ahhh... kids

true story, overheard ko sa jeep, from a gradeschooler: "saya ng pasko namin last year. kumain kame ng aso. dami naming tira. bigay ko dapat kay brownie kaso di ko mahanap..."

i miss my friends

Camille is behind me. I am pulling her through the maze that is my Mother's house. I breathe in fabric softener as I wave aside hung shirts, blankets, and emerge in the sala. Mother's eyes meet mine and I stop, I pull Camille from behind, to my front, and she blinks under a spotlight. My classmate, Mother. But Mother is not new to this, her eyes swing back to the flowered curtain she is mending. I don't, her averted eyes say, have to meet every scrawny kid you drag back home. I tug at Camille to follow and the elevator shudders, like it suddenly remembered something, and opens into my room. My classcard is taped on the floor-to-ceiling mirror. 'Ok, we're ready!' I yell, and Camille yeheys with me, jumping up and down like a ten year old. I am jumping, too. Now I can enroll. Someone is hollering from behind us. I stop and stare at my classcard, all eight and a half inches by eleven inches of it. The paper is brownish-yellow, like my original birth certificate, and I see, highlighted in neon green, my grade in Charlson Ong's fiction class: 2.0. Dammit! I stop jumping, and I notice that whoever was hollering was saying exactly that. Dos. My grade. My bad. I turn around and see Siege on top of the Faculty Center, his hair dishelved by the wind, his legs in an upturned V, his arms crossed on his chest, like a lazy I-told-you-so pose. A photographer leans close and frames him, digitally. I wave my aging classcard at him and Camille resumes jumping up and down, waving at Siege, too. Siege says, 'Para,' and I suddenly remember my grade. Dammit. 'You know,' Abi says in the Ikot jeep I suddenly find myself in, 'I've screenplayed this.' She hands the manong driver a shining ten peso coin, and the driver rows faster, ignoring the other passengers outside, all floating in the debris of a flooded UP after an anonymous storm. 'You just have to say two lines, one to your Mother, and another to Camille.' At that I wish I had stopped Abi from giving the manong ten bucks. Because Camille is still in my room jumping up and down. And Siege is still on the faculty center rooftop, posing, still hollering 'Para!'. I jump out of the Ikot jeep. Airborne, I can hear Abi screaming, 'Don't do it, Dude!' And I wonder, before I hit the cold water, if my bond paper-sized classcard is waterproof.