Serena took a day off today. She didn’t tell anyone, nor invent a valid reason for it. Instead, stayed in bed, staring into the ceiling like she looked at abstract art. Confusing yet mesmerising. The bland, uniform white resonated with her, almost as if it was sending her a message she had yet to interpret.
Every ceiling she’d ever seen was white. At Motel 91, the ceiling had water spots and mould forming in the corner. At work, the ceiling was divided into grids, lit by equally white lamps. At home, the ceiling housed spiders and wasps in every nook and cranny, and protected refugee mosquitoes from death.
Get up. Shower, eat breakfast, either go to work, or seize the off-day to get ahead on groceries, pay the bills… But her body did no such thing. It believed its time was up and rotted on the mattress to return itself to Mother Nature.
This was enticing.
But the acid burning in her stomach did not. Inch by inch, step by step, she dragged herself to the bathroom like a corpse washed ashore. Showered, made coffee, and sat in the golden rays of sunlight. It betrayed her muscle memory to sip her coffee, as opposed to chugging it.
The smoky aroma never failed to wake her up. Sunlight was a nuisance most of the time, blocking her eyesight and cooking her skin medium rare. But, in these rare moments, it was a sauna that detoxified the negative energy clotting her blood, and recharged her with its golden embrace.
How would Fate judge Alicia? Often, it took an entire childhood’s worth of data for it to make a verdict. She had detected signs of both rulings, good and bad. Smoking; a bad omen. Her unwavering diligence; a good omen. But said diligence was losing. Over her dead body, would she let that happen.
The best omen she saw came in Alicia’s childhood. For reasons beyond human comprehension, baby Alicia insisted on reading the medical textbook Wei Xiang loaned her for bedtime. The child clumsily flipped through the pages until the topic of ‘DNA’, then smacked the page, showing her piqued interest. Serena obliged and read it for bedtime. It worked like a charm.
Any word with over three syllables made Alicia laugh.
This omen remained as she grew. Her wide-eye excitement whenever she visited Wei Xiang, her curiosity to smell every herb and taste every medicine. Raising a doctor may be as noble as being one.
She had already found the JCs and universities Alicia would enrol in, and set up the accounts to save for her school fees. Of course, she shouldn’t enforce her broken dreams on the girl, which made it an eternal blessing when Alicia herself wished to study medicine. Serena promised herself to allow the girl carve her own path, choose her own speciality, and become the doctor she wanted to be. She will not be like Ma and Pa.
Doctors earned high salaries. Alicia could have an adult life free of worries over rent, bills or taxes. That’s paradise.
Doctors are attractive. Who wouldn’t want to marry them? Not only do they have a head start, they also had no bumps. Alicia could live without being single and heart-ache. That’s paradise.
Doctors had money to take care of their retired parents. Once Serena reached her golden years, she would be well taken care of. That’s paradise.
All this was perfect. All this was decades away. There’s nothing she could do now but wait. She went back to bed. Continued rotting.
She did it again tomorrow. Cheryl criticised her lack of communication. Gen gave a ‘Get well soon!’. Kelly asked what’s wrong? She didn’t answer, because there were no words to explain this.
It was time to confront Alicia on the letters. Wei Xiang was right. This was her job as a mother, and no one else’s. Enough procrastination. Rather than rotting mindlessly, she rotted whilst rehearsing.
The talk needed to tackle three problems. One, how does she conceal her crime of snooping through the girl’s phone? If Alicia caught her red-handed, it would be all the girl talked about. The conversation would go nowhere.
Two, talking about him always carried a risk of piquing Alicia’s curiosity further. A mysterious parent who vanished from the face of the earth? It was a mystery that begged to be solved.
Three, how to talk about him without sharing the real story. She decided Alicia was still too young to hear it. Her weird hand flapping, stubbornness to possess basic respect, and lack of common sense sparked zero confidence in the girl’s maturity to handle it.
Alicia wasn’t ready.
As the girl did her assessments, Serena tried again and again to broach the topic. But all she managed was to cower behind a tired nag. It was like jumping into an icy lake; no matter how she jumped, it would be freezing.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Even Fate got annoyed at her cowardice, and instigated Alicia to take the lead. The girl dragged her into her own bedroom, demanded she turned the air refresher on, and requested a talk.
She was doing the hand-flapping thing again. “My results for my assessment tests returned!” She handed her the report book. “Look!”
How is that possible? “I thought you said they took a week to mark it.”
“Correct.”
“What?” She shook herself awake and checked her phone. Her jaw dropped; it had been a week. What the hell happened from Wednesday to Sunday?
