The Fight
Round One
In Form One, I celebrated the last day in school before the December holidays by fighting in an impromptu wrestling tournament in class. For some reason, there were no teachers in class, and I decided to mark the occasion by running around with a Malaysian flag tied around my neck, proclaiming to be Captain Boleh, the undiscovered, future superhero of
We smiled sweet little girl smiles and answered, “Spring-cleaning the classroom.”
A classmate whispers to me, “I think you hurt my spleen” while trying to control her laughter.
“Don’t make too much noise,” the teacher said before turning on her heels to return to the staff room.
I still can’t believe the teacher fell for it. Or maybe she didn’t but found it hard to believe that a bunch of girls or young ladies would ever start their own young, female Fight Club.
As for us little wrestlers, we could hardly believe how we were feeling. Dirty from being pinned to the floor, sweaty, bruised, aching all over and probably suffering from some mild concussion and minor brain damage, we were also, utterly and inexplicably elated. It was the most exhilarating day in school we had all year. To be able to let out all that pent-up aggression of adolescence in an open and direct manner usually reserved for boys was a welcomed release. They say that boys will be boys but girls, well, it seems that we aren’t encouraged to just be so most of the time girls will appear to be whatever people expect them to be. But when we think no one’s looking, we might just turn out to be no different from our male counterparts, anatomical structures and biological functions aside. Hey man, chicks get aggro too. Society just doesn’t think it’s becoming of us to show it. Boys, well, they can take it outside. But girls, girls are socially taught to be non-confrontational so we plaster on fake smiles when faced with our nemesis while verbally assassinating them when their backs are turned so that the other party will never ever know what the issue is. Or, we learn to take that anger, aggression out on ourselves.
The last bell of the day rang and my friends and I hobbled out of class with wide, deranged smiles on our faces. My friends, my classmates, they say, “Shit, that was fun. Hey, we should do it again next year!”
But we never did. Not ever again.
Round Two
Eight years later, I meet up with my friend for lunch at a café in town filled with dirty yuppies and faux-sophisticates. She’s wearing a pretty, spotless white dress and dainty heels, sitting with her ankles crossed and back straight. She doesn’t have a single hair out of place. We greet eachother with an air-kiss as to not stain each other’s cheeks with our lip-gloss. I apologize for being late – traffic and lack of available parking spaces always slows a girl down. I compliment her on her dress. She compliments me on my haircut. I ask her ‘what’s up?’ She says “Nothing much”. She asks me the same and I say, “Nothing much.” But we both know the other is lying. I ask how her boyfriend of two years is doing. She says fine; they’re planning to move in together soon. She asks if I’m with anyone yet. I say no. She asks why and I say, “Well, it’s not something you can exactly buy off a shelf, is it?” I tell her that a couple of other friends are giving me a hard time for being single, feeling sorry for me when I personally don’t feel like it’s much of a problem. It’s them thinking that they should feel sorry for me that brings me down. I confess that I just want to rub that look of pity off their faces with a cheese grater. I don’t do it, of course. I just tell her that I want to. We talk of the weather. We talk about our separate lives at our respective universities and future job prospects. My friend confesses she wished she hadn’t listened to her parents when they told her to do pharmacy. She hates it, hates it with a passion. She wanted to be an archaeologist. She says more and more, she’s feeling the weight of other people’s expectations crushing her into a splatter of the person she used to be. I tell her I know what she means. Then I commend her for not having a hair out of place while being crushed and reduced to a splatter.
She laughs, not as loudly as she used to, without showing much of her teeth and says, “Hey, you remember the wrestling match we had in Form One?”
I grin. “Yeah, what about it?”
“Why didn’t we ever do it again?”
“Because Gandhi said violence is not the answer.”
“Gandhi got shot.”
“Yeah, sure, go ahead and hold it against the man. It’s not his fault he got shot. Lennon said give peace a chance and he got shot too. Jesus said turn the other cheek and he got crucified.”
“Exactly. So we should just do it again,” my friend says. She looks around. So many people around. She looks at me and says, “Eh, maybe not you’re about a foot taller than me now…But then, you’ve been smoking for the last, what, 4 years, so you’d probably tire pretty quickly now, won’t you?”
