Confessions of a Cat-holic (17)

I did not receive any invitations to dance that entire night, as expected. Rita, on the other hand, was the popular prom queen of the evening. Well, Rita was among the prettiest girls in my class. She was elected as our class' Miss Beauty Pageant together with Vincy. It was no surprise that she was invited to dance with a handful of guys that night. I was sitting close to her but I was not paying attention to her suitors in the hall and it was too dim to look around, so I just spent the night idling on the bench. In my distant memories, I was quite sure that she later sat down with one of her dance partners and chatted with him in depth for the rest of the night.

It turned out that the guy Rita spent the most time with that night asked her out after the event. I couldn't recall his name now. After all, it had been some good twenty years. Rita told me his name a few times but my memories faded away as time passed by. He looked like an Eric to me. Okay, maybe I would call him Eric from now on. All I could remember was that Eric had a scar on his forehead. He also had skinhead and really tanned skin. These were traces that suggested he could be a gangster. After living in Hong Kong for all these years, I knew very well who to avoid having troubles with, you know.

That's the thing about our school. We were all very insidious. I wouldn't think our school had nothing to brag about but we liked to stay low-profile not because we were trying to be some hidden gems. It was obvious that the activities we engaged ourselves with just could not be exposed to limelight. Majority of us grew up to join Disciplined Services while many of the rest ended up marrying criminals. If not the daughters of cops, we might just be some wives of the mafia members. Would you still go flaunt your school if you were one of us? What happened underground shall stay underground, ain't it so? Nevertheless, Rita confessed to me that she was in an official relationship with that Lasallian and yes she told me he belonged to one of the triads in Hong Kong.

Weeks after the La Salle ball, things were going well with Rita and her boyfriend. It was known to us that they had been kissing at Toysrus at Windsor House in Causeway Bay. French kiss it was. Their bold moves took us all by surprise. The context was that we were just some grade 8 teenager girls. Neither of us tried kissing with a guy, let alone kissing in public. Was it PDA? No, Rita was not that. She was not into any public display of affection. I knew her well enough to object to that proposition.

Later, I invited Rita to stay over at my place. She was the first to ever sleep over in my then new apartment. I made sure what we shared in conversation was in absolute privacy with no phone tapping, no video recording and no computer hacking whatsoever. I asked Rita if she slept with her boyfriend. Keeping virginity was quite a thing among us all in a Catholic conventry. But she said no. She assured me that they had not done it yet. I trusted her and that remained our best kept little secrets of all times.

Toysrus, gangster, public kiss and virginity. These details imprinted on my mind so profoundly that it taught me a life lesson I could never forget. I recently found Rita on facebook again after losing contacts with her since I transferred school. Her boyfriend looked like the Eric I knew from that La Salle ball. Was it still him? Rumor has it that she went out with a cop. Rumor also has it that she went out with a gangster. Browsing through her pictures, I saw that Eric-looking guy with a scar on his face now in police uniform.

Our mutual friend, Yvonne, told me that she suspected Rita's boyfriend was stealing her cell phone in an overnight birthday party but then she had no chance of tracing it or reporting it to the police. Why? Because he was a cop. You know what, her boyfriend might not be a cop. Her boyfriend might not be a gangster either. Who said that cops and the mafia were mutually exclusive binary entities? He could be both, all of the above. Yes, a gangster cop.