“Macbeth was such a pussy.” Zhen Rong joked as we exited the classroom.
“Lady Macbeth was too much of a girlboss for him.” I laughed in response, my hand purposefully brushing against his as the school of students swam out the door with us. He doesn’t react.
When Zhen Rong laughs, my ears perk up. If he smiles, I smile. Should he ask me for water, I’d give him the ocean. He’s the track star of our school team and less importantly (I swear), my ex-boyfriend. When we broke up, Carissa was quick to come to my side and talk mad shit about him, which is funny in hindsight, considering the fact we’re all still inseparable friends. Our relationship ended amicably. Perhaps too amicably.
It was too clean, no hard feelings, no shouting. In its place was a lot of ‘I understand' and ‘I hope you’re okay’. It’s a blessing that we handled it without vicious shouting matches, or that we didn’t end up hating one another slowly but surely. Nights spent obsessing over young adult novels made me believe that breakups end a relationship in flames, so to have no explosion of fury and cold wars between the two of us felt… so anticlimactic.
It used to hurt to see him in school, especially after we graduated from secondary school into junior college and we followed one another into the same school. That ache has numbed but devolved into a dark desire: the desire to get back together with an ex.
It started with checking my phone out of muscle memory for messages that weren’t there. Before long, I started to read old messages wistfully, laughing at old jokes and cringing at what we said during the honeymoon phase. Sometimes I’d look at him, pining away even when he sat in front of me in the canteen. I consider myself a hopeless romantic, Carissa thinks the ‘romantic’ is redundant.
Why was our breakup so friendly, to the point where I never managed to fall out of love with him? Well, it was never anyone’s fault. Zhen Rong wanted space when we went into JC, wanting to focus on his studies which his parents were getting on his case about. For me, I wanted more attention to the relationship, and we realised it wouldn’t make sense at the time. We were nothing more than a victim of circumstances, so harbouring any ill will would be psychotic. Besides, I’m far too busy for love as well these days, after all this city needs its protector. Even if there is barely any crime to thwart.
Despite my best efforts I found it terribly difficult to fall out of love. Sometimes in a room with him, I find my eyes lingering on him. When I carry around my box file of work, he offers to carry it for me even though I have literal super strength (doesn’t stop me from pawning off the books). And embarrassingly, I’ve stared at his calves one too many times during PE. It’s his fault they’re so toned.
Lots of people discredit teen romances, and maybe it's the hopeless side of me, but I think they’re as meaningful as whatever adults have going on. You don’t need a developed frontal lobe to know how much you care about someone.
“I’ve got a break now, do you?” I ask hopefully, looking and lingering in his chestnut irises. When it’s just him and me, the corridor with shiny sports trophies and photos of various reputable school alumni completely vanish into the white and all I can focus on is him.
“Nah, I got Chem. See ya around, Rosie!” He said, splitting off from me the moment we reach a crossroads. I watched from afar as he joined his ‘bros’, laughing away at whatever silly story they were sharing. I smiled longingly, trying to convince myself I was happy he was happy. It’s unfortunate the thought of those gorgeous brown eyes he harboured popped into my head, shattering any hope I had of being content without him. Great fuel for poetry, I noted to myself.
‘Perhaps you should tell him how you feel.’ Sol rudely intruded in my head.
‘Absolutely not. No way. Nope.’
‘May I ask why not?’
‘Because, like I’ve said before, it’s embarrassing! And what if our friendship is ruined? I can lose him as a boyfriend, I can't lose him as a friend!’ I know my face is contorting awkwardly as I explain the predicament of young adult romance to Sol, making it look as if I had something bad for breakfast. As I trot rhythmically down the stairs surrounded by students rushing for a snack, I’m hoping no one takes a close look at my face. Though they say nothing, I can feel Sol’s quiet judgement tickle my scalp. Mercifully, they don’t press it any further. With that routine question out of the way, I closed my eyes and tried to feel for Carrie.
WIth Sol, I’ve been able to track the heat signatures of people and objects. I’ve had Carissa’s memorised like lyrics to a catchy song by now, so I can find her anywhere in school. Right now, I can tell she got released late by Mr. Seah and is making her way down from the fourth floor. I make my way to the stairway she’s coming from to meet up for our shared break and get a drink.
“How was geog?” I ask, sipping my iced Milo.
Carissa goes over what she learnt (though it completely goes over my head) and tells a funny story of what Sofia said in class, but I’d be lying if I said my mind was fully on her. The literal voices in my head had gotten the better of me today. Maybe I should tell Zhen Rong what I feel. Maybe he’ll take me back. Maybe I can save him from something as the Salamander and start off our romance once again: his jet-black knight in shining scales being me all along, an epic romance tale come to life. I want to kick myself for being such a loser.
“Hey, wakey wakey!” I refocus my eyes on Carissa snapping her fingers at me cheekily, my cheeks burning red. Sol could have easily warned me about the fact I was zoning out and daydreaming, but clearly would rather see me squirm my way out of this conversation.
“Sorry, sorry. I was thinking about stuff.”
“Zhen Rong is stuff.” She teased.
