I ended up asking Ginny to lunch with me and my gang, who were confused but compliant enough about my unusual decision to add someone new to the mix at the very start of the year, when I tended to be picky about who could or could not sit at our Sacred Canteen Table. (It wasn’t really as effortless as that, if you want to get into the nitty-gritty of it—I mean, Janice said, and Lee said, and Rosetta said, and then Lee said again, but in the end I was louder and bossier than all of them put together, so I got my way.) As it turned out, though, Ginny had already arranged to have lunch at her house, which was within the same village as the school, so she invited us home with her instead.
Of course, by school regulations, we weren’t allowed to leave the campus without written permission from our parents or guardians. But equally of course, I never let details like that stop me.
about witchcraft
THE SECOND THING I noticed, when we got to Ginny’s house, was her bookshelf. (The first thing I noticed was that she was, obviously, putridly rich—as in, beyond ‘filthy’. I mean, not only was her place in Snob Central, but her bedroom was actually larger than our dining room at home! I kid you not.) It was a massive bookshelf, all her own—eliciting my immediate envy—and naturally, there was the usual Sweet Dreams stuff you’d find from any girl our age who bothered to crack open anything that wasn’t a textbook. (There would’ve been Sweet Valley Highs too, probably, but this was actually before the Sweet Valley High series came out, which tells you just how long ago this was, and how shockingly old I now am.)
Much more interestingly, though (at least, after I’d confirmed that I’d already read all the Sweet Dreams titles she had), there were four or five books on psychic phenomena, the occult in general, and witchcraft. Now, I know when I told you about me earlier, I never said word one about that kind of thing, but I wanted you to understand that I was pretty much a normal girl in most respects (aside from being, you know, pushy, self-centered, and habitually noncompliant). But Sweet Dreams notwithstanding, I devoured any reading material I could get my hands on that had anything to do with the occult, from horror novels to those Rosicrucian ads in the backs of magazines that promised to teach you the secrets of the universe, if you only lived in the States and could dial a 1-900 number.
Unfortunately, I met neither qualification, so I had to do the best I could on my own, following whatever advice I could glean from the writings of Richard Bach. (Yes, Richard Bach. Stop laughing.) I had been told by a fortune-teller when I was even younger that I had enormous psychic ability, and seriously believed that I’d had out-of-body experiences a couple of times in my sleep. (You know the kind of thing, where it feels like you’re floating above your bed, and just as you realize, “Wow, look what I’m doing, I’m so cool!” you come crashing down and waking up, right?)
But that was as far as my knowledge went, though certainly not my curiosity. You have to understand that in those days, in the Philippines at least—or maybe just in the admittedly limited circles I traveled in—no one had even heard of the word ‘wiccan’. You couldn’t find occult books in the local bookstores, not even the ones an eleven-year-old like me would have known were written by crackpots (and probably would’ve bought anyway, in desperation). Heck, you couldn’t even find The Lord of the Rings then, that’s how straight-arrow Philippine book buying was—in which sci-fi, for instance, was synonymous with Star Trek, and practically nothing else.
So Ginny’s little store of supernatural stuff was like a gold mine to me, and somehow she knew that right away. I mean, when I looked up from where I was staring at that shelf, she was watching me, and then she said, and I said, and we said, and I wish I could remember exactly what it was that we did say, but give me a break, it was twenty-eight years ago, remember? Basically, we understood that here was another thing—maybe the most important thing—we had in common, and it put the seal on our becoming instant best friends in the course of one day.
After that, we had lunch at Ginny’s house a lot (although never more than twice a week, since anything more would risk our claim on the Sacred Canteen Table). The two of us would hole up in her room poring over The Books, while the other girls would hang around downstairs giggling over Ginny’s older brother Joel, who was good-looking in that tidy Chinese way, like his sister, and nice enough to bother actually knowing our names, despite his exalted status as a first-year high school student. (He also had the distinction, by the way, of being the only scion of their family who managed to escape infancy with a halfway-decent sort of name. Their youngest sister was christened Whispering Hope, and the twins in between Ginny and Hope were called—wait for it—Learnwell and Welcome, names which their father had apparently decided went well with Joel’s. “He gave me a reason to hate him almost before I was born,” Ginny liked to say.)
