Confessions of a Cat-holic (90)

I was wearing a white knitted turtle neck vest with pink edges, which was bought from a boutique at the New Town Mall in Mongkok, together with a polyvinyl chloride skirt, which was supposed to be really in trend at the time.

I didn't want to talk to Daryl at the time because Samatha Lam was there. I suspected that Daryl suddenly stopped talking to me on the phone because Samantha was said to have a crush on Daryl back then. I believed that she thought she had a higher chance of dating him had I not transferred there. That was the thing about people in SPCC, they thought going to a school with opposite sex increased their chances of getting married with them because they treated love like a musical chair game. Their rationale was that if they could outlast everybody and get rid of whoever in direct competition or conflicts with them, they would be the ultimate survivor of the love game and live happily ever after. To them, love was a theory of statistical probability and a chance of elimination. If you could kill whoever standing between, you could miraculously make your target fall in love with you like you got thrown to an island where there was no one else around. Hong Kong was just another Pacific Island afterall anyways.

Daryl easily stood out from the rest of the boys in our class anyways, with a residence at Clovelly Court and a physique that was not visibly crooked or frail. He liked eating. And I believed we shared the same passion in food. He was tall and athletic. He liked watching football games and he didn't spend his recesses on cracking math equations, unlike the rest of the class. During most of our phone conversations, he told me all about the places he travelled and the exotic cuisines that he had tried, so I kept wanting to know more. He also told me that he had sold his Jaguar for HKD 20,000, which I could have bought had I had the money at the time.

If I treated marriage like a game of monopoly, I would have fallen in love with him, and easily too. But I was held back for many reasons. Daryl was the first guy whom I had ever gone out with on a date. I didn't mean date as in boy-girl kind of dating, even though we were actually a girl and a boy. It was more like a social event after school on a weekend to kill time. We went to Times Square, Causeway Bay, to take photo stickers around second semester in F3, where we accidentally saw my dad walking around. I later found out that Daryl had this photo sticker with me stuck onto the skin of his leather wallet after he left SPCC. But I was still half an ugly Betty at the time, since I had my braces on and hadn't grown my hair long.

He was often seen around Keith when he was a student at SPCC. They would watch football games together and tease me in the first semester until Daryl no longer found it fun as time gone by. I was not sure whether his relationship with Keith was rivalry or genuine comraderie. I really didn't like Keith at all, to a point I almost wanted him dead. Daryl never mentioned anything about Keith when he talked to me. This uncertainty was very unsettling for me because I would not want to be in any love affairs with a friend of my enemy. Of course, I wouldn't hint a bit of my ill feelings towards Keith in front of Daryl either.

The fact that Keith went out with Sibyl kind of disturbed me. I didn't like either of them because they both thought that they were a heavenly couple at the top of the world, with Sibyl living in Arden Court / Grand Hacienda, and Keith living a block away in Kent Mansion. Sibyl insisted that I was a fan of Gigi Leung no matter how many times I denied it.

Oh talking about Gigi, Daryl confessed to me that he had a crush from Maryknoll Convent School, and her name was Gigi too. Then, I thought, Gigi again?!