Mika, Side One
During my high school years, I was never in student politics, nor did I join any sports club or scholastic team. I also didn’t date anybody – not to out myself as a go-homer who never did anything or anyone. That said, high school is for better or worse the place where you learn to compete, to compare yourself to others, to try and differentiate from the rest – probably at the highest intensity of one’s life, for most people. And so, I happened to have someone I considered a rival.
At fifteen, Mika was the first peer I met who combined a boldness of opinion with the composure and eloquence to back it up. She was the new kid in our sophomore year in 201X, at this fearsomely academic high school alleged to have a university-level maths and sciences curriculum. A disadvantage that never seemed to faze her as we all hung on through to graduation. While she was on the quiet side, she quickly developed a reputation for being whip-smart and engaging to debate with on almost anything under the sun. Mika always seemed perfectly centered, never anxious, never shy or at a loss for words, not gregarious but still often able to draw small groups around her just by the quality of her discussion and intellect. She fiercely debated boys against using gendered insults one minute, and taught them how to use the word “binge” in a sentence the next. Mika had a short fuse and ran her mouth about anything that read as injustice in our limited high school experiences, and also when it came to beefing with our eccentric Technology teacher, which I found so funny as both of them were so similar in their outspokenness.
I felt that Mika and I were opposites in most ways – I was easily amused, easily rattled, and prone to careful diplomacy over lively debate. Nevertheless, the way she expressed her beliefs was aspirational to me. I liked hearing her frank opinions, even if I didn’t share all of them, or didn’t believe that they should be shared. I did not believe in voicing dissatisfaction about things I couldn’t change, like the massive amount of workload we had for nearly every subject. I was the type to try to get things done without complaint, and as cheerfully as I could. It seemed to just go easier that way.
I also didn’t understand her preference for solitude. During big school events like the intramurals or the science fair, I’d often come upon her sitting alone in a quiet spot away from the action, reading a book. That perturbed me. I was always anxious in those years about being alone and found myself so more often than I liked. I didn’t have a consistent group to sit with at lunch most days, except if we were cramming assignments together. So I spent a lot of breaktimes in the library studying, the only respectably productive solitude I permitted. Still, any chance I could hang out with the couple friends I had in any given year, I did. I was mystified that Mika didn’t want company around her all the time, and made attempts to drag her out of her preferred seclusion to no avail.
We were friendly but not particularly close as sophomores, and nothing indicated we would be. I played visual novels and doodled chibis and ponies on the back of my notebook in class; she was in her anglophile bag, watching Doctor Who and Sherlock surreptitiously on a tablet during breaks. Little things like your preferred TV fare could divide you.
But in junior year, we both chose Creative Writing (or “Crew” as we called it) for our free elective. After the application exam, she and I were appointed to the editorial board for the yearly anthology, with Mika overseeing Fiction and me handling Poetry. This was the first and only position I held for any organization in school, and it meant a lot to me. For the first time, I felt like a distinguished member of the class, someone others looked up to in a particular subject. It got easier for my ego, thus soothed, to be generous and open with others. I think I needed to feel admired before I could let myself admire anyone else.
So I looked at Mika that year with the hearty esteem of knowing we were the two badasses at the head of Crew. (Looking back, I wonder if I would have felt the same if only one of us had made Editor.) We got closer as friends, in part because we read each other’s work and ate up our weekly reading assignments together with gusto, and because we liked each other’s company. But it’s weird how the last part never occurred to me back then. That’s only something I realize now.
Interlude: A Separate Peace
Preserved … like stale air in an unopened room, was the well known fear which had surrounded and filled those days, so much of it that I hadn’t even known it was there. Because, unfamiliar with the absence of fear and what that was like, I had not been able to identify its presence.
A Separate Peace, p. 10
Reading A Separate Peace again after thirteen years brought back a lot of memories of… well, thirteen years ago, which for me was in high school. Probably, it was my first time confronting the concept of high school rivalry – not the fantastic kind like in teen dramas and sports anime, but the realistic kind that could apply to me. It spelled out the unspoken truth that the school system is an environment that quantitatively ranks you against others, making comparison and hierarchy natural. This leads to friction occurring not just between very dissimilar youths, but also between similar ones, in the form of rivalry. A Separate Peace is about how the unnatural friction of the school environment (combined with bonus heteropatriarchy) can fuck people up.
