by Inez Tan
Eat a moderate and balanced diet.
Make sure you are drinking enough water.
Stay positive! Don’t give up!
But perhaps the counsellors had made some impression on her after all, because after that day, Curie had to admit to herself that Edison did not look like someone who was effectively managing stress. He had become so thin you could see the outline of his ribs when he tucked in his shirt. Their mother accepted his explanations that he wasn’t hungry, while their father said that one overweight child in the family was enough (he meant Curie). Curie said nothing, as shame and schadenfreude duelled in her heart.
Then Edison’s behaviour became more neurotic than even she could ignore.
He came by her room one Saturday afternoon, when their sister was out at her school’s weekend remedial programme.
“Curie,” he said.
“What? I’m studying.” (She was.)
A pause. She could hear him rubbing his palms over the front of his pants. “Never mind,” he said, and wandered off.
They had this conversation—compulsive, creepy— several times in the next few weeks. On top of that, there was something very wrong about him taking as long as he did in the toilet. She noticed that before he ran the shower, there would be a long period of quiet. But even when she pressed her ear to the door, she couldn’t hear anything. If he had been sobbing, or screaming, or tearing pieces of paper into very small strips, she wouldn’t have minded. But his silence scared her more than she cared to admit.
At last she made up her mind to investigate. One evening, after he’d been in the toilet for over an hour, she knocked urgently on the door. “Edison, I need to use the toilet.”
After a pause, he said, “Use Ma and Pa’s.”
“I need something inside here,” she lied. “Girl stuff. You’ve been in there all day. What are you doing?”
“Hot water stimulates the brain,” said Edison unconvincingly.
A minute later, he opened the door. He was fully dressed, his hair was wet and his glasses were fogged up. He hurried past her, carrying a towel bundled up in his arms. He could not have made it clearer that he was concealing something.
Finally, one afternoon when her parents were out and her sister was taking a nap, Curie decided to do the most drastic thing she could think of. Twenty minutes after he’d gone into the toilet, she yanked the door open.
Edison was sitting on the closed toilet seat, with his white Stamford pants bunched around his ankles. Curie’s first thought was that there were long pink earthworms ironed flat onto his thighs. Then she saw that they were thick, meaty strokes of scar tissue, interspersed with bright parallel lines of blood.
In one hand he held a small blue penknife. A roll of tape and a roll of plastic wrap were on the floor. He had already measured out a fresh length of plastic wrap to encircle each thigh.
He said, “It’s not as bad as it looks.”
Curie stared. For a few weeks in secondary school, she had joined classmates in drawing dotted lines on their wrists with permanent marker, alongside the words, “Cut Here”—but only as a joke. Once, Annette had rolled down the Stamford monogram on her sock to show her six shallow cuts beneath her anklebone. The sight of them seemed to frighten Annette even more than it did Curie, and she never did anything like that again. But all that was nothing compared to what Curie saw in front of her now. She could have laid a finger in Edison’s widest cut, which gaped like a pair of lips.
“You shouldn’t do this to yourself,” she stammered.
He placed the penknife face down by the sink. “I’m fine. I’m very careful. It’s just something I do.”
“You need help.”
“This helps.”
“How? How does this help?”
He went on, as though he hadn’t heard her. “If anyone finds out, I’ll get into trouble. I’ll be fine if no one knows.”
“Edison, you’re not fine.”
“It would be a mark on my record,” he said in the same calm tone. “Promise me you won’t tell anyone.”
“Edison, you’re not fine!”
His expression clouded. He got up, shuffling comically with his pants still around his ankles, and slammed the toilet door as he left. The loud, sudden sound woke their sister, who started to scream, “Coo-rie, Coo-rie, Coo-rie.” Curie had no choice but to leave Edison and rush over to attempt to pacify Elise. The neighbours had often complained.
Later, Curie lay on the floor of her room, thinking. Outwardly, Edison did seem fine; at least, no one else seemed to have noticed anything. It was true that scholarships were competitive; a less than perfect mental health record would jeopardise his future. Telling on him would amount to sabotage on her part. As sick as it seemed, perhaps the best option was to say nothing.
She thought about the penknife instead. She’d recognised it immediately. Some years ago, for a geography project in secondary school, they had been tasked with inventing a country. Besides writing an account of their country’s history from its founding to the present, they were required to construct an accurate map with landmarks and natural resources made out of recycled materials glued onto a piece of poster board cut into the country’s shape. Like all projects in the curriculum, it called for outrageous expertise, and it was a terrible use of their time but they had to do it anyway, for the marks.
In an unusual move for him, Edison had proposed a collaboration. Using his greater knowledge drawn from books on the Roman empire and The Art of War, he designed two complementary city-states that shared a border, Edisonia and Curiopolis. One was coastal, with a strategically located seaport and shipping hub. The other was landlocked but rich in iron and precious minerals. After a turbulent, bellicose past, the two were now mutually interdependent, harmoniously thriving in a symbiotic relationship (Edison claimed that the more keywords they could include, the better). Curie’s contribution would be to do most of the craft assembly. She was meticulous and had an eye for beauty, while Edison, for all his dexterity in the science lab, could barely spread margarine on bread.
