Then it became clear to me. Two weeks ago, Lena had snuck into Science Lab 3 to finish an assignment we were supposed to do the week before. We had stood guard outside the lab, artfully arranged along various pillars, to create distractions and alert her if a teacher was approaching. The next day at morning assembly, our principal announced that a Bunsen burner had been left on in Science Lab 3 all night—the fifth one in as many weeks.
“I just cannot imagine how any girl in this school thinks this is a funny prank,” she screeched into the microphone, making all our ears ring. “There could have been a fire! There could have been an explosion! The school could have burned down. Someone could have died. I just cannot imagine.”
She then announced that a full interrogation would be made of every class that had used the lab the day before, and that the staff would not let up until the culprit had been caught.
Since our class didn’t have a lab period the day before, we did not get questioned. The five of us who had been standing guard outside, though, knew that Lena had been working with a Bunsen burner and had left in a hurry, but none of us said anything about it that day, even among ourselves. She most certainly was not the serial arsonist the school was looking for, but we knew that if anyone suspected her of this last incident, she’d look guilty of them all. After school, Lena had suggested we go to the McDonald’s near the MRT station. She’d bought us all French fries, confirmation that we were in this together, and we would stay silent.
Char’s growing estrangement from the group, though, posed a problem for Lena, as the witch-hunt was still on for the lab prankster.
I couldn’t think of how to say I understood without making it clear what it was I understood, so I just nodded and immediately regretted it.
“Good,” said Lena. “We’ll do it right after the movie.”
*
I had less than a week to defuse the time bomb that my group of friends had become. Every day, Lena would give me a knowing look and a slow nod, and I figured out after a while that she wanted me to nod back, a confirmation that I was still committed to the cause. I watched closely to see if she nodded that way at anyone else, but either she did it only when she was alone with one of us, or I was the only one whose loyalty was in question.
Every time I felt irked by that, though, I reminded myself that I was definitely torn. I wondered if I was the only one of the group feeling this crisis of conscience. Lena, clearly, did not see anything wrong with what we were about to do to Char, but surely at least one of the others did? I searched their faces all through class, but they looked the same, and would just smile whenever they caught me looking at them. I started to doubt that Lena had let them know of her plans, but couldn’t think of a way to bring it up. It consumed my thoughts every day at school and I stopped paying attention.
In class, we often sat around circular tables with eight seats. No one ever tried to sit with us; everyone knew better. Most of our class was organised into groups like ours, solid cliques with firm boundaries that weren’t taking any more applicants. The smaller cliques, with four members, would often share a table with another small clique, but those like ours were allowed to have two empty chairs. Even the independent operators, who cared about little other than their grades, would form a haphazard group of their own—a silent, studying clique. No one in our class had ever left their group, much less been kicked out, and it weighed on me that we would be setting the precedent.
“Where will Char go?” I whispered to Lena one day when we were the last two packing up after Maths. “During class. Who will she sit with?”
Lena took her time putting her things away. “She’ll sit with whoever she wants to. It just won’t be us, and it won’t be our problem.”
She hoisted her bag up to her shoulder and looked me in the eye. “Stop being weird,” she said.
“I’m not,” I said, taken aback.
“Yes, you are. You’ve been acting really strange since I told you in the bathroom. You’re quiet and fake and during class you just stare at us. Seriously, stop it.”
“Sorry,” I said, realising I hadn’t been subtle. “I’m just spacing out.”
“Yeah, okay,” said Lena, with more than a hint of suspicion. “We’re already late for Science Lab.”
When we got to the lab, Lena and I were the last to arrive and were made de facto lab partners. I scanned the assignment on the worksheet and saw that it needed a Bunsen burner. Lena had perched herself on her stool, not looking at the assignment, and was regarding me a little coolly, so I figured that I should probably count on being on my own for this one. As I took the burner out and plugged it into the gas supply, Lena’s eyes flashed a warning to me, and at first I thought she wanted me to be careful with it, but then I saw it was another small test of my loyalty. It was the first time any of us had been with a Bunsen burner since Lena’s incident, and she was warning me not to say anything, again. I knew how to pass: I pretended not to notice her expression, I kept up a quiet stream of chatter as we held test-tubes over the flame and watched liquids crystallise, and soon her face relaxed again.
This gave me an idea. I remembered my conversation with Lena in the bathroom, and thought about how her grievances really stemmed from not being able to trust that Char wouldn’t betray her. I started wondering if there was a way to ascertain that Char wouldn’t tell on Lena and pretty soon it consumed me. I had to know.
Char and I went home on the same bus fairly often. We had different extra-curricular activities: hers was netball and mine was drama, and they met on different days. But on Tuesdays and Fridays, we both headed back home right after school on bus 105.
