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In junior high school, there was an excursion day every six months. All students wore the school uniform every day, but we were allowed to wear plain clothes on an excursion. Although my mother suggested wearing something I already had, I demanded new clothes for the first excursion day in junior high now that I wasn’t in the local elementary school any more but in the privileged school in the city. She reluctantly took me to the local shopping arcade and got me a T-shirt and a denim skirt. I was in a good mood wearing the new clothes on the excursion day, but that good mood dissipated easily at the meeting place even before the excursion started. The school was girls’ school and the students’ plain clothes weren’t plain at all. They were wearing fancy clothes, casual but not inexpensive. I had forgotten the school was privileged and its students were all rich girls. My clothes were plainest, and apparently cheapest. I had never seen other students out of uniform and didn’t know what kind of clothes they would wear for an excursion. I was in a wrong outfit but it was too late. “Is your style some kind of cheap-chic?” a girl mocked my clothes that my mother had thought were costly and had complained repeatedly. I should have bought clothes at a department store in the city not at a mom-and-pop shop in the local arcade. And I also learned that I couldn’t depend on my mother’s sense of money any more…