Anyway. While Lee, Janice, and Rosetta were busy being normal girls in the thrall of burgeoning hormones, Ginny and I were in another thrall entirely, lighting candles to help focus our inner beings as well as mask the scent of our cigarette smoke (even though smoking mostly made us choke, which probably didn’t help with the focusing); chanting the mantra “I am alive, I have power, it is real” to help develop what was described as ‘man and womankind’s innate ability to affect change in the cosmos through the emanation of their essence’; and arguing amiably about whether a candle flame had gone out because we had finally managed to channel our mental powers or just because of Ginny’s arctic-blast air conditioner.
Did we take it seriously? I can’t honestly tell you, because when you’re eleven it’s uncool to take practically anything seriously except how you look or what’s happening to characters on TV, whom you actually know better than you know yourself at that point, because you’re still figuring all that stuff out. (Ginny, of course, had a bigger and cooler TV than I did, but they both still had actual buttons on them for changing channels, because people like my mom still had trouble working the remote control. And we all thought these buttons were very cool, because they were easier to use than the rotary dials TVs had had when we were little, and we also thought the Betamax was the best thing to happen to movies since sound.)
It was fun, anyway—even the small but distinct voice of panic telling me Not To Play Dice With The Universe (which we probably both heard but would have mutually died before owning up to) was fun, in that perversely thrilling way. If we didn’t take it seriously, we sure took to it faithfully—we hit The Books every time we were at Ginny’s house, and what we studied in them was the subject of most of our conversations at lunch and furtive note-passing in class.
But we didn’t do much more than mess around with candles and try to levitate pencils—until Dominic Protacio.
about boys
OKAY, I NEED to explain this part in case you’re a guy, because if you’re a girl you probably know it already, but if you’re a guy you may be mystified by the fact that, to a sixth-grade girl, guys the same age are vermin—and sometimes significantly lower than that, which we’ll get to in a bit—whereas older guys are considered to have evolved into actual humanity and are therefore crushable. Which is why my friends were crushing on Joel, and I was crushing on Kevin Bacon (Footloose was big that year), both of whom were about equally unattainable, since the distance between Manila and Hollywood was not, subjectively speaking, substantially greater than the divide between grade school and high school.
I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone, but in my school, at least, it was definitely not until seventh grade at the earliest that some of the males apparently began to comprehend the benefits of deodorant and cologne (But once they did, it was in a big way; I could have died at the age of twelve from asphyxiation due to Drakkar inhalation), as well as addressing the opposite sex by means of human speech rather than through an assortment of snorts, grunts, and a truly peculiar auditory phenomenon that I can only render here as ‘nyuk nyuk nyuk’. (Don’t ask me why or what it’s supposed to mean; I’m not a preadolescent boy.)
These were onl
y the tip of the glacier of reasons we had for categorizing the boys in our class as subhuman, even subvermin. They were loud. They were smelly. They picked their noses and were perpetually shifting their crotches around, as if they had actually grown anything there by then worth shifting. (I probably didn’t actually think that second part at the time; I just thought they were gross.) Some of them had rings of dirt embedded not just on the inner collars of their shirts, but in the skin of their necks. Granted, there were a few of them who did appear to be acquainted with the rudiments of hygiene—these were supposed to be some of the smartest boys in our grade level, after all—but by and large, if they weren’t disgusting in themselves, they regularly acted disgustingly.