Besides the specific setting of a boys’ prep school in America during World War II, A Separate Peace is the story of Gene Forrester, an emotionally neglected young man in a tumultuous period, anxious to distinguish himself through school achievements. This leads to Gene developing a one-sided, life-threatening rivalry with his star athlete best friend Finny, who’s just chilling and none the wiser (and thus in for a nasty shock when it all goes down).
It is a curiosity that this relatively uncelebrated novel by one-hit-wonder John Knowles was sandwiched in our curriculum between super heavyweights like The Great Gatsby and Les Miserables. It’s not considered one of the greatest American novels of all time, let alone in world literature. A quick search on Reddit suggests that many Americans had never even heard of this book, and quite a few of those that do disliked it. Yet there it was, curated by my state school in cramped, humid Manila for the enrichment of young Filipino minds. (I think I know why, too – you’ll see in a minute.)
I liked A Separate Peace back then, and still enjoyed reading it now, albeit with greater worldliness and understanding. For example, it finally fully dawned on me that this is an American novel. I’d always had the impression it was British. There’s something Brit-coded about its World War II trauma and the posh all-boys’ boarding school setting. The narrator Gene also doesn’t show typical American YA protagonist traits, like being bootstrappy, outgoing, or straightforward. Gene is an ambitious yet studious, straitlaced, and non-confrontational introvert. Looking back, it was surely propaganda to promote ideal student behavior – a culturally compatible English novel for a Southeast Asian high school. I have to hand it to our school’s English department for their deviousness.
Apart from that, the above-quoted passage about fear hits me hard. I’m looking back on my time in high school over a decade ago, much like Gene does in the framing of this novel, and only now do I grasp just how much fear I also felt back then. Fear was the uniform I wore, the halls I walked, the air I breathed. I guess an Asian science high school in the 2010s is kind of like an American boys’ prep school in the 1940s, in that even though you’re not in a terrible spot, there’s a lot of competition and you have plenty to lose. For example, I was always afraid of flunking out, of upsetting my parents’ careful and costly preparations for my future. That wasn’t my biggest problem, but it’s the one I’ll always admit to first because it’s the most conventional one. (Practically a cliché, and even a badge of honor depending on how you look at it.)
Most of my problem was directly attached to my person. I had the bad luck (but in some ways, long-term blessing) to have been fat and shy at an all-girls’ elementary for seven years before entering a co-ed science high school. While the latter was the best thing that happened to me at the time, I carried a lot of my survival strategies from elementary, which just proved to be a hindrance in high school. I had severe paranoia about others’ opinions of me, and was too skittish to talk much about myself or invite much attention, except for low-risk and positive attention like getting high grades.
