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Lust Contracts novel Chapter 18

“Having a nice figure and a beautiful face sure is nice. I wished my eyes were as pretty as yours and my lashes as long…” one of my friends said before she sighed.

“That’s right and your waist is so slim all the time no matter how much you eat. How do you manage to control your weight?” another girl asked curiously as they both stared at me from across the tea table.

Having afternoon tea with the girls was part of how we spent our school time in the afternoon. It was to ensure that we knew how to properly socialize and practice our manners at the same time. By this time, I was so used to receiving these compliments on my looks that it no longer surprised me or made me feel happy about it.

Despite how people tend to compliment me on my looks, I never once felt proud of these traits that I was born with. I didn’t put any effort in making sure that my eyes were round and wide or for my lashes to be long. I was simply born like this and coincidentally how I looked happened to match with society’s perception of beauty. In other words, I was born lucky…or so I had thought. Exactly because I didn’t do anything, I didn’t feel like I had achieved anything at all in my life so far.

“You should eat healthy food and fruits. Cutting down on cream and scones might be a good start for a slim waist, don’t you think?” I replied teasingly before smiling warmly at them.

“Piano class is so boring. I prefer cooking so much better,” one of the girls said.

“If you can play a couple of pieces, that will be good enough to pass…” I said truthfully.

The thing that I had figured out about these classes was that they weren’t designed to teach us to master any real skill. Rather, they were designed to quickly teach us just enough to impress our future husband and his family. For instance, you could pass the piano class if you can play a few classical showcase pieces that would make you look good if you performed them at a family gathering of sorts. Essentially, practicing those few pieces until you learnt it by muscle memory was good enough for you to graduate from the course. There were cases of girls passing the course even though they couldn’t really read the notes on the score paper.

The same applied to the other classes as well. For instance, you could pass cooking if you could cook all the menu on a particular course from starters, main, and dessert. If you practiced cooking those repeated menus enough, anyone could pass. That didn’t mean that you could cook anything else off the menu or that you understood anything about the basics of cooking.

All in all, I quickly came to realize how superficial everything that we were learning was. That realization led me to realize that whatever life was waiting for us after graduation and our marriage to our ideal husband would also be fake and superficial at best. I spent the final year of my high school faking every single smile and laugh. Since I had figured out that everything was meaningless, I lived my life in a meaningless way as well.

Unsurprisingly, the concept of love wasn’t something that was taught or ever talked about on the school grounds. I figured out a while later that love was a dangerous concept that would threaten the very foundation that the school and the parents have worked so hard to jointly create. That’s right, love could make you rebellious and could lead you astray.

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