“Look at my results!” Alicia rubbed her knuckles together.
Did that mean what she thought it meant? Math, ‘C’. The curse persisted.
“If you look at my history paper, I’m—”
“A ‘C’ for Math? Your results got worse?”
“Mom, my history paper—”
“Do I look like I’m talking about your history paper right now? How did your math grade decline! I thought you said you focused on what Mrs Fei told you to.”
“Yes, but she didn’t tell us about the graph question at the back. And she only spent a single lesson going through it. That’s not fair!”
“Don’t blame your teachers for your own laziness!” She scoffed. The nerve of teenagers never failed to disappoint her. “Stop making excuses already! You think the JC cares about that?” She tapped the ‘C’ violently.
Alicia placed her hands behind her back and stared at her feet. Silent as she should.
“And look at what Mr Lee wrote! ‘Alicia has been increasingly distracted, chit-chatting with classmates during lessons and failing to submit homework assignments on time.’ Hm? What’s that about?”
“But Vinn—” Alicia cut herself off.
Serena rubbed her temples. The migraine came right on schedule. “Why can’t you just—What’s the problem? Do you need help?”
Alicia remained motionless.
“Do you want tuition?”
“No.”
“Then what other suggestions do you have in mind to fix this?”
She dropped the report book on the mattress and asked the girl for solutions multiple times. Alicia had nothing to say. Alicia remained motionless.
“And what about your FCE coursework? Did you catch up? Or will Mr Lee talk to me again?”
“I don’t have my phone—” the girl mumbled, thinking she wouldn’t get caught.
“You dare to ask for your phone back right now? When you scored a ‘C’ for math? You’re joking, right?”
“I’m not. I’m taking this seriously!” The smart aleck protested.
“You dare to get clever with me?”
“I’m not! I’m stupid!”
She shook her head and folded her arms. The parasite of immaturity chose Alicia as its host, feeding off her for its stubborn survival. It blinded the girl with this obtuse superiority complex. It left her feeling smart, and growing dumb. The best host to infect was the stupid one.
It left Serena in a proverbial checkmate. She had no choice but to move on.
“I have something else to talk to you about.”
Alicia nodded.
Problems one, two, and three remained un-tackled. But the ‘C’ demanded her to confront this now. Now or never. She revealed Alicia’s phone from her workbag, and opened the ‘Bin’ folder.
“What’s this?”
Alicia went whiter than the ceiling. Whipped her head away.
“Hey!” she shouted, made Alicia flinch. “Look at me when I’m talking to you! How many times do you need me to say this? Until the day I cough up blood? What Is This?”
“Mmm….” The girl whined like a kettle trying not to explode.
“I’m upset too, Alicia. It’s not just you! Be honest with me, and we can get this over with quickly. I just want to know whether you’ve sent this to anyone.”
Alicia shook her head like a toddler at vegetables.
“If you think you found him, you haven’t. Whoever out there that you think is him is a scammer. He’s pretending to be him and gaining your trust. And with your trust he will ask you for money or naked photos! You know that, right?”
Alicia nodded. Whined louder.
“Did they ask for money? Or naked photos?”
“No!” Alicia dared shout.
“Hey! Don’t you dare shout at me? I gave birth to you! You better show some respect! I’m so sick and tired of your attitude. How do you think you can make any friends in class when this is how you talk to your own mother?”
The kettle exploded. “I was one mark away from getting an ‘A’ for my history paper! Why won’t you ever listen to me? Why can’t you just be proud of me? I’m stressed!”
“You think you’re the only one who’s stressed? Huh? Have you ever considered how I feel about all this?”
“I don’t—Mmm… I don’t care! I don’t care! I don’t care! Fuck it!”
“You’re cursing? You learnt it from that Kat, right? Right? You really wanna end up like me?”
“Fine! I’ll just end up like you! I don’t care anymore! Fuck it!”
A fragment of the kettle struck her heart. Red exploded in her eyes. Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable. Sixteen years of lost time, of back and joint pain, of unbridled misery… Sixteen years spent under these white ceilings… all to be cursed at. As if she was junkie scum, a crushed up cigarette by the side of the road, a waste of space. The nerve, the audacity, the disrespect, disrespect, disrespect!
Something broke in Serena tonight.
She pounced at the devil girl and squeezed the life out of her left ear. Using it as a leash, she dragged the devil girl into the car and pumped the gas.
“You don’t care? Fine. Fiiine. Fine With Me. Let your dear mother teach you where to start!”
Alicia screamed, begged and pleaded madly. But Serena heard nothing in this car; only the singular voice in her head telling her where to go.