It was a wonderful plan, and Curie had almost said yes. But it was then, for the first time in her life, that she’d felt a twinge of resentment towards her brother. She didn’t like how Edison just assumed that he would be better at the cognitive aspects of the project. They had started out on an even footing as children, and although it was becoming more and more apparent that Edison had genius that she didn’t, she wasn’t ready to acknowledge that yet.
So she’d insisted on doing her own project, even going out of her way to buy her own penknife so she wouldn’t have to share it with him. Hers had a red plastic handle, but they were otherwise identical, from the same school bookshop. She spent hours and hours on her project, sawing through egg cartons, empty tofu boxes, plastic bags and endless newspapers, gripping the little red penknife until her hand cramped up. When their teacher returned their projects, and Curie saw that they had received the same marks— Edison’s scoring higher on content while hers had excelled in design—she felt a little thrill. It felt nice to be recognised as Edison’s equal. It hadn’t happened since.
On the bed beside her, her sister grunted and whimpered in her sleep. Curie decided not to tell anyone about Edison’s cutting. She didn’t wish to expose her brother, she thought. Nor did she want to end his pain.
The secret felt like a lead weight in her stomach, but only sometimes. Edison was constantly on edge, and she enjoyed seeing him that way. Within days, the busyness of school life occupied her fully again. She took this heartless reordering of her priorities as a sign that she was finally becoming Assiduous and Focused.
By November, she was beginning to do marginally better on her practice Physics exams, yet her performance was erratic at best. For a while now, she had been able to sense Mrs Lam’s impatience with having to re-explain the year’s concepts. Worse still, she could tell that Mrs Lam, being a good person, was getting annoyed with her own impatience, and Curie knew better than
to think of herself as anything but the cause. “I wish,” she said one afternoon, unthinkingly, “that I understood things as quickly as my brother did.”
“Well, when your brother was your age, I’m sure he had a hard time too,” said Mrs Lam kindly.
“My brother is my age,” said Curie, her stomach dropping suddenly. “My brother is Edison, Edison Chan. We’re in the same class.”
She watched the struggle to make sense of the situation play out across Mrs Lam’s face. “Your brother is Edison Chan? But then, why are you so stupid?” she imagined her teacher saying, as others had said to her in as many words.
Having assembled her thoughts, Mrs Lam turned on her with a smile and exclaimed, “Why, then you should really ask your brother for help! He has quite a solid grasp of the material.”
A bitter taste crept up the back of Curie’s throat. Mrs Lam was beaming as though to congratulate her for being related to such an exemplary young physicist. Curie smiled painfully back.
Yet before long, the awful reality of her situation began to sink in deep, a shipwreck on course for an unfathomed ocean floor. She dragged her feet as she walked home, knowing she would be nothing, nothing at all if she failed her final exams. She saw herself with sunken cheeks and powder-white hair, a crabbed old witch hunched over a mall cart, still selling mobile phone cases. Only no one used mobile phones in the future; they communicated via chips implanted in their heads. Perhaps a museum would employ her to demonstrate a forgotten way of life. She had absolutely no idea what options she had as a failing student. It was just as well, she realised, that she had never thought about what she might actually want to do with her life.
In her time of need, she began to succumb to the plan that had been forming in her mind ever since she began surreptitiously looking through Edison’s notebooks. Final exams were barely a week away. Time had run out. Late one night after their parents had gone to bed, she found him studying at the kitchen table. Lowering herself into her old seat across from him, she reached over and turned the radio off.
You should really ask your brother for help.
“Edison,” she said. “I need your help.” She could feel a vein throbbing in her head. She would never live this down, but it was the lesser of two catastrophes of shame. “I need you to take my Physics final for me. Just Physics, please.”
He regarded her stonily.
She pressed on. “Final exams are always marked by outside invigilators who won’t know your handwriting from mine. I’ll do the first two pages, and I promise to get everything right. I’ll leave the rest blank to make it look as though you just…fell asleep or something. We’ll be seated front to back, so we can easily switch papers.”
He has quite a solid grasp of the material.
She continued, “You don’t need to make me look like a genius; I only need to pass. Or I’ll get kicked out of Stamford. They’re going to kick me out.”
After a moment of silence, he remarked, “You’re a prefect.”
“I won’t be,” Curie argued, “if I fail out of school.” She had never thought that she would break the rules, but now it was break or be broken.
“You won’t learn anything.”
Sweat prickled along her scalp. “I will!” she said. “I’ll learn everything. Afterwards, I promise. I’ll be as good as you.”
“That’s very unlikely,” said Edison blandly. He could only ever see what was factually true.
She forced herself to take deep breaths. “All right,” she said. “You’re better than me. I will never be as good as you. But I need to pass to make it through to next year. You have to help me.”
“No,” he said, distressed. “Cheating is wrong. It’s wrong! I can’t believe you’re even thinking of doing this!”
“Edison, if you don’t help me, I’ll tell everyone about what you’ve been doing. Ma and Pa, all our teachers, everyone.”
