ing bull, was the first thing that came to Mi Cha’s mind when she opened the exam paper.

The people around her were already starting on the question; she could hear the frantic scribbling. Sneakily, she peeked over at her friend Sun Hee, just to see how she was doing. Sun Hee had her tongue slightly sticking out of the side of , and her forehead crinkled with concentration as she wrote the first line of her essay.

I’m screwed.

Mi Cha stared down at the essay question with absolute hatred. It was only one sentence, yet its presence seemed to take up the entire A4 white paper.

“What is time to you? Express your views,” the question said.

Hesitantly, she wrote her first sentence: Time is of the essence.

Nah.

She cancelled it out, thought for a while, and wrote: Time is within us.

At the very last minute, Mi Cha finished her last sentence of her two-page long essay. When she handed in her paper to the invigilator, it was with satisfaction. The essay she wrote should be decent enough to pass. Happily, she met Sun Hee, who seemed like she was going to collapse anytime soon, at the doorway of the classroom. Majority of the class streamed out of the classroom looking extremely offended with the paper.

“The essay was so difficult to write,” she whined. “And look at you, looking all happy and confident.”

Mi Cha slung her arm around the shorter girl’s shoulders.

“You can’t always do well in examinations. Cheer up, life’s good.”

Sun Hee punched Mi Cha in the arm. “Of course you would think life’s good, you graduated from the singles’ class two years ago,” she grumbled.

Mi Cha couldn’t help but smile at the thought. She had dated him for a while already… two years was quite a long time, but she every time she met him, it was as if it was their first meeting on replay. The feelings were still there. He was always there for her… and she was always there for him.

She remembered how she, at fifteen, had declared to the class that her ambition was to ‘never date anyone, ever’. How extremely ironic. But how could she have resisted his smile, his words and his actions. The small little things that attracted her to him, the crinkling of his eyes whenever he laughed, and how he pushed his bangs away from his face, seemed to affect her the most.

It was nearly love at first sight. Nearly.

She wasn’t exactly at her best when she met him. It wasn’t too bad, she was playing soccer with a bunch of boys her a