Chapter Text
By Thursday, Mikee Leal had already lost the ability to act normal around Arianne Agustin.
Not in a dramatic way.
In smaller, worse ways.
The kind that made hallways feel longer, spaces more dangerous, and the word hi feel like something her body should have been warned about.
Which was unfair, because the thing had happened on Tuesday and Wednesday had already taken most of what she had.
Wednesday had at least been busy. There had been the hallway outside Arianne’s classroom, the quick awkward talk where Arianne, looking unfairly calm for someone who had been in Mikee’s living room the afternoon before doing something life-altering and then acting normal about it. Then lunch, where the barkada had apparently smelled panic on Mikee from three Monoblocs away and turned it into entertainment. Then classes, then home, then the kind of exhaustion that comes from spending a whole day trying not to look at one person too often.
Thursday had less mercy.
Before the first bell, Mikee made the mistake of passing the girls’ restroom mirror alone.
She did not stop because she was vain.
One crutch caught awkwardly against the doorframe and she had to pause anyway, and then, because she was already there, she glanced up.
The girl in the mirror looked mostly fine.
Uniform neat enough. White blouse still pressed. The two front pockets flat. Blue buttons all in place. Ponytail still holding. Brace hidden as much as it was ever going to be under the blue A-line skirt, which today sat a little off because of the crutches.
Mikee should have left it there.
Instead she lifted one hand and smoothed the collar.
Then the side of her ponytail.
Then frowned at herself, because wow.
Really.
For what?
As if someone was going to appear around the corner and take attendance on everyone’s face.
Mikee dropped her hand, adjusted her grip on the crutch, and left before she could get any more embarrassing.
By first period, Mikee had already learned three new things.
One, being on crutches after the thing on Tuesday made every hallway feel longer.
Two, Arianne Agustin’s voice sounded completely normal the morning after she turned your world on its head, which was honestly offensive.
Three, once your brain had linked a person to the feel of her palm on your cheek, that information did not leave just because there was a teacher in the room.
Mikee discovered this last one during Filipino, which she felt was particularly rude.
She sat through a discussion of an excerpt in El Filibusterismo she did not absorb at all, her left knee angled so the brace wouldn’t dig into the chair, and tried very hard not to think about Tuesday.
This failed immediately.
Not because Tuesday had been dramatic.
That was the problem.
It had not been.
It had just been in her living room. The TV on in the background. Nobody declaring anything. Nobody suddenly getting more articulate. It had happened. Then happened again, which really felt like something the universe should have flagged in advance.
And now Arianne was still just Arianne.
Still walking around school in a white blouse with the two front pockets and the stupid blue buttons all the way down, blue A-line skirt, white socks, black leather shoes.
Still tilting her head when she read.
Still smelling faintly of Red Jeans by Versace, which Mikee only knew because Arianne had worn it often enough for her to recognize it without ever asking.
Still somehow able to say “hi” without sounding like she had wrecked Mikee’s entire nervous system.
Mikee stared at the blackboard and copied two lines from the discussion that she would later find out made no sense.
From the seat behind her, Cleo kicked the leg of her chair once.
Mikee did not turn.
Cleo kicked it again.
Mikee sighed. “What.”
“Nothing,” Cleo said, much too innocent. “Checking lang if you’re alive.”
“I’m in Filipino.”
“Oh, tapos?”
“I shouldn’t be alive during Filipino.”
Cleo made a quiet noise through her nose that Mikee had known for years and currently wanted banned. It was the sound Cleo made when she had seen something and was deciding how much damage she could do with it later.
Mikee faced front again.
This was what senior year had become, apparently.
Not college forms.
Not final grades.
Not the slow collapse of realizing high school was actually ending.
Just Cleo Varona sitting behind her like she had nothing better to do while Mikee tried not to visibly remember how Arianne’s lips had felt.
At recess, Mikee discovered a fourth new thing.
Her balance got worse around Arianne now.
Not in any catastrophic way.
She was not toppling into decorative plants or falling down stairs like an idiot in a bad movie.
Just small humiliations.
