If you asked anyone who’s ever known me, they would tell you that I tended to act strangely around girls who were a bit younger than me.

  Not in a creepy way. God, no. That was a terrifying thought. And sickening.

  At least, well… I hope no one thought it was creepy.

  I didn’t mean girls who were massively younger than me. I wasn’t talking about the age gap between a high-schooler and a kindergartner.

  Just two or so years younger. Basically anyone I went to school with who was in a lower grade than mine counted.

  Again, I wasn’t being creepy. I wasn’t stalking them or constantly looking at them and telling them they were cute or anything. I wasn’t looking to date any of them. That felt kind of gross.

  I was just…

  Well, how should I say it…

  Protective?

  I was always really anxious about their safety, health and wellbeing.

  Most of the time, it wasn’t anything that noticeable or out-of-the-ordinary.

  It was normal, you know, like if we were out playing a sport or something for PE and one of the girls scraped their knee or tripped or something, I would often be the first one to drop the game and rush over to help them.

  Most of the time, it was something like that. A kind of ordinary kindness. A slightly heightened awareness and attentiveness to their plights.

  Sometimes, though, it was really obvious that there was something going on inside of me.

  I’m pretty sure by the time I graduated high school, everyone in town knew about this tendency.

  I don’t think they were put off by me or anything.

  I sure hope none of them felt as if I was dehumanizing them or acting as if they couldn’t help themselves or something like that. It really was not my intention to do stuff like that.

  I think most of them understood my heart was in the right place. I was otherwise not that much of a big ‘manly’ man. I wasn’t that big into machismo or the patriarchy or the ‘a man’s gotta provide and be the pillar of the family’ mindset or whatever else those people liked to say.

  It was, however, really embarrassing at times. People would constantly give me shit and tease me whenever I fucked up and got overzealous about something.

  For example, there was this one time. I was seventeen years old then.

  It was lunch time.

  I saw one of the girls in the grade beneath us getting pushed into a small alley between some of the campus buildings by a boy whose face I couldn’t see, but I could still make out a rough smile on his features.

  The girl looked really nervous. Worryingly so.

  At least that’s how my brain saw it.

  My blood boiled immediately, thinking something terrible was going on. Maybe the boy was trying to coerce her into something. Maybe she was being bullied or threatened or blackmailed or something.

  I got up from across the grounds and zeroed in on them immediately, stomping across the concrete and drawing a ton of eyes to me as I did so.

  I wrestled the boy away from the girl and reprimanded him, shouting at him to keep his hands off her and a bunch of other vaguely threatening stuff.

  Only for the girl to interject, blushing, telling me that they were dating, and she wasn’t being pushed into anything.

  I sputtered, going red myself.

  She then immediately made it worse by saying that actually, she was the one pushing him to follow her into the alley. She wanted to make out with him in the alley, but was nervous since she didn’t want her friends knowing she was dating him, having previously talked down about her now-boyfriend in the past to them before they got together.

  Well, thanks to my interjection, now everyone knew they were dating.

  Everyone in my grade gave me a ton of shit over that moment. They teased and heckled me about it for the rest of the year. They wouldn’t let me live it down ever. They made all sorts of jokes, talking about the school boogeyman who would make sure you would NEVER be able to kiss your partner on campus otherwise he would publicly embarrass you.

  It all worked out in the end, though. Nothing bad came out of it.

  The girl’s friends didn’t give her much trouble about her new boyfriend. I think they all got the impression that she was complaining about him because she was in denial about her feelings. They teased her once or twice about it and then became supportive immediately after.

  And I knew this because I would go on to become casual friends with the boyfriend himself after apologising to him about the mess I started.

  They remained together throughout their time in high school, and even stayed together after graduating.

  Last I heard, the girlfriend was moving into the boyfriend’s apartment.

  I think it was a year ago I heard that piece of news from him.

  Well, by a year ago, I mean a year before I died.

  That was the sort of thing I meant when I said I tended to act a bit ‘strange’ around girls who were a bit younger than me.

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  All sorts of similar incidents occurred across my entire life.

  They weren’t all embarrassing, of course. There were more than a few times it actually came in handy. I did manage to stop bullying from happening once or twice.

  It wasn’t all just about being super confrontational either.

  Sometimes it manifested in subtler ways.

  Once, when I was thirteen, I noticed one of the smarter girls in my class started to look really listless in class, not really paying that much attention and she was often scrambling to do her homework before the teacher would come in.

  After the bell rung, I made sure no one was around and went up to her and asked if she was doing alright. She was a bit skittish, nervous about talking to a classmate she’d otherwise never spoken with, but after making it clear I was just a bit worried, she did open up to me a bit.

  There was some messy family drama going on between her older sister and their parents. Apparently there was a long period of extended shouting and arguments between them about her future that escalated into her sister staying over at a friend’s house for an indefinite period of time.

  I thought about the situation, pondering about my own relationship with my parents and arguments I had with them about my future and what I wanted to do with my life, and told her what I thought her sister might have been thinking and feeling in that moment, and gave her advice on how I would have tried to connect again with my parents if I was the older sister, hoping she would find a way to get her sister and parents to talk again.

  I liked to think my advice was helpful.

  We didn’t talk much after that day, but after the weekend, that girl did go back to being her usual self. She never mentioned it ever again. I never brought it up. It was just a small moment that would stay between the two of us. Aside from times we were in the same group for a project, I don’t think we ever spoke to each other again.

