Pei was sitting in the middle of the empty classroom, one leg crossed over the other thigh. Her hanging leg shook restlessly. Above her, the big white fan clacked, spinning slowly, drunkenly. The wind it released was warm, and the papers on her desk fluttered feebly. She was determined to fix her gaze ahead, towards the whiteboard streaked with marker stains and not at the discipline master sitting across her. The man had cleared the surrounding desks so he could get right up to her, and now he sat on a chair spun backwards, his legs splayed apart like a frog. The other desks were arranged in a grid, overturned chairs stacked on top, their legs pointing up in the air. 

Pei had flung one of these chairs out of this classroom that morning. ‘Just to see,’ she’d said afterwards, when Miss Geetha asked why. But the girl couldn’t explain more when her teacher probed. 

‘So. “Just to see,”’ the discipline master now said, nodding at the phrase which had been passed to him, but not with an adult’s incredulity. His voice was high and raspy as though he’d never recovered from a sore throat; it sounded thinner and stranger in the empty classroom. 

‘I get that,’ the discipline master said, and Pei finally faced the man. ‘Sometimes, you have to do it first, before knowing if that’s what you want.’ 

‘Am I right?’ The man leaned forward, resting his hands in the shape of a pyramid. 

 The other girls liked to mimic this posture. When they asked one another things like, would you rather be disfigured or retarded; or nominated names for Fuck, Marry, or Kill, their pyramid hands would hover under their chins as they went, ‘Hmm,’ buzzing in unison until someone cracked a smile and made everyone collapse with laughter. 

None of the girls were in school at this hour. Just the netballers, whom Pei could hear training at the parade square. Downstairs, in the thick heat of the afternoon, the coach was counting reps in a commanding, singsongy way. Pei was a shoo-in during tryouts last year; her hands naturally extended up high to swat flying balls from the net. But she got kicked out by the third month for head-butting a teammate. 

During a practice match, a girl from the opposing side had advanced right up to Pei’s net, holding out the ball with both hands and swishing her arms about, like one teasing a dog. But Pei had no capacity for anger on the court—someone else on Pei’s side tackled the girl, and the foul broke up the game. Only when the team was cooling down did Pei realise her own grudge against the girl who’d taunted her—it had been tucked within Pei, like a secret note folded into a thick, tiny wad. So, when the girl paused for a sip from her water bottle, Pei appeared from the side and rammed her forehead into the girl’s cheek, driving the hard grooves of the bottle rim up her nose. 

Pei instantly regretted the trouble—the murmuring pack of girls, teachers charging over with jumbled questions and instructions, her bloody, screaming victim coddled in the centre. But later, in the freezing principal’s office, Pei recalled the hard, obliterating thud of her own skull against the girl’s soft face and felt a sweet, tired relief as though a soft breeze was blowing through her bones. This was the same feeling that came to her when she let the chair fly from the window earlier. 

For attacking her teammate, Pei served a month of daily detention, where a blank-faced counsellor occasionally visited with questions dictated from a laptop. That period had the fog of one endless day: every afternoon, a different, disgruntled teacher was retained to watch her. Because an ambulance was involved, her case bypassed the discipline master, and only once did he stand by the doorway of her classroom, peering in. He was on the phone, his voice somewhere else but eyes trained on her, as if, in multitasking, he could rely on his instincts about her. She noticed what the other girls saw—the man’s odd, elfish prettiness, his blocky brows and pointy nose, a slyness contained in and working against his slight stature. 

This morning, Pei hadn’t been provoked. Listless from three periods of Pythagoras’ theorem—the whiteboard full of flying triangles and frenzied equations—she simply could not bring herself to stand and bid the math teacher goodbye. The only way to escape this chore was to put on a show of clutching one’s abdomen with a grimace—two girls at the back of the class promptly adopted this pose, bums glued to their seats. Pei had no qualms faking a menstrual cramp, was even gleeful about such easy manipulations, but today, she suddenly felt weighed down by her confinement and obligations. Yet, she could not articulate this, and it was a vague, heady frustration that drove her to destroy the chair—a feeling irreversible and beyond her control, like a growth spurt. 

The discipline master rearranged his hands. They were delicate like a woman’s, his nails trimmed and white and opaque as shells. ‘Let’s just put this morning aside, OK?’ he said. 

