It started out with Brandon, Meng, Zheng and I walking through Roxy Square one torched Friday afternoon. The hottest days of the year landed around this period, and even in the surprisingly cool indoor environment of the rundown, rustic building, I could quite vividly imagine the searing heat of the sun beating down on the world outside. To a point however, having survived the erratic temperatures just an hour ago to actually get out of the house for lunch served enough experience as reminder for each of us. No one really bothered much otherwise about getting outside again.

Meng called the place 'dodgy', a word he commonly associated, as I had found out a little while before while eavesdropping on his conversation with Brandon, with worn out, fossilized hang-outs like this one. Only those who lived in the bygone era of bare-walled barber shops and well-outdated fashion boutiques could bear with its ugly corners and angles, twists and turns of old building plans. Honestly, I would not have been caught dead 'hanging-out' here after school. Not that I had a straight bus here from school, but you get the idea. The only reason I would have ever been here like I was today, was for the air-conditioning. The boys however, had brought me here to meet their good friend and trusted barber, Le Le. The primary issue at hand, was for Zheng and Brandon to get their hair cut. I never really understood why boys had to keep getting their hair cut,especially when there was already a lack of hair on their heads, much less the length of it. That problem aside, we talked and laughed, as old friends do (though that we were not, figuratively or literally) to De Barber Shop. Or at least that's what I think it was called. Some French thing.

Le Le (oh gosh that sounds French too, thinking about it) was not at the shop today, unfortunately. He was out teaching French. Okay just kidding. But he was not there today and thus the boys refused to get their hair cut by anyone else. After a quick decision, being boys, to come again tomorrow before church, we set off for home. Zheng, who had just met us during our lunch break, decided to come along too. He had to get his beloved X-Box back from Mark's possession, Mark also being my neighbour. In one of those moments of walking together where no one in particular is leading anyone else, but there is an unspoken destination, we ended up walking a subconsciously longer way to the door than I had vaguely recalled. We also ended up talking about the all-too-familiar topic on school grades. To be exact, O level grades.

Zheng and I both had A2s for both our sciences. That's as far as we got with the topic. After digging out the fact that I got the coveted A1 for English, Meng proceeded to gladly tell everyone about how I wrote my own stories, and at this sudden change of subject I got rather embarrassed about my secret trade. So I asked Meng if he was trying to annoy me, and that I had already endured a bad enough debate with my cousin the day before about how I was boy crazy. This yet-another change of discussion literally sent the boys crazy and all of a sudden the sunburnt world outside did not seem the most heated thing around anymore. It sent Brandon off into one of his giggling fits.

"But you are boy crazy." Zheng looked at me briefly and said in that I-am-so-serious tone. Being Zheng, when he actually spoke up to comment on something, it somehow came out like the Ten Commandments, Judgement Day-style, for that matter. He had this uncanny ability to make you feel bad, as I had found out in China when he accused me of being superficial. Although that time it was pretty true.

It was this tone of voice and persistence in Zheng's five worded statement that left me defenceless. In bid to look for moral support in the eyes of one of my friends, I found none as being 17 and below the normal age height requirement, Meng and Brandon, both towering above eye-level, laughed amongst themselves. It was only later that night that I unconsciously arm-twisted Zheng into revealing the reasons of his argument by putting a display picture of his face behind a crosshair. Reasons for those lay behind a much later afternoon episode where Meng borrowed my laptop whilst I was caught up in my room to watch the OC. After Zheng came over from Mark's house with his X-box, he hijacked the laptop from Meng. Peals of laughter and suspicious conversations concerning my MSN account and I drew me back outside, only to find Zheng triumphantly typing away at my computer, my MSN account blatently displayed on the screen and one very exciting conversation with Wesley, his cell member, going on. Brandon had abandoned his physics worksheets entirely and now both boys, Meng concealing laughter discreetly behind his physics notes, sat side by side. They were clearly in the midst of destroying my reputation online. But as loving Christians, the damage was minimal.

Back to arm-twisting Zheng finally at night to explain why he deemed me as boy crazy, he gave me four well thought out reasons.

1) My nicks are always somehow about boys.
2) My display pictures are somehow about boys (if not, myself).
3) I think about boys all the time.
4) I am always caught talking about hot guys.

I am simply misread, misinterpreted and misunderstood. There is sometimes no way to change that.

Meng did say however, "Go write a story about now", with regards to my A1 for English.

So I have.  ¶ 11:01 PM 1 comments