JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Several months ago my friends (Itago mo na lang ako sa pangalang. . .) Zaida and Zaido adopted a baby. They needed help taking care of the child, so they hired a nanny—a stern woman in her 60s who had been recommended by a colleague. The woman had plenty of child-raising experience so they often deferred to her, and even found her fascist tendencies amusing—she would yell at them if she thought they weren’t holding the baby the right way, and she disapproved of their musical choices. She pronounced Beethoven and Mozart lugubrious (“Parang ponyebre!”) and preferred to sing Boom Tarat and other TV hits to the baby.

Everything was fine for a few months, and then one day the nanny returned from her day off dragging a 3-year-old child. “Who is that?” Zaida asked the nanny, remembering to smile lest she be viewed as unwelcoming. “This is my grandson Pemberley Darcy (not his real name, but close),” Nanny announced gruffly. “I had to rescue him and bring him here because his goddamn father isn’t taking care of him.” Apparently Pemberley Darcy’s parents had separated and he’d been left in the care of his father, a construction worker. Every day the father would leave Pemberley in the house with only a bottle of water and a plate of rice with soy sauce. Pemberley would cry and scream his lungs out. Sometimes a neighbor would take pity on him and feed him; sometimes he was left alone. This continued for months, until his grandmother brought him to Zaida and Zaido’s house.

Zaida wasn’t expecting to shelter a 3-year-old child, but he had no one else, and he’d had a rough life for one so young. “Poor kid,” Zaida thought, observing the boy who was hiding behind the nanny’s skirt. “He just needs to be treated well.” She would remember these thoughts of hers very soon.

If you’re not in the mood for revelation, look away. I hated high school. It’s no secret; I’ve written about it a few times. Most of those years I remember as an abyss of rage, misery, and loathing. You don’t know how angry I was, I was about two minutes from going Columbine. I don’t blame the school; I probably would’ve been as miserable elsewhere, and my family life didn’t help. I don’t blame my classmates because I didn’t know them and they didn’t know me. I was an angry, alienated teenager—not a unique situation, and not one I relish remembering.

That should be the end of the story, but for the ironies that follow. Anger gave me material. I actually became mildly famous for being angry. (It was the grunge era; rage was in.) This is not how I thought my life would turn out, but on the whole it works. And now because of the fame shit my old school wants to have something to do with me.

Do you know how warped and bizarre that is? I have no school spirit. I can’t get nostalgic for the time I spent seething. When I watched Auraeus’s movie Pisay I wished I had been like those kids, well-adjusted and happy. I can’t feign retroactive bonhomie. Then I realized that no one is asking me to do these things. It’s just a gig for which I’m qualified. I talked it over with my friends, I talked it over with the alumni, and I thought, what the fuck, I’ll do it. It’ll be an exorcism.

My friend Zed is sitting in a van crawling through traffic. It’s two in the afternoon of a hot day so naturally the airconditioner conks out, and after 10 minutes of breathing the same air, she opens the window. Along comes a little sampaguita vendor, a girl who looks about 12 (though she’s probably older). She waves the sampaguita garlands at the window and says, “Lady, buy sampaguita, very cheap.”

“No thanks,” Zed says. “Please, lady, I really need the money,” the kid says in a monotone. Zed shakes her head. “Just one, so I can have something to eat,” the kid goes on. Zed shakes her head. “Come on, can’t you buy just one?” the kid repeats in her unchanging monotone. “No,” Zed says.

Then the kid takes one garland and throws it into the open window, where it lands on Zed’s lap. “There,” the kid says, “That’s my gift to you.”

Zed tosses the garland back out the window and the kid catches it. (Maybe I shouldn’t have done that, Zed says, but it was instinct.) “No, thank you,” Zed says. The kid tosses it back at her. “Take it, it’s a gift.” Zed tosses it back, the kid tosses it in, Zed tosses it back, it’s becoming absurd. Finally Zed takes out her wallet. “Let me pay for that one,” she says. She hands the kid a ten-peso coin. The kid throws it back into the van. “You can keep it,” the kid says. They resume playing catch with the sampaguita.

Finally the sampaguita vendor moves away from the van and goes over to the sidewalk. She takes her garlands of sampaguita and starts whipping them against a concrete wall.

I once punched a guy in a movie theatre. I’d always thought that when I got in a fight I would feel heroic and proud, but all I felt afterwards was embarrassment. The occasion was an advance screening of Brian De Palma’s Snake Eyes. That in itself should’ve been a warning: the word “Crap” should’ve blazed on the marquee.

My friend and I sat in the front row, center. Scarcely had the movie begun when I felt a tug on my hair. The troglodyte behind me had put his feet up against the back of my chair, and was stepping on my ponytail. I was furious, but I tried to be polite. I turned around, looked him in the eye, and said, “Please don’t step on the chair. Pakibaba ang paa ninyo, wag nyong aapakan ang silya.” He stared at me as if he did not understand what I had said, so I repeated it. He went on chewing his popcorn with his mouth open, but put his feet down.

Only to put them up again twenty minutes later. Again, I turned around and told him to remove his feet from the back of my chair. I said it louder, in case he had a hearing impediment. I could hear my voice echoing inside his skull. His mouth was half-open, as if to catch any stray sources of protein such as flies and cockroaches. Or maybe he lacked the chromosome that controls the open and shut mechanism of his yap. He did not reply to me, but he put his feet down.

The next time it happened, I realized that no amount of civility would work. Clearly it was subhuman. It did not occur to me to transfer to another seat—I wanted to sit front row, center, and this moron was not going to make me change my habits. I should’ve walked out right there and spared myself from that godawful stupid movie, but for some reason I stayed. I sat up very straight, my spine not touching the seat.

When the movie ended I addressed the troglodyte. I asked him why, despite my repeated requests, he kept stepping on my hair. His reply confirmed my diagnosis. He said, “Ha?” So I punched him in the face. Really put my shoulder into it. A direct hit. He said, “Bakit mo ko sinuntok!” and tried to slap me, but his hand only caught the edge of my glasses, which fell to the floor but didn’t break. Then I started calling for the guard, which must’ve triggered some genetic memory because the troglodyte fled. True, I hit him first, but I was provoked. Besides, whose side would the guard take—the open-mouthed subhuman, or the articulate female?

I slunk home in an agony of shame.