A different expression spasmed across his face. Yes, she thought. Let him imagine every door to the future slamming shut. The humiliation would overshadow him for the rest of his life. In a way, she even blamed him for his predicament. If he’d only let her get him help sooner, he wouldn’t be in this bind now. The time when she thought she ought to tell someone for his own good had passed.
“Fine,” he said at last, without looking up at her.
Curie slept better that night than she had all year.
For once, she was fresh the next morning for school. During their first period physics lecture, she sat back, not even pretending to take notes. That was how, with indelible clarity, she saw Edison reach into his pocket to do what he did next.
Like everyone else, she jumped to her feet shouting, as though it were an All-School Sports Day. Caught in the chaos of the crowd, she watched helplessly as the judo head prefect tackled Edison, wrestled away the penknife and threw it aside. It skittered across the floor, and Curie was just close enough to recognise it was a red-handled penknife, her penknife. Edisonia and Curiopolis, the cities that never were.
Mrs Georgina Lam came running into the lecture hall. She took in the hundreds of panicked students, Edison lying stricken on the floor with his hands tied over his head, and Curie standing off to the side, looking lost. She gently squeezed Curie’s shoulder and said, “Take him to the sick bay and tell the nurse to call the hospital.” Curie, moving as though she were in a trance, pulled Edison to his feet. Clutching the blazer knotted over his wrists, she led him slowly up the aisle like a condemned man to the scaffold. They seemed to be climbing and climbing without getting any closer to the exit. The students who flanked them wore solemn, funereal expressions. A few looked at them with haggard reproach. Behind her, Edison had started to sob.
The other classes were still in session. The corridors were deserted. Curie whirled around to face Edison on a staircase landing where they were half hidden from view. “What were you trying to do?” she demanded, which only made him cry harder. Cords of snot swung from his nostrils.
She lifted Edison’s tied arms and used a corner of the blazer to wipe his face with roughness she hadn’t thought herself capable of. She said, “You told me not to tell anyone, and I didn’t. I would have kept your secret. All I asked was for you to help me!”
“I’ve always tried to help you,” Edison choked out. “You wouldn’t let me.”
“What, you think this is your revenge? What did I ever do to you?”
“You tried to blackmail me. You wanted to cheat.”
“You went back on your promise!”
“Because you’re better than this. I’m not.”
“Yes, you are,” said Curie furiously, a knee-jerk reaction. She was a caregiver at heart, she realised, and the thought filled her with cold dread. “Yes, you are, you are.” Edison began to howl. Not knowing what else to do, she hugged him. His face was hot and slimy on her neck. She had resented him for so long that even at his weakest, it was hard to feel any other way towards him. She whispered, “Shh, shh,” and if she had only picked up the penknife earlier, she would have driven it through his back as well.
Edison was suspended from Stamford for the remainder of the school year on the grounds of mental instability. (For a while, rumour had it that some students had salvaged tiny dried granules of Edison’s blood and were going to ingest them immediately prior to taking their exams, until they decided that Edison’s blood was more likely to bring bad luck instead.) Edison was banned from sitting for his final papers, and while his marks were good enough to absorb the hit, what suffered was his sense of purpose. While he lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, Curie took every one of her exams, and she took them seriously. Thus, with dignity and a clear conscience, she flunked out of Stamford Junior College.
“I know you must be disappointed,” said Mrs Lam quietly, as she met with Curie to review her final marks. They were sitting in a meeting room in the staff lounge, the airconditioning raising goose pimples on Curie’s arms. “But your situation isn’t hopeless. Because you’ve demonstr
ated good attitude, I’ve already submitted my recommendation that you be allowed to repeat the year.”
Curie felt as though her head had been struck with a hammer. Dazed, she said, “What if I don’t want to?”
Mrs Lam looked confused. “What do you mean, you don’t want to?”
“I mean, I don’t want to.”
After a long moment, Mrs Lam reached over and took her hand. “I know you feel like giving up. Believe me, I know how that feels. But God has a plan for all of us. When I was your age, I worked very hard on my Maths and Physics because I knew God wanted me to be a teacher. He wanted me to teach the young people that there was more to life than school.”
“Is there?” said Curie. “You don’t seem to think so.”
She expected Mrs Lam to rebuke her for speaking disrespectfully to a teacher. That would have been satisfying. But Mrs Lam only looked sad.
“I’m sorry, Curie,” she said. “I’ve failed you.”
Curie felt a lump in her throat. For months, she had tried her best not to disappoint Mrs Lam. Now, unexpectedly, she seemed to have dealt her a much harder blow. Mrs Lam added, “I’ll do my best to look out for your brother next year,” and Curie nodded mutely. Perhaps this was to be her one legacy at Stamford.
She tried to put it all out of her mind. But whenever she had to explain that she had chosen not to return to Stamford, she found herself repeating Mrs Lam’s words, “There’s more to life than school.” It was her only defence against the uneasy looks she received, and although she still wasn’t sure if she believed it, those words were enough for now. Over the next few weeks, she pored over newspapers at the kitchen table, circling Wanted ads. This was a form of denial; for a while now, she’d suspected she knew exactly where she ought to be. When January rolled around again, she followed her sister to the Active Minds Special Needs School.