Like clearing the top two steps outside the Science Pavillion perfectly fine, then seeing Arianne halfway down the covered walk with Steph and Sheryl and immediately having to rethink how feet worked.
Arianne hadn’t seen her yet.
Mikee had maybe three seconds of private damage before Steph threw her head back laughing at something Sheryl said and Arianne looked up too.
There it was.
That moment.
The one Mikee was already starting to understand would ruin her every time.
Arianne saw her.
Then smiled.
Not the bright social one. Not the one for teachers or seatmates or classmates asking for notes.
The real one.
The one that started at the mouth and only counted once it reached her eyes. The one that pulled out the little dimples at the corners of her lips before she could stop it.
Mikee tightened her grip on the crutch handle.
This was absurd.
Nobody should be allowed to smile like that at eight-fifty in the morning.
Arianne slowed when she got close enough. “Hi.”
The word should not have done anything.
It did too much.
Mikee felt it everywhere at once, in the hand tightening on the crutch, in the heat at the back of her neck, in the very real possibility that if she waited even one second longer she was going to say something useless.
“Hi,” she said back, faster than she meant to, which was good, because another beat and she might have just stood there looking winded in the middle of a school corridor.
Steph looked between them once and instantly started looking like Steph when she knew something she was not yet supposed to say out loud.
Sheryl, bless her social instincts, said, “Ay, may kukunin lang kami ni Steph sa room,” in the tone of someone who had absolutely not just decided that on the spot.
Steph blinked. “Ha?”
Then Sheryl elbowed her and suddenly Steph understood the assignment. “Oo nga. Yung ano.”
“The thing,” Sheryl said gravely.
“The very important thing.”
Then both of them vanished back the way they came with the unbelievable smoothness of girls who had, at this point, probably spent years helping each other create moments and then denying all responsibility afterward.
Mikee watched them go. “Walang subtlety.”
Arianne looked after them too, smiling a little. “Not even a little.”
There was a beat.
Just enough for Mikee to notice the covered walk, the canteen noise drifting over from the other side of the hall, the ridiculous fact of both of them being in broad daylight in school uniforms after Tuesday like the world had not become much harder to manage.
Arianne looked down briefly at Mikee’s brace. “How’s the knee?”
“Fine.”
Arianne lifted her eyes back up to Mikee’s face. “That doesn’t mean anything when you say it.”
Mikee almost laughed.
Almost.
“Manageable,” she corrected.
“That’s slightly better.”
Mikee shifted her weight. “Coach still won’t let me anywhere near practice.”
“Good.”
Mikee stared at her. “Good?”
Arianne nodded like this was obvious. “You’re injured.”
“That’s a little anti-athlete of you.”
“That’s very pro-you-keeping-your-knee.”
That landed exactly where Mikee least needed it to.
So naturally, she looked away first.
Across the covered walk, someone dropped a bottle and shouted because plastic apparently had emotional consequences now.
Mikee looked back. “Ang drama naman.”
Arianne smiled. “Like you weren’t just glaring at a knee brace like it personally offended you.”
“It did.”
“I know.”
There it was again.
That stupid, immediate click of being known.
Just in the smaller, worse ones. Arianne knew which words Mikee used when she was trying not to say the real thing. Knew when “fine” meant “leave me alone” and when it meant “I don’t know how to explain this better.” Knew when Mikee was performing indifference and when she was actually calm.
Mikee, unfortunately, had no idea what to do with that.
The bell rang from somewhere near the Principal’s office.
Arianne glanced over her shoulder. “I have Filipino.”
“I have Calc.”
Arianne made a face of immediate sympathy. “Worse.”
“Salamat sa suporta, ah.”
Arianne’s mouth moved at one side first. Mikee noticed that now too.
“Lunch?” Arianne asked.
Like it was an ordinary question.
Like they had not made ordinary a lot harder on themselves for no practical reason at all.
Mikee said, “Lunch,” because apparently the part of her that did not want to sound too eager was now permanently understaffed.
Arianne nodded once and started to step back.
Then paused. “Mikee?”
“What.”