Pei squinted at the man. A two-hour detention was the deal—it was time to let her go. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Just spare me a minute.’ 

‘Talk, talk, talk,’ she replied, opening and closing her hand like a beak. 

The discipline master laughed lightly. He rocked forward, balancing on the front legs of his chair. They were separated by only Pei’s desk. 

‘Actually, I don’t talk much. Not my strength,’ he said. 

Pei tried not to meet his eyes. The man’s hair was swept sideways and upwards, gleaming and frozen in place by hair wax. She could smell the chemical fragrance of his scalp. 

At the start of each day, the man led the national pledge on the parade square’s podium, dwarfed between two flag poles. His fist would lodge so still over his heart as though his hand were a stone. While reciting the daily vows, his feathery voice would sometimes crack, sending a quake of giggles across the parade square. But the man was unselfconscious, stalking around the canteen and corridors with his arms behind his back, singling girls out for their too-long fringes and too-short skirts. And when told off, the girls would retreat, limp and mute, their self-esteem crushed. This was why Pei found the girls cruel—not because they could find every minute thing to mock but that their opinions were fervent yet fickle. 

One morning assembly, the discipline master reported multiple complaints from the public: some girls from the school had been lying face-down across rows of MRT train seats during peak hour, mimicking planks. More seriously, others had stolen gear from the Girl Guides and set up tents at nearby void decks to smoke and do all sorts of questionable things. Scanning the sea of girls, he confronted each of their sleep-heavy faces and said, ‘I can’t imagine how you’ll amount to anything if you can’t even conduct yourselves.’ 

At once, the atmosphere sagged. The vice-principal, a sweaty red-faced woman, took over with a long-winded but amiable lecture, but the damage had been done. And because the transgressors remained anonymous, the shame was evenly shared; even Pei felt briefly drawn in from the periphery, culpable in the mischief she had just learned about. But by recess, the man’s warning was parodied by different cliques, girls miming a music conductor, hands drawing L-shapes in the air. 

‘So, can I go?’ Pei said to the discipline master, shoving her desk as she got up. She wanted it to crash, to send her vandalised worksheets and forged consent forms into a whirl and scatter, but the table, with uneven legs, tumbled on the spot. She stared down at the discipline master, her ears flushing. 

‘That doesn’t solve it.’ He stood up and smiled. Pei was taller than him. 

‘How ‘bout this,’ he said. ‘I need a swim. Can’t stand this weather. What do you think? Why don’t you join me? Pent up energy is no good. You can see that.’ 

Pei stared at the man. ‘Swim? Now? Where?’ 

The discipline master put a hand on his waist as if he’d just asked the girl to carry books to his office. 

Pei shrank back from her outburst of questions. She could hardly keep up her tough act, just like the girls at netball whose animalistic grunts and simmering focus disappeared once they stripped off their bright, numbered vests. She glanced out the windows into the dull, white heat of the afternoon and felt as though the clock on the wall was ticking inside her. The netballers were tiny and luminous, crab-walking in a circle. It was a day like any other, fading with routine.  And so, finding no reason to say no, Pei followed the man out of the classroom. 

Down the stairs and through the corridor to the driveway, there was Miss Geetha. She was seated on a bench with a girl who had her head in her hands. Pei liked Miss Geetha. The woman was hunched towards the other student, fingers interlaced; she could have been whispering or saying nothing. Keeping pace behind the discipline master, Pei stared at the figure of Miss Geetha. The woman’s face was hidden by her hair falling past her shoulders; the soft fabric of her yellow dress had gathered across her lap and fell to her ankles. Pei toyed with the scenario in which her teacher would feel her gaze and look up. But the woman remained engrossed in her consoling, and when she shifted, rolled a bracelet up her arm, Pei quickly turned away. Something like a tide lapped inside the girl. 

Pei did not have a watch or the urge to check her phone, but she knew that exactly twenty minutes had passed when they tunnelled into the underground carpark of a condominium. She was shocked by the certainty of what was happening, by her total trust in the man. Perhaps it was because the discipline master’s car smelled like her mother’s taxi—worn-in leather mixed with body sweat and a hint of lemon-scented air freshener, too false and cheap to mask it all. 

