Confessions of a Cat-holic (95)

Daryl came from a respectable family. Maybe he was not at the level of a tycoon yet, but he assured me that his family actually had to make a press release when his grandfather passed away. He took me to meet his mother once, in his car, when she offered to drive me home. He told me that his family ran a textile conglomerate, not sure which one. When he graduated from Pepperdine, he didn't join the typical route of an Ivy League graduate to be an investment banker. He was just a marketing executive for a restaurant chain in Star Street. But he was not the quintessential SPCC-profiled accountant-to-be. He was not a science major although he had very good singing skills and could play more than one instrument.

Fast-forwarding things a little, I was in already in an official relationship with Rex when Daryl came back for Christmas break in 2000. Millenium christmas, that was. What a romantic time to be in a first love. Daryl always told us how he had a crush on somebody new every time he came back from the states. During his time in SPCC, he said he liked Samantha Lam. Then it was Gigi from Maryknoll. At one point, he told everyone that he found Sharon attractive. When he visited me on Thanksgiving break in my freshman year at Columbia, he asked Serena out, who also came to New York all the way from Carnegie Mellon.

This time, it was different. He told us he was going after Nicola Lai, the girl whom I replaced upon my transfer to the new school. She was a Malaysian Chinese, and I heard she came from a very renowned background with a house somewhere on Hong Kong Island. I never crossed path with her but I heard enough about her to deduce that she was not just wealthy, but upscale wealthy. She was good friends with Clairol and I heard them converse in English. Yes, they would not even speak Cantonese, despite being brought up in an all Chinese environment. Nicola Lai was on good terms with me and we both knew of each other. She went to a boarding school in England, then LSE for college and later worked at ABN Amro (or another European bank, which I might have mixed up) with my La Salle buddy Gary Choy, the gangster indigeneous inhabitant and squire from New Territories. She was recently married to an Asian American from New York. Even though her brother from Harrow School of England, Christopher Lai, was just a year below me at Columbia, I never met him in person. But I remotely remembered that he would only hang out with the Caucasians in school. He also joined the investment banking industry and recently rose to partnership in an investment fund. I found him slightly attractive and I considered him a vague resemblance of Eddie Pang from Taiwan.

Okay, so what happened on millenium Christmas?

We had half of 3E showing up for a karaoke event during Christmas and he somehow invited Nicola, who had to leave early to meet her boyfriend then. His name was Sean (or Shawn?). I heard he went to boarding school on the east coast in the states. I was not curious enough to find out his surname but it was known to everyone in the room that Daryl got into a fight with Sean because they both wanted to ask Nicola out. Nicola didn't go out with Daryl, and Daryl said that Nicola picked Sean because he was buying her expensive handbags from Prada, Gucci and LV. Daryl obviously was agitated, thinking that he could have had a higher chance of dating Nicola, had Sean had not asked her out at the same time with such aggressive pick up tactics.

It was said that Daryl was asked to quit Kent and had to return to Hong Kong to continue his studies because he got into a fight with his peers over a girl. Therefore, Daryl went to college a year later than everyone else, and was a freshman roughly the same time as me.

I knew for a fact that Kent School was a very small academy just an hour north of Manhattan, which could be another reason why I reckoned my husband could have known me or my friends way back in time when he told me that he went to Kent.