“No. There’s no guy. What I meant to say was Miguel; he’s just Mamá’s boss. It’s nothing like that,” I mumbled.
He snickered. “Fraternizing with the boss, huh? Well, that’s convenient.”
I knew what he was implying. But I couldn’t believe it. My head and the back of my neck, my gut, were so hot it felt like my insides were going to burn through my skin.
“I’ve got to go now,” I said, staring at the keyboard.
“Yeah, sure. Nice talking to you, kid … Keep a lookout for the UPS guy. I’m going to send you that shark tooth first chance I get.”
I nodded, glancing at his blobby image one more time before pressing the “End” button.
Ding.
He was gone.
My room was swaying back and forth. I itched; it felt like I’d break out in hives at any moment. The lights were too bright, blinding almost. And the lines and patterns and shapes and shadows were jumping out at me, trying to pull me in. I couldn’t breathe.
I searched for something, anything to make the swaying and brightness go away. Then I saw my sunglasses on the nightstand, the ones Miguel had given me. I stumbled toward them, trembling as I put them on. The room, the lights, the shadows, the lines, the patterns, and the shapes—they dimmed.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
I needed more air. I needed something else. Something more. But I wasn’t quite sure what that something was.
* * *
I sat outside on the front steps, head hunched with my sunglasses still on. It was late, so the usual noises were hushed. Once in a while I’d hear the sputtering of a tricycle or a barking dog. Even the massive narra trees above me were quiet, as if they were too tired to ruffle their leaves and creak their branches. They weren’t the only ones. I was tired, but for completely different reasons. I was tired of trying to please my father. I was tired of moving around so much. I was tired of having no real friends. I was tired of all my fears and worries. I was tired of being abnormal.
And most of all, I was tired of being me.
Twelve years seemed like an awfully short time to be alive and still be so exhausted. I mean, assuming I’d even make it to the ripe old age of ninety-two, how could I possibly last eighty more years? Just the thought of it made my head want to explode.
There was a noise from across the street. A rusty gate opened and closed. Footsteps. And then a lightbulb flickered. Happy tiptoed toward me with a pair of squishy green rain boots. The closer she got, the more I noticed how big they were. So big she kind of looked like a circus clown.
She stopped right in front of me and made a funny face. “Why are you wearing those?” she said, pointing at my eyewear. “They make you look suspicious.”
“I thought they made me look cool.”
She twisted her features into an even funnier face. “Hmm … Not so much,” she said, plopping down on a nearby step.
Well. At least she was being honest. I took the sunglasses off and hung them on the collar of my T-shirt. She must have caught me eyeing her boots because she proceeded to stomp them on the ground. “I know. They’re big and I look like a duck.”
“More like a clown.”
Happy slapped my leg. “They’re my dad’s boots. I couldn’t find my slippers in the dark.”
And then it was quiet for a second.
“So … how was the beach?”
I jerked forward like a car switching gears too fast. I wanted to tell her about Heinz and Lucky and Sam and the sunrise and the sea and the surfing. But then I slammed on the brakes. I didn’t want to brag or anything. “It was okay. Kind of fun, I guess.”
She raised her eyebrow. “Then why the sad face? I mean, I’ve been practicing my jealous look for days now.”
“It’s just…” I slumped down.
“It’s just what?”
“It’s just … a lot of stuff. I wouldn’t even know where to begin,” I said with a sigh.
Happy scooted closer. “I know I may talk a lot, but I’m a good listener too. So try me.”
My insides knotted and unknotted and knotted and unknotted, and all of a sudden, words started flying out of my mouth again.
“It’s just … I’ve always felt I was strange. Like I was different from all the other kids. I was always worried about something, scared of something. Things only got worse when my mom and dad split up, when we started moving around … There are days when I feel okay. Sort of … Then there are days where everything is wrong, everything bothers me. Germs. Dirt. Messes. Crowds. I can’t stop obsessing. I can’t stop it from messing with my head. And it doesn’t help that I don’t have any real friends. Friends who I can talk to. Friends who get it. Friends who will like me no matter what.”