They took any incidence of anyone reciting in class as occasion for derisive hilarity, whether the recitation was right or wrong. Then they would turn around and cheat off our test papers! (Not that we didn’t copy off each other all the time—those of us seated toward the back of the class anyway—but just you try having a sweaty mouth-breather leaning over your shoulder, compared to someone who smells like baby cologne, and you’ll see that our discrimination was not without basis.) They were constantly trying to peek in between the buttons of our uniform blouses, and Dominic Protacio, who was like my opposite number in the enemy camp, essentially won his leadership position among the male creatures by sticking his chewed-up gum in poor Ana Lopez’s hair, an act that was celebrated during recess of that particular day as the evident pinnacle of preadolescent boyish wit.
And then there were the compact mirrors.
For the longest time (but bear in mind that a month counts as a very long time in the sixth grade), none of us girls could figure out why these worm bellies that we were forced to share space with all seemed to carry around a small mirror of some sort, when available evidence suggested that none of them had bothered to actually look in a mirror since the little plastic ones that might once have been included in the mobiles hanging over their cribs. It was only one day in July or August, while Lee was standing up to spell the word ‘risqué’(I am not kidding, that really was the actual word, and I’m not making it up just so everything fits better. Can I help it if the universe has a well-developed sense of irony?), that Teret Andolong spotted what the boys closest to her were doing with their mirrors, and the light dawned.
By now you’ve probably figured it out, and any eleven-year-old these days would probably have caught on way back too, but these were the 1980s, and it was a (somewhat) simpler time, and we girls were a lot less sophisticated than girls are today. When we finally understood that the pond scum who polluted our otherwise scented atmosphere had been using their mirrors to peer up our skirts practically since the start of the year, we were—I don’t think ‘outraged’ is a good enough word to describe it.
Remember, this was back when Madonna had barely begun to spread her religion of weaponizing feminine sexuality, and maybe before Britney was even born. In the time just before I became a teenager, ‘madonna’ was not so much a cultural icon as the thing a girl needed to be, if she didn’t want to be classified as a whore instead. We were young, we were female, and most of all, we were Filipina—we could only be innocent or slutty, it was one or the other; generations of conventional wisdom had told us so. The sexual revolution had already occurred before then, of course, so we weren’t sure we absolutely believed them, but we were absolutely sure that we ought to believe it when our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, and sundry told us that our purity was our most valuable possession. (Brains, for instance, being not a distant second, but quite possibly twenty-second. Heck, you could have had the ability to climb Mount Everest blindfolded while waving a pompom with your free hand, but if you weren’t a virgin, you were pretty much worthless, was the general understanding.)
So really, the word ‘apoplectic’ would not be an exaggeration. Neither would ‘livid’. Or ‘infuriated’.
Or ‘vengeful’.
about witchcraft, part two
IT STARTED SMALL, just Ginny and me and a piece of paper on which we wrote the phrase ‘Dominic’s hair’ over and over, until it filled the page, front and back. We spent the entirety of math class (I know it was math, because I was completely secure about not listening, having already bribed Melissa Jimenez with the promise of a baking soda volcano for her science project, in exchange for a copy of all her notes for the semester) tearing our respective halves of the paper into the tiniest shreds we could manage, muttering our mantra “I am alive, I have power, it is real,” and basically wishing him all the concentrated ill a young girl’s righteously-offended heart can hold.
Does actual witchcraft work this way? I doubt it; remember, we were working from whatever knowledge we’d manage to piece together from a couple of books (which Mr. Miyagi could have told you is hardly the best way to learn karate), the authenticity of which we had no way of even verifying. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could look up further in the school library, and the Internet wasn’t even a concept any of us would’ve imagined at that point. I have friends today who tell me they’re witches—or magic-users of one flavor or another, whatever—and they mess around with herbs and black candles (which are the most powerful, so they say) and semiprecious stones that channel specific energies, shit like that. Ginny and I, all we had were imagination and will and a piece of paper.
But it worked.
