideal boyfriend.

In the hallways, she saw the boys slap William’s books from his arms and claw his glasses from his face. She made a point of tucking her gaze away during these moments. No, she did not want William Kim.

She would wait patiently for the right kind of love to come knocking.

It came at the start of the second semester, packaged in that bored gait of his, that smile that dented in the left corner. After all these years, he had not grown into a kind or sensitive boy, as other students could attest to, but his cruelty was an afterthought, something clipped carelessly on his belt. There was nothing graceful or beautiful about him, either, save for the fact that he moved through the world like it was his. And so to Ingrid’s eyes, there was something graceful and beautiful about Stephen Greene.

In home economics, he was assigned the seat next to Ingrid’s. His eyes grazed hers — uninterested, then curious. Curious only in the sense that now, she was a woman. Not so much a person, but a woman.

Did he remember the earthquake drill, the friendship bracelet? She didn’t ask.

Instead, Stephen asked if he could borrow a pencil and she opened to him, just like that. Surely everything now would rewrite everything then. Not that she ever thought about those days in elementary school — those lonely, amber-colored days.

In class, she felt her body only in relation to his. When he shifted his leg or leaned back in his chair or snatched at his notebook, it made her spine stiffen, her fingers twitch, her thighs compress together.

At home, she wrote an inventory of his body. The dimple in his right cheek and the slope of his bottom lip. The ridges of his knuckles and the hollows in his neck. She underlined, crossed out, circled. She was busy spinning him into something he was not, her own private Stephen Greene that lived in the pages of her diary.

He did not court Ingrid. He smiled at her or made an inane remark or brushed against her arm. Once, he drummed his pencil on the edge of the table before lightly dragging it across her wrist. Ingrid believed all of the above was courting (she had carefully noted every moment down in her diary), so she began preparing herself for their first date, imagining where he would take her. To the movies or the nice Italian restaurant downtown? Followed by holding hands, a kiss, some furtive over-the-sweater petting in his car. Nothing more, of course.

Most everyone at their age did not care about holding off on sex. Most everyone their age had sex when they wanted to. But Winnie, Susan, and Lorrie had declared long ago that they were saving themselves for marriage. They weren’t sluts. Ingrid wasn’t a slut, now, was she?

When they gathered on Winnie’s four-poster bed after school, Ingrid announced that she liked someone. After so many years, she liked someone.

Who? they asked, button-eyed and eager. William Kim? they wondered aloud. She could only avoid it for so long.

No, Stephen Greene.

Their mouths tightened, their eyes drooped with pity.

But it was harmless, they thought. No need to warn her. After all, nothing would come of it.

So they were surprised, but none of them more surprised than Ingrid, when Stephen asked her after class one day what she was doing for homecoming. Images flowered in her mind, of him pinning a corset on her wrist, his arm cinched proprietarily around her waist, the two of them posing for pictures front-to-front, back-to-front, side-by-side.

Nothing, she said. Her heart a trapped animal, half-rabid with hope.

And now he’ll ask me to be his date, she thought.

Instead Stephen asked, Want to come over?

Come over? she echoed in confusion.

To my house. Homecoming’s stupid.

She felt a momentary drop in her stomach, the softest pinch of disappointment. Far greater, though, was the thrill of his words and their import.

He’s choosing me, she thought. Me.

Yes, she said.

But she had wanted to say, Thank you.

The girls were gracious to Ingrid. At Winnie’s house, they plucked and oiled and curled as Ingrid oozed anticipation in a chair, her smile so wide, it hurt.

Stop smiling, Lorrie said, it’s making your blush look all wrong.

No one mentioned how going to a boy’s house for a first date was unusual, unheard of, actually. Instead they ordered Ingrid to slip on a dress and a pair of heels before flinging them off her body for a different dress and pair of heels and again and again (this, the making of themselves into presents with bows on top waiting to be unwrapped, was their favorite part — better than all the hickeys and bite marks combined).

They pressed a box of mints and a tube of lipstick into her purse and wished her good luck. Ingrid bottled up their luck like a vial of perfume and carried it, all the way to his house, past his lawn and up the steps to his porch. For years, she had waited patiently for love to come knocking. Now Stephen opened the door.