So, when Gene Forrester rocks up in A Separate Peace with his first person POV, telling us very little about his personal life and interests and values, but providing exacting detail about the talents, personalities, and social standing of every one of his classmates, I think there’s something to unpack there. Here’s the defensive, not-at-all jealous way he describes his bestie Finny inventing and popularizing a new sport at school:
Right from the start, it was clear that no one had ever been better adapted to a sport than Finny was to blitzball. I saw that right away … I suppose it served us right for letting him do all the planning. I didn’t really think about it myself. What difference did it make? It was just a game. It was good that Finny could shine at it. He could also shine at many other things, with people for instance, the others in our dormitory, the faculty; in fact, if you stopped to think about it, Finny could shine with everyone, he attracted everyone he met. I was glad of that too. Naturally. He was my roommate and my best friend. (40)
His over-calculated description of a minor character classmate’s school reputation, it must be noted, already fifteen years after they went to school together:
[Chet Douglass] devoted himself to playing two things, tennis and the trumpet… Much like the rest of us on the surface, he had an underlying obliging and considerate strain which barred him from being a really important member of the class. (132)
Gene also has some choice thoughts about a couple of outcasts at school. To his credit, besides getting in a physical fight with one guy who insulted him, and “jouncing the limb,” he never actually bullies anyone in the story. He just has a judgmental train of thought, which is more forgivable but still not too pleasant to read:
Quackenbush was the crew manager, and there was something wrong about him. I didn’t know exactly what it was. In the throng of the winter terms at Devon we were at opposite extremities of the class, and to me there only came the disliked edge of Quackenbush’s reputation. (76)
With Leper it was always a fight, a hard fight to win when you were seventeen years old and lived in a keyed-up, competing school, to avoid making fun of him. (96)
I read into all of this as Gene being overly concerned about his reputation and insecure about his origins. Though he barely references his background, there is this random reveal that he was self-conscious enough to lie about his family and hometown when he first arrived at Devon School:
Over my cot I had long ago taped pictures which together amounted to a barefaced lie about my background—weepingly romantic views of plantation mansions, moss-hung trees by moonlight, lazy roads winding dustily past the cabins of the Negroes. When asked about them I had acquired an accent appropriate to a town three states south of my own, and I had transmitted the impression, without actually stating it, that this was the old family place. (156)
I appreciate that John Knowles wrote such a telling, mildly embarrassing detail about Gene – the kid was suffocating under the weight of lies. No wonder he couldn’t be a good friend. His friends may understand him more than he realizes, but he’d always feel alone and see others as rivals first, because he’s perpetually concealing his real self from everyone and desperate not to show vulnerability or weakness. It’s a difficult trap to find yourself in in (young) adulthood: craving connection but fearing you won’t get it by being your authentic self.
Mika, Side Two
I should have told him then that he was my best friend also and rounded off what he had said. I started to; I nearly did. But something held me back.
A Separate Peace, p. 48
In senior year, Mika and I were in the same homeroom class, and we continued to get along well. We were partners on a year-long science project, and I even joined the drama club mainly because she did. Other people casually started referring to us as best friends, and for good reason. We were pretty inseparable that year.
At the time, I did feel a connection to her that I wasn’t able to fully realize – she opened up then that she had been bullied at her own elementary school. I was still in denial that the exact same thing had happened to me, and would not admit it for over half a decade more, but here Mika was making peace with it at seventeen. What an absolute chad. I wish I was brave enough that we could’ve talked about it openly together.
As I write this, I’m now at the end of my twenties, and I’ve made good friends at different phases of life. Best friends who I might now speak to just a couple times a year. Dear friends for a short time who I no longer see but who’ve changed me profoundly. And recently for the first time, friends who I can work on passion projects with, and that’s really precious to me. I understand now that friendship, even best-friendship, is the furthest thing from a jealously guarded blood pact. It’s glimpsing a bigger and more interesting world through joyfully sharing it with someone. And it is not a heavy thing to carry – in fact, it’s light as a breeze.
I did not know this yet at seventeen, so I’m sad to say that I deliberately avoided believing in my friendship with Mika, for no other reason than I was afraid of making a fool of myself. Mika would sometimes talk about friends from her previous school, and I was jealous of people who had friends from before or outside high school when I didn’t have any. Despite how well we got on, I figured I couldn’t possibly be that important to her and didn’t want to be caught caring too much.
What I’m most sorry for, and what makes my insides twist a bit to this day, is the Yearbook Incident. In the last semester of senior year, everybody was tasked to submit a written profile for their page in the graduation yearbook. A description about the kind of person you were in school, listing your hobbies, talents, accomplishments, and best qualities. The profile was meant to be written by your best friend in class, a prospect that made me writhe with anxiety. I cast my gaze nervously around the classroom. Well, the person I would ask was a no-brainer: my closest friend in class, my partner in every project, one of my harbors in the stormy seas of high school, who happened to be a really good writer. Yes! I’ll ask her!
Then our teacher joked, “If you don’t have any friends, you can write your profile yourself.”
I didn’t find that funny. In fact, I took it absolutely seriously. Screw vulnerability, screw the mortifying ordeal of seeing how someone else interpreted me. Almost spitefully, and towards who I didn’t know, I wrote my own profile for the yearbook and sent it in. As far as I know to this day, I was the only person in the class to write my own profile in the yearbook.
