Random Tales From Youth #5

Going out with friends was like a rite of passage. You meet people, mostly from school, and you end up hanging out with the same set of people, sort of the certain stage upon the threshold of adolescence. Not that whatever we did was what you call a hell of a time. Mostly we’d just waste our hours away circling the mall until we familiarize ourselves with every shop and stall, until we can pinpoint what precisely they’re selling. It was fun as long as someone can think of another way to make this seemingly routine be different from days before. Come to think about it, that was the closest thing we could ever have that was close to having fun. (Except maybe when we cross the street to the nearby skating rink which had the latest video games that would make our quarters worth while, even if it only lasted for less then half than half an hour). My mom always objected to the idea that I would hang around the neighborhood, circling around the commercial district (if ever it would be commercial enough to be called as such) the whole day. I never quite figured it out. Maybe it was due to her being strict, or maybe her worries of a typical mother to not want her son to meddle with the wrong type of crowd. Then again, who knows what she was she was thinking. All I know is, it was something “cool”. Some act so I can be “in” with the crowd. You see, I actually liked going out with friends. Either hanging out in the movies, where they had Tekken 3 for only a quarter, or meeting new people, who are five times out ten, are pretty good looking. So I guess my mom wasn’t entirely wrong when she said that all I wanted to do was to hang out with friends. And that I only made the excuse that my step father hit me on the chest three or four times, and strangled me until my back was up against the wall just because I spilt blue ink all over the white walls (this occurred in the span of less than a week). That was because my older sister didn’t want to sign my detention slip for the day, so out of frustration I chunked that blue sign pen across the floor and made a mess. I should’ve ran away the day that happened, but something inside me made want to stick it out until the weekend, so that I wouldn’t have to skip class and miss out on the boring subjects. That and they’d have a harder time trying to find me. I admit that I did want to hang out with friends for a while. But I guess what hurt the most was my mom read half my mind. She said “you just ran away because you just needed an excuse so you can go out as much as you like”. She may have forgotten that I wanted to go out as much as like over the weekend, but I guess that’s not the point. If I could only go back to that day, I would’ve told myself then and there that I should’ve left right after, even if it was a school day, just so my reason would have been more credible, that I felt like running away because I didn’t like the way I was being treated. So I think it goes to show how plainly stupid I was when I was a kid yet again.