Detect a rich boy anywhere!

I sat patiently, feeling the chill settle on my goose bumpy skin. An attempt to people-watch did not succeed. The people in my scope of vision were dorky, nerdy, and plainly uninteresting. A new batch of test-takers walked in. I hoped there’d be at least one interesting character to see. One of them wore a crisp white shirt tucked into his jeans, with the sleeves folded (folded, not pushed up: pushing them up would have been an obvious attempt at looking effortless) to just above his elbows, revealing a set of well-defined forearms. Despite his diminutive stature, he sauntered in confidently with wide strides. Napoleon complex, maybe? Intuitively, I knew he was rich.

Few guys my age wear white shirts, and fewer still wear them with such casual flair. If they do, they’d either: (a) leave it untucked, which automatically renders the crisp white shirt undone and sloppy, or (b) wear it half-tucked, revealing a tacky belt buckle that is usually emblazoned with something like a blinged-out dollar sign perched right above his groin. It’s so untypical of a teenage guy to wear his shirt tucked in. Not many have the physique to accomplish it with aplomb; fewer still have the guts to venture into potentially dad territory. Even if guys my age wear long sleeved shirts on a regular basis, it’d most probably be of a gaudy print —either floral or geometric patterns— its costumey effect meant to make up for the scarcity of such clothing on peers. However, this guy looked totally at ease in his white shirt. He carried it off perfectly, as if he lived and breathed white shirts ever since he was a wee tot.

Unlike t-shirts, shirts require ironing, rendering them relatively high-maintenance. Let’s ponder the process of a regular guy putting on a white shirt. If this guy doesn’t have a maid, he probably wouldn’t be extremely well-off – which also means the occasions for him to put on a white shirt would be few and far between. (Several assumptions made here, which I shall attempt to explain away later) Therefore, the only time he’ll iron his shirt is when he is prepared to wear it. Now, it seems fairly ridiculous that anyone would spend the previous night contemplating wearing a white shirt for a SAT test, much less a guy. Therefore, he wouldn’t have thought of ironing it the night before. It’s even more ridiculous to think of a guy waking up especially early just to iron his shirt, and for something as inconsequential as an SAT test.

This leads us to two things. Either he has an ironed shirt hanging in his wardrobe due to neglect, or due to a maid. But having assumed that the average guy doesn’t generally own a plain white shirt (and that the average guy doesn’t wear a white shirt for a SAT test), he must have a maid. Therefore, you can at least be sure that his family is NOT poor.

Then there was also the fact that this guy was wearing an analogue watch. Even though he was about five meters away, I could tell from the solid glossy black face of his watch that it wasn’t a digital one. Again, teenage boys don’t frequently wear analogue watches. Digital watches are still de rigueur for teenage boys. Furthermore, any decent looking analogue watch has got to be expensive. And his, with its overly large face that spanned his entire visible wrist, was flashy enough to look expensive.

Perhaps if he had just worn a white shirt, he would have looked merely poseur, a wannabe. Perhaps if he had just worn a big shiny watch, it would have just looked like a cheapskate pasar malam affair. But it’s the combination of these things, plus his cocky swagger that put him squarely in the “rich brat” category. The assumptions I had made earlier, such as not having a maid = not rich, or having a maid = rich, are assumptions that can be aptly eradicated with the simple thing called intuition. Intuitively, you just know a person is rich by looking at him. Attempting to justify intuitive knowledge by means of rational logic results in gaping loopholes.

Perhaps he caught my eye simply because he was a reflection of how I was dressed. Case in point: I was wearing both a white shirt and an analogue watch. Perhaps it would be useful to examine why I wore a white shirt? Nah, my reasons are irrelevant to his. Perhaps save for the obvious reason that we just wanted to distinguish ourselves from the pack.

Aside from the fact that he was oozing rich boy vibes, this guy looked seriously familiar. I know him. I think I know him. Isn’t he J? (J for Jackass, which I shall explain later.) Yes, he must be. The J I knew was a rich bastard. Fucking rich bastard. Yet wait, he looks different. Hmm. I’ll see what happens after the test. Either I gather the guts to ask him if he truly is J, or see if he approaches me.

The test started, and for most of the three hours or so, my mind was frantically grappling with substandard paragraphs riddled with grammatical mistakes and tricky algebraic questions. I forgot about the (presumably) rich boy for a while. When it was over, all intentions of approaching him had vanished. I remembered the last time I approached someone because I thought he was someone I knew. I was horribly wrong, and I was deadly embarrassed. So, I was down to my only option: be passive and hope he recognises me. If he recognises me, but doesn’t approach me, it wouldn’t matter anyway. He’s just an acquaintance. If he doesn’t know me, then certainly he wouldn’t approach me. Unless he thought that the glances we exchanged earlier when he entered the room were worth extending, he definitely wouldn’t approach me.

And guess what? He WAS J, and he DID approach me! I was right, after all. I wouldn’t say that recognising him went sequentially like:

1) Rich boys look a certain way
2) This boy looks rich
3) I know a rich boy, J
4) J looks like the boy
5) Therefore, the rich-looking boy is J

It was more of a commingling of inherent knowledge (1, 3) and intuitive perceptiveness (2, 4) that led to an awakening in that brief few seconds when I had my eyes locked inquisitively on him.

We then made the customary small talk: how did you find the test, how's school, how's your holidays. Wanting to break out of the monotony and insincerity of small talk, I spontaneously mentioned, "Well, I noticed you because you were wearing a shirt."

He made some psuedo self-effacing remark, like "Oh, you only noticed me because I looked like a freak, right?" -- a remark meant to reduce his level to one of the common folk, to one of normalcy, but only served to throw his concealed arrogance into sharper relief. I made an indistinct grunt, or a distracted sort of false reassurance that he didn't look like a freak; oh no, not at all. He then volunteered a reciprocal response. "Well, I noticed you because I walked into the room and I was like, 'Is that cleavage I see?'" I emanated an "uh." He went on, "I pity the guy sitting next to you. He must have had one hell of a distraction. No, two distractions to be precise."

The wanton rudeness of his remark stunned me into silence. With such blatantly lewd comments, one can either choose to get angry, or delicately sidestep the situation. I was shocked by his inappropriateness (and possibly frankness? he could have just been trying to tick me off), yet --though I probably shouldn't admit it, in the very depths of my soul I was-- mildly flattered, so I chose the latter option instead. I was a bit too bewildered by the situation at hand to even realise that I should take offense.

I have never found myself in such an obviously stereotypical situation before. This is a such a primal case of the female attracted to the male because of his perceived ability to provide security, and the male attracted to the female because of her perceived fertility. He is rich, and wealth = power, and power = security. I had attractive boobs, and boobs = fertile = able to produce descendants. We were shamelessly sniffing each other out for biological compatibility! During the onset of the conversation, he had tried to offhandedly ask about my relationship status. How obvious can he get?

All this is somewhat surprising. The latent instinctual urges in us had been stripped of its social veneer, and it was enlightening to see how one behaves devoid of restraint. I don’t mean to say that we were completely unaware of what we were doing. We were conscious, every action perfectly deliberate, and that is what makes things so surprising. We were consciously being unself-conscious.

Still doesn't change the fact that he acted behaved like an obnoxious twat. Cleavage! These things are better hinted at than verbalised.