My decision seemed to be validated by the fact that Mika didn’t ask me to write her yearbook profile. No one did. So it was true that I wasn’t anyone’s best friend. I congratulated myself grimly for saving face. I didn’t speak to anybody about it, so at least no one ever learned that I had no one to ask and no one who asked me. I calculated that most people would assume Mika wrote mine. And Mika alone, in my head, knew we weren’t close like that, so she’d be relieved I didn’t ask her, if she even thought about me at all (as I concluded in pathetic theatrics). A Gene Forrester-ass moment if I ever had one!
Around that time, something was going on with Mika that caused her to miss most weeks of graduation practice. I believe she had gotten hospitalized, or perhaps she needed to take remedial exams. I don’t really recall now. I’m even sadder to say I don’t remember checking up on how she was doing at the time. I remember being fairly clueless what she was going through then, but maybe I asked. I hope I had the decency to.
What I do clearly remember happened sometime after the deadline of the yearbook profile submission, and during the graduation practice period. In what was our first contact in a while, I received an email from Mika, asking if I would write her yearbook profile. As I read her request, my heart sank to the pit of my stomach. Like Gene Forrester, I realized I’d fucked up. I replied yes immediately and got to work, my mind racing.
I’d already willed myself to forget about the yearbook business, but now I had to confront the matter again. By now, since the deadline had passed, Mika knew full well I didn’t intend to ask her to write my profile. And now I alone knew that I had wanted to ask her, and would have if I only knew she really did trust me to do the same… which meant nothing by that point. It was too late to take back my cowardice.
Why had she taken so long to ask me? Was it because of her recent indisposition, or was she swallowing her pride to do it now? I felt even worse. No matter how I looked at it, all the cynical assumptions I’d made about our friendship were clearly my own invention. I’d pushed her away, and maybe that coldness made her think twice about whether she should ask me. Or maybe, she’d simply been too indisposed to ask me sooner, but I was an easy choice for her to make when the time came. It was the first time I learned that me being uncommunicative and self-reliant in the effort not to bother people, was actually letting more people down.
To add another twist of irony: another perspective of the Yearbook Incident would surface a couple years later. Another friend revealed to me that she had hoped I would ask her to write each other’s yearbook profiles back in senior year. But because I didn’t (and to be fair neither did she), she reluctantly partnered up with an odious boy in her class who had an unreciprocated crush on her. In trying to be unassuming and not to take any space, I did more harm than good. I left more than one friend in the lurch, friends who hoped they could rely on me and that I would rely on them.
All this was eye-opening and even a bit funny, and made me realize I was fucking mad back in high school. I could’ve asked Mika and King and whoever else I wanted to write a profile for me that I could splice together, and written their profiles too if they asked me back. I definitely had bullying-induced delusions about the world then, because I understand now that any friend I asked would’ve done this for me. (They wouldn’t have looked at me with pity or disgust or mockery, which is what I feared they would do and was sort of how it went back in my old school.) It would’ve made them happy to know I wanted their help, the way I was so pleased and honored to be chosen by them too.
Friendship can be uncomfortable and strange, especially for those of us who had to start from scratch during (or after) adolescence. Even now, I don’t always get it right. While I wish I had acted differently and been a better friend so many times, I could not have skipped over the reality of my worldview at the time, ignorant as it was. All I can do now is strive to reflect back onto the world the same grace it has shown me.
Epilogue
I haven’t seen Mika in a long time. Shortly after high school, she moved to the U.S. and we lost touch. Apparently she’s deleted her social media, which I only know through friends who use Facebook. I also heard a rumor that Mika now goes by a different name, but I’m not positive what it is, so I only speak here about Mika the way I knew her 10+ years ago.
A few acquaintances have asked if I still talk to her and if I know how she’s doing. It would be nice if I did, but to be honest I never earned that confidence. I was a shit friend, too busy dealing with my own nonsense for too long. Besides, I can’t deny there’s something fun about just disappearing and changing your name in a faraway place… isn’t that right, old friend?
love, enjolras
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