‘This is your house?’ said Pei, when they were up at the pool. She was sitting on the edge of a deck chair, looking about. The condo was small, with three cottage-like apartment blocks clustered around a single lap pool. The discipline master was standing above her, the ring of his car keys still looped around a finger. 

‘This,’ he said, referring to the surroundings, ‘Isn’t anybody’s house. But yes, my unit is upstairs.’ 

The discipline master pushed his keys into his pocket and began to frown. ‘Let’s see,’ he said, nodding to himself. He looked at Pei, and she looked up at him. She hugged her bag on her lap. He stared at the pool, and she watched him. The pool’s surface mirrored the sky and the greedy bulbous clouds. ‘Friday,’ he declared to no one. ‘A good day.’ 

‘Uh, sure,’ said Pei. But she saw that he could not look her in the eye. He looked drained as though he had walked for hours in the sun. 

Pei realised that, at home, the discipline master had someone to answer to––a wife, perhaps. Why else would he seem hesitant yet spiteful as though the woman were lurking somewhere, watching them? She thought about her father and uncles at family reunions, crowding in the corridor outside her aunt’s flat, telling stories and goading one another in Hokkien, swathed in cigarette smoke. The women would stay inside, playing cards with the TV on, their minds sharp and split everywhere: game strategy; the shocks and revelations in soap operas; their husbands languishing outside. Pei used to think the men were plain stupid, blind to the women’s sour faces when they reunited at the end of each night. But over time, she realised that the men smoked more compulsively and gossiped more crudely precisely to mock their wives’ concern. 

The discipline master roused himself by clapping once. ‘OK—towels. Will get towels. Back in a minute.’ 

The heels of his shoes began clicking across the stone tiles. Pei got up and sat down again. The discipline master disappeared into the lobby of the last apartment block. Pei stared and stared upwards, but she could not spot a stirring in any of the units. What if there truly was a woman, watching from a window and now waiting for him? Her mind wrapped around the thought of this woman, but there was no image for her to fixate on. 

Pei noticed that protruding from every home was a large, semicircular balcony. She wondered how much someone could see, suspended there: the pool, so still, as though it were a picture; the three barbeque pits sprouting from the garden; the veranda with checkerboard tiles; the gym, shaped purely out of glass, sparkling like a crystal. Further up, Pei supposed, one could see more—the pruned hedge grown along the walls of the estate, containing everything here and cushioning it from the traffic beyond. Her own family’s flat looked out on the bin centre, a dignified-looking hut painted with a fresh coat of blue but which smelled when its shutters went up with the arrival of the garbage truck. She’d often watched bags of garbage being fed to the truck and would stare defiantly into the truck’s black, yawning jaws, refusing to be disgusted.  

A lace curtain from a room upstairs was drifting in a breeze. Pei studied the tendrils of plants spilling from one balcony. Her eyes began to tear from the sun. She cranked the deck chair back and reclined with an arm over her eyes. Her uniform was stiff with sweat. She put a hand under her blouse and moved it across her chest—she had on a sports bra. She pulled out her PE shorts from her bag and spread them over her skirt like a napkin. Pei lay back and felt good in the sun. 

‘All set.’ The discipline master’s voice jolted her. He was now standing above her, cradling two towels. Two pairs of goggles were hanging around his neck. He had on a cap, a T-shirt and trunks that stretched to his knees. Pei had seen men like this in malls—out of their work clothes, they could be anywhere from thirty to fifty years old. He seemed relaxed now as if to report that no one was home after all. 

‘Sure you’re going in like this?’ he said, pulling his shirt off. 

Pei did not expect to be unfamiliar with a man’s body. A man’s body, though less shapely and more unkempt than a woman’s, was always on display. At home, her father was often without his shirt. The moment he stepped into the flat, his shirts, all caked in dust and paint, would come off. Bare-bodied, he’d spread himself like a starfish on the floor, the standing fan bowed and whirring towards him. But now, Pei saw that the discipline master had made a point not to let his body become a sum of neglected parts, like her father’s—a back infected with red bumps, a hippo-like belly, hair growing out of funny places. 