He was dressed in the same clothes he had worn that day at school. The realization brought on a hot lick of shame. Ingrid reached up to her hair, coaxed into unnatural forms, desperate to yank off her heavy clip-on earrings, to wipe the caked layers from her face.

Without looking at her, he said, You look nice.

Her shoulders softened at that.

In the living room was a red-lipped telephone, a shelf of records, and Stephen’s father, a phlegmatic man in an armchair who looked at Ingrid up and down. Down and up.

No introductions.

No how do you dos.

No matter!

Down a short flight of stairs and behind a wooden door was the den. Ingrid noted a dart board on the wall and a poster of a naked girl with her toes pointed skyward, her blond head peeking out from behind her legs. Briefly, she thought of diluted candlelight on restaurant tables. The velvety red plush of movie theater seats. Stephen pulling open the door of his white Chevrolet Cavalier for her.

No matter!

Want a drink? Stephen asked, and tossed her a can of Miller Lite.

Would they play a game of darts? Or air hockey? She could learn how to play air hockey. He could teach her how to play air hockey.

Stephen dropped onto the couch and glanced at the sunken seat next to his. Ingrid understood his invitation and, carefully holding her borrowed dress to avoid wrinkling it, sat down. He turned on the TV and drank his beer, keeping his eyes on the screen.

Ingrid opened her mouth to say something. Something about the weather. Something about home economics. Something about anything.

Stephen looked over at her and smiled.

They would get to know each other now, she thought.

He moved closer to her.

They would talk about their classes.

He placed his hand on her knee.

And how wonderful it was to be a senior in high school.

His hand slid up her thigh.

And where they were applying to college.

He placed his mouth on her neck.

But my lips are up here, Ingrid thought.

And later: I’ve been robbed of my first kiss.

The following week, Winnie, Susan, and Lorrie demanded an inventory of the night.

Tell us everything, they breathed.

So Ingrid painted a picture of the father and the living room. The dart board and the air hockey table. She invented a family dinner cooked by a mother, then a walk in a park and a kiss under a streetlamp’s golden embrace.

Does that mean you’re boyfriend and girlfriend? Winnie asked. She tried to filter the disbelief out of her voice, which came out as disdain.

No, Ingrid said, and the look on her friend’s face was something like triumph.

I realized I’m not ready to be in a relationship, Ingrid went on.

She had rehearsed that line all weekend, testing out its different cadences. I realized I’m not ready to be in a relationship.

I’m just going to focus on my schoolwork now, she added for good measure.

Oh, Ingrid, you’re so Chinese! Winnie laughed. Susan and Lorrie joined in. Ingrid laughed, too.

In this way, everyone passed over Ingrid’s puffy eyes and how her voice sounded oddly hollow, as if it had traveled somewhere far away and had not yet returned.

In home economics, Stephen still smiled and made inane remarks and drummed his pencil against Ingrid’s hand. He did not ask her to come over to his house again. He did not ask her to go anywhere. She worried he had forgotten about that night. It was as though, in his reel of memories, he had simply snipped out the segment that featured her.

And then, on a chilly afternoon when the sky curdled gray, she learned that their night together had meant something to Stephen after all.

Ingrid was walking to the bus stop when she passed by his friend, Dennis Mahoney. Where are you going, Ingrid? he called. He was standing by his car with two other boys in the school parking lot.

Home, she said.

Come over to my place.

Ingrid looked up at the plain square of his face. She had never spoken to Dennis before, had only seen him eating lunch or studying with Stephen.

She thought of the couch that reeked of onion dip. The shouting of the TV. The ceiling fan’s silent admonishment. The sour pain squirming between her legs.

Fuck off, she said. She couldn’t believe the words had left her mouth and nearly touched her fingers to her lips.

His friends laughed at him.

Whatever, Dennis said. His face darkened. I just wanted to find out if it’s true.

Find out what? she asked.

Later she would think, I shouldn’t have asked.

Dennis said, just loud enough for her and his friends to hear, if it’s true you got a slanted pussy.

Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel, Disorientation, is out today from Penguin Press.