My friends joke I am a gay. They have evidence. Every time I am alone with girls, I am not myself. So self-conscious am I that I either blush or breathe heavily. By contrast, most of my buddies have a way with she-creatures; with the know-how, they are expert at flattering them. My basketball teammate, Mr H, for instance, won Miss W’s heart, no sweat. Anytime I am talking with a girl, however, the atmosphere will go leaden. A gamer and fan of weaponry, I find my interests restricted to PC games and guns and missiles. Very few girls share my passion. If girls are raving over anime or manga, I find myself miles away because my knowledge of their boring stuff is next to nil.

The reason I could not bond with girls in junior high school was that I thought computer games and fighter jets more fun. Things did not change until I met Jane.

Jane was a bouncy sunny girl, always carrying a smile on her face. Like a streak of bright colour, she entered my barren junior high school landscape. In junior high, my English was a shame. I often turned to Jane for help. English was her forte. When I asked her for the answers to a test, she would withhold them from me at first. In the end, however, she would give in and share them. I was grateful to Jane for that because by copying her answers, I took the time to get my other homework done, with an English test going on in the classroom. That way after school, I would have more time left for my hobby at home.

One day, Jane noticed that I was doing my homework while she was answering the questions in a test. “Jack, that’s a brilliant idea,” she bluntly said, “but it’s unfair.” A gamer too, naturally, she would like more time for her passion back at home as well. That day we decided to save time by collaborating when a test was given in the future. She would do the first part of the test; I the reading passages. Then we would swap answers.

As you can imagine, our first collaboration ended up in disaster. I had got wrong most of the answers to the reading passages in the test. The next day, both of us got invited to the English teacher’s office for “a cuppa” because of the miserable grades. The teacher had detected our “smart” way to cheat.

I made up my mind to better my English. I fed myself more English passages and articles and did more practice. Encountering a problem, I consulted Jane or my classmates about it. The subsequent weekly tests saw my English grades gradually inching up.

Jane and I had a lot in common. Both of us gamers, we consumed Game of Thrones, Big Bang, and other American movies. I no longer felt nervous and clumsy, staying with Jane, because she was a humorous great talker. While we were gaming together, I laughed at her if she made a blunder. Jane would curse me heartily should that happen. Did we lose our hearts to each other? You bet! One sunny afternoon on the way home, we had our hearts shown and made passionate confessions of love. It has been the sweetest moment of my life.

All good things must come to an end, as the saying goes. The salad days did not last long, unfortunately. Half a year passed, and the high school entrance exams confronted us. Jane’s grades were way better than mine. In my town, extremely slim are the odds of gaining admission to YYHS, for only about 30 places are allocated by the City Education Authority to the hundreds of exam candidates annually.

Weeks before we sat the high school entrance exams, the principal of our local high school came to give a presentation at our junior high. In retrospect, the hypocrite was promoting his own school at the expense of YYHS. In his speech, he claimed matter-of-factly that not only is it next to impossible to earn a place at YYHS through entrance exams but also teachers there eat their students alive. It was incredible that such bullshit should have worked on the naïve souls like us. The speech got Jane worried.

I tried every way possible to undo the negative influence Jane was cast under. “Don’t believe that guy, Jane,” I encouraged her. “We will need a much better place to study than our town’s high school.” However hard I tried, Jane would not subscribe. In addition, neither of us was 100% certain that I could make it to YYHS although Jane should have little difficulty. Of course, we could easily stick together by both choosing to study at our local high school.

That misleading speech made Jane no longer as focused on her lessons as before. A week before the high school entrance exams came, we had to file a formal application on the City Education Authority’s official website to the high school of our choice. Jane did not go for YYHS at all. She did not even give it a thought. On my parents’ advice, I decided upon YYHS as my first choice and our town’s high school as a backup option.

The results, which came out in June 2019, stunned us both. Both Jane and I passed the entrance grade for YYHS. Jane, a smart learner, had outperformed me by over 10 points. To our deepest chagrin, the applications we had submitted on the website prior to the exams placed us in different schools in the end, Jane in the high school at our town, me here at YYHS in the regional capital.

The past has vanished like wind. Jane and I parted ways. Life is as it is, and things often will not be running as expected. We have to adapt to changes and go with the flow. Since we left behind junior high, Jane and I have been estranged from each other. I still do my games, but there is not some nice girl by my side, physically or virtually, when the online warfare is on. Jane might have got a new boyfriend in her school; or she might still remember me. Whoever knows?

Although folks enter and exit the world stage all the time, memories stick. Warmth surged in me whenever those bitter-sweet moments creep back into my consciousness.