Life on Point

My friends were sitting around me in the common room. The guys had their legs spread slightly apart and were all smoking; the girls all had perfectly straightened hair and over- mascaraed eyes and they sat with their legs crossed, heads cocked to one side, listening intently to me talking about the audition. They were little replicas of each other, identical apart from slightly different coloured hair or an altered facial expression. Don’t get me wrong they were great friends, they would support me through anything (well, almost anything) and were hilariously funny, but when it came down to it I wasn’t sure that they were nice people. Yes they were nice to me but that’s because I was one of them, one of the exclusive little group. I was popular, I was talented in some ‘cool’ area and they had deemed me attractive enough to be included. Or maybe it’s just because, being Chinese and the only person in the school who wasn’t Caucasian, I interested them like a new toy interests small children. But the sad fact was that if you weren’t any of those things then they didn’t care about you, you were insignificant to them except from when you provided gossip or a source of laughter. This was something I hadn’t really noticed before, or perhaps I had but just tried hard to ignore.

The reason the truth came out on that particular day was because Sophia walked into the common room surrounded by her group of friends and had the ‘audacity’ to smile at me. “Urgh,” my friend Clarissa shuddered, “What does that lezza want? Christ does she think by smiling at you your going to covert or something?” They all laughed, my friend John commented next, “I mean if she wasn’t a dyke and if she put on some makeup maybe she’d look half decent but until she changes she should keep the hell away.” Again all my friends started laughing and the sound of their voices rang harshly in my ears as I looked over at Sophia. She was trying to look like she didn’t care, trying to carry on her conversation with her friends but I could tell how much she was hurt by them. As if she could sense my eyes watching her she turned around and our gazes met. Her eyes looked empty, empty because of what they were saying and empty because I didn’t have the guts to stand up for the person I said I loved.

I could almost hear her thoughts, almost see her wondering why I’d said that I loved her when I wasn’t even prepared to stand up for her. “Guys, shut up.” The voice didn’t seem to be coming from me, it didn’t feel like I was saying it but by their reactions I knew that I was. They looked at me in horror, in utter disbelief. I could tell that they were trying to work out if I was joking or not but when they saw I was deadly serious they erupted with a hundred angry questions. I glanced over at Sophia and her face had cracked into a smile, her friends were glancing between me and her suspiciously and mine were doing exactly the same.

I don’t know what came over me to make me do what I did next. Soph puts it down to how much I love her whereas I lean more towards temporary insanity. I guess I figured I wanted to shut them up, I wanted to show Sophia how much I loved her, and I only had three more weeks left at this place so even if my friends did hate me it wouldn’t be the end of the world. To this day I reap the consequences of what I did then, to this day what I was scared would happen haunts me constantly. What happened that stupid Monday lunchtime has come to define me in every way and I resent that so much I can’t put it into words. I resent what I did and, in many ways I resent her.

It’s not that Soph actually did anything wrong because I know that in that moment I was the one that chose to walk over to her, I chose to wrap my arm around her waist and pull her body into me, I chose to press my lips against hers and to dart my tongue into her warm mouth that tasted like peppermint. I chose to make out with her in a busy common room just to prove a point. None of that was her doing, but I still can’t help but think it was somehow her fault. If we were never in a relationship that would never have happened and if she hadn’t been around we would never have been in a relationship. Simple as that.

However the amount of love I felt for her was stronger than my resentment and so together we continued to battle on. Of course our relationship was more strained than ever before after that but in many ways it had bought us closer together. We could finally be open about our feelings, finally stop hiding and start living.