“No! Not Zhen Rong! No! Of course not! No! Nope!” I deny to no avail. As I do almost every day, I wish my power set involved perfect conversational skills.
“Five denials, you really are thinking of him, eh.” She smiles a devilish smirk, taking a sip from my iced Milo. A pang of discomfort in my palm tells me I’ve begun to subconsciously grip the bench I’m seated on tightly. I let go as quick as possible, hoping I haven’t left a dent.
“You’re so-”
“Hopeless, I know. I want what I can not have.” I groan, slamming my head on the table. These little stunts to visualise my agony don’t hurt anymore, so I do it often to get some laughs.
“You can always-”
“Tell him how I feel, I know! I don’t want to ! It’ll complicate things!” I speak towards the floor, hoping Carissa knows I’m talking to her and not the grout. I can hear her giggling as she gently pats my head like I’m a confused puppy. This conversation is essentially rehearsed dialogue between actors at this point.
‘Your friend is so wise. Perhaps she has a symbiote telling her what to say.’ For a moment I can’t tell if Sol is joking or serious, their monotone never makes it easy to tell. If I ever wanted to do a deadpan comedy routine, I’d have the perfect teacher living in my mind.
‘No, Sol. People always give the right advice as long as they’re not the ones who have to follow it.’ It’s a true fact. The people who give the best relationship advice? Not in one. The people who tell you to follow your dreams? Never did. It’s always easier when it's not you.
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“Sup gals!” I hear from above, looking up to find Ashen, Zhen Rong’s best friend and son of Chemistry teacher Mr. Adams, though not taught by him. By association we’re friends but not extremely close, having good conversation but nothing intimate. Carissa, friendly as always, invites him to sit with us which he happily obliges. As if a peace offering for intruding on sacred space, he offers us each a sip of his iced kopi. Carissa wastes no time getting that straw in her mouth.
While Zhen Rong's always been sweet and carefree, Ashen isn’t far off. His hair is almost never up to school dress code standards, his pants always tapered and a smile which makes many girls and guys swoon. He’s got the charisma necessary to let his arrogance and playboy attitude a little more tolerable, which is the pretty privilege of the world in action I suppose.
“Sup, Ash.” I greet cooly. He plops himself down next to me, leaning on the table and forward towards Carissa, who has now moved to drinking her own beverages instead of ours.
“Carissa, what did you get on the GP essay?” The sentence is a question, but he says it in an absolute way that’s more like a command. Carissa takes a moment to think about it, only for her to realise she’s forgotten the raw grade, in the same way someone who’s rich can’t tell you the prices of everyday items. Apologetically, she pulls the essay out of her bag to check the score.
“Out of 40? 31. Just an okay score.” She says without a hint of sarcasm. That’s the kind of score most students in class dream about, anything above one of the 20s would send students over the moon. Ms. Jinat is a tiger with a red pen in hand. “I think my content in paragraph three could definitely be improved, I had a writer’s block during the practice so it’s all smoked…”
But Ashen stopped listening the moment her score was revealed, making an overexaggerated groan. Apparently we were all taking turns today slamming our heads on our tables.
“Hey! How’s your dad?” Carissa says, her bright eyes focusing fully on Ashen. His dad was over the news yesterday, as the man “allegedly” saved by the Salamander Man, who stopped a speeding car from ramming into him on the way home. And I say “allegedly” sarcastically, I know it happened because I was there. With piercing claret eyes gazing straight into the soul of that driver, I single handedly managed to snap that man back into sobriety.
“Unfortunately, alive.” Ashen mumbled. He barely attempts to hide his bitterness, his joy seemingly evaporated from his body at the thought.
“Thank you! You saved my life! I--I didn’t even--” Mr Adams ran up to me on the road and I turned to catch a glimpse of the man I saved. He was showing me gratitude now, and he spoke in a flurry that told me he was riding off the adrenaline of hearing a car skid on the road and stopping before it crashed into his. But it was Mr Adams, Ashen’s dad, beloved teacher but terrible person as anyone close to Ashen would know. I couldn’t feign a smile knowing I saved him. I almost felt bad for doing that.
I couldn’t say anything to him. I just left, quipping to our drunken driver to take a taxi next time.
That incident was a feel good incident, one of the biggest to happen in the months of my career. Second to breaking up a small scuffle in the streets between two adolescents who thought they were tough stuff, even though they had hit puberty in the last year. This time I had saved someone and protected them from the consequences of someone else’s crime.
There was a bubbling guilt within me whenever my eyes glanced at Ashen, whose father I saved. If it were most people, I would never have this issue, but it’s Ashen’s dad.
Who he despises. And for good reason.
Tension began to weigh on everyone, like intensified gravity. Carissa, who asked a question she definitely shouldn’t have. Ashen, whose loathing of his dad was the most unrivalled emotion on the planet. Me, who’s the reason for all of this happening.
“Ah, whatever man. Never lucky I guess!” He dryly laughs and tries to play it off as a joke, but it’s forced. Carrie began to squirm in her seat, her face squeamish. If I didn’t do anything, she’d vomit from the stress of the situation. I can see my cup of Milo shake in her hand as she attempts to drink it to be excused from speaking, I don’t desire to stop her.
