She stepped hesitantly towards the door. The doorway seemed to arch at alarming heights above her. She caught a mere glimpse of the class within. The boys and girls stared and wouldn’t stop staring. She burst into tears and whirled around into her mother’s arms, begging and demanding to be brought home. She wouldn’t go to preschool! Sherefused to go to school! She didn’t want to be away from Mummy! Her mother relented. Hence the little girl never attended preschool.
Kindergarten was a whirl of play, workbooks filled with the big, loopy scrawl of inexperienced writers and a best friend whose name rhymed with ‘fairy’. She went to PAP and her blue uniform was a bit too small, but it was fine because she had always been a chubby child. She was not that hyperactive kid with dirty hands and restless feet; she was the little girl who took that Enid Blyton book and sat herself down in the corner to read. She read and she read.
She continued reading through primary school. Her eyesight deteriorated and she needed spectacles. She had her first crush at the tender age of eight. She had not realised it then, of course, but she had always been partial towards him, always eager to please, always eager to be around him. There were humiliating incidents involving accidents in her panties, but hey, she was still young enough, wasn’t she? Either that or she had awful bowel control at that age. (Too much info?)
Maybe it was the fact that she read so much. Maybe that contributed to her abject social skills. In any case, her preference for the company of books lead to many social faux pas and only one true friend. This was the friend who encouraged a budding hobby – writing. The more she read, the more she realised that she wished she could do the same. She wished she could create these worlds so she took up a pen and one of those blue notebooks.
Slowly and shakily at first, her love for writing developed and exploded. It amazed her how she could create worlds she could only dream of. She would write and her best friend would write and they would write together. It cemented their friendship. She never thought that such friendship would eventually erode, the poor naive girl. She never thought she would have to work so hard to attempt to salvage such a great friendship. She never thought all those sleepovers, all those talks, all those notebooks they wrote shared stories in and all those jealous feelings when her best friend made new friends would merely become distant memories igniting only the faintest feelings of sadness and lost when recalled.
When she entered secondary school (which was so far from her best friend’s school), she was determined to make more friends. She decided that she was far too shy and she simply needed to lighten up. There was no need to be nervous. She just had to be herself and she would have more friends. After all, it was not as if she was not a nice girl, not a funny girl, not a good girl. She was simply shy and so very quiet around strangers. The three girls who would eventually become her best friends are girls she never imagined she could be so close to.
“What’s your PSLE score?” a small girl she vaguely remembered from the ice breaker games on their first day of secondary school asked as they climbed the stairs to the second floor.
“238; I thought I told you already?” was her reply.
She had come off sounding rude and brash in her nervousness, not realising it until a few years later when they would reminisce the early years of their friendship. That small girl was Joanne. Little Joanne had no idea that this mean girl would become one of her best friends.
One day after school, she realised that one of her classmates – one of those three girls who sat all the way across the classroom next to the windows – took the same Bus 33 home. Surprisingly, she hit it off with Charmaine, who she always saw as kind of cool and not the kind of girl she would be friends with. From then on, she tried to go home as often as possible with her. Charmaine was fun to chat with! Eventually, she would meet Tammie and that third girl, E.
In the beginning, she hung out with Joanne and another girl, P, but it had been awkward; she could not really click with the two of them and she felt like an outsider. Then in the middle of that year, 2005, to celebrate Tammie’s birthday, the six of them – her, Jo, Char, Tam, E and P – went to Escape theme park. That cemented the six of them as a clique so they began to spend all their time together.
Slowly, P drifted away because she could not really relate to the rest. E, they ostracised. There is no other word for that. They didn’t really like E so they ostracised her. They would laugh about her. They would avoid her. Yes, they were being really bitchy but callously enough, she doesn’t really care, even right now. Where once she had only one friend, she now had three very good friends. She had a clique!
When they were to split up into different classes for upper secondary, it nearly tore the clique apart. Beating the odds – the other cliques in their lower secondary class had split up after all – they remained close and tight although there was an awful period when she was thought she was being replaced by another girl. By the time they graduated from secondary school, it was four years of friendship.
They knew the tertiary years of their education was going to be tough and they were. They would meet up once every two months. They would only meet up to celebrate birthdays, but guess what? They never failed to celebrate each other’s birthdays. These are important events they must clear space in their calender for.
She made new friends in JC, good friends. She had a lot of fun with them. They are different from her clique. They spoke too much Chinese. They didn’t read the books she did. They didn’t watch the shows she did. They didn’t listen to the music she did. However, they still became friends. There were senseless periods of drama. She made a friend she thought she could remain close to but it turned out it was a case of getting too close too quickly. In any case, her JC years passed in a flash – the fastest two years of her life and the two years she did the most growing up, the most changing. She and her friends would spend too much dawdling in the library (free air-conditioning), by the water cooler, in the bathroom and in the canteen. She and her friends would spend too much time chatting during lectures, during tutorials and in the library’s discussion rooms about other people, about teachers, about themselves, about celebrities, about dreams, about their respective secondary school cliques, about everything.
Her change was rather drastic from 2008 to 2010. She shed some 6kg, she cut her hair short and she dressed much, much, much, much, much better. Her personality, however, didn’t change much. She is still too talkative, too rude, too insensitive, too tactless, too awkward. She hates meeting new people and making friends but Joanne seems to think she has a knack for it. As she waits in the wings to launch into the new stage of her life, she certainly hopes that her ability to make friends would not falter. She has learned this much: friends make life so much brighter, so much happier, so much funnier.
So now that she has made it to 2011, waiting to see what other turns her life might make, she just wants to thank everybody who has helped to make her who she is now. Her family, her friends, everybody. She could not have made it here with you and your support, although yes, you may appreciate it more if she doesn’t refer to herself in third person. It might be a smidge less creepy perhaps.
Here’s to an awesome time ahead and the new people I would meet: Cheers! (:
It is, however, unavoidable to point out the fact that the only reason Tam’s mother allows the sleepover is because we’re (most probably and we’ll know soon) collecting our results on Fri.
The green pair is really comfy (From Factorie) but I’m not sure about the cost!
