Something odd occurred during the English club’s gatherings. Throughout the passing lessons, let it be Tuesday or Friday, as long as Shum Deil was in, Pan Rita would pair him up with Sae as conversation partners. Others quite frequently changed partners. Their teacher said a variation of people with differing levels of the same language helped and taught each other more efficiently.
So, why was it that Sae got stuck with Shum Deil making monosyllabic exchanges at best?
The thing was, with time, Sae realised that Deil’s communication skills were out of touch with his brilliance. He could understand pretty much everything after paying attention and hearing it once. But, for some reason, he could not speak up for the life of him. His accent was wonky. There was an inner strain in him, a kind of fright to express himself freely. He often forgot how to say things; terms of speech he used without a thought on paper escaped him once he had to voice them out loud.
Those times, Deil became embarrassed. What Sae first thought of as annoyance turned out to be indignation Deil directed at his own mistakes. Working together was not easy. Sae’s mood turned for the worse. One time, he straight up asked the teacher about the reason for this partnership.
Pan Rita told him with surprise, “Why? Is it a problem?”
Sae did not know whether to laugh or cry. What could he say when it was put like that?
“I mean,” the woman continued, “I only paired him up with you because you’re one of the best with the spoken language. You are both first years and boys. I thought it’d be easier for you two to overcome this hurdle. If I put him with a girl, he’d become embarrassed so fast.” The last sentence was spoken in soft tones, lest someone beside them heard it.
Sae really didn’t know how to react. Objectively, he understood what his teacher was saying. Subjectively, he thought, Would Shum Deil become any more embarrassed in front of a girl?
“Could you help him?” Pan Rita was saying, “Maybe sometime outside of class? I think the other members make him more clamped up. Or are you two distant?”
That was an excellent question. Sae let out a deep sigh. Their relationship, could it be called distant? He felt he wasn’t a good choice for having a light chat with Shum Deil in the first place. What would they talk about?
He admitted, “I don’t know how to talk to him.”
Pan Rita waved a dismissive hand. “It doesn’t have to be one of the conversation topics. Knowing how to form the perfect speech isn’t his problem. His vocabulary is abundant; construction and tense, it’s all there. It’s more like...” She shook her head. “He’s not accustomed to talking out loud in another language.”
Sae couldn’t help but say with some irony, “Because I am...”
Pan Rita’s eyes arched in delight. “Well, isn’t that true? You can talk without a problem.”
Sae opened his mouth but could not refute it.
“Everyday chit-chat, what you usually talk about with your friends is enough. I don’t need more for now,” the woman still very diligently tried to convince him. She shifted her hair back and cleared her throat. “I know this is selfish, but…there’s an upcoming competition in January. Your age groups fit the limit. I want to send both of you.” Here, Pan Rita made a face. “There’s an oral test after the first screening.”
What Sae felt was concern. Not deep concern, but he couldn’t say his heart was as clear as the sky without a sign of clouds.
Oddly enough, he was not against the idea of this competition. He could feel that his head teacher only wanted them to go and challenge themselves. See what they were capable of. There weren’t any ulterior motives. “I’ll think about it,” he said, not committing to anything just yet. It wasn’t clear if he meant the competition or talking with Shum Deil.
Pan Rita gazed at him with a warm smile. She took it upon herself and said, “Very well. So this means I can still put you into one lot.”
“We don’t have to do the conversation topics,” Sae told Shum Deil at the next club meeting. “Just talk about anything, as long as we’re talking.” He glanced towards the teacher’s desk. “We’re kind of being supervised...”
The two sat the same way as the first time, bodies facing outside. With a tilt of their heads, they could see each other without a problem.
Since Shum Deil usually had to move seats, he took to the habit of sitting near Sae. “Talk about what?” he asked and frowned. “And supervised? It’s more like stalking.”
