From: Your Secret Admirer

Chapter One

To Sharm -my very first watty friend. Thanks for being a great friend till now :)

***

From: Your Secret Admirer.

Did he think that was even sweet?

I folded the small piece of stationery and placed it back in its envelope.

Normally, a seventeen year old college freshman would have swoon over the fact that she would soon find romance in her new school. But I was not normal, figuratively speaking of course. I was not like the rest of the girls my age, in fact. I mean, I did believe in love and all that pertains to it. I just didn't believe that love would want to stick with me.

If you really must know, my mom and I were both cursed to never finding real love forever. And I guess we were destined to be just the two of us. Forever.

And the crowded cafeteria wouldn't even let me forget about the family love curse.

"But Kyla, you always complain of not finding love, like, forever since we hit puberty," my best friend Meredith Delgado pointed out. "Don't you think that this secret admirer of yours is the answer to all those lonely Friday dateless nights?"

"You're wrong, Mer." Thank God I had best friend number two, Ryan Castro, to back me up. "She started complaining of not finding love since the day Daniel Radcliff played Harry Potter in the movie and she hadn't received any reply from the fan mail she had sent him. And that was before puberty."

"Yeah, Kyla. I remembered you telling me that was the time you started believing you are cursed." Since when did these two start agreeing with each other?

"But I am cursed!" I shoved the envelope inside my backpack. "You remember, Ry? All our classmates back then received his picture with his signature. I received none. Zero."

"Maybe your letter got lost in the mail room," Ryan offered. I knew he was trying to be helpful. He was always trying to be helpful. But right now, he wasn't helping at all.

You might be wondering what the heck we were talking about. So let me take you down to my memory lane.

My mom, she's a great cook. Right after she finished culinary school, she planned on travelling the world to find different exotic recipes she could try. But before she would tour the world, she wanted to find authentic Filipino recipes. So she traveled to different cities within the country. She found herself stranded one day in a far off village in Zamboanga del Sur, and a couple took her in. The couple had a son who was close to her age (Mom was twenty-four that time). He was a soldier and was on leave at that time. They met, they kissed, they fell in love. Romantic, right? Uh, no. It turned out that the guy was already engaged with someone else and when he broke their engagement, the ex-fiancée went ballistic and all and started chanting curses and stuff at my mom.

"You will never find true love! You will forever feel heartache and despair, blah-blah-blah. You and your children and your children's children blah."

The guy died during an ambush in Basilan between the rebels and the military. Mom was forced to leave the village since the people thought they would be receiving the same misfortune. And several, several and more several years later, mom had me.

Okay, curses, I know right? I mean, c'mon. In this age where Twitter already replaced newspapers for source of reliable news, not to mention the rise to stardom of Marcelo Santos and his monopolizing the news feeds with his fans re-tweeting his love quotes, my mom still blamed a curse and voo-doo and stuff for her loveless state. Maybe mom should listen to Marcelo's love advises.

But then, I became a witness to mom's two failed marriages, three funerals for her three late husbands and several disastrous relationships and break-ups. It was a nightmare I tell you. My dad was mom's first husband. They got separated when I was two.

So anyway, my mom's roller coaster love life was not the trigger point where I started believing about the curse. Contrary to what my friends said, I started believing in that curse the day I told Mark Cruz, a Sixth grader that time (I was a year younger than him), that I had a crush on him. And boy that was one memory I wanted to obliterate and pulverize into smithereens. He told me he didn't want Dumbo's twin for a girlfriend. I retaliated by shoving my chocolate cake in his face. We hated each other's guts ever since. Then Harry Potter came next.

I was a certified NBSB after that and then this note arrived. This love note was several years too late for I didn't believe I would ever find love -I was destined to be alone like my mom.

"Why don't you just give this bloke a try?" Ryan suggested with an air of nonchalance. Too nonchalant, in fact.

I turned to face him and gave him a suspicious look. "You're not my secret admirer, are you?"

He almost choked on the pudding he was helping himself with. "What? No! Of course not. I mean, you're my best friend, Ky. You're practically like my sister, and it's illegal to date your sister."

"Good. I don't want to see you dead like my mother's previous husbands."

"Kyla, that curse isn't real. Your mom probably made that up to explain her misfortune in her love life. And to scare you off from finding a boyfriend until your graduation." If my mom heard what Mer had said, Mer would never have free deserts in our small restaurant my mom owned.

"Now back to this secret admirer," I said as I whirled my fork around my spaghetti. "Curse or no curse, I think this guy is either A. Making fun of me because of that "curse rumor" that had spread like wildfire because of some girls who overheard me and Mer when we were talking about it in the bathroom, B. This guy has a death wish and wanted to use me and the curse, or C. He is a coward for not telling me in my face that he likes me."

"I choose letter D," Mer said.

"I wasn't aware I have option D."

"Option D is the guy's probably scared to tell his feelings to you directly for fear of you rejecting him immediately without giving him a chance to prove himself to you."

"Which leads us to Option C, which is him being a coward."

Mer lifted her hands. "I give up. Ryan, talk to your best friend, will you? Before I decide to stab her with my fork."

"I think you need to give this guy a chance, Kyla," Ryan suggested. "I mean are you not even curious who this guy is, who thinks you resembled the moon who gives light to his lonely night?"

"That guy just insinuated that I have craters on my face. It's not my fault I had chicken pox last month."

Ryan sighed. I know I was almost there, getting on to his nerves that is. "So maybe the guy's not a genius when it comes to poetry. All I am saying is let's just allow this guy to continue whatever that he is planning to do until he shows us his identity and then you decide whether to allow him in your life and give love a chance."

"Are you sure you're not my secret admirer?" I would beat him to a pulp if he admitted he was.

"I told you, I'm not. You know I have been making my moves on Olivia Arquiza." Yes, I knew that. He even created an Instagram account just so he could follow and check out Olivia's latest selfie.

Maybe I needed to give this "secret admirer" a shot. I mean, maybe it was about time I make experiment of my own whether this curse was real or not. Maybe, if the curse was true, then I could find a way to break it. "Okay."

"Okay, what?" Mer asked.

"Okay as in okay I will give this guy a chance."

Mer gave me a triumphant smile while Ryan sipped on his Coke as if I just didn't make any news breaking, earth-shattering declaration.

"And you guys are going to help me find out who this guy is," I added. Maybe, if fate would be kind to me, I would find real love.