By the time I was done spilling my guts, there were tears in my eyes. I grabbed my sunglasses and put them back on. At the very least, I could save myself from further humiliation.
“I’m sorry,” Happy said with a frown.
I didn’t say anything at first. It felt like I’d run out of words. Like everything inside me—all my emotions—had been emptied out all at once.
But then her frown disappeared and her eyes sparkled. “Well, now you’ve got at least one friend … It’s a start.”
I nodded. But what I really wanted to do was give her a great big hug.
Happy glanced at her house. “I better go before anyone notices.” She stood and moved slowly as if she didn’t really want to leave, but had to.
And then I remembered something.
“Wait. Hold on.” I snuck inside the house and shuffled down the hallway until I was in my room. When I found what I was looking for, I snuck back outside. Happy was waiting patiently by the curb.
“Here,” I said, handing her my gift.
She took the pink shell that Heinz had turned into a necklace. “My pasalubong. It’s perfect,” she said with a dimpled smile.
I fidgeted in place, hoping it wasn’t bright enough for her to see me blush. “You were right. I saw it, and … well, it made me think of you.”
Happy held the shell with the tips of her fingers. Her eyes drifted closed. She brought it to her face and inhaled deep. I watched and waited, hearing nothing except my heartbeat. Then she fluttered her eyes and threw her arms around me. I gasped. Her cheek brushed against mine.
“Thank you for bringing me the sea,” she whispered.
THIRTY
The next morning, I was in an unusually good mood. It felt like I’d slept on a cloud, like I was walking on marshmallows, like my fingers and toes were light as feathers. When I got to the kitchen, Mamá was already dressed in khaki shorts and one of her work shirts. She was slicing bananas ninja-fast. “Oh good. You’re awake,” she said, looking up at me.
I served myself some oatmeal before taking my seat. Chiqui grinned and handed me her spoon. I wasn’t quite sure why, but when I saw my place setting I noticed Mamá had forgotten about all my spoons, or maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she’d done it on purpose.
But Chiqui knew. She knew I could use an extra spoon—her spoon.
If she were tall enough, I was sure she would have reached up on the shelf and grabbed me eight more. All this time she’d been watching and learning and absorbing all these little details about us—about me.
Mamá gulped her orange juice and then took a deep breath. “Grace is running a bit late. But I can’t stay. They’re delivering a pair of Philippine eagles and I have to prepare their enclosure. Come by any time in the afternoon if you want to check it out … Invite Happy if you want.”
“Thanks, I will.”
“See you later,” she said, kissing me on the forehead. “Oh, and Chiqui, please try and finish your bananas this time, okay? BA-NA-NAS … SA-GING.” Mamá pointed at the sliced fruit in the bowl, staring at Chiqui with I-mean-business kind of eyes. “SA-GING … BA-NA-NAS,” she repeated.
“What’s sagging?” I asked.
Mamá sighed. “Nothing is sagging, Pablo … Saging is ‘banana’ in Tag
alog.”
“Oh.” I slid down in my seat.
How was I supposed to know what saging was?
“Okay. I’m really going now.” Mamá pointed at the bananas one more time and then she scrambled away.
All Chiqui did was scowl.
I could hear the door opening and closing.
I could hear the cring-cring-cringing of Mamá’s bicycle.
As soon as she was gone, Chiqui plucked the sliced bananas from her oatmeal and dropped them on her napkin with an icky face. Clearly, Mamá’s plea in English and Tagalog was a total fail.
“Yuck,” I said, pointing at the offensive fruit bits. “Super-duper yuck. Right?”
She giggled and made an even ickier face. “Saging. Yack. Yack. Yack.”
I chuckled. “So … Chiqui.” She stopped eating and listened. “How come you don’t talk to anyone but me, huh?”
It was silent for a minute, maybe longer. Her eyes narrowed. Her lips twitched. Her head tilted to the side.
I guess she didn’t quite get what I was saying.
Then it hit me.
Chiqui knew what I needed.
But I knew what she needed too.
