GUYS, I’m about to tell you an incredible story about how I fell in love for the first time. But before that, let me introduce myself. My name is Windy Tyas Patriandika. And I’m a nerd—or a bookworm, according to the Great Dictionary of the Indonesian Language.
This story began in 1999, a year when my life felt incredibly, overwhelmingly, ridiculously awesome. Because not only did I get a great national exam score, I also got accepted into one of the top-tier public junior high schools in Surabaya. Back then, getting into a public school—especially one with top-tier status—was a major accomplishment. To get in, we had to beat hundreds, or even thousands, of other people through the New Student Admission Selection system, which was based on national exam scores. As a result, society developed this perception that students at public schools, particularly top-tier ones, were smart, had high IQs, and bright futures ahead of them.
That perception wound up affecting me and changing the way I lived my life. First, I went from being shy to being obnoxious the moment I put on my junior high school uniform. Just so everyone could clearly see my junior high school badge, I stopped wearing jackets altogether. And second, I became more ambitious than I’d ever been. Back in elementary school, my ambition had been to stay in the top-five ranking. But now, because I wanted to prove to everyone—especially my classmates—that I deserved to get into this top-tier public junior high school, I became determined to be the alpha male of the class. And to make that ambition a reality, I did quite a lot of things. I went from actively interacting with teachers to eagerly volunteering to go up front and work out problems on the board. I went from taking the initiative to offer to erase the board to taking the initiative to help teachers carry my classmates’ student workbooks from the classroom to the teachers’ lounge. I went from diligently reminding teachers when we had homework to diligently answering, “Yes!” every time a teacher asked the class something like, “Kids, the essay questions in your student workbooks, from page 10 all the way to page 193, are homework, okay? And they need to be turned in on my desk tomorrow morning!” Or asked, “Kids, we have a test today, okay?” Or, my personal favorite, when a teacher said, “Kids, there are a few lessons I didn’t have time to explain to you. So how about we hold an extra class after school? God willing, it won’t take long—just about an hour. What do you think? Does everyone agree?” I would immediately answer in a loud, firm voice, “Yes, I agree! I TOTALLY AGREE! In fact, if possible, let’s make it even longer so we can really understand the material! Five hours, for example.” Then a girl would scream from the back of the room, “I WANT TO GO HOME, DIKA!”
The effect was exactly what you’d expect. After only a few weeks of school, all the teachers who taught my class already knew my name. But what baffled me was that the longer it went on, the more I felt ostracized by my classmates. For example, there was a one-and-a-half-hour gap between dismissal and our scheduled time to enter the computer lab. During that time, without my knowing, all my classmates gathered at Fira’s house, which was close to the school and within walking distance. They had a blast there. They watched TV, chatted, gossiped, laughed and joked around, read magazines, and ate fruit with spicy sauce. Meanwhile, I—the only person in the class who hadn’t been invited—spent that one-and-a-half-hour gap sitting on the floor in front of the computer lab, aimlessly wandering around and feeling hungry. I felt absolutely, spectacularly miserable. I was so miserable that I even poured my heart out to the school custodian. Unfortunately, he didn’t help at all. I’d barely started talking when he cut me off and said, “You’ve still got it better than me. Me, on the other hand…” And somehow, before I knew it, he was the one confiding in me. And his story was wildly overdramatic. He even sobbed as he repeatedly wiped his snot on the left sleeve of my school uniform shirt. Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore, so I finally spoke up. “Sir, enough, sir. Okay? MY SHIRT ALREADY STINKS, SIR!”
Or take the time my classmates arranged a group outing to see a movie at an XXI theater. I was invited that time. But when they handed out the tickets, everyone else got tickets for the 1:30 p.m. showing. I, on the other hand, was the only one who supposedly got stuck with a ticket for the 5:40 p.m. showing because they’d run out of the earlier tickets. My seat was K-9, right in the middle and closest to the movie screen. So throughout the movie, not only was I lonely because there was no one sitting to my left, right, or in the two rows behind me, but my neck also hurt from looking up for so long. Then, when I walked out of the theater, something seemed off with my vision. Everything looked a little blurry. When I had my eyes checked at the optical shop near my house, the verdict was in: I was officially nearsighted at negative one-half. If this is what they call a group movie outing, then it wasn’t a group outing at all. It was… a group act of injustice. (Or, to put it in religious terms, injustice in congregation.)
