Confessions of a Cat-holic (5)

Sharon was suicidal. Actually, she still is. All she cared about was getting ahead of others. I could see why she behaved in that way. She was relatively well off. Her household owned three cars, one audi, one bmw and another hatchback. Her grades were good. She loved studying, which made her almost half blind without her glasses on. She was one of the very few in our school who never really worked out, therefore leaving her as skinny as a skeleton.

She didn't have any friends when she was a kid. Her parents were just insurance brokers, but she still thought she stood a chance of breaking into the blue blood circle. Nobody told her that her dreams and ambitions had been too wild and unrealistic and that outperforming others in school could sometimes lead you nowhere. Nobody liked her in our school. She never quite fitted in in our community. She was actually a kind-hearted person, unlike the rest of us. She was clueless about many things, which could be her Anchilles heel. She did not know about the vendetta between our school and Wah Yan, despite her mother's 60-year legacy as an old girl of St Francis. She dated Jason, just because he went to the same high school with my boyfriend then, Edmond. She liked to mirror my actions, I know. And I kind of liked to use that against her.

Sharon was a whiny person and all she did in her childhood was complaining about her friendlessness. We did not really bully her, not physically at least. We just gave her the cold shoulder whenever she moaned. We left her alone because she was too full of herself and slightly delusional. We still talked to her though. I liked to chat with her on the phone because she liked talking about killing herself. I didn't think she was kidding. She was so depressed that even her pet dog jumped through her apartment window off her building at Baguio Villa. She meant it when she talked about suicidal methods with me, asking me more than once to attend her funeral if she were to die the next day. Of course, she never really quite commited the promised suicide. She said she worried that she would soon be forgotten by her peers.

I never saw Sharon as my friend. She was too money-oriented. Her materialistic mindsets could drive her insane sometimes. She would easily betray her buddies if the benefits were lucrative enough. I chose my friends based on compatibility. Karen Lee was my best friend because we could read each other's mind without talking. Karen and I liked to discuss the world's cruelest murders in history and investigate all sorts of savage torture methods. Even our school encouraged it, so you couldn't blame us for our wickedness. Our teachers periodically posted pictures of Jesus beaten to death with a spear spun through his lungs on our school boards. The Catholic church visually filled us with images of ancient Chinese and Western criminal punishments. You might not believe it but many of us turned to witchcraft when feeling stuck. We could be quite creative and shady in terms of the solutions we came up with in combating our enemies.

Karen and I were the evil twins. No, we were more like partners in crimes. She completed a Chemistry college and master degree at Cambridge on multiple merit-scholarships. She was recently running a local skincare product brand and her official title was "chief formulator", whatever it meant. I told her I could call myself "veteran enchantress" if anyone cared to interpret what I was trying to say.

I remembered she used to invite me to her cozy penthouse at Heng Fa Chuen when we were kids. Her parents were highly educated. I think her mother worked at the High Court as a translator. I was not sure what her dad did for a living. Karen told me but I must have forgotten. Karen's grades were even better than Sharon. I was always the dark horse lagging behind, ranked beyond 50th out of a class of 120 in my early years. Karen helped me improve my grades by encouraging me to go shopping before the school exam. We liked to battle who spent the least time in studying and ended up with the highest scores. I guessed I came to excel through friendly competition with this good old buddy.

Whatever murder attempts and needle prick tricks you read from the media and newspaper, I actually thought through them all as early as when I was in grade 2. I told Karen about all the bizarre murder tricks I knew about from textbooks and crime fictions. And we liked to evaluate each and every one of them. I even told her about the new-age myths of human souls. Apparently, a corpse weighed 21 grams lighter after being certified dead and that would be the weight of our spirits. We also decided that needle pricks were very low-level ways of assassination. We wanted to try something more faultless, one that would be evidence-free, blameless, unnoticeable and idealistically gave your opponent no room for revenge.