"Florante and Larry and The Last Days of Summer"

Chapter 3

Another thing about Catholic schools was that they're fond of naming classrooms after saints. Saint Mary. Saint Joseph. Saint this. Saint that. Every saint had a thing or two attached to their names where they sort of specialized in so when you pray you could sort of ask help from the saint specializing on your troubles. Saint Anne, patroness saint of unmarried women and housewives. Saint Nicholas, patron saint of children. Saint Camillus, patron saint of the sick. Patron saint of this, patron saint of that. Saint Francis de Assisi, patron saint of animals was appropriately the name assigned to my classroom. When I arrived, Saint Francis de Assisi was in a complete state of disarray. Minutes went by without a teacher and its hormone-fueled inhabitants brought forth a havoc. There was jostling, and laughing, and shouting and crying, and throwing balls of crumpled papers all around. The room would have been better of if it was named after saint Jude, patron saint of lost cause.

We were dismissed early for lunch. I walked the corridors on my way to the school library, the only remarkable thing in this shit pile-of-a-place where I could find solace by reading. Miss Sandoval, the school librarian dozed-off at the counter. She slouched on a plastic chair that was in imminent danger of falling apart. Some students called her Ms. Piggy behind her back due to her disproportionately large nose and plumped figure. Some of that allusion was credited to her somnolent nature and the sound she made while sleeping.

I logged the date and time of my visit in the blue book and skedaddled towards the "Classic Section". I ran my fingers through the neatly-arranged novels on the shelves and surveyed each classic with an ardent appetite. There were classic ones from Hawthorne, Dickens, Austen, Tolstoy and Harper Lee. I had read all of them. They made me hate schools like prep and boys like the ones who gutted and kicked Simon.

I picked Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, Mahfouz' Midaq Alley and Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist. I loved books, particularly the old ones with woody scent in them. I sniffed them one by one and got high. Books were like people; some were easy to get along with even if you just met them, others hard to come-by, and in rare cases, they fill a hole in your heart. I read the first few chapters of Angela's Ashes and decided it was one of those rare types. I sat on the edge of the reading table where I could barely hear Ms. Sandoval's snoring which sounded like a revving car engine that was stuck in the mud. I wore my headphones and played Nirvana's "Come As You Are" on my Walkman.

The book was a memoir of Frank McCourt's childhood life. It was pretty dark. Like when God decided to rain down all sorts of misfortune on earth, Frank and his family got all of them. Poor guy. The death of his younger sister left a hole in my heart. Hammered through it like a nail would be on a wood. I wept.

"Hey! It's you again." A voice half-baked to adolescence squealed behind me. I traced the sound and saw Golden Retriever boy. He was no longer wearing the sunglasses but I definitely needed one because he brought the sun with him in the room with his blinding smile. He stood frozen on his track for a while grinning like an idiot. He held the rim of his Polaroid camera and clicked the shutter like it was a good idea to go around taking pictures of people you just met. Maybe another one of his bad habits.

"What the hell?!" I barked. Fist clenched ready to fly in a moment's notice. I classified myself as a Pitt bull. Easily-triggered. Short-tempered. Hot-headed. Wired to fight. Sometimes I got this weird feeling of punching someone in the face just for the heck of it. Nana told me I got it from dad. The apple does not fall far from the tree she said. Retriever's face turned red like he was about to cry. He looked at his toes remorsefully like a child under the apprehension of an adult. There was something about his face. In my head I would have said "Get the fuck outta here!" but what came out of my mouth was different. "Thanks for the ride earlier by the way." I said. His eyes lit up like a log-fire crackling with flames that refused to be extinguished. I never thought facial expressions could change so fast like that. It was hard to look at him with all this light beaming from his tiny freckled face. So, I looked at the house lizard on the roof.