  Most of the time, it was just something like that.

  Nothing too big, nothing damaging. Just a little quirk that was sometimes appreciated and sometimes really embarrassing for all parties.

  Really, most of what it boiled down to was that I was often the unofficially appointed ‘school guide’ for transfer students who joined part way through the year and had English as their second language.

  I was still pretty comfortable back then with my Mandarin, and it gave me a lot of experience talking to people who weren’t confident in or didn’t know much English. I just made sure the new kids fit in, made friends and felt comfortable.

  Oh, right.

  I was supposed to be talking about something, but I got distracted remembering these small, irrelevant memories of the past.

  My attitude towards younger girls, right.

  Well, if you asked me where it started, I would say it was with my little sister.

  I was just starting kindergarten when my mother made the announcement that I was going to have a younger sister.

  I was insufferable about it for the next few months.

  I was incredibly excited about the prospect. It was all I could ever talk or think about.

  I rambled about it all day every day to my classmates. I made a massive deal out of it, bragging to everyone I met. I told them all I would be the best big brother ever, and my little sister was going to be so awesome and cute.

  I started getting a bit self-conscious then, worrying about how I treated the girls in my class. That was when I first changed my attitude, I think, and started being nicer to them.

  In my mind, it made for really good practice for when my little sister would arrive home. I was getting a head start in how to treat her right.

  I remember it was around then I started to learn how to use the internet, and the topic of ‘how to be a good older brother’ was maybe the literal first thing that I tried to google.

  My little sister became the only thing in life worth caring about – the only reason I got up in the morning and went to school. I was going to make sure she lived the best life she could and she was going to get everything she ever wanted.

  When I say I was insufferable, I mean I was really insufferable.

  One of the boys I was friends with had an older brother in like the fourth or fifth grade at the time. I would go up to him at least once a week and start really petty fights over how I was going to be so much of a better big brother than he was for just absolutely no reason at all.

  It was really embarrassing, looking back on it all.

  I never really got better, either.

  I stayed that way for literal months.

  I only stopped being super annoying about it when one day, my mother was rushed to the hospital.

  I didn’t really get any of it back then; I barely even understood what a hospital was. I just remember everyone was in a rush and didn’t have much time to talk to me. My father looked really panicked about the whole thing.

  I sat outside the hospital room for what felt like the entire day, bored out of my mind.

  It was really noisy behind me. Something was happening, but I didn’t really get it or care why. I was just thinking about how awesome it would be when I finally got to meet my little sister next year.

  Then I heard the vibrations through the walls – my mother started to cry.

  That was when I noticed something was wrong.

  I hopped off the chair and curiously looked at the door.

  I was too small to just be able to look through the little glass pane, so I had to jump up and down over and over.

  I didn’t get to see much more inside.

  I saw the curtain next to the hospital bed drawn fully, with the silhouette of my mother painted in shadows on its blue fabric.

  She was hunched over, crying into her hands.

  The nurse and my father were next to her, their shadows also painted on the curtain. My father was hugging her, crying into her shoulder as well, while the nurse hovered over them, a remorseful hand on my mother’s shoulder, trying to comfort her.

  After what felt like another few hours, my mother finally opened the door.

  She looked terrible, even I could recognise that.

  She was haggard, incredibly pale. Her eyes were red and teary, and her voice scratchy and clogged with phlegm.

  I remember cluelessly asking if anything was wrong. She looked sick.

  She did her best to smile, crying as she did so.

  The expression on her face was truly cruel to remember.

  I might not have remembered what I was doing or what I asked her, but I remember, clear as day, what she said to me next.

  “Nǐ de mèimei… Shàngdì gǎo cuò a. Tā méiyǒu bǎ tā gěi wǒmen. Tā shuō cuòle. Tā běnlái shì xiǎng sòng tā chū línjū de jiātíng.”

  Your little sister… God made a mistake. He wasn’t going to give her to us. He spoke wrong. He meant to send her to the neighbour’s family.

  I didn’t really get how pregnancy or childbirth worked at the time. I had no clue what my family had just gone through.

  At the time, I just thought she was sad for the same reason I felt miffed at that moment.

  I simply pouted and felt annoyed, thinking that all of that effort went down the drain for nothing. I was a bit angry at God, wondering why He didn’t just go along with His mistake and send her to our home anyways.

  I remember telling my teachers about it the next time I went to school. I didn’t get why, but they became deathly afraid, their eyes going wide with shock and gasps leaving their mouth.

  They told me they were sorry with the worst looks on their face.

  I didn’t really get why they were pitying me.

  It wasn’t until I was eleven that I learned what it meant to have a ‘miscarriage’ or to be ‘stillborn’.

  I think that’s where it all started.

  Everything, not just the situation I was currently in where I found myself dragging this little girl away from a bunch of slavers, I mean everything; from before I died, before I came back from France, before I started travelling the world, before I moved out from my parents' home.

  The whole reason I started feeling lost in the world in the first place, the reason I felt I needed to find something that would bring meaning to my life, the reason I wanted to go around the world 'soul-searching', the reason I started growing distant from my parents…

  I don’t think I ever got over the fact I would never get to be an older brother.

  I wish I could have seen what kind of person my little sister would have grown to become.