Chapter 3
The next morning, Amy suddenly realized it took her a lot longer to do her hair, her make-up and put on her perfume. She had never been in this situation before, she didn’t know what other girls would do, she didn’t know what she should do. Did she show too much eagerness? Should she be more reserved? But what if he thought she didn’t like him? So many thoughts running in Amy’s head she felt so troubled.
And just like that, they were together. Amy didn’t try to hide the relationship; she wouldn’t avoid John’s intimate gestures in public, even responded to them. They took classes together, had lunch together, at weekends John would take Amy out to a park, a cafe or just somewhere they could be alone together. Being with Amy, John had to face a lot of pressure and resentment from teachers, her friends, and even guys who liked Amy. Amy kept seeing John’s bruises and cuts, he had never told her anything about them, she had therefore never asked. Yet she started to form the habit of always carrying around some band-aid, medical alcohol or personal medical kit. Not long after, to everyone’s surprise, John’s grades started to climb up. When he got his first B+ in math, the teacher looked at Amy, sitting a few rows away from John, for a few seconds and then quietly turned away. As John’s grades continued to improve, idle gossips around them accordingly faded away. It’s not that Amy never paid attention to those gossips, she thought about them here and there. Sometimes she wondered why she agreed to be with John. What was this about him?
“What’s wrong?” John asked one day as Amy had been quiet for the whole lunch time.
“I got B for History,” Amy sighed, “But that’s OK. It was my fault, I hadn’t memorized well the ancient Greek history,” she smiled to John.
He winced as he looked at her smile. John knew Amy’s history teacher, Mr Noah, a weird nerd who liked to ‘surprise’ his students with brain-racking questions and rarely gave out a grade higher than A. And John knew Amy enough to know that she didn’t omit her study; there must be something that that Noah did.
“Don’t smile. Unlovely,” he said.
Amy’s smile froze, her anger began to form in her stomach. Yet before she could let it out, John pulled her into his embrace, rubbing her hair as he asked, “Do you want me to beat the crap out of that Noah guy?”
Amy burst into laughter and her embryonic anger was gone in a blink of an eye, “No, you can’t. You’ll get expelled”.
“I’m not stupid. I’ll mask my face,” John growled under his breath. “Baby, you don’t have to smile in front of me. If you’re in a bad mood, you can hit me; if you are angry, you can scream at me; if you feel writhed, you can cry to me,” John gently whispered into Amy’s ear. And after that, I’ll beat the crap out of the guy who upsets you. Of course, this sentence John only said to himself silently. For many years later, every time Amy woke up in the middle of the night, what John said that day would come back to her and she’d whisper to herself “What if I want to cry now but you’re not here?”.