I hate to define myself by him. But to try and do otherwise is to ignore the truth. In my life there is a clear division between the time before him and after him. Both times are painful in their own ways. But there is one that I clearly prefer. And of course it's the time after him. How could I say anything else?

I can see it now, the past. Surrounded by the beautiful girls who were my friends. When you are little there is no clear indication who will grow up to be pretty. Plain children grow up to be beautiful. You hear it all the time. All those supermodels who were teased in school for being 'ugly'. Pretty children grow up to look unremarkable. Looking at old pictures of me and my friends there is no clue as to who would be beautiful. I was an adorable child. I can tell you that objectively.

When we got older there were slowly emerging signs of who would become beautiful. Trisha was tallest when we were children but as a teenager she tapered off and became petite. She had the perfect proportions of everything. She complained that her breasts were too small. In place of large breasts she had a natural flirtatiousness with dark lashes to bat.

Then there was Alma. She was chubby when we were in primary school. Her face was the roundest. And then almost overnight she turned svelte, firm curves where there had once been roundness. She had boys and girls after her. The butch girls in police cadets wrote her letters and left them in her desk before school started. She didn't mind, she liked it both ways.

Alicia seemed the least likely of us to grow up pretty. She was all angles in primary school. She always had her hair cropped short and to add to the effect she was clumsy. And yet, she defied what anyone might have predicted. Alicia's sweetness softened the right angles and sharp corners. The most remarkable thing about her were her lips. Soft, lush and pink. Rosebud lips to match her title of fairest of them all.

Which leaves me. What was I? I had hoped that the beauty that had come to my friends so suddenly, so naturally, would come to me too. I was a late bloomer, Alicia said. But I stayed the same. I looked the way I did when I was a little girl. Never emerging from cute into pretty.

It was made all the more obvious by the way boys reacted to us. I had plenty of boy friends. The others had plenty of boyfriends. I knew sometimes that boys were friends with me just to get closer to them. It was easy to tell when after a few times of talking on the phone or instant messaging they started to ask about one of my friends. They were never subtle and if they tried at subtlety they weren't very good at it. I tried not to resent it too much. Knowing that my friends never asked to be beautiful. But more importantly that they had never asked for me to be not beautiful.

This was before him.

He was a friend of Alma's older brother. I didn't think he was attractive when I met him. And to this day I cannot tell you if anyone would find him attractive, though I've been told that he was, is attractive. I can't remember his face collectively. Only individual features come to mind. I suppose that if you put together the sharp nose, only slightly crooked from having been broken, steeply sloping cheekbones and full lips that he might be handsome. He probably was.

What I remember most is how I felt at that moment. The moment I first saw him. I had a habit of looking people straight in the eye, defying them to look through me. I couldn't with him, I had to look away. I can still remember how I felt at that moment. The awareness of how I looked. Of how I appeared to someone who was meeting me for the first time. I could feel the absence of a singlet underneath the baggy white baju of my school baju kurung. The flower pattern on my bra was painfully obvious if anyone happened to be looking at me. And I realised in that moment that I was not a girl who didn't mind her bra being seen.

I could feel how big my pores were and the throbbing of a pimple near my hairline. I felt the scar on the back of my hand from a childhood experiment with a blade. When I laid eyes on him I saw only myself and how utterly hideous I must look to the world. I wanted very badly to leave. But Alma was introducing us and I could only mumble my name and I could barely stand to look him in the eye.

I would have forgotten him I think. Out of sheer desperation to erase that feeling of self awareness. But then, he spoke to me.

He spoke to me first. Not to Trisha and not to Alma, his turned his back to Alicia. I was so used to being passed over by boys our age that it took some time to hear what he had said. He was pointing to the Nirvana badge on the strap of my school bag. He had just said that Nirvana were posers.

“Whatever. So who do you like? Simple Plan?”

It came out with a lot more derision than I expected. He laughed and said no it was Guns n' Roses all the way. I rolled my eyes and said that you couldn't compare the two. We were supposed to be seeing a movie so Alma said goodbye and we went off.

I don't remember what we saw. Instead I sat in the cinema and remembered the way I had said, Simple Plan? And the way he had smiled. Like he was pitying me, silly girl. She doesn't know what she's talking about. It made me angry. Not because he had insulted my taste in music but because he had made me feel so inadequate. I had never felt anything like it. It was like jumping when someone taps you on the shoulder and you thought you were alone. Only magnify that feeling of surprise by a thousand and your jump by another five thousand. And that's something like what I felt.