“Please don’t do this later if we have to dance in front of people.”
Seph responds by jiggling his shoulders in front of me. “Don’t you want the music to be your guide?”
I place my hands on his shoulders to stop him, then he slides them to the back of his neck. My breath quickens when I feel his hold move to my waist.
“See?” he says. The sides of his eyes crinkle when he holds my gaze. “Excellent dance lead.”
“Is this how you get the girls? Do you use your ‘My heart is yours’ catchphrase on them too?”
Seph makes a face at that. “Ilagan, that’s disgusting.”
The rest of the song plays and I let Seph’s arms hold me as we sway along to the melody. I don’t know how this always happens. How does everything suddenly feel okay when Seph’s around?
Maybe my brain doesn’t know how to process romance. I mean, even during this slow dance, I’m thinking about random online videos. There was this one night where I couldn’t fall asleep, and for some reason, I got so fixated by this random video of a duck in a river. The duck looked like it was having a great time, gliding calmly through the water, living its best life. But when you looked beneath the surface? The duck was paddling furiously, like it was scared it would drown if it stopped going for even just one moment. Being with Seph is one of the rare times where I feel like things could still be okay if I stopped paddling.
I bury my head in his chest and imagine that all I have to do tonight is stay in this moment with Seph, dancing to some cheesyHigh School Musicalsong in the middle of our high school’s covered courts. It’s the first time that whole evening where I feel like I get to breathe.
But then hearing my sister’s voice makes the wind go out of my lungs again.
“Nika.” Achi calls my name and pops out of nowhere like she’s some ghost (the actual terrifying kind). Seph and I spring apart when Achi catches us. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
“Are they announcing the prom awards already?”
A new, bigger kind of panic wallops my gut when I see Achi’s expression. It’s the same dead look in her eyes that comes out when she has bad news.
Then she tells me, “He’s gone.”
36
I can’t believe I didn’t see this coming. Just as I let down my guard, it was inevitable that all hell would break loose.
The second I get to the condo, I ransack the whole place, yelling out Pa’s name. I check every bedroom, the bathroom, under the couch. “Pa?” I keep calling out, my voice sounding more and more hoarse. “Pa?”
My sister keeps telling me to calm down, but there’s no time to calm down! As soon as she told me Pa was gone, I dropped everything and started running back home. My sister chased after me and insisted that I get in her car.
What if Pa turned invisible again? What if he’s here somewhere, trying to call us, but we can’t hear him?
I try lifting my heavy mattress and my sister is being zero percent helpful. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”
Ignoring her, I squat and use the momentum from my legs. This is what they say in those workout videos that also end up on my feed when I scroll through late at night.
“Pa isn’t there,” she tells me, which is getting very annoying.
“How do you know?”
Then Achi says, “He told me.”
My chest constricts when I remember she and Pa spent the whole day together.
I drop the mattress. “What happened?”
“Did you even eat dinner?”
This has become my family’s tactic.If we distract Nika with food, then maybe she’ll forget about all the things we’ve been hiding from her!
“What happened?” I press harder.
Achi draws a sharp breath when I insist that I’m really not in the mood for her garlic rice.