I looked forward to the bus rides with Char. Sometimes I would forget what day it was, and when I saw Char heading towards the bus stop, I’d feel a pleasant jolt of memory—That’s right, I have Char for company today. On the other days, I’d bump into various people I knew at the bus stop who were taking the same bus. There were very few of them I really liked to talk to, and I’d have been perfectly happy sitting alone, but all of them would expect me to sit with them, as the rules of secondary school go. Bus rides with these girls usually consisted of some light chatting and heavy silences while we both stared out the window or racked our brains for another conversation topic. With Char though, that never happened. It didn’t matter that we had just spent the whole day in classes together—we’d start talking as soon as we were out of class and wouldn’t stop till one of us stepped off the bus.
That day, Char and I were, of course, talking about the movie. We walked out the school gate and instinctively reached up to remove our nametags. This was a common practice in our school, but I never did it until Char talked me into it. “What if,” she’d said, “an old lady gets on the bus and all the seats are taken and you’re asleep in one, and she takes down your name to complain to the school later? They’d make an announcement the next day, MISS PRIYA MANIAM OF SEC 1-3, PLEASE REPORT TO THE PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE.”
I laughed with her, then shuddered, then started slipping my nametag into my pocket upon exiting school, like everyone else.
Char told me that she had read a review of the movie with a spoiler in it, but she wouldn’t tell me what it was. “It’s supposed to be really good,” she said. “Really strong themes. They say it’s going to be nominated for an Oscar.”
I felt sure she was just parroting the review, and perhaps trying to sell the movie a little more since it was her fault we’d missed all of the year’s PG-13 summer blockbusters, but I just nodded. “I can’t wait,” I said, excitement mixed with dread in my stomach. I looked at Char, who was still chattering excitedly, the innocent lamb to the slaughter.
“My mother thinks the movie is too adult for us, but I reminded her, it’s PG-13 and we’re all thirteen, okay?” Char said. “She’s still grumbling about it a bit, and she thinks that we’re all watching it because Lena wants to. She thinks Lena acts a lot older than she is.”
“She does?” I asked. We had rea
ched the bus stop at the perfect time; 105 was just pulling up and I had managed to avoid eye contact with everyone else at the bus stop that I knew.
“Yeah, but don’t you? Maybe she just has an old face. And I heard she wears make-up when she goes out. My mum says we shouldn’t be trying to look twenty at this age,” Char said as we showed the bus driver our bus passes and practically ran to the two empty seats at the back of the bus.
“I don’t think she’s trying to look twenty,” I said, realising for the first time why Char was so entertaining to me. She really was always talking about other people— our friends. And I liked listening to all these things about them that I would never say, learning scandalous details, knowing that Char was telling me, by proxy, you’re not like them. I started wondering then if what Lena and the others said about Char could possibly be true. How much of what she said could be verified? Or were they all so strategically juicy yet insignificant that I would never bother to check?
I started worrying that the group would think I was complicit in Char’s crimes. I tried to change the subject. “What time is the movie on Friday, again?” I asked, even though I knew the answer perfectly well. “Will we have time to change out of our uniforms?”
“Yeah, it’s only at three o’clock,” Char said dismissively. “We can bring our entire wardrobe and change fifteen times if we want. As Rachel no doubt will.”
Until I was consciously trying to stop her from doing it, I hadn’t realised how much Char talked about the rest of the group in less-than-flattering terms, and I hadn’t realised that I got a slight thrill from hearing them talked about while not participating in the gossip myself. Now I wasn’t sure what she was saying about me to the rest of them. I still had to figure out a way to see how committed Char was to keeping Lena’s lab mistake a secret, and tried to approach it vaguely.
“We have Science Lab for our last period on Friday, right? I hope Miss Woo doesn’t keep us late. But the last lab was actually quite fun. Making those crystals with the Bunsen burner,” I said carefully.
It was easier than I’d imagined. Char sniffed and immediately said: “You were partnered with Lena right? Did you make sure she turned off the burner?”
I gaped at her. “Don’t say that so loud,” I hissed, checking the seats behind and around us for anyone else in our school uniform who might have overheard. “Anyway, it really might not have been her at all.”
Char snorted loudly. “Please. Why did she buy us all fries that day if not to keep us quiet? It was totally her.” She made an attempt to speak more quietly, but her voice was still too loud for my liking.
I decided to come right out with it, as best as I could. “You didn’t tell anyone, right?” I asked, trying to look casual about it, but probably failing.
“No,” she said, looking straight at me, as though I should comprehend her meaning.
When I didn’t say anything for a few seconds, she continued. “But I know Lena thinks I did.”
“What?” I said, still careful to keep my voice down despite my heart starting to hammer.
“It’s so obvious,” Char said, turning away from me and towards the window as if she were bored. “She’s been so cold to me since it happened. Even when we found the movie, I thought she’d be so happy and finally stop being mean to me about my September birthday. But she acts like nothing has changed at all. She barely looks at me or talks to me anymore.”
“That’s crazy,” I said, not knowing how to respond but understanding instinctively that I had to deny knowledge of everything for the sake of self-preservation. “She knows you wouldn’t say anything.”
I heard my voice rise a little on the last sentence, and I felt betrayed by my own vocal chords.
