The Battle Of Saga Seeds

I never thought it would come down to matter of a few red saga seeds, thought Aoife. She held in her hand several shiny scarlet pits, absently rolling them about in the palm of her hand, thinking how something so innocent looking could be responsible for the sting in the pit of her stomach, the growing numbness in her jaw, and the lachrymose heat behind her eyes that threatened to get worse.

She would have preferred that Twink picked another kind of, well, more serious matter to make a big deal out of. More serious, that is, in Aoife's book.

It was a game they played every day, she and Twink, a ritual they developed over the three years since they started sitting side by side in class. Each would harvest the seeds from the sand in the school vegetable patch, then hurry to a stairwell near the home economics kitchen to flip seeds. The two had it down pat. With a little division of labour - Aoife hurrying off to buy a couple of 40-cent sausage buns from the tuckshop, Twink getting a headstart on finding seeds and liberating them from their dried brown pods - the game would be underway in three minutes, keep going for another 15 minutes, leaving a neat two minutes to get back to class before the bell rang.

Then she came along, with her fancy Gameboy manufactured by that funny Japanese brand Aoife never could say right (and so never said it out loud). She also had a big allowance. She got at least a full five dollars a day, and Aoife only held five dollar bills at Chinese New Year when granny slipped her her angpow; and then only until Ma came along and whisked them out of her hand for "safekeeping".

"It's for your own good, Aoife," she would say every year, without fail. "You'll only lose it if you hold on to it, or else Uncle Pi from next door might take it from you to buy himself some Guinness."

Money was magic to Aoife. She always thought it was because people didn't quite understand it that they always argued over it so much. Ma and Pa certainly never understood it, she thought. Maybe it was so magic that they were afraid it would hurt her if she wasn't careful with it. Plus granny was always so mysterious about it.

"Eeeh-fah," she would say, taking her drag from her Consulate. "Eeeh-fah, come, let mamma look at your palm. Ah see, all the tiny holes here, when you close your fingers together? Yours can let in light, I can see through them. That means surely you cannot hold on to money. You will lose money."

She never told Aoife what that would mean, this not hanging on to money. They way Granny said it, it was almost as though Aoife's inability to hold on to money was a mystical talent.

"But is that a good thing or a bad thing, Mamma?"
"You kuat belanjah," she would say, shaking her head and exhaling cigarette smoke through her nose. But Aoife only found out what that meant much later on, when she developed a fetish for designer shoes.

In the meantime, Twink seemed to be the only person in Aoife's life who didn't care about The Mystery Of Money, unless they did not have enough between them for sausage buns.

Then Ping started buying Twink all kinds of goodies with her five dollar bills. And not just sausage buns either.
At first it was those Roundtree blackcurrant sweets, which costs a dollar a pack. Twink had secretly passed a piece to Aoife before English spelling, which they both always aced. Aoife had wondered where she got a whole tube full, but when she had later asked Twink, she had merely said her friend had given it to her. Then it was an entire stash of Haw flakes, which Twink was more reluctant to share. Then once, Aoife spotted two one dollar bills in the magnetic compartment of Twink's Xiao Tian Tian pencilbox, where Twink kept her daily 50 cent allowance. Twink had hastily shut the compartment as soon as she spotted Aoife glancing at it, blushing and mumbling something about how her mother had wanted her to pick up potatoes from the void-deck shop after school.

Then Twink started making excuses for skipping saga seed sessions, leaving Aoife to wonder what was keeping her friend away.

It didn't take long for Aoife to spot Twink and that horrid apple-cheeked Ping sitting in the tuckshop each with a bowl of 50 cent noodles - something Aoife and Twink only did on Fridays because that's how long it took them to save up for the soupy snack topped with their favourite deep friend lard garnish.

That was Monday.