Pei got up. She drew up her shorts under her skirt then stepped out of the skirt. She unbuttoned her shirt as the man watched. Her uniform fell to the ground, and she hugged her stomach. The man came close and took her arm. 

‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘It’s alright.’ He let go, and Pei straightened up. It was natural that she was alert to the flaws and merits of her own body in front of the man. But she had rarely been self-conscious because she stood out easily. Pei was tall, with pale legs and feet which pointed apart when she stood. For a while, she was preoccupied by her pointy elbows—when she  put her arm carefully around another girl for group photos, her bones connected in such an angular way, they looked like lines drawn against a set square. She thought her face was plain but was certain that she disliked herself less than the pretty girls. 

Now, Pei felt more exposed because the idea of the discipline master’s wife was growing in her mind. She felt a great distance between herself and the woman when she imagined that the woman had a version of her husband’s sculpted, markless body. 

‘Come in; it’s nice,’ said the discipline master, slipping into the pool. Pei followed, walking across the scalding ground on her bare heels. She stood above the water, looking in. Her  toes curled on the wet tiles. 

‘You can swim, right?’ he said. ‘No problem?’

‘What are we doing?’ she said. 

‘Cooling off,’ said the discipline master. ‘Whatever you wish. Come on. Can you stand this furnace?’ He had one pair of goggles snapped on, which made his eyes look like they were slammed behind two dark doors. He tossed up the other pair still wound round his neck. Then his head went under, and he launched himself off the wall. Pei glanced back at the deck chair where the man’s key card was buried under his cap, and his shirt and towel were folded like things in a store. 

She lowered herself in slowly but was soon drawn to the painful, numbing cold of the water. She was surprised that it only came up to her shoulders. 

Despite her broad shoulders and long limbs, Pei could only manage two laps of frog style at a go before she clung to the wall, panting. But she liked that the water made her body feel like a big jelly, weightless but slow. She was afraid that the man would stop his laps and try to correct her clumsy strokes. But the man continued to swim. Once, crossing each other, their ankles collided. Pei was stunned by the power of his kick, by the meeting of their skin underwater. She could not help but laugh. The man paused and raised his goggles. 

‘Hey,’ his tone rose, a teasing question. ‘Careful.’ In her laughter, Pei wanted to go under and catch the taut, rapidly moving man by his ankles. She wanted to take hold of his even, pumping energy that was leaving straight trails of ripples as he swam back and forth. But the discipline master torpedoed away. Pei gave up swimming and floated to the surface, watching the sky. 

After a time, the man stopped at one end of the pool. He hooked his arms around the ground above. 

‘Now what?’ Pei called out to him. She paddled over, keeping her head above the water, and he swam to her so they could meet in the middle. While she stood comfortably on the pool floor, Pei realised that the man’s feet were fluttering below so he could stay adequately afloat. She began to see that he did not have a plan for the afternoon, that he was counting on chance. 

‘I see you’ve enjoyed the pool?’ the man said. He breathed evenly, restfully, though his feet were still moving. 

She nodded and rubbed her wet face. ‘Thanks,’ she said and began to thwack the strap of the goggles against her hand. She twirled the goggles around her wrist. 

‘My pleasure. Alright. Let’s go up then,’ the man said. But just then, the goggles slipped from Pei and sank swiftly into the water. 

‘Shit,’ said Pei as the man ducked, his body shooting downwards like an arrow. When Pei looked down, he had already retrieved the object, and she found him contorted, his body curled into a rock so he could stay suspended below, near her belly button. She tried not to think about time and how long he could hold his breath. She touched her cheek; it was warm and tender from the sun. 

Then the man bobbed to the surface and said, ‘You have to know what you’re playing with.’ He swung the goggles he’d fished out. ‘Goes down quickly when it’s small but dense.’ 

Pei watched the man moving to the edge of the pool and hoisting himself out in one swift move. When she tried to do the same, her arms shook, so she took the ladder, careful not to skip a rung. 

By the deck chair, the discipline master had a towel wide open for Pei as if he were a magician who would zap her into a rabbit once she went behind the cloth. He reached up to close the towel around her shoulders, and she could feel the nearness of his breath. 

‘Why can’t every afternoon be like this,’ he said. She thought he might come closer, but he just looked at her. Then his hand moved down to hers. 