Char laughed. “I wouldn’t have before. But now I might. Don’t think I haven’t noticed that things have changed. At first it was just Lena who was cold, but it seems lately like things with Shu-en and Rachel are strained, and a few days ago Tina snapped at me for no reason. It’s only you who has really been normal, to be honest.”
That’s because I didn’t know, I felt like saying. But instead I said: “You wouldn’t really tell on Lena… Would you?”
“It depends,” Char said evenly, meeting my eyes without flinching. “It depends on how she treats me. If this goes on, then I really don’t know.”
“But they’ll kick you out,” I said, the words spilling out before I could stop them. “They’ll kick you out of the group, and then what will you do?”
Char bit her lip, but I could see she had already thought of it. “Well,” she said. “You’ll come with me though, right?”
*
My anxiety made its way straight to my stomach and I spent most of the night in the bathroom. My mother was worried about me, and I was tempted to confide in her and ask her what to do, but whenever I rehearsed what I was going to say, it sounded unbearably juvenile. Lena wants to kick Char out because she’s scared she’ll do something and Char wouldn’t have done it but now she might because of how mean Lena is being.
I was also equally ashamed at my own alarm when Char asked me to leave the group if they kicked her out. I wanted to be a loyal friend, but I wanted to be a part of the group more. I liked all of them, even Lena, who was funny and smart when she wasn’t trying to manipulate the group into excising a member. They were my friends too, and I didn’t see why I should have to choose Char over the rest of them just because she considered me her one friend in the group.
The next morning, our Literature teacher was late for our first period and our conversation naturally turned to our movie, which was now only two days away. “What are you guys going to wear?” asked Rachel, interrupting Shuen, who had just started to talk about the same review Char had told me about the day before.
Shu-en shrugged. “T-shirt and berms?”
Lena nodded and Tina said she was going to bring jeans. “And maybe a sweater? That cinema is very cold,” she said, wrinkling her nose.
Rachel rolled her eyes. “I was going to wear a dress. But now I may not, since none of you are dressing that nice,” she said, with a small pout. “But maybe I’ll just bring a few options and see what you guys actually end up wearing on that day.”
I didn’t mean to catch Char’s twinkling eye right then, but I did. She pursed her lips as though trying to suppress a smile but a small laugh escaped her. I wanted to laugh too, but couldn’t risk it with Lena’s eyes on me. Instead my face twisted into a half-smile half-grimace that was the furthest possible thing from the neutral expression I wanted.
Lena caught up to me by the lockers. As she leaned against them, I briefly felt relief that at least we were not in the bathroom this time.
“So, you and Char. Are you best friends now or something?” she asked, sounding careful.
“No, of course not. Why would you ask that?” I shoved my books into my locker and made a huge show of jamming the lock shut violently. “Come on.”
“You’ve been acting weird since I told you that we were kicking her out. You seem like you are always so worried about her. You share all these little inside jokes and giggle with her. You’re being so defensive now when I’m asking you about her,” Lena said, numbering off each point on her fingers. She stopped. “So. Are you a lesbian? Are you and Char lesbians together? Is that why you don’t want to kick her out?”
I felt all of the heat in my body rush to my face. “No. Of course not. Are you joking? That’s not a funny joke. That’s gross,” I said, alarm rising within me as I realised my protests would now be taken for further defensiveness. “I like guys, you know that.”
“It’s not gross,” Lena said calmly, studying my face. “It’s normal, you know. Nothing weird about being lesbian. A lot of them in our school, you know that, right?”
“Stop saying that word,” I whispered, knowing I sounded like I was begging. “I’m not.”
“Okay,” said Lena. “Sure. So we’re still on for Friday? We’ll all talk to her after the movie. Give he
r the weekend to get over it.”
She kept staring at me, as though daring me to disagree now that I was in her power.
I nodded. “Yes,” I said forcefully. “The plan has been on this whole time. I’m in.”
Lena walked away, pulling out her hair-tie to put her ponytail up a little higher. I watched it bounce and swing from side to side as if taunting me, and stood by my locker until the feeling of wanting to cry passed. I had no choice now, I told myself. I had to go through with it, or risk being branded by Lena and the rest of them, and lesbian probably wasn’t the worst thing they had in their arsenal.
I thought so long and hard that my stomach started roiling again and my head started hurting. When I put my fingers up to my face, the heat of my embarrassment felt like a fever. So I started thinking about how falling sick right after the show would solve all of my problems.
*
I set my new plan into motion almost immediately. I had to really commit to it, so I started selling it to my parents that night. “Feeling pretty tired. I think I’m going to bed early,” I told them at 8pm, and they were shocked enough to turn away from The West Wing to inquire if I was feeling all right. “I think so,” I said heroically. “Good night.”
The next morning, I made sure to be quiet. I started the first of many sniffles I planned to keep up till the next afternoon, and made sure that when I did talk, my voice would rasp halfway through a sentence.
Only Char noticed. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Hope you’re not falling sick right before the movie.”
“I wouldn’t miss the movie even if I were on my deathbed,” I told her, trying to make sure my rasping voice carried a little to be heard by the others.
Regrettable Things That Happened Yesterday Page 9
