Don’t Tell Me: Part One

by Katherine Chan

If you see his, him, he, etc., it refers to Kit’s step-father. If you see hers, her, she, etc., it refers to Kit’s biological mother.

My father always parks right in front of the school gates. I always sling my bag onto my right shoulder, although it's supposed to be on my left since I'm right-handed, but it's more comfortable this way.

Sometimes other students are walking to the school gates as well, most of them in higher years. Sometimes I get to school so early that even the twelfth years haven’t arrived yet.

It’s lonely, because everyone else gets to say hello to each other when they get to school, and have a good gossip about the weekend or whatever happened in the last eighteen hours. But me being me, I can’t just sit around waiting for them to arrive, and I’m always holed up in the library or the tech labs, and by the time I find them or they find me, they’ve already finished.

So I say hi sometimes, when I get to, but most times it’s a little too late. The only thing they talk about during breaks is what just happened in the last three classes. Nothing interesting really, not groundbreaking nor what friendship bonding material is made of. I don’t really have friends, at least not in the purest definition of friendship. Sure, I have the frequent associate that I get along with and occasionally argue with, but that’s it – they’re just associates. Not ‘friends’.

You might wonder what I deem friendship if I don’t call them friends. Friends hang around with you, and give you space when you need it. You understand them, and they understand you. They don’t tell tales on you, and if they hear someone saying something bad about you that they think is unfounded, they not only stand up for you in your absence, but they tell you about it. Friends tell you when you have something in your teeth. They don’t up and disappear when you tell them you’re gay.

I guess the only good thing that came out of having that certain secret blown open was that I found out who was definitely nowhere near being a friend. But that’s all that was good. They all say that every cloud has a silver lining, and in this cloud’s case, it was half mercury, half silver. Mercury, heavy metal, poison. Beautiful but deadly, and that’s part of the story of my life.

My parents sent me to a private school because they thought I was going to get a better education there. Guess it was both boon and burden: I get an education, I realise that I’m someone with a certain aspect that they would disown me for. And it doesn’t help that a lot of the girls at the private school I attend are very attractive.

Then my father died. The police couldn’t prove that my mother had shot him, nor could they prove that he was responsible for my father’s death either. If he hadn’t married her right after the funeral, I wouldn’t hate my mother more than I already did, and I wouldn’t hate him either. In fact, I would’ve been happy that I had a new father, that I had two sisters and two brothers. I would’ve been celebrating at the wedding, even in the white dress.

We never asked, and even if we had, she would’ve denied it. No-one wants to tell their children that they had been cheating on their father, and that the other person had ordered the death of their real father. My brother and I know that’s what happened, but no-one would believe us, and we wouldn’t have been able to prove it either.

At least my two step-sisters and step-brother are nice. The step-brother is much older than me, even older than my brother. I only saw him twice, once at the wedding and another time when he visited his father to tell him that he’d been accepted into Stanford University. The two step-sisters are going to my private school now. One’s in my year, the other’s in primary.

There was a bit of confusion when I put in the notice that I had moved residence. We hadn’t told them that my father had died, and they wondered why we were sharing a residence with the single father of two new students. He wrote a letter, and from how the teachers at the school talked to me, I think it just said that my mother was now married to him. Most of the teachers at my school are female, and the nature of women is to gossip about other women. Their daughters, those that were attended my school, told other students, and soon the entire school heard that the dyke, that girl in 10th, her mother had been cheated, that her mother had slept with hundreds of men whilst still married, that it was obvious how she ended up being gay. The speculation of certain teachers, the adding and removal of details, the twisting of the story by the imagination of gossip-mongers, the speed at which women gossip at, and so stories that were nowhere near the truth were flying all over the school. The teachers would hear the stories, they’d think that that girl had told their daughters that, and the whole circle would continue going round and round.

Thankfully for my step-sisters, his name was never uttered, never mentioned. The one who was in my year, she and I became close friends. As with all things, she had been told of my… ‘perverse’ ways not long after we had been spotted indulging in a friendly hug. She didn’t care, but she knew enough of my mother to not tell her father, nor our siblings, step- or not.

Let’s call her Layne, her little sister Alexia, their older brother Kane, my older brother Danny and me ‘Kit’. It’ll make things easier to explain.

I guess if I didn’t hate them so much, I would’ve loved moving to the new house. He was rich, filthy rich in fact. A beautiful house, but bad memories can make a mansion seem like a tin shack. Three storeys, plus two basements, and that warranted an elevator. Outside, it seemed like all the other manors in the area. Well, the other manors in a 100km radius, at least. Inside, however, it was all high tech.

We all got rooms on the second floor, but we never got the codes to go to the top floor, nor to the bottom basement. And we had a curfew, where our blinds would automatically lock shut. Probably to stop us from looking outside.

When we moved, I saw that she was going to live on the eastern side of the second floor. Layne and Alexia had rooms on the western side, and Kane had a room, but it was later emptied. There were several rooms empty, guest rooms. Huge, a lot larger than my old bedroom, and they had ensuites too.

I noticed that we didn’t have locks on any of the doors, except for the one that opened up to the hallway where our bedrooms where. Layne said it was locked during the curfew, and if we wanted a drink of water or a snack, we could get it out of the mini-fridge in our rooms. The butler, she said, would check it every day, and refill and replace items in it.

A loft bed (I chose a jet black frame with a dark purple bed-spread), several filing cabinets (midnight blue), a stainless steel desk with drawers, a leather gas-lift swivel chair and an executive rubbish bin (jet black) awaited me when I opened the oak-panel door to my room for the very first time. The walls were bare white, except for the air-vent the size of a tissue-box.

Within days, with my much enhanced allowance, framed posters of pop-stars and anime characters graced the walls, now night purple. A small rotating device in the middle of my room projected stars onto my walls, and sometimes, when trying to relax and de-stress, I would gaze at the walls, making out constellations. When that would not take my mind off whatever incident had just occurred, I would go to the gym, also on the second floor, and begin taking out my frustrations on the punch-bag.