The crowd was – as is only possible for the main lobby of a university in the throes of midday break – packed to the point of seducing a tantrum out of the most stalwart claustrophobic. Reaching the apex of the throng and preparing to enter the library by way of converting the books in my arms into flying battering rams, my jugular-targeting plans died in my head as they were overtaken by something else.
Her. Looking straight at me.
Lex talionis;
The law of retaliation, whereby a punishment resembles the offence committed in kind and degree.
Tanya.
Looking back on high school, we all like to think we emerged victorious. I know and admit for a fact that I alighted on the lower end of the straight flush spectrum. And yet, being a PhD thesis-worthy case study in basket-case hypersensitivity, my apparent thwarted chance of being able to fondly look back on my school years was purely self-inflicted.
I was never bullied. Studying at a strict private girls’ school in a year level with cliques largely apathetic to each other, the most abusive words ever directed my way uniformly involved indifferent mentions of ‘pipe bombs’ and ‘wrong lockers’.
But then, there was the plague treatment. And Tanya.
She was a latecomer to my field of friends. The quintessential friend of a friend of whom you’re never quite sure whether to bear hug or prime as a patsy in all cases of misplaced explosive devices. Coupled with never having been particularly close to the actual friend – Jane – it wasn’t the most rock solid paragon of hand-holding chumminess.
So it was in year 10, having conjured up a future for myself inevitably as far removed from my current one as subtlety is to soap dramas, that I landed myself in science class with Tanya and Jane (TJ), while the rest of my group allowed themselves to be swept away by a large dose of cosmic humour and siphoned into alternatively offered computer and computer graphics classes.
Of course, being a teenager and choosing one over the other had to mean a minimal good friendship with TJ, and it was there. I even remained on speaking terms with Tanya up until graduation, after which I erased all memory of her from my mind for fear of all post-Tanya friendships not being able to live up to the one we had.
In the way of not being ensconced in crap, that is.
Our science classroom was made up of long rows, each with three seats on either side of a wash basin. For a few weeks into the school year, I perched with TJ in the front row, Tanya in the middle separating me and Jane. Beaker and test tube shattering hours passed without ego-marring incident.
Then, in a grammar school act akin to coating a friend in wool and cannon-balling them into a wolves den, Tanya shifted away from me. Literally.
Every Tuesday and Thursday morning during the first few minutes of science class, she would make a show of screeching her chair as far to the right as it was possible to get away from me without her and Jane swapping DNA and becoming conjoined twins. A casual observer might have thought me deficient in the way of molding myself into a human squeegee. In reality, I was an eight ball permanently set on question mark.
Within the pure triviality of each case of steadfast body distancing lay the genius in Tanya’s tactics. There were no words involved. The last thing I could do was wave a cudgel in the air, beat my chest and holler, “Why the hell are you moving half a metre away from me again? Matching it with the exact length of the stick nestled up a certain aperture, are we?”
However, taking into consideration Tanya’s complete non-acknowledgement of my existence during science class, along with the witting students watching everything from behind us, the aforementioned apathy of my year level’s cliques and the more pertinently aforementioned hypersensitivity of my ego, I was cowed into mortification. Worst of all, Jane never said a thing.
Okay, there are worse ways to humiliate someone than through verbal spitlicking. That was a lesson better taught by dunking your head repeatedly into a vat of hydrochloric acid. Why’d you make an example out of me?
Though Tanya’s behaviour eventually stopped – a year later – seeing her again having not even surmised that we’d been studying at the same university dredged up a wilted question of renewed burning proportions.
I continued walking towards her. She turned away from me, but didn’t move. I formed the question into one able to be verbalised without getting me dragged away by campus security.
Then I realised mid-step that she had believed I was getting nothing more than I deserved. All those years ago, someone had told her what I had done.
