When I was in sixth grade, a girl named Avie sat
one seat up, one row over from me in English class.
I don’t exactly remember how she, I, her sister, and
another girlfriend of theirs first began meeting in
the auditorium after school. We’d dump onto the stage
a scatter of books and binders, then get up there
ourselves. Avie would strum a guitar, and all three
girls would sing folk songs and RnB music by the
likes of Nexxus, Eagle and Parokya.
When it was my turn to do something, my own
speciality was for pratfalls. I’d spent a lot of time
watching television comedians such as Rene Requiestas,
Dolphy, and Babalu, and I could improvise
any number of daffy skits–all of which, at some
point, involved an inglorious tumble which would land
me abruptly on my bum or flat on my face.
We’d be there up on the stage for thirty minutes,
maybe forty-five, our play carried along by a great
undertow of attraction, very present, but certainly
then unfathomable to me. Afterwards, my books and
volleyball bouncing around in the wire basket on the
handlebars of my bike, I’d pedal lickety-split home
and bustle to walk in the door as if none of it at all
had happened, and I was late only because I’d done the
“normal” thing of stopping off at the city park for a
quick game of barangayan volleyball.
Almost immediately at that time in my life, the most looked-for part of my school day was after school,
getting up there on stage with Avie and the others,
and I seemed to be able to find endless funny ways to
fall.
Now I already knew Avie was a very clever girl. For
example, weeks earlier she’d come to school wearing a
self-made necklace on which dangled the lacquered
innards of the bull frog she’d dissected the day
before in our Biology class.
One day, Avie handed me in class a slip of
paper–about the size of a fortune cookie
“fortune”–on which was written in soft pencil the
phrase “PJ met Avie”.
This WAS a puzzle to me, although I COULD decode what
was very likely intended to be her signature in the
very corner of the slip: an illustration of a volleyball and some
pompoms.
I read the phrase, then I re-read it many, many
times. I can’t recall whether the day I got the note
we met after school up on the auditorium stage.
Nevertheless, as soon as I got the note home, I held
it in front of a mirror, hoping to understand what it
meant. I turned the note upside down. I re-arranged
all the letters in all the words. In short, I did
everything I could think of to make it make any sense
at all. Yet days later, I still hadn’t figured out
what Avie was trying to tell me.
“How could I possibly be so unclever and
thick-headed!” I chastised myself.
I put the note in my cufflink box, and pushed that to
the very back of my top dresser drawer. The following
day I abruptly stopped going to the auditorium
immediately after school. Morever, I stopped passing
the vicinity of Avie’s hall locker between classes
when I knew she’d be there, I stopped trying to catch
her eye during class, I even stopped looking in her
direction at all–although I certainly wished I was
doing otherwise.
Meanwhile, “life”, of course, went on. For me,
“life” was pretty much school, home, and volleyball at
the court.
As for Avie, at some point I heard she was going out
with a freshman from the Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila.
Months and months later, I was handed a slip of paper
by a classmate, another classmate. That slip of
paper, too, was about the size of a fortune cookie
“fortune”, and was signed in the very corner with a familiar-looking-illustration volleyball and some
pompoms.. On it,
written in the inimitable handwriting of Avie
was the following message–
PJ met Avie,
Made a hit.
PJ wouldn’t shave,
PJ and Avie split!
Papa Cologne
I had seen Papa Cologne ads posted at
intervals along EDSA on any of several long
distance car trips with my parents. But I didn’t
need to have seen even a single one.
Apparently, I’d had my chance with Avie–to do
something or make something or show something MORE to
her. All I’d done, though–all I’d dared to do, hence
her cryptic encouragement, was to footle around taking
pratfalls–then inexplicably avoid her completely.
The VERY instant I read that second note, I knew.
And so much about me then seemed so silly.