“Chiqui,” I said, leaning toward her. She gazed at me with an open mouth. “At night when Mamá falls asleep…” I laid my head on the back of my hand, closed my eyes, and snored. “You come to my room.” I pointed at my bedroom door. “And I’ll teach you, so you can understand. Okay?”
She nodded.
Had she understood? Maybe she had. Maybe she hadn’t. Either way, I felt like it was my responsibility to help her.
But could I?
I was just a kid.
Not even a normal one at that.
* * *
We were at the eagle enclosure. Ms. Grace, Chiqui, Happy, and I watched from the outside. Inside were Mamá, Frannie, and a really short Filipino guy dressed like he was going on safari. Besides his weird khaki-colored ensemble, he also had on a thick leather glove on one hand, which made him kind of lopsided. It bothered me, of course. But I tried to focus on what was going on with the eagles rather than how awkward he looked. Supposedly, he was from the Philippine Eagle Foundation—a group protecting the endangered bird species.
There were two large carriers situated on tree stumps. Safari Guy opened the door of one of them and stuck his gloved hand inside. After a second or two, he pulled it out, and on it stood a ginormous bird. Its talons were practically the size of my hands. Strangely, it had a brown hood over its head and eyes so it couldn’t see us. He brought the eagle to a nearby tree branch. It hopped off his arm, ruffling its brown-and-white feathers. Then he fetched the other bird, who was even more ginormous, and brought it to the same branch. He shushed everyone with his finger.
Slowly, really, really slowly, he removed their hoods.
At first the eagles seemed kind of dazed. But the confusion didn’t last very long. One bird raised its crest feathers, and then the other did the same. The two of them resembled medieval knights with punk-rock hairdos. For some reason, they made me nervous—the way they glared and stared at me as if I’d done something wrong.
After a few minutes they backed out of the enclosure one by one. Safari Guy sidled over to us and whispered, “Mayari and Tala were confiscated from an illegal zoo in the province. We hope to release them after some months of rehabilitation. But we must be very careful because the last eagle we released from captivity was shot soon after. We never caught Pamana’s killer.”
We all gasped.
“Oh yes. I remember hearing about Pamana on the news a couple of years ago. Kawawa naman … Poor thing. She was a beautiful bird,” said Ms. Grace.
Frannie was angry all of a sudden. Her neck, shoulder, and arm muscles rippled and bulged. “Man. If I could only get my hands on that guy, he’d be sorry, real sorry,” she growled. Even though she didn’t have on her freaky owl costume, she was still kind of scary. It didn’t help that she was standing next to Safari Guy, which made her seem even huger than she already was.
Happy looked at me and I looked at her. She had this expression that screamed, I’m scared out of my wits, and I must have had the same one. We kept on staring at each other, twisting our faces more and more until we cracked up. Safari Guy glared at us just as the eagles had. Maybe he’d been around them for too long. Maybe he was turning into zombie-man-eagle. We laughed even more, stumbling around like a couple of fools. Mamá shooed us away with her hands. Neither of us could stop no matter how hard we tried. So we half-ran half-walked until we were far enough not to be heard.
“I thought he was going to bite my head off,” said Happy in a hushed voice.
“Impossible. Not with Frannie around.”
She giggled and then punched the air with her fists. “If I could only get my hands on that guy, he’d be sorry, real sorry.” Her impression was actually pretty good, except it was kind of difficult getting past her head-to-toe sparkles—sparkly headband, sparkly pink shirt, sparkly leggings, and sparkly sandals embellished with sparkly rhinestones. I was almost blinded by her sparkly-ness.
Finally, we’d run out of laughter. It was mostly quiet except for all the birds chirping. We strolled. After a while we found ourselves back at the muddy puddles where the kalabaws lazed. It was bizarre how they enjoyed wallowing in the dark and sticky muck. But it was obvious they did. Everything about them was relaxed—from their sunken backs to their floppy ears, to their eyes with super-long lashes. They even managed to ignore the pesky black flies buzzing around them. That alone was a most formidable feat.
