Image Credit: Lorraine Yu
If you ask me whether I enjoyed going to school or not, I’d say school is much like eating. Three meals a day. You simply don’t think much about whether you enjoy your lunch or not. You just eat, much like how you didn’t really know much as a kid, and all you knew was that your only obligation was to go to school, every single day.
That bit has always bothered me a little.
One day, I decided to ditch school with my best friend. To skip school was merely a slice of cake, since the both of us lived quite far away from school. It meant that Mr. Chan would never bother to drag our sorry butts back to school all the way from our homes. As the Chinese proverb goes, it was much easier for Mr. Chan to just close his eyes to whomever was absent that day. Without saying goodbye to my mum in the kitchen, I snuck out of the house with my bicycle. The fact that us boys never thought of cycling back to school, but instead chose to walk for twenty minutes every day for those six years of primary school had always baffled me. I guess in a way, cycling had always been a treat for us; it was a necessary component for the recipe of an adventure. And we were more than ready for an adventure.
I decided for us that we should see who catches the most birds on the hill behind our school, but my best friend had something else in mind. Without saying a word, he drove down the hill, fast as a flying sparrow, turned around and yelled, “Let’s go for a swim in the pond today! I bet the water is cool like pineapple ice!”
Little did he know that I hadn’t the slightest clue on how to even float on water.
Before I could even protest, he had already disappeared in the distance. There was nothing I could do but to chase after him on my bike, as if I were a national cyclist.
“Come on, take off your clothes, jump into the water! Don’t be such a wuss!”
“Didn’t you hear that a primary six girl died exactly in this very pond last year?”
“Cut it out! No way!”
“Yes, it’s true I swear! I think it’s best that we leave. It’s not too late to go back to the hill for a while and stop by home for breakfast after the 9 a.m. bell.”
“Not a chance, I bet a lot of people drowned here in the pond. You think we could find anything in the deeper end of the pool? The first one to find a shoe wins! C’mon, let’s go, you wuss!”
The next thing I knew, my clothes were being torn off by my best friend, and the both of us were stripped down only to our underpants. It was a late autumn morning, and I was getting goosebumps from the breeze. I remember thinking to myself that I would rather drown and join the ghosts at the bottom of the pond than to admit that me, a boy of 10 years old, was unable to swim, agile like a fish, much like other boys in my class.
“You ready? Okay. Three! Two! —”
“WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU TWO ARE DOING OVER THERE?” a voice roared from a distance.
I swore the voice sounded like Mr. Chan was simply a few steps away from us, even though as we turned around, we spotted that he was at least one mile away.
“Oh crap, we have to run! Now! Put on your clothes, we have to run!”
As we both got dressed in a frenzy, I couldn’t really tell whether I was actually relieved that Mr. Chan came to my rescue or not. I suppose I could’ve really drowned, had I jumped into the pond with my best friend. To drown or to take a beating, I could hardly decide. I could barely button up my shirt properly, when my best friend shoved me onto the bicycle and forced me to ride.
“C’mon we have to go! I can’t take another beating from Mr. Chan again!”
As we rode our bicycles against the raging breeze, running away from Mr. Chan’s bamboo stick and from our sole responsibility of going to school every day, I had never felt more free.
Author Bio: Online language teacher by day; out-of-work theatre performer by night; dazy drifter in between.