Sae glanced at him from the corner of his eye. Deil’s uniform looked like he just rolled out of bed; even his hair was a mess. Pulling a leg up, Shum Deil rested his forearm on his knee. He was the definition of uncooperative, and this was a class. A class of choice, but still. Just now, he said he considered the teacher making sure her students participated in class as stalking. Okay…
“Teach said she’s going to keep an eye on you. And now on me too.” Sae could not help but ask, “Why are you here at all?”
“Your head teacher threatened me. Said I missed too many classes. But she’d let it pass if I came here for more scrutiny.” Shum Deil spoke slowly with short sentences. There was no emotion in his voice – he told everything in a matter-of-fact tone.
Sae turned his body to the side. “Why weren’t you in class? How many classes could you even miss?”
Shum Deil let out a ha! “I don’t know. It’s not like I kept counting. Can we not talk about this?” He glanced at Sae and shook his head. “Go on. Let’s talk about you then if you wanna talk that much. Why are you here?”
Hearing his question fired back at him, Sae turned to face forward. He felt a bit agitated with himself. Why did he have to ask about such things? It wasn’t like he had anything to do with Shum Deil’s tardiness.
At Deil’s probing gaze, he said, “I wanted to join. What about it?” He unconsciously did that thing again, where his plain answer came off as a conversation stopper, cold like he was uninterested in the matter of verbal exchange.
And so, the two shut their mouths after that.
It was easy to order someone to go and chat about everyday trivial things, but it wasn’t like Sae shared any relation to Shum Deil. They were neither friends nor in the same class. It was awkward, akin to going out in the streets to chat up a stranger.
Up until this point, their whole conversation had been uttered in English. Shum Deil fared just fine, only a bit slower than his usual speech. Since this was their first club meeting after the midterms, the atmosphere became a bit lax. They could pair up by year and discuss the English test papers.
The exams were written tests made of two parts; reading and listening comprehension. Sae had not seen the other boy’s test paper, but they probably got similar marks. Thanks to Susu, Sae knew that Shum Deil ended up seventh in his class ranking. Exactly like him. In their case, it didn’t make sense to put their heads together and correct the mistakes. The test papers were marked with red only on occasion; nothing much to ponder about.
Actually, the atmosphere around the two was a bit awkward – stilted and cautious – no matter if they talked or not.
Sae started to shift a few books around in his bag, looking for something. After a minute, he put all his notebooks on the desk, emptying his bag.
“You draw?” Shum Deil asked out of nowhere. He pointed to the bottom of the stack on Sae’s desk. More precisely, at the black, thread-stitched block with perforated sheets secured by a rubber band. It was a pocketbook, not much bigger than a smartphone. “That’s not a simple notebook.”
Sae followed the finger pointed at the stack, and pushed the books back into his bag. “It’s a sketchbook. I use it sometimes in-between classes.”
Shum Deil remarked, “Your hands don’t look it.”
“What?” Sae’s hand stilled for a second on the sketchbook. His friends knew not to comment on it when they saw it, like a kind of inhibition to mention. But this person did not know about that at all.
“Your hands,” Deil said, “They don’t look gentle enough, I guess. They’re really bony and knobby, though.”
Sae blinked. Never did he care about how his hands looked.
“Look,” Deil stretched out his hand next to Sae’s. They were just boy hands. Slender and a bit angular. The difference was that while Sae’s was well-kept with clean nails, Deil’s hand wore scabs like a second skin. His fingers were long, and his nails even longer. His thumb curved back in an extreme arc. Sae stared at it in a daze.
“Your bones are too big to be this slender. Look at my hand. It’s got mass.”
“Take it out of my face,” Sae said and turned away.
“Whatever.” Deil took his hand back. He shifted closer. “Anyway... humanities students are sure closer to arts. That’s a pretty good topic to talk about at your interview.” He meant the competitions that would come with the season.
Sae hid the sketchbook from sight with some force. He refused. “I won’t do that. It’s not something to talk about.”
Deil asked, a bit puzzled, “Why?”
“There’s not much to tell. It’s not like I want to pursue arts in the future,” said Sae. He put away the rest of his things.
“But I thought that’s why you’re in humanities...”