Suddenly, I got this feeling someone was staring. It turned out Happy wasn’t at all interested in the water buffalos. Her eyes were on me. “Your face,” she said, waving her hands. “You should see it. Really, you should … It looks like you’re constipated,” she said with a giggle.
Constipated?
I had no idea what she was talking about. But then I touched my face with my fingers. It was all scrunched up. It was the same icky look Chiqui had made at the bananas. “I can’t help it,” I said with a shrug.
“I think you can. And I think we need to work on it.”
“Work on it? Like a science project?”
Happy rolled her eyes. “No, nothing like that. I mean, obviously this is part of you, Pablo. It’s not something you can change overnight. But I think there’s room for improvement. Maybe you just need to get out more? See things you’re not used to seeing. You know what I mean?”
“Didn’t I just come back from the beach?”
“Well, yes, but what about the everyday kind of getting out? Like taking the tricycle to the palengke. I bet you’ve never even been to the palengke,” she said, leaning forward as if to challenge me.
“The palengke?”
“See? You don’t even know what it is.”
“Well, why don’t you show me, then?” I said, stepping forward as if to accept her challenge.
“I will.”
“Good.”
“It’s a date.”
THIRTY-ONE
I wasn’t expecting Chiqui to show. But I stayed up anyway, browsing Google and YouTube for lesson plans on basic conversational English.
Ding.
My father was online.
I quit the video chat program and went back to browsing. I didn’t want to see him or talk to him. I didn’t even want to think about him. I was that mad. Then I heard something. My door creaked open and Chiqui’s head popped through. Her hair was puffed in different directions, as if she’d been tossing and turning on her pillow.
She tiptoed inside. In her grasp she held a small plate of cookies. It was obvious she’d raided the pantry. There were Oreos, digestive biscuits, and Mamá’s favorite Marie cookies for dunking in tea and coffee. With her messed-up hair and crumpled pajamas, she was definitely giving Cookie Monster a run for his money—or rather a run for his cookies.
Chiqui must have gotten the gist of what I’d said after all.
Good thing Ma
má was a heavy sleeper.
“Come, Chiqui. I’ve got some stuff for you to watch,” I said, tapping my desk.
She traipsed across the room and hopped on the chair. “Kuya Pabo. Kuya Pabo.” Her hand danced in the air, moving like a talking mouth. It was actually pretty adorable.
I laughed. “Yes. Pablo and Chiqui are going to talk a whole lot. But first I want you to pay attention. Okay?”
I clicked play on a YouTube video titled Speak Cartoon, Learn English for Kids. It was pretty silly. The cartoon voices sounded like chipmunks. But Chiqui seemed to like it. She sat still except for her legs, which swung back and forth. Her hand reached for a cookie every so often.
Munch. Crunch. Munch. Munch.
I supervised from the bed. But in reality, I was doing more thinking than supervising. I thought about Chiqui and her talking and not talking. Part of me wished Mamá and everyone else could see her laugh and hear her jibber-jabbering. But the other part of me was happy to have her all to myself. It felt special somehow—to know that she trusted me, she had picked me to open up to. Besides that, I also thought about what Happy had said, about getting out more and seeing things I wouldn’t ordinarily want to see. I thought about the last five years—all the countries we’d moved to and from, all the people I’d met and hadn’t met, all the stuff I’d done and hadn’t done. When it came down to it, there wasn’t much there. My memories were mostly of the different homes we’d had, and the different teachers. But that was it.
Happy was right.
Until the last few weeks I’d hardly been living.
“Kuya.” I flinched with so much force, the bed bounced. The YouTube video had finished, and Chiqui was standing there staring at me. “Hewo. I, Tintin,” she said, reaching out to shake my hand.
Tintin?
I kind of frowned. And then Chiqui slapped her mouth with her hand.
“Is that your real name … Tintin?” I pointed my finger at her chest.
For a second she glanced down at her lap. And then slowly, she found my eyes with hers. There was fear in them. She nodded apprehensively.
How to Make Friends with the Sea Page 11