to let a mockingbird live

it shames me to no end whenever i think of it.

she only wanted to be liked. she didn't have much confidence to begin with and seemed like a puppy dog; eager to please, happy with whatever scrap of attention given to her.

she was, in every sense, a mockingbird.

i don't know why we did it. maybe she irritated us with her too nice, 'please walk all over me' way about her, maybe she was so naive and innocent that we felt that we needed to 'give her a taste of what the real world is like'. i don't know. perhaps we were bored. possibly we were just venting all our insecurities out on her.

but what we did shattered her.

we made spectacle of her. pretended to be her friends, gave her a false sense of belonging in our group, inviting her out and all that when all we actually wanted to do was make fun of her, led her to believe that a guy liked her by writing her love letters and getting a guy friend to pretend to be her secret admirer and call her. snicker behind her back whenever she talked about that guy.

and ooh, my oh my, was she happy that she actually had a secret admirer.

which 14 year old wouldn't? who else would she have confided in if not for her 'friends', maybe embellishing a little to make the story juicier.

i didn't like it, but i was too cowardly to say that, going along with it in fear that if i opposed, i would be cast off as well. and so i played along a sick girl's idea of 'ooh-its-so-easy-to drown-that-kitten' entertainment. at 14, the need to be accepted by my peers outweighed the need to do the right thing.

and so i played along and forever smeared the blood of an innocent on my hands.

tell me: would you be at the stoning of a someone and join in without rhyme or reason, because you don't want to be the one stoned as well, or would you dare to risk your life and stand in front of them like Jesus did and question why they were doing that?

but i did what worst.

i just couldn't do it and blurted everything out to her. that the whole secret admirer thing was a hoax, that she's been the object of ridicule of everyone who knew about it, which was a lot and spanned the student population of approximately 3 schools.

and how she cried.

what shocked me was that she wasn't angry. in her own resigned way she just seemed to accept it and try harder to be in the group. it sickened me and for the first time, i realised that some people just want to be abused.

then i found out she almost had a nervous breakdown.

i don't know if they were angry at me for exposing them, i'm not sure if they were secretly ashamed that they did it. perhaps we just somehow managed to push it to a corner of our minds and never want to think about it again. we never spoke of it again.

it was an eye opener. from then on, i lost respect for my friends. if they could be so cruel to someone, what makes me think that they wouldn't do the same to me, i realised in horror. and so i slowly withdrew from the group.

in search of sincerity, i lost popularity.

but i discovered other friends. true friends. friends like yen who willingly lug 10kgs of foodstuff and all from malaysia to pass to me whenever she flies to london and not want to accept a single penny from me for the things she bought. friends like lizzie and dave who drove all the way from kl to some secluded place on the way to bidor to pick me up when the bus broke down on the way to taiping from kl. and yes, friends like doreen and amyr who insisted on waiting up for me when my bus back from london was delayed and reached plymouth at 4am. friends who respect me enough to tell the truth and not lull me into a false sense of security.

but sometimes some things are best left unsaid. she wouldn't have wanted to know anyway. perhaps it was selfishness in me that told her that, to unload the burden off my chest and feel like i did the right thing.

shades of grey.

sometimes the right thing to do is just to shut up. because they don't want to know it anyway. or maybe they know it deep down but refuse to acknowledge it. and you're just being cruel by forcibly bringing it to their attention.

maybe sometimes its best to wonder than to know.