Don't Ask, Don't Tell

“Miss Ching?”

I started and immediately stood up, simultaneously sending my stationery clattering to the floor as I knocked the swinging table down. Everybody else in the class roared with laughter.

Including him.

Mr. Rahman sighed and took off his glasses, wiping it against his shirt. “I suppose you won’t know the answer to my question,” he said wearily. “You may sit down. Miss Gloria? Would you care to answer?”

I sat down and gathered my pens and notepad, eyes glued to the floor. My face is burning. I just hate these swinging table tops. You know, the kind that comes with the chair? This isn’t the first time I messed up in Mr. Rahman’s class. He’s got a habit of putting a Mr. or Miss in front of everybody’s name.

In fact, I’ve been making a fool of myself since the beginning of this semester. Since he joined our class. 

Tall, dark and handsome, built like one of those rugby players you see on ESPN. I can never concentrate when he’s sitting in front. In fact, I have no idea what Mr. Rahman has been teaching this past two months.

“Very good, Miss Gloria. Now, for the next problem…”

I finally gathered all of my stuff and set them down on the empty chair next to me. My friend Mai used to comment on how I’d bring ten different pens to class and never actually used them. I rarely took notes. 

Especially when he’s sitting there. I can feel my face burn again.

One of these days, I’m going to rupture my facial veins just fantasizing like this.

“Mr. Ralph?”

I froze. Oh my God, it’s him! He’s been called!

“Would you demonstrate in front how x would change with y in graphical form?”

I suddenly got very interested on x and y. I settled down comfortably and propped my face on my hands and watched. Smiling like some psychotic stalker. Joker would be proud.

He shrugged and stood up after a pat on the back by one of his friends. He walked slowly to the whiteboard, with a gait that said easy confidence. He picked up the marker and drew a perfect loop between the two lines, smiled (ohmygodhissmileismakingmefaint) and sauntered back to his seat.

Mr. Rahman leaned on the rostrum and looked at Ralph’s masterpiece, an eyebrow raised.

“Unfortunately, Mr. Ralph made a mistake here…” he said, and corrected it with a differently colored pen.

I don’t care. That’s how I’ll be doing my graphs from now on. Oh, he’s just so perfect! I swooned. I can only imagine him wrapping his big, strong arms around me, as he looked me deep in my eyes and said, in his deep, strong voice, “Hey, baby, wanna get married?” And I said… and I said…

“Miss Ching?”

I snapped out of my temporary view of paradise and looked around. Everybody’s looking at me, especially Mr. Rahman. “Is something the matter? You look faint… Ralph, can you take her to the nurse’s office?”

I think I really fainted then, because the next thing I know, I was being carried by someone through a long corridor. I opened one eye and looked, and almost fainted again. Ralph is carrying me in his big, strong arms! I snuggled against his chest and smiled. I could get used to this.

“Here she is,” I heard him say as we arrive at the sick bay, all too soon. His voice is just like I imagined, and I blushed again. I was put on a bed, my temperature taken, and my eyes checked.

He sat on the chair next to the bed and watched. I started blushing again, and the nurse looked alarmed. “Oh, dear, I must get the doctor,” she said, and left us to ourselves.

We sat in silence for a few moments, me fidgeting, and he texting someone. Finally I broke the silence.

“Hey, thanks,”

He looked up. “Oh, no prob,” and looked down again.

“My name’s Ching,”

He smiled. My eyes fluttered again. “Mine’s Ralph,”

I was about to say something else when someone walked in. It was another guy from our class. Damn, what a pest! I clenched my fists under the blanket.

“Hey, what’s up?”

“Ching here fainted suddenly,”

The other guy looked at me and held out a hand. “Hi! I’m Joe,”

I shook his hand and smiled. “So, are you guys, like, buddies?”

They both exchanged a look and smiled. Uh-oh. I do NOT like that smile.

“We’re… more than friends,” Joe said, looking deeply into Ralph’s eyes, gripping his left shoulder.

“Yeah,” Ralph said, almost too passionately, “More than friends,”

No. No. No. I decided to push it.

“Like, you guys are in a team together or something?” I said, trying to deny what is slowly dawning on me.

“Nope. Closer than that,” Ralph said as Joe gave him a peck on the cheek.

I dry heaved. This could not be happening to me! All my fantasies, broken! I don’t know what happened next, but I got a three days medical leave after the doctor checked me. Turned out I got a fever right then and there.

I called up my best friend Phoebe and told her what happened. She just laughed and said she’d still try to get him anyways. The slut. I told her I don’t care anymore, and she can do whatever she wanted. I knew that guy was way too perfect to be available.

When I returned to class, I can barely look at him anymore. I still daydream in class, but of what could have been and how I’d like to strangle that guy.

A week later, I saw him making out with Jane under the staircase. I could not believe my eyes. Wait till Joe hears about this! My eyes glinted with vengeance, and I feel like a butterfly as I floated over to Joe, who was having a drink at the fountain.

“Hey,” I said, smiling like the Cheshire cat.

“Oh, hey. Ching, right?” Oh, so Joe has an accent.

“Yeah. Guess what,” I said, my voice getting all excited. “I just saw Ralph making out! With a girl!”

He raised an eyebrow and looked at me as if he was looking at a pink elephant. “Y..eah, so?” he asked. “Have you been watching long?”

