According to my mother, my hair used to be outrageously wild. From age three onward, she would even read me a book called Wild, Wild Hair once a week, every week, so that I wasn’t the only person I knew with hair like this. The movies and television shows I watched were racially exclusive: shows like Dora the Explorer and Maggie and the Ferocious Beast; the suburb I lived in was homogenous except for my one Chinese neighbor down...

My first encounter with the undead was in the ninth grade. At 7:30 in the morning, first period was a breeding ground for this pandemic. I could see it in the way they moved—their awkward gaits (due to cerebellum atrophy); their short attention spans (due to a damaged parietal lobe), impaired speech and strange dialects (probably from an underdeveloped Broca’s area), and inability to control emotions (likely from messed up Papez circuits). At least, his was the way I...

Valerie has known she liked “bad boys” since elementary school with the airing of “Avatar: the Last Airbender.” She fell in love with Prince Zuko, a firebender who was banished from his kingdom for speaking his mind to save his soldiers. He was rebellious, “cute” (or, rather, well-animated), tortured (swoon) and older (swoon, again!). That’s why she likes Alex. He was all these things and this one was a real… thing. He wasn’t exactly human—he was more...