Dominic started clutching at his head, during probably the sixth or seventh repetition of Mr. Cortez’s habitual “Do you get what I’m trying to say?” (uttered, one memorable day, a record-breaking nineteen times, since the combination of his subject matter and Mr. Cortez’s own haplessly ineffectual teaching style virtually ensured that no one, ever, got what he was trying to say). We weren’t sure, of course, if it was a result of our efforts that had Dominic grasping at his skull as if it was threatening to fall off his (grime-encrusted) neck, but when he started vigorously messing up his hair, we felt that maybe we were starting to get somewhere (although Ginny refused to discount the possibility of head lice).
Dominic went to the clinic, and we went on to bigger and more ambitious attempts, bringing first Lee and then other girls in on our occultish endeavors. It was Ginny who suggested that Ana Lopez might be interested in joining our little trio; it was me who figured that we should avoid the word ‘witch’, since it might scare the other girls off. We called it ‘light magic’, since a lot of it involved stuff like focusing imaginary pink light toward our mental image of Teret Andolong’s parents, so that they’d give her permission to join the class field trip. (See? It wasn’t all nasty stuff.) Someone or other suggested that we call ourselves the Pink Ladies because of it, but that was voted down with mild vehemence and not-so-mild ridicule. We finally settled on the name ‘Coven-ant’ (Get it? We thought we were being subtle and clever), and were supposed to all become blood sisters, only Ana practically passed out in the girls’ comfort room, which made me drop the needle, and then no one was willing to get on their knees on the highly dubious tile floor to find it—so that was one idea that fell by the wayside, and looking back, who knows? Maybe I shouldn’t have let it. Maybe it would have changed things, but then maybe not for the better.
Anyway. Our biggest success happened in PE, another class taught by a male teacher. Most teachers at our school were women—a lot of them nuns, even—but the rule of thumb was pretty much that physical education in the all-boys’ sections was taught by men, and by women in the all-girls’ sections. (And you haven’t experienced surrealism until you’ve been led doing jumping jacks by a nun in a habit!) For the Experimental Mixed Sections, it was toss-up which gender of PE teacher you got, and our roll of the dice landed us with Mr. Albaño, a former seminarian whose first act of the year was to decree that we girls would be wearing our uniform skirts with our PE t-shirts instead of the usual shorts. (This resulted in a complaint from Rowena Salgado’s parents, of all people, because they had paid for the regulation shorts and would therefore be damned, appar
ently, if Rowena wasn’t going to wear them. This in turn led to Mr. Albaño being quite possibly the only teacher in the entire school who did not like Rowena Salgado, which, admittedly, made me like him a little more than I probably would have. By now you’ve realized that I was more than a little bit of a snob myself.)
Although I liked Mr. Albaño well enough, this did not prevent me from pretty quickly sniffing out his acute discomfort with all things pertaining to the female body (as demonstrated by his dumb skirt idea, which only Ginny had thought was okay, and that was only because she said she tended to be a bit klutzy at times and get her legs all banged up, which you couldn’t tell unless she was wearing shorts) and progressing from there to the realization that all you had to do was tell him you were ‘experiencing a feminine complaint’, and ta-da! Not only would he let you sit out the class, you could actually get away with this several times a month, before he overcame his beet-red embarrassment enough to wonder just how many periods a girl could have in the course of thirty days.
Naturally, I took shameless advantage of this, and equally naturally, a bunch of girls started following suit. (There are generally just two types of schoolgirls who actually enjoy PE: the popular ones who honestly are athletic and all that, and the freakishly obedient ones who strive not only to do everything authority figures tell them to, but to do it with enthusiasm. Clearly, I was neither.) So it was me, Ginny, Ana Lopez, Melissa Jimenez, and the unfortunately named Chinny Eugenio (whose sobriquet needed no explanation, once you clapped eyes on her, providing said eyes were not perforated beforehand by the eponymous chin) who were sitting around, pretending to cramp up from time to time and complaining as per usual about the boys and their perennially puerile behavior.
OUTPOURING: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology Page 51