‘Wait,’ said the girl. ‘Wait, Mr Mok.’ But Pei did not shake herself free. 

The man took her other hand. He gave her a gentle look of defeat. ‘I just wanted to say it was nice that you joined me.’ 

Pei didn’t know when it happened, but she felt that the man had leaned in even though he did not move. She realised that this was because the man was having an erection. She didn’t need to look down to see that through his trunks, the discipline master’s penis was pointing at her, authoritative, as if an accusing finger. 

She’d only known about sex from novels, content with the allusions and imagination. Yet now, she could picture the most private and exposed part of the man, swollen and angry, helplessly demanding something from her. She didn’t know if she should move her hand down or away, but it didn’t matter—he now had her tightly by the wrists. The man did not seem to care about hiding himself, but he suddenly released her. He stepped back. His face turned hard like a mask, and he spoke with an impatient efficiency: Pei could rinse herself in the bathroom at the veranda then leave his towel folded on the deck chair; when she was done, she could board either of the two buses across the road that would take her back to school. 

The man refastened the towel around his waist and strode off to the lobby. Pei sat herself down on the deck chair. Then she got up and hurried after the man. The lift had swallowed him in, but she saw that he’d travelled to the ninth floor. She hit the lift button again and again, but it would not light up because she did not have a key card. 

Pei found the stairwell and ran up. Her wet feet slapped sharply against each step. She sensed an inevitable doom awaiting her, yet she could not stop herself from rushing to it. 

There were four apartments on the ninth floor, one at each corner of the building. Pei glanced at the rusty bicycles leaning against the parapet and the cracked vases at one door and was surprised how people’s clutter here was no different from the junk outside her flat. 

 Pei stared at the four units. Someone was practising a piano with a stuck key; the low, blunt note was struck insistently. She tried to think. She dripped with pool water and sweat. She did not notice her own exhaustion, her thrumming heart. 

Pei dashed across each door, ringing the bell. Each doorbell had a different tune. One was a melody like the recess bell. It repeated once from within. She heard a man and woman talking inside. Their conversation rose and fell. A dog was barking from another place. 

Then there were footsteps. The woman’s voice came closer. Now it was just the woman. The sounds of the man had vanished. The door unlocked. 

‘Hello? Who’s that?’ said the voice. Yet, it seemed as though a girl had been expected, and the question was posed to get to know Pei—her name, age, what class she was in. The penetrating concern of the voice frightened Pei. She ran back to the stairwell and hid inside. 

Outside, the voice pursued Pei. ‘How may I help you? Are you there?’ 

The door of the stairwell whooshed open, but the woman did not speak again. Pei did not let herself look before she fled down. 

She did not think about the man. She forgot about his penis, the curiosity and repulsion which had sent her upstairs. It didn’t matter if he’d used the girl in a half-hearted game with his wife, a trump card in their petty negotiations, as cigarettes were used by the men in Pei’s family; it didn’t matter if Pei was on the cusp of understanding this. 

Pei thought only about the woman, the woman whom she’d first formed in her mind and was now real. The woman, too, had predicted Pei’s coming; Pei felt yoked to the woman, but she could not stop running from her. She felt split apart, separated from her own body. Halfway down the stairs, she saw a small window and had the urge to throw herself out. She thought about the lightness of the chair, how its four legs broke instantly as it smacked the ground, how restful its pieces looked, lying on the hot concrete of the parade square. But when she looked out now, her feet went numb. Pei let go of the man’s towel instead. It glided and rested on a heap of cardboard in the dumpster below. 

Pei sat by the pool, rocking herself so she would stop shivering in her wet bra and shorts. She sat for a long time, watching the bougainvillea and heliconia blazing among the dark bushes of the estate. As a child, she’d learnt what these tropical flowers were called. The other girls had been tickled by the rafflesia—the monstrous paradox: a stinky flower. Till now, some of the upper secondary girls still referred to this flower as an insult. But even then, Pei had shut herself from their chanting and laughter, only hearing the song of the flowers’ names. Pei felt proud of the things she knew and kept to herself. In the distance, the sun was lowering and ripening into an orange eye. Upstairs, a woman was coming out to the balcony to water her plants and survey everything below.  

2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize Shortlist: Issue 2