report day

On the last day of term they give you your report card in a brown envelope, sealed, and you have to carry it all the way home and hand it to your mak unopened. That is the rule. Sealed, unopened, straight home, into the hands of a grown-up. It is a good rule and a sensible rule and I have never once managed to keep it.

I was not scared of mine. I knew mine was fine. I am not a top kid and I am not a bottom kid. I am a middle kid who talks too much, and the report always says some version of that, every single term, and Mak always reads it and does her eyebrow and that is the entire event. So it was not fear. It was that I could not stand not knowing a thing about myself that I was holding in my own two hands. The not-knowing itched. It itched the whole length of my arm.

The teacher hands them out right at the end, after everything else is packed away, so the envelope is the last thing that happens to you all term. She says the same thing every year. Hand it to your parents. Do not open it. And every year forty children say yes cikgu, and every year forty envelopes are opened somewhere between the school gate and home, because a sealed thing with your own name on it is the hardest thing in the world to carry and not look at.

So the second we were out of the school gate, I opened an investigation into my own envelope.

First, the sun. Everybody knows you can read a sealed letter by holding it up to the light, like the bones in your hand at the clinic, an X-ray. I held my envelope up to the sun, and I could see the shapes of the writing coming through the paper, lines and numbers, ghostly, and I read them. I read them with great confidence. I read them, I found out later, completely upside down, because I had the envelope the wrong way up the whole time and was busy X-raying my own report standing on its head.

Aiman came over. Aiman charges for everything, and he had a service ready, fully priced. For a fee, he said, he could make any report card disappear. Into the longkang. A tragic accident on the way home, very sad, nothing to be done, and you cannot be asked about a report that is at the bottom of a drain. He had a rate for it. He was doing brisk business, working down the row of kids whose reports were worse than mine, taking deposits on drownings. I told him I did not want mine in the longkang, I wanted to read it, and he said reading was a completely different department, not his, and moved along.

After the sun failed me, I tried other ways into the envelope. I held it under a tap, very briefly, to see if the paper would go see-through. It did not. It just went wet, and a wet sealed envelope is somehow more sealed than a dry one, and also now suspicious. I tried steaming it over a friend's mother's kettle through her kitchen window and was sent away from the window. By the time I gave up I had a damp, slightly cooked envelope and exactly as much information as I had started the morning with.

Kavi did not need the sun. Kavi only knows loud, and before he had even broken the seal on his envelope he announced his result to the entire road, the result he was certain he had got. Then he opened it, to check. Then he had to announce, a little less loudly, the actual result, which was not the one he had just shouted, and then explain to everybody who had heard the first shout that there had been a small revision since the first announcement. So the whole road got both of Kavi's numbers, the wished-for one and the real one, which is the only way Kavi knows how to do anything, including keep a secret he does not even have yet.

And I, meanwhile, walked home in a complete state about a number that did not exist. My upside-down X-ray had shown me a number, and the number was bad, much worse than I ever get, and now I had a problem I had invented out of sunshine and a backwards envelope. I planned what I would say to Mak. I built a defence. I rehearsed the defence on Divya, out loud, the whole walk, and Divya kept saying you do not even know what it says, you read it upside down through an envelope, and I kept not listening, because by then the wrong number felt realer to me than the envelope it was not even written on.

Divya is my best friend and she is right about things, and being right about this was getting her nowhere, because a person rehearsing a defence does not want facts, they want an audience.

And Faiz, walking the same way home, just opened his.

Faiz is a kid from a few houses down who does everything the proper, allowed, sensible way, which is unbearable, because it works. He did not hold his up to the sun. He did not pay Aiman to drown it. He looked at his sealed envelope for a moment. He thought about it. He was going to have to know what was inside eventually. Knowing it now or knowing it at home was the same knowing. So he opened it. Calmly. Read it, calmly. Folded it back up, and carried on walking, calm. His was fine. He had known it would be fine, because his always is. He was not scared of it, so opening it was not a scary thing. It was just lifting the lid off a tin to look at the thing you already know is inside.

I watched him fold his card back up and keep walking. I stopped rehearsing my defence. It had started to feel a bit silly, a whole speech said out loud on the road, a defence for a number I had read upside down through an envelope.

Nobody's card was going to leap out and bite them. Mine said what it always says. Faiz's said what his always says. The only frightening thing on the whole walk home was the secret I had made out of it, and I had made it myself, out of sunshine and a backwards envelope.

So at the corner where we all split off to our different houses, I stopped.

I did not read mine alone, hunched over, peering, panicking. I did not hold it to the sun one more time. I waited for Divya to catch up, and Faiz waited too, and Kavi, who had nothing left to hide having already shouted both his numbers to the road, and we opened them there at the corner, all at the same time, each of us reading our own and nobody reading anybody else's, the way you should have been able to do the whole way home if only somebody had let you.

Mine said exactly what it always says. Middle kid. Talks too much. Works hard when she is interested and we are working on the rest. It was completely, boringly fine. The bad number I had panicked about the entire walk was a thing the sun and a backwards envelope had made up between them out of nothing.

Then we folded them back, the real ones now, and walked the last bit home the same as any other day, the envelopes in our hands, nothing different about the world at all, the term over, the long hot holidays opening up in front of us. I handed mine to Mak unopened, technically, which is to say opened and then folded back so carefully that she and I both quietly agreed not to discuss the exact state of the seal. She read it. She did the eyebrow. That was the whole event, exactly like every term.