I was taken aback. He doesn’t seem mad or jealous at all! Or…

“Wait, isn’t he your boyfriend?” I blurted out. Whoops.

At this, he laughed so hard that he had to hold on to the fountain to keep from falling. All the while I’m standing there, looking like a hammered sheep. “Are you done?”

“Oh, oh, whooo…” he said as he wiped his tears. “You have GOT to be kidding me. He’s my cousin,”

“WHAT?! You kissed him!”

“I’m from French. It’s common for me to kiss my relatives,”

“WHAT?!”

Living Still

When you first step into this town, I guess the first thing you’ll notice is the quiet. The thick, heavy quiet, and the lack of people. Sure, most towns don’t have that much people anyway, but this town seems deserted. However, it’s not.

Welcome to Aldelati, the town where dreams come true. It’s situated in the middle of nowhere, and no crops grow here. The people are strange, and the animals are dumb. And to think that this place used to be so busy, too.

Used to be? Yes, my friend. This place wasn’t always like this. There was a time where Aldelati was the place to be. Placed in the intersection of several – several, mind you, not one or two – important roads, we can’t help but have all sorts of people coming in everyday, and different people coming in as soon as those leave.

And I’m in the place to know, too. See, my dad runs one of the biggest inns in town, and I used to get to meet all kinds of strangers every night. Tired businessman, laughing couples, noisy families, classy wives of merchants, you name it. We had it all.

Being the son of the innkeepers, I naturally run a bar on the ground floor of the inn, with me as the bartender and a couple of friends as waitresses. And, oh, my girl Relda. She’s the head waitress here. And between me and her, we had a lot of gossip coming in every day.

Sometimes the gossip had nothing to do with this town, sometimes it’s about some superstar, but most of the time, it was something close. Like how Mary Sue took two men home last Saturday night, or how Mr. White’s son sells crack at his old man’s farm. Petty things, really, but I like to be informed. It made the life in this busy town better.

So I guess I can only tell you what happened to this town only through the gossip I get. From what I’ve heard, it all started with Grendell deGract. She’s Relda best friend, and the second prettiest girl in town. After Relda, of course. So it’s no big deal to say that there’s a lot of gossip surrounding her.

To add to her popularity among the bar customers, her widowed mother’s rumored to be a witch, too. The people around here knew her as Old Witch deGract, but affectionately. See, Mrs. deGract is a good witch. She helped with the crops, gave blessings to newborn babies, helped in delivering them, and, as good as the gossips can tell, helped ladies stay young and beautiful.

One day, a fine young man entered town, Randy Lisper. He’s a good-looking man, and seemed quite rich, too. A lot of the ladies went crazy over him, but Grendell, she went head-over-heels in love with him. Now, it is said that Lisper was engaged in some other town far from here, and that he’s on the way to some other faraway town on a business trip, so I guess he’s not thinking of checking out the babes on his one night stay here.

But then again, I guess I was wrong. My guess was that Lisper saw how easy Grendell was going to be, and he took her with him for the night. But of course poor Grendell thought that Lisper fell in love with her, and she’s just heartbroken when she woke up alone next morning. She spent the whole night at my counter, getting drunk and crying.

When we had to close for the night, Relda sent her home, still crying. She told me that Mrs. deGract looked somewhat different that night, as if she hasn’t slept in days. What happened next, nobody knew. What we knew is that the next morning, there’s a huge uproar, and the whole town is in shock.

The local cemetery has been literally turned inside out, with tombstones and gargoyles strewn around as if they were swept by a hurricane, and each plot emptied. All the dead townsfolk are gone, and not a single bone remained in any of the coffins. Only one dead body remained in the whole cemetery, and it was Randy Lisper’s.

He was impaled on one of the spikes on the fence at the far side of the graveyard, facing in, with the spike going in the base of his spine and going out the back of his neck. The most disturbing thing about him was the fact that his face was frozen in a laugh.

Grendell and her mother was nowhere to be found. Some people went to their house and found it empty, but they saw something weird there. As soon as they entered the house, they saw handprints all over the place. Every square foot of the walls, ceiling and floor were covered with reddish-brown handprints, as well as their furniture.

The handprints came in all sizes, from adults to children to even babies.
Of course, nobody would live in the deGracts’ house after that, and the mayor had it burnt down. During the burning of the house, some folks said that they can hear Grendell howling, but some said they heard nothing. We set the graveyard in order again, and the mayor decided that we build a library on the foundation of the deGracts’ home. Lisper’s body was taken down and cremated, and his ashes were sent back to his hometown with no mention whatsoever of what happened.

Try as we might, the town was never the same again. Little by little people stopped coming in, and the roads leading in and out of our town became overgrown with grass. We never left, though. Soon we found that nobody was hungry or thirsty anymore. My bar was still filled with people, but people just ordered a beer and never drank it.

People also started looking older and became so thin that bones showed through their skins. I noticed that Relda’s cheeks have lost all flesh and skin, and now her teeth showed. Everybody looked almost skeletal, but nobody died. We just went on doing stuff that we do, but now we never went outdoors anymore. The sun hurts our eyes.

But if you happen to come here at night, you’ll find that this town is quite alive.
And that’s how Aldelati became what it is now. We’re still here, still living, but hardly any new gossip comes into town. If you do come by, be sure to stop by my bar. We’ll be happy to have you.