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“Do you feel close to home now?”
She grins wider, and so do I. “Yeah, salamat, Emi!”
“You’re welcome back anytime!” my mom says.
As I eat another pool of sinigang, Aprilette leans closer to her screen, clearly ignoring our mom. No matter how many times our mom insists, Aprilette never wants to come home. “You guys are having sinigang, aren’t you? Ugh! Bring some here!”
“Why don’t you ask Piolo to cook you some?” A smirk creeps onto my face.
Piolo is Aprilette’s boyfriend. Like my Atè, Piolo graduated with a perfect GPA and now works at a pharmacy. Plus, he loves rock climbing. Unlike my Atè, Piolo burns everything he cooks. But my parents overlook this part of him because he’s everything they’ve ever wanted for their daughter—smart, successful with a well-paying job in a pharmacy, polite, and Filipino. He even speaks to my parents and my Atè in Tagalog.
Aprilette’s eyes squint to slits. “Anyway,” she says, ignoring my question. “What are your plans for tomorrow?”
“I’m going to do as much of my summer AP homework as I can, and I’ll take some more SAT practice quizzes, too. Can’t decide if I should get started on the vocab section or another math section.”
“And Monday, she’s starting her first day at Wilson Community Hospital,” my mom adds.
Monday? That gives me the little time I have tonight and the whole weekend to enjoy my summer (if I can call it that, anyway).
“Also,” I start, “I want to squeeze in some time to marathon BTS and SB19 and binge-watch The Summer I Turned Pretty.”
Aprilette nods once, her face still. “You have a lot going on there. Try not to scramble everything together. You always want to have some kind of structure so you know when to start and when to stop.”
I nod and take in everything. My parents continue eating, forks raking across their plates, spoons clanking inside their bowls.
“How about this? Let’s make a schedule right now,” Aprilette offers.
Dropping my spoon back into my bowl, I reply, “Where should I start?”
“I say start out with your shift volunteering at the hospital. It has a solid time slot. What do you want to do after that?”
As I think this over, I heap some rice into my mouth, chewing on the sticky pieces as I consider my options. “I’ll probably be tired, so maybe I’ll have my BTS and SB19 marathon.”
“Good idea. But keep the marathon-ing to two hours max, siggi? It’s easy to get distracted.”
Two hours feels too short to me. But instead of protesting, I reply with a nod.
“How long do you want to work on your summer AP homework?” she asks. “Be realistic. Set a time limit for each subject. Maybe bio, then English?”
We work on my schedule as I continue eating. Once we’re done talking to Aprilette, we finish the call with a round of mahal kitas. After eating dinner, I scoop us three bowls of ice cream, and we continue laughing and talking together. We wash our dishes, my dad quizzes me on what I have learned in AP Bio, and then we head into our rooms. The first thing I do is start on my AP Bio homework.
Thirty minutes pass.
My shoulders slouch as I reread question eleven of my AP Bio homework on my laptop. I look down at my textbook, all the bolded words highlighted in neon green, and process everything I need to know about Chi-Square tests. A sigh huffs out of me. I yawn, but I don’t feel tired. I peek through my closed blinds, only to see my mom’s garden and everyone’s front yard shaded by the night sky. My eyes flick to my camera, which is on my desk’s top shelf. Another sigh. As I reread the same textbook pages, I prop my head on a balled-up fist, knuckles sinking into my cheek. I answer a few more questions before moving forward. The more pages I flip, the more my eyelids flutter. This is interesting! I keep trying to tell myself. But then I check to see how many more pages are left of the chapter. Twenty.
I close my textbook and twist around, gazing at everything in my room. From the Shawn Mendes poster taped beside my door, to the bookshelves lined against my wall. My eyes glide to the gloss photographs taped above my bed arranged in the shape of a sunflower.
My interest in photography began when I took a photo of Nora’s small clay pot. She was crying that day, sobbing over how awful it looked.
“Mr. Gibbons couldn’t even tell what it was,” she cried. We were sitting on the curb in front of our school, waiting for our parents to pick up fourteen-year-old us.
I held up her pot and examined it like a gem. There were cracks all around it, and some parts were unevenly sculpted. But the moment I spread out my fingers, the pot standing on my palm, I smiled at it, and I couldn’t help but take a picture with my phone.
When I showed it to Nora, I said, “It’s so small and cute. Look how perfectly it fits into my hand.”
Tears still leaked out of her eyes, but a smile stretched across her face. “Thanks.”
It felt nice showing her the little details that made her clay pot something special, something unique. So when time came to sign up for electives, I knew I wanted to take photography. But I didn’t expect myself to fall so deeply in love.
