Chapter 1 - Lisa and Us

Lisa was the oldest among the four of us. She was 15, in secondary school, while myself, Ah Pui and Samat were just 12, still stuck in our primary school shorts. We had a common meeting place after school: a deserted bus-stop which no one frequents since it was the last stop before it reaches the bus interchange. Since the boys and I came from different classes, we meet there right after school. We often had to wait for Lisa for around 2 hours as her secondary school is quite far away. During those 2 hours, we usually make a lot of noises, often making fun of Ah Pui of his super-tight shorts which made his buttocks look like two full blue balloons. Ah Pui never fought back, except once he got so angry that he threw his ice cream on the floor, walked to one end of the bus-stop and big angry tears started flowing down his full round cheeks. After which Lisa came, bought Ah-Pui another ice cream and refused to talked to Samat and I for the rest of the day.

When Lisa came, we would go to the nearby park near to her house. At times, Lisa's maid would come down from their house with Badminton rackets, shuttlecocks, or sometimes even a soccer ball. Lisa doesn't play soccer. She prefers to watch us play with the Malay boys: the whole gang who only miraculously appear everytime the ball is brought to the field. My guess is the Malay Boys could not play anything else other than kick a ball around. Samat does not like the Malay boys even though he is Malay himself, because he said they always make fun of his small-frame and his girly school bag. And unlike other Malay boys, his skin is also pale yellow, just like mine.

Ah Pui didn't like to play soccer, and even if he did play with us, the Malay boys would make him the goal keeper, "Because Goal-Keeper don't need to move around much!", or he would complain that he is tired after five minutes into playtime. He would join Lisa at the marble table nearby, as she flicks through her textbooks, such as Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, while he buried his flat nose in stupid books like True Singapore Ghost Stories. They don't talk much, much enjoying this comfortable silence between them.

Occasionally, the ice-cream van would come to the park at around 4-30, his brass-bell shouting for attention to salivating and thirsty mouths. Lisa would dig into her brown coin-purse: the one with the weird embriodery of a fish, fishing out loose change, and insist we go get our fill. That comes with one condition: that we helped her buy her favourite ice-cream cone: chocolate-chip ice cream in between two thin waffles. After which we would sit together, seeing her as she sink her teeth into the ice cream slowly, savouring every bite as though each is a estacy moment: the very process which would take her at least 15 minutes, while the rest of us had gobbled up our fill within 5.

By 6pm, when the smartly-dressed adults were in sight with their leather bags, on their way home for dinner. It was a sign: we too picked up our schoolbags and started leaving. Ah-Pui would walked off to another direction, and Samat and myself would walk home together sicne we lived in the same block. Lisa would get her maid down to carry her belongings, while she leaves, saying nothing, though we already knew that we would be seeing her again the very next day.