“Uh, I mean, at least we know she-- or he, is a good guy? That he saves… indiscriminately?” I muster, trying to defend myself latently and blatantly trying to shift the subject away from the victim but towards the action. Ashen’s eyebrow shifts upwards, as if wondering if I’m insane.
“He saved one dude! And it was my father. I’d say net negative for the world.”
“Yeah, but like, what if it wasn’t? What if it was someone else?”
“Fair, but the fact is that it was my father. That alone makes him a villain in my eyes.” Ashen’s expression was difficult to nail down, a hint of grief and disappointment in his blue irises gushed out. His eyes twitched against his will.
“I don’t think he decides who’s living and dying, I don’t think anyone can do that.” I try to defuse the situation, hoping that this is enough to keep him from talking more about how much he wants his dad dead. He’s gone silent now, and I can’t tell if it’s because he can’t think of a counterargument or he has thought of one but it’s something he can’t say out loud.
“In any case,” he begins with his concluding argument, “I don’t know who he is, but this Salamander thing needs to stop. Natural selection and all that.” He laughs like it’s a joke, the kind of humour spawned from saying something so egregious it has to be a joke. “Kidding. But like, randos shouldn’t enforce the law. Or randomly save or decide who to attack and who to defend. This kinda thing should stay in comic books. And if she’s going to keep doing it, don’t save abusers, maybe.”
“She?” I try to focus on the rest of his words but my mind had pinned onto the pronoun used.
“It could be. Never know these days.” Ashen spoke quickly.
“I don’t care if he’s boy or girl, lah! He still saves people. He stops crime. He’s a hero in my eyes, we can’t stop him from being him, but at least so far he’s doing good right?” Carissa asked rhetorically, the imaginary pedestal she put me on top of soon to manifest itself into reality. Neither Ashen nor I bother with this conversation, because neither of us can make any objective arguments. We’re both too intimately involved with the situation that has taken place to say anything further, and no one wants to upset Carissa. That is the unbreakable law, you don’t stress out Carissa.
My free hand grabbed my phone, my timetable telling me that linguistics class was in about five minutes, which was a perfect excuse to flee. Before I could leave, Carissa reminded me about our beach cleanup. The environmentalist in her can't stop doing good and I loved her for it, enough so that I’ll go for beach cleanups that she had a big part in organising. Besides, she baited me in with a solid argument.
"Zhen Rong will be there!" She cheekily told me. Maybe a bit too eagerly, I agreed upon hearing that. Look, my life isn’t all about my ex, but if you want to reel in a fish…
As I said my goodbyes and stood up, I released the death grip on the bench I was sitting on. I didn’t realise I was doing that. Ashen eyed me for far too long as I left, so I’m hoping he didn’t notice the dent I just left. If he did, his smile left me with no info.
‘To hate his caretaker this much… it’s incomprehensible.’ Sol said gravely as we made our way to the school lift lobby.
‘Not all parents should be parents.’ I said sadly, thinking back on Ashen’s strained relationship with his dad. We never went over to his house to hang out, because he said his dad would yell at him if anything went wrong while we were over. One day, Carissa needed help applying concealer on a pimple scar, and Ashen was oddly competent at using it. We never asked how he got good at it, but we never needed to ask either.
‘I can’t make sense of that. Perhaps that is a privilege in itself.’ Sol said, their words being tucked into my head like a child by their mother. A culture without domestic abuse must be nice, where every child is happy to go home and doesn’t dread family time. A civilisation where children don’t have to hide hobbies or bodies from the prying eyes of overbearing adults who would shame anything they did. That in itself is a utopia, isn’t it?
‘Do you regret saving him?’
‘No. We don’t choose who to save, right? We just… save everyone.’ I tried to smile, but it came out strange. ‘That’s what my favourite superhero stories told me.’
‘And yet, even after all that, people despise us. Not just Ashen.’ I couldn’t disagree. Fear of the Salamander Man was not uncommon. I thought I projected the image of someone someone who embodied the heroism I wanted to see in people. That illusion was completely shattered one day, when I heard a mum tell her son that if he didn’t behave himself, the lizard man will kidnap him.
Whenever I reflect on the hardships I face as my alter ego, I never find it to be a matter of my ability. I know I can stop a petty thief or save a man from running into an accident on the road. But it’s all about how everyone perceives me, it worries me to be the subject of mob judgement. If I did all this as a normal teenage girl I’d be hailed a hero, but as the monster man? Everyone thinks I have some wicked agenda behind these crimson eyes, that one day I’ll swing my tail into innocents and hurt them. I can grapple with flames, but not an angry mobs.
I hear conversations all the time by my family, about how unsafe it is for me with a monster on the loose. Christopher, my brother, in his pragmatism finds the prospect of a vigilante with extraordinary powers to be nothing more than a, in his words:
A timebomb for catastrophe.
Those words are burned into my brain. It hurts to be told what a monster you are by the people who think they love you.