Anne was thirteen years old the first time she disappeared.
In fact, she couldn't even tell you how, why, or even when this happened. All she ever remembered was the excruciating pain. Then, it faded slowly to a dull ache. Until one day, it vanished. Nothing was left. And that was how she knew she no longer existed.
Since the first day she set foot on its ground, Anne had mentally dispatched her highschool along the line with the Bermuda Triangle or Tsunamis, or simply, any montrous things that were capable of swallowing her whole.
As a swimmer, she was reminded often enough not to play hero in the face of a raging current. The rule was to grab onto a floating object, long enough to be washed up to the shore. For all the survival instincts she had in mind, her body seemed to react in opposite. In lieu of going with the flow, she had been thrashing, kicking, splashing and spluttering to stay afloat. She didn't cared about anything except that she didn't want to be like them. Any of them. It wasn't as much her discomfort around people as her diverging interests from her friends. She detested being surrounded by people who only cared about what happened to Wu Zun and Jay Chow; who gossipped away the first hour of extra class and have her babysit them through the next; they seemed so fake sometimes she thought if she poked them with a sharp pencil they'd burst like balloons.
Add to her indifference was her first cardinal mistake was to assume that things worked the same way as in primary school: that being top in academics was the ticket to the top of the totem pole of popularity. Apparently, adolescents were nothing about standing out but all about fitting in. By the time Anne learnt the lesson, she had netted a string of A's and lost most of her friends simultaneously. As if that wasn't bad enough, her alleged best friend dealt her the biggest blow of all when she broke off their friendship deliberately. As much a failure as Anne was in relationships, she couldn't fail to notice the aftermath of this outbursts: how every lies spun, every rumours weaved hung menacingly around her like poison, driving the distance between the world and her to a gaping ravine-a blackhole so vast she didn't know how to bridge.
The theory Anne had formed on the whole business of popularity was somehow ironic: either you were someone you didn't want to be, or someone who nobody wanted. In other words, to be a fake, or to be yourself. The question was: would you be either?
