“It’s… for chemistry class.”
“What do butterflies have to do with chemistry?”
“Weren’t you the one who wants me to do well in school?!”
Achi grumbles while she checks the window blinds. “What does this insect look like?”
“A butterfly,” I say, and double-check the closets again. “It kinda looks like…”
Once I open Achi’s drawer, a hand suddenly reaches through the wall.
“Pa!” I exclaim when his body appears back in the room.
“The butterfly looks like Pa?” Achi gets up from checking under the beds.
“Sorry, I thought you’d still be asleep by the time I came back…”
Pa is trying to explain, but Achi’s busy talking over him about some dumb school stuff.
“With or without the butterfly, you’re going to clean this room and show up to class. I’m going to kill you if you don’t graduate.” Achi opens my closet and hurls my school uniform at me. “Be ready to go in five minutes.”
Achi leaves the bedroom and I get to fully focus on today’s itinerary with Pa.
I’m suggesting a day trip to Tagaytay when Pa asks, “Why did Jackie say you weren’t going to graduate?”
“Just some attendance thing.” I brush it off. “Ooh, you know, we could also go to La Union. I’ve never driven that far, but since I was able to handle EDSA—”
“You’re going to school,” he cuts me off.
“Pa, there’s no way I’m going to leave you.”
“Then we’ll go to class together.”
“Sure.” I roll my eyes. “Everyone who comes back to life wants to go back to high school.”
Pa agrees and takes my sarcasm way too seriously. “The best moments of my life happened in Saint Agnes. Bringing you and Jackie to your first day of school, all those fun parent-teacher conferences.”
I’m trying to dissuade Pa when Achi opens the door again without knocking.
“Let’s go!” she barks.
Pa follows her and looks at me over his shoulder. “You heard your sister. Let’s go!”
Mornings at Saint Agnes are always the worst kind of chaos. Before classes start and we can enter our classrooms, all the high school students swarm to find a space to sit in the gym that realistically only has space for half our population. By sevenAM, you get lost in the sea of girls wearing the same plaid uniform.
Well, on this particular morning, it’s a sea of girls in the Saint Agnes uniformsanda ghost father floating among them.
“We could be halfway to the beach by now,” I say with my earphones plugged in. After getting weird glances from looking like I’m talking to myself, I start pretending I’m on a phone call whenever I speak to Pa.
Pa spreads out his arms across the crowded gym. “And miss out on all this fun?”
The girl seated next to Pa shouts out that she got her period and asks if anyone has an extra napkin. Pa instinctively ducks when surrounding students in the gym start tossing menstrual products to the girl in need.
“It’s like when Batman turns on the Bat-Signal,” he says in awe. “Your mom got her period during prom night, too, and five different girls offered to help.”
For the past seventeen years, I never really heard much of my parents’ love story. Pa used to joke that he was “hard to resist,” and Ma seems like she’s allergic to the past these days. My mind suddenly goes back to the prom pictures of my parents in their yearbook. “You never told me you and Ma started dating in high school.”
“Didn’t I?”
