nektros - Cynicism in a Hot Dish

A few weekends back, milling around a ferry terminal as the preordained quota of swear words beggared by all forms of public transport reached its daily limit, I recognised a girl disembarking from the most recently docked hell boat.

She had belonged to a high-visibility group in high school, while I had remained comfortable in a no-visibility one. She hadn’t come across my radar in four years, much less spoken to me during the six preceding ones.

My long unused skills for blending into the background had barely put up a fight against her wandering gaze when she smiled at me. The farouche shields feebly churning themselves into action inside of me sputtered into a useless black hole as she approached.

“Hey,” she said.

Clique-wise, my high school had never been the usual stereotype. Being an elite private girls school, the smartest girls had always been the more popular, while the image-obsessed coasters had fallen by the wayside.

Then there had been the top-tier group who, with their beauty and brains, had been allotted access to the best of both worlds.

Needless to say, “Gosh, Marie, I’m so glad you were able to laser-drill through this newspaper I was holding in front of my face, and didn’t come to the conclusion that I was doing it deliberately to avoid you, because that would have been more awkward than the awkwardness of this conversation, of which there’s absolutely nil” did not come to mind as my immediate response to the top-tier girl standing in front of me.

“Hi,” I replied, flirting with the scenario of pretending not to know who she was, before deciding that only a question on the current contents of her uterus would rank higher on a scale of petty passive-aggressiveness.

She took a seat next to me on the bench. Not noticing my bristle of discomfort that she hadn’t finished off her polite introduction and left, she asked, “How are you?”

One of my strongest memories of her had taken place in our second last year of high school. During our year level’s camping trip, there had been a particularly hot day during which we’d traversed a forest with a cruel selectivity when it came to filtering out the heat.

Most of us had elected to keep a bare minimum of modesty with our clothing, despite the accompanying sweat. The top-tier girls, however, hadn’t hesitated in stripping down to their bikini tops and short shorts. Trudging through the silently mocking forest, my aversion to facile jealousy had temporarily been rescinded as a pang of envy had shot through me, witnessing the fun the top-tier girls were having splashing through a creek while the rest of us lagged behind.

It must be easy to be so confident, when you have everything.

The sentiment blipped through my thought waves in an unpleasant encore as I made pleasant with Marie. She was in the throes of an architecture degree at university, and had a new boyfriend on her arm. I was already gainfully employed, and didn’t have anything on my arm in terms of a meaningful relationship.

“So who’ve you seen from school since we left?” she asked, brushing a strand of her natural blonde hair from her face.

“No-one,” I said, staring longingly out at the river, before coming up empty and returning to her eyes. “Except my friends.”

“We weren’t friends?”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled, my tone rapidly failing my forced diplomacy.

Her inner discomfit detectors finally shattered against the weight of my refusal to make eye contact with her. Standing under the pretence of answering a mobile which just happened to be on vibrate (though bashfulness does tend to fuel the nodes in my brain more predisposed to a full blown persecution complex), she took five minutes to turn back to me.

“You haven’t really recognised anyone around uni,” she said, in the universal voice of bullshit-detecting skepticism.

My ferry appeared on the river horizon at that moment. Jumping for joy had never seemed a more enticing cliché.

“Yeah,” I replied, my imminent means of escape bolding my words. “I lied. I was never as confident as you. I can’t just walk up to people I didn’t even know in high school and start a conversation.”

A double reel followed my confession, as I was taken aback at her taken-aback expression.

“It’s not about confidence. I’m just being friendly.”

Her wounded reaction tugged at my guilt lyre. I tried to choose the most appropriate word to emote my sorriness as my ferry pulled into the dock.

“Huyhm.”

“Listen,” she said, after I’d bidden her goodbye and started down the terminal gangway. “I lied, too. I don’t have a boyfriend.”

I stared at her, amazed. “I wasn’t planning on letting that eat away at my soul, but thanks for telling me.”

“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to think less of me. What kind of confident person thinks something as insignificant as being single is something to be ashamed of?”

Feeling an oncoming moment of poignance in both the modern and archaic sense of the word, I didn’t reply. She chose to say no more, however. Smiling more warmly than when she’d first seen me, she raised her hand in a small gesture of farewell, before leaving.

Seating myself on the ferry, the cloud of an unexpected encounter lifting from my head, the relieved set of my mouth gave way to its own smile at the meaning behind her words, as well as the possibility that they themselves had been the lie, fabricated for the sole purpose of raising my confidence to a level she merely claimed she’d never had.