“Shut up. I’m fitter than I look. Kinda. Whatever it is, I think the question we should be asking is why we started beating the shit out of eachother in the first place.”
“I don’t know. But it was really, really fun.”
And unlike the many other things we do in our lives, it felt absolutely natural. And we felt free. And when we hurt, the pain had a name, a color, a wound, a scar that was visible for all eyes to see. And if others saw it, then they would finally see that it was real, that it was justified, that it would be something they could remedy. And it felt good. And ironically enough, we’re still better friends with eachother than the people whose stomachs we’ve never kneed, whose backs we’ve never slammed to a window.
“I don’t want to ruin your dress,” I say. “Besides, we’re civilized people now, eh?” We’re 21 not 13 any longer. It isn’t about boys will be boys and girls will be what anymore. They’re young men and we’re young women. It’s about being an adult. You don’t punch people in the face for no reason anymore. You have the right to vote, so instead, you can empower your government to drop bombs on a nation you’ve never visited, whose people you’ve probably never met. It’s the way of the civilized world.
My friend sighs. She shrugs her shoulders. She runs her hand along the bottom of her dress to smooth out the creases. She straightens her back and takes a deep breath in. She exhales and collapses into a defeated hunch over her half-eaten lunch. “Being civilized sucks.” She stabs her food right through with her fork. Stabs it again and again and again. But doesn’t eat it.
I laugh, probably a little too loudly seeing how the people at the next table turned to glare at me. I light a cigarette and take a long slow drag from it.
The world sees two nicely dressed young women (well, one more than the other), having a nice chat over lunch at a nice little café in a nice part of town, like a poor imitation of a scene from Sex and the City. What the world doesn’t realize is that we’re sitting there in wait of a great, invisible weight to come crushing down upon us; the weight of other people’s expectations that by our own fault, we have made our own. And what the world doesn’t know is that all we really want to do is smash all their heads against a wall. Repeatedly. Instead of our own.
Round 3
I always get a funny if not an outright frightened reaction every time I mention the secondary school I used to attend.
“You’re from Assunta?! Assunta?! Shit……” said one friend I made in college.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. Not that I didn’t already know. Anyone who has ever crossed path with an Assuntarian has some kind of horror story to tell. That is if they’ve managed to live to tell the tale.
“You Assuntarian chicks are ganas. Brutal siioot.” My friend rolled up her pants to her knees and points out the part in her shin where the bone feels sort of misaligned. “One of your Assuntarian hockey players did that to me during a match. On purpose. Still hurts.”
I shrug but didn’t feel the need to apologize. I wasn’t on the hockey team; I was the sissy on the debate team. The hockey team hit balls with sticks. The debaters rip balls with words. Two different worlds. I didn’t even know the girls on the hockey team. I rolled up my jeans to show a similar injury on my left shin. Of course, I didn’t get it from playing hockey. I got it from climbing and jumping out the school fence and falling on pieces of a broken chair some other school-cutting idiot had left there earlier.
“What’s your point?” asked my friend. “Who asked you to cut school in the first place?”
“My point is: shit happens. Assuntarian hockey players or no Assuntarian hockey players.”
I didn’t tell her the story of how one of my classmates lost her virginity at 13 to a plastic skittle. We were playing a game of Rounders, which is basically a dumb-down version of baseball (if it’s at all possible to dumb down baseball). She was bringing our team down by not paying attention to the game so we decided to hit a few balls in her direction. The objective was to scare; we weren’t actually intending for a ball to hit her. But poor classmate must have thought we were out for blood and in an attempt to save herself, she lost her balance and fell backwards, butt-first onto the pointed end of an orange skittle and screamed, “Fuck, I think it went in!!” It was bad enough that she had difficulty in walking for the rest of the day. To add insult to injury, for the next few weeks, every time we went down to the field for P.E. and came across an orange skittle, we would say to her, “Hey man, don’t you want to say hello to your boyfriend?!”
Now that’s brutal.