From that moment on, I couldn’t help suspecting my classmates whenever some misfortune befell me at school. For example, when I got locked inside a school bathroom stall for almost an hour. I didn’t have any proof that they were involved. But I was pretty sure what happened to me wasn’t fate or simple bad luck. It was sabotage—the stall door handle had been deliberately damaged while I was using it, the result of an evil conspiracy by a group of classmates trying to get rid of me.
My suspicion that a group of my classmates was plotting against me got even worse one day, just before lunch break ended. I had just returned to class from the cafeteria. I sat in my chair, unzipped my backpack, and reached inside to take out my stationery and the next textbook. But when I managed to unzip the backpack all the way, I was immediately shocked to find what looked like vomit scattered inside it. Then, because I was so stunned, I could do nothing but sit there dumbly for several minutes, staring at my school supplies and books mixed together with the vomit. But after that, my emotions truly exploded, because this was clearly a gross violation of basic human decency and justice. Therefore, I felt I had to get revenge on whoever had thrown up carelessly inside my backpack in the cruelest way possible: either give them the wrong answers during a test, or… tell my mom so she could chew them out for hours until they became completely stressed out.
Then, impatiently, I went around to each person in the classroom and asked, “Do you know who threw up inside my backpack?” Almost all of them answered, “No idea.” That left two boys sitting in the very front row near the classroom door whom I hadn’t questioned yet. I walked over to them and asked, “Do you guys know who threw up inside my backpack?” Unlike everyone else, who had answered clearly and directly, these two didn’t answer my question. Instead, they looked at each other. Suspicious. They clearly knew the truth but were trying to cover it up. Luckily, I sometimes watched Bollywood movies with my mom, so I knew how to interrogate people properly. Staring intensely into their eyes, I said, “Guys, I know. I know you two actually know who threw up inside my backpack. So I’ll make this simple. Point out that bastard, or I’ll report both of you to Kak Seto for protecting the criminal responsible for contaminating a minor’s backpack. The good news is, you might get to meet Kak Seto and take pictures together in all kinds of cute poses, like duck face or putting your index finger against Kak Seto’s lips. (Wait, what?) But the bad news is that Kak Seto will definitely punish both of you. And you won’t just be ordered to wash my backpack until it’s clean and smells good again. You’ll also have to wash my underwear, the teachers’ underwear, the principal’s underwear, and the underwear of every school custodian in the entire province of Jawa Timur until they’re clean, fragrant, and free of those thick black grime stains that love to cling stubbornly to the edges. Which means both your hands will become completely paralyzed—not because you got too tired from scrubbing underwear, but because they were contaminated by the nasty bacteria living in all our underwear. So which do you choose: pointing out that bastard, or having both your hands become completely paralyzed?”
The two of them exchanged another look. Then one of them suddenly pointed outside the classroom and shouted confidently, “THERE’S THE CULPRIT!” I immediately turned my head and followed the direction of his pointing finger. The next second, I saw Mr. Subagyo, the math teacher, walking alone past my classroom.
Psychologically speaking, I was even more shocked than before.
Huh?! Mr. Subagyo, the math teacher, was the one who had thrown up inside my backpack? Okay, this is weird and totally wrong. How could he—a teacher who was supposed to set a good and proper example for his students—casually throw up inside my backpack, even though he wasn’t even that close to me? And to make matters worse, he had absolutely no manners. I mean, if you know you’ve thrown up inside someone else’s backpack, the least you can do is leave an apology letter. You don’t just abandon it like that, without a shred of guilt or responsibility. If, within 2 x 24 hours, he still hadn’t handed me an apology letter and continued wandering around pointlessly in front of me, acting as though he hadn’t done anything wrong—as he was doing right now—then he really ought to be ashamed of himself, Mr. Subagyo. Yes, YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED!