#19 Uniform

She kept everything, from photographs she took with a shoddy film camera she found in the art room and ticket stubs to the films she saw, to yearbooks with nary a scribble and school uniforms. She had three different sets of summer uniforms – one for each school she went to.

The first was a white short-sleeved shirt and green-and-blue checkered skorts combination that she wore during the first three years of primary school, where her only friends were the fleeting clouds.

She changed to the second school to finish her primary years when the bullying got worse. At the new school, the uniform was an ill-fitting striped dress of green and white, with round white collars and a yellow ribbon at the throat. It zipped up at the back and when she was eleven, a boy unzipped it afterschool to reveal that she had a training bra on earlier than the others. Luckily, she had friends and found the strength to tell a teacher.

The third school was where she would stay for the remaining six years of her compulsory education. The uniform was a white shirt and a blue pinstriped skirt, worn with black kitten heels — the high school equivalent of an office lady’s outfit. Though the shirt she was now holding is no longer white. Instead, it was covered, from collar to hem, with messages and doodles her classmates and friends had written in multi-coloured markers on their graduation day.

There was one in particular, written on the sleeve. The girl who wrote it, had her face very close to her arm that our protagonist could almost feel her breath on her skin if she concentrated hard enough. When she was done, the girl gave her a bittersweet smile and kissed her; “I don’t know if I’ll ever have another chance to do this again.” She left for London two days later and never came back.

She wrote “thank you.“

*****
Evidently I am not willing to fall behind on #peachtober.

A little revisit of the girl who stared at clouds, years after she graduated from school. When I was in high school, we had several sets of uniforms – not just dictated by the season, but by your year as well as whimsy (junior uniforms came in blue and yellow versions). What did yours look like?