My mother takes me to the hair salon to curl my hair. Since then, I’ve been curling my hair twice a year, with the exception of the year I cut my hair like a boy and it was too short to curl without looking like my late grandmother. I don’t think anyone really remembers how I look like with straight hair anymore.
I take part in my first inter-school dance competition, an anti-drug initiative known as Danceworks. A group of 12 of us from the Dance Ensemble at school compete under the stage name Revoltage. I’m the second youngest in the group, and I’m nervous to be performing in front of so many strangers. We pass the preliminary round in March with a very good score, and make it to the finals in May. That particular month of April sets the tone for the rest of my adolescent years. We work so hard, and we grow so close. They are the elder sisters I never had. (No offence to my legit elder sister, who is 16 years older than me. But really, she mothers me more than she sisters me.) They teach me about makeup, dressing up, boys, alcohol, nightclubs, music gigs. We practice till the security guards chase us off school compound, we dance the same eight counts over and over again until everyone stomps their feet on the same count/all knees are bent at the same angle/all body rolls are the same level of sexy, we sleep over at each other’s and prank call boys dead into the night.
We emerge forth out of six at the finals. We are super disappointed, but we are given the ‘High Energy Award’ and win a ton of Energizer batteries, which is better than nothing.
It dawns on me that dancing is something I really enjoy and I’m actually not totally bad at it. This is the perfect boost for my self-confidence. When competition season is over, we explore other avenues of dance. I start sneaking out of the house and into nightclubs. We press our wrists against each other’s if the club stamp is symmetrical; otherwise we use a UV pen to draw it on ourselves. We use fake IDs, borrowed IDs, befriend club bouncers and door bitches. We hide in drains during police raids, and then worry about snakes in those drains. The night I had my first sip of alcohol, I also had a friend of a friend stick her finger down my throat to make me throw up because I’d drunk too much.
My bestfriend has two homes, and we’d always crash at her empty place whenever we stayed out late, with our parents under the impression we were sleeping over at each other’s – technically I was. (Kinda, sorta)
‘Bak Chor Mee Boy’ becomes affectionately known as ‘baby’. I can’t remember how it happened, but I’m guessing my schoolmate eventually gave into my persuasion and dumped him just so that I could go out with him. I think we’re going to get married. (I don’t know that I’m delusional and crazy yet.) We play with yo-yos, talk on the phone till 3am, watch movies instead of attend classes, and one day lose our V (for vanilla).
In school, we pass the Sophie Kinsella shopaholic series around and read it under the table during lessons. I read it like it is the bible. I start shopping for my own clothes with my allowance, which leads to several hits but even more misses. My new hobby: shopping. When I am done with Sophie Kinsella, I turn to Marion Keyes to satisfy my chick lit. urges. I fall into a brief spell of depression after reading Watermelon because for some very compelling but unfounded reasons, I believe my future husband is going to leave me on the day I give birth to our first child.