“I wouldn’t come to a school that only offered liberal arts programs from the second year with no concrete syllabus for the first year. It’s mainly theoretical learning with a few courses held out of school at other facilities. You have to put in a lot of extra work if you want to learn art in a non-theoretical way. No universities like to hear about art programs with only outside workshops to show for practical pieces.” Sae said in a self-mocking way, “I’d be in an art school if I wanted to do it so much.”
At some unknown point in time they switched back from speaking in English, but at least from a distance they maintained the image of conversing. It was fine as long as the teacher did not come any closer and they continued talking at a low volume.
Sae said, “I guess you don’t know a lot about our school even though you’re attending it.”
“Huh,” Deil tried to take in all this information. In the end, all he said was, “No wonder even your pen’s like that.”
Sae gathered his brows. “Like what?”
“Like those needle-tipped pens. Last time I borrowed one, remember?”
“It’s a Fineliner pen.”
“Oh.” Deil gave a faint smile. “You really know a lot about this topic.”
That barely-there smile kind of made Sae tick. He did not plan to share so much just now. Currently, he was frustrated with himself and wanted to end this little chat once and for all. On purpose, and out of being uncomfortable with this line of conversation, he asked, “And where else did you encounter Fineliner pens to know it’s an art supply? I never told you that, and I doubt there are a lot of them in places where you spend your free time.” Although Sae didn’t say anything outright bad, it wasn’t like he cussed Shum Deil out, but his tone made his sentences sound quite vicious.
Shum Deil wasn’t an idiot – it would be hard not to take the hint. He stared at Sae intently for a minute before scoffing. “Really fucking popular. Say, what kind of places d’you mean?”
But Sae brushed him off. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”
“No, I want to know now,” Shum Deil kept being pushy, anger evident in his voice, “What did you mean by that?”
Sae closed his eyes and pushed his head back into the wall a few times. Rationally, he knew this was akin to throwing a tantrum, attacking someone because they were ignorant of his mental state about particular issues. It wasn’t the other’s fault for not knowing things about him. And it wasn’t like Sae started conversations sharing his private matters. He did not want to willingly share anything about this subject, especially not with Shum Deil.
Neither of them said anything for a while. There wasn’t much time left from class. Sae could feel Shum Deil’s gaze on himself, even with his eyes closed. Then, the boy said under his breath, “Pretentious ass.”
Sae’s eyes sprang open with indignation.
“Did you write your reflection paper yet?” he asked, his tone mocking, “Do you want to borrow a pen, maybe? There’s a brush pen as well, real comfortable to hold.”
In the past weeks, more and more paper planes littered one side of the school’s yard. It started with the forecourt and expanded out to other areas. Once the teachers took notice, they tried to figure out which class was responsible. The problem was that at some point the planes started to surface from several hallways, making it hard to determine the culprit. Then one afternoon, going with the long-held suspicion of the chemistry teacher, the school surprised the first year science class by secret monitoring.
Since the principal was out of town, the director had all fourteen offenders of the class write reflection essays and submit them to the principal once she returned. In addition, they all had point deductions and had to stand outside the teachers’ office for two hours while all of their parents got notified via phone calls.
Sae gave a dig, but Shum Deil seemed to not even feel it. He pulled back and taunted, “Not yet. Care to help? Maybe you have ideas on how to sound repentant but not too… pitiful. Those not-quite-artist hands could’ve written numerous self-reflecting essays. They sure look suitable for throwing fists, and as I heard, they actually do.” Shum Deil was a fiery youth, full of hot air. The smallest provocation and he was ready to throw a punch. Now, his expression looked rather complicated as he laughed in frustration. It wasn’t like these measly comments actually hurt him, but he did not understand why he got thrown with rocks all of a sudden.
Sae didn’t reply. He only glanced at Shum Deil, his gaze cold enough to freeze, before looking away. After a moment, he said, “Don’t bother me.”
The two of them maintained their half turned postures, so the teacher thought they worked well together. In reality, they did not even breathe in the other’s direction.
Neither of them said another word until class got out.
