Chapter 15

My earliest memory was of my parents laughing, telling me exaggerated stories and visits to those indoor playgrounds. I did not remember being sad; the routine day would be breakfast with them, lunch with the maid and dinner with them again. To me, they were the only sunshine in my life. I had even thought that I had lived in this world for them.

When I was ten, I would hear shouting and quarrels in their room. The maid would rush to my room, covered my ears and I would lie down motionlessly. Thinking that I was asleep, the maid would leave me. I would then jolt out from my bed, pasted my ear on the door and listened to what my parents were talking about.

“So what’s more important?” I remembered my mother yelling.

“You think we’ll have enough?” that voice belonged to my father and I had never heard him shouting before.

“Does it matter?”

“It does! Look, if I don’t work hard now-”

“Work smart, not hard!”

“You’re not in my position!”

There was silence for a few seconds.

“You work more than eighty hours a week; you’re no different from her.”

“Look, I just want to give ah girl and you a good life! You think I-”

“What good life? Isn’t it all great now?”

I swallowed. I had never expected myself to be involved in their argument.

“It’s still not perfect enough. I need to get ah girl to a good school. We can be perfect!”

Perfect. I thought of the word and my mind drifted to the prefects wearing ties in school who could catch people for not queuing up to buy food.

“Perfect? Isn’t it perfect enough now?”

“Perfect is when we’re living in a landed property, got a big BMW and retire! And ah girl with a PhD, working in a big multi-national corporation and be a successful person!”

I was getting more perplexed by his words. My mind was telling me to go and sleep now, like a warning sign cued by fate.

“Lim Kok Wee, that is how you define perfect?”

I started to pull myself away from the door.

“Then?” my father said. I jumped towards my bed as I heard the last two words gliding into my ears: “Define perfect.”

And the two words; they glued into my mind and like a cancer cell, lingered in fragments of my photogenic life.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

We would never know when we would get our ‘O’ Levels results, until the television news or newspapers announced the date. Usually, there would be rumours circulating on when the date would be.

On the release day, which was on a Friday, we were all supposed to go back to our Secondary schools. I did not bring any bag for I intended to go home after getting my results. In school, old schoolmates updated about their new lives: Some had new boyfriends, some had new part-time jobs and some just never change.

I sat alone in the canteen before going up to the Hall. Serene, as usual, was surrounded by her bodyguards. When she walked across me, she passed me a wink and strolled up slowly, her confidence aura lurking. When we were all seated in the Hall like the flag-raising we had everyday at NYJC, our ex-teacher took the stand and crapped about the history of our School again. He said that he was proud of this and that and that no matter what happened, we would always be part of River Valley High School and that once a RV-ian, always a RV-ian.

I balled my hands. He took exactly fifteen minutes before passing the microphone to another teacher. Then the top students’ names were flashed on the stage: There, I searched for my name.

Linda Lim Xiu Zheng
L1R5: 8.

I turned my head. Serene was glaring at me. Not because my name was up there; it was because her name was not up there.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Chew Ling called me ten minutes after I had spoken to my ex-form teacher.

“I got nine points! You? Gosh, I was expecting something like ten or eleven. Minus off my CCA bonus and my three months PAE bonus, I’m only at five points! I can count my points with one hand!” she laughed so loud into the phone that I pulled my ear away for a while. “You? What are your points?”

“Eight.”

“That’s good enough! So you got a… let’s see. Eight plus two plus two will be twelve. So your L1R5 is twelve, eh? That’s pretty awesome too!”

I did not try to explain to her that my L1R5 was eight and after deducting my bonus points I would be left at four, one of the top students in my school.

“How’s missy’s results?”

I froze. Looked around me. Serene was sitting at one corner; alone. She was holding on to her results slip, her Tag Heuer proudly ringing her wrist.

“I don’t know.” I said. Sighed.

“Want to go celebrate? We are going to the Zoo-”

“No, thanks.” I said and hung up.

Do all Cedar girls have the habit of going to the Zoo to celebrate something? Or maybe it is just Chew Ling?

Next (Chapter 16) >>>