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. 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 the shapes of the writing came through the paper, lines and numbers, ghostly.

"What does it say," asked Divya.

"It says," I said, squinting, reading with enormous confidence, "a number. A bad number. Much worse than I ever get."

"Your envelope is upside down," said Divya.

It was. I had been X-raying my own report standing on its head the whole time. But I had already read the bad number, and a bad number, once you have read it, does not much care which way up it was.

Aiman came over. Aiman had a service ready, fully priced.

"For a fee," said Aiman, "your report card can have a tragic accident on the way home. Into the longkang. Very sad. Nothing to be done. You cannot be asked about a report that is at the bottom of a drain."

"I do not want mine in the longkang," I said. "I want to read it."

"Reading is a different department," said Aiman. "Not mine."

And he moved off down the row of kids whose reports were worse than mine, taking money up front to drop them in the drain.

After the sun failed me, I held the envelope 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 now suspicious as well. I gave it up with a damp envelope and exactly as much information as I had started the morning with.

Kavi did not need the sun. Before he had even broken his seal, Kavi announced his result to the whole road.

"STRAIGHT As," shouted Kavi.

Then he opened it, to check.

"...MOSTLY Bs," shouted Kavi, a little less loudly. "THERE HAS BEEN A SMALL REVISION."

So the whole road got both of Kavi's numbers, the one he wished for and the real one, which is the only way Kavi knows how to do anything: out loud, all of it, at the top of his voice.

And I, meanwhile, walked home in a complete state about a number that did not exist. I planned what I would say to Mak. I built a defence. I rehearsed it on Divya, out loud, the whole walk home.

"You read it upside down, through an envelope," said Divya. "You do not even know what it says."

I kept not listening. 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. She wants 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, 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 envelope for a moment, and then he just opened it. Read it. Folded it back up. Kept walking.

"What does yours say," I asked.

"The same as it always says," said Faiz, and that was that. He was not scared of it, so opening it was not a scary thing.

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.

So at the corner where we all split off to our different houses, I stopped. I did not read mine alone, hunched over, panicking. I did not hold it to the sun one more time.

"Together," I said. "On three."

Divya waited. Faiz waited too, his already read, patient about it. Kavi had nothing left to hide, having shouted both his numbers to the road already. On three, we opened them, all at once, each reading our own and nobody reading anybody else's.

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. Completely, boringly fine. The bad number was never there at all.

Then we folded them back, the real ones now, and walked the last bit home, the same as any other day. The term was over. The long hot holidays were opening up in front of us. The ones where we cross the Causeway to Pak Su's in Singapore, and Ayah does not go to work for a whole week.

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. Same as every term.

In the morning Aiman knocked to sell me insurance against next term's report. I told him to come back in a year. He wrote down the date.