“Don’t use the left stairs after last period. They’re extra bad when everyone’s leaving.”
Mikee blinked. “How do you know that?”
Arianne shrugged. “I’ve seen you trying to pretend you’re not struggling.”
Then she left before Mikee could say anything normal in response, which was probably wise because there was not much normal available to her at that point anyway.
By Physics, Mikee had become so aware of Arianne in her day that it felt like low-grade fever.
Not constant enough to count as illness.
Present enough to ruin concentration.
Prof was saying something about vectors and relative motion and why half the class still kept getting direction wrong, and Mikee, whose own sense of direction now consisted mostly of one girl and a growing inability to use doorways like a stable person, copied the formulas down and stared at them until the symbols stopped looking like Physics.
Cleo passed her a folded strip of paper from behind.
Mikee opened it under the desk.
It said: buhay ka pa ba diyan?
Mikee wrote back: unfortunately.
Cleo got the note back, read it, and drew a tiny heart beside the word unfortunately before passing it forward again.
Mikee crumpled it in her fist and spent the next two minutes wanting to commit a felony.
At lunch, the barkada reclaimed their corner tables with the full noisy entitlement of people who believed the canteen had been built for them specifically.
Steph arrived carrying juice and gossip in equal quantities. Jess had three folders and the moral exhaustion of someone who had already been disappointed by humanity before noon. Maffe slid into her chair like she had been lowering herself onto a throne since birth. Ger sat down quietly and somehow made everyone else look louder on contact.
Mikee got there early enough to choose a seat.
This had become, she admitted privately, part of the problem.
Because now she noticed seats.
Proximity.
Pathways.
Where Arianne usually dropped her bag. Which chair was close enough to brush shoulders without it looking arranged. Which side of the table got more light and which one got the easier exit into the corridor.
That was not normal.
That was strategy.
And Mikee refused to call it that.
So she sat down, set her bag on the chair beside her, and told herself this was random.
It was not random.
Arianne arrived with Sheryl two minutes later, saw the open seat next to Mikee, and sat there without a word.
Of course she did.
That alone would have been enough.
Unfortunately there was also lunch itself.
Arianne was eating from one of those school paper plates that started bending under sauce if you looked at them too hard. She had a notebook open beside her plate, a pencil tucked behind one ear again, and the kind of concentration that meant she was pretending very hard that all of this was ordinary.
Mikee knew because she was doing the exact same thing.
The problem with two people pretending at once was that no one else could be trusted in the vicinity.
“Cap,” Steph said, without preamble. “Rate your pain from one to ten.”
Mikee looked at her. “About seven, now.”
“Seryoso nga.”
“I’m not bleeding, Steph.”
“That’s not the question.”
Jess, opening her drink, said, “If she starts bleeding in the canteen, I’m leaving.”
“So if I bleed, iiwan mo'ko para ma-tegi?” Steph asked.
Jess looked at her over the bottle. “I’d leave you to be loud about it somewhere else.”
Mikee should have followed the conversation.
She meant to.
Instead she became aware, with immediate and total clarity, of the fact that her right elbow and Arianne’s left elbow were touching on the edge of the shared table.
Not enough to be obvious.
Enough.
Arianne was still writing something in the margin of her notebook.
Mikee was still holding her spoon.
Neither of them moved.
That made it worse.
The canteen went on around them. Chairs scraped. Somebody at the next table laughed too loudly. The kuya behind the counter shouted that he was not breaking a hundred for one juice. The whole school stayed normal in the deeply annoying way the world always did when something privately catastrophic was happening to one person.
Beside her, Arianne turned a page.
Their elbows stayed where they were.
Mikee became aware of exactly three inches of warmth and immediately lost the ability to participate in society.
“Mikee,” Arianne said quietly, not looking up.
“What.”
“You’re doing the jaw thing.”
Mikee looked straight ahead. “I’m eating.”
“Mhm.”
“Can you not diagnose me in public.”
Arianne’s mouth moved at one side. “Noted.”
Across the table, Cleo lowered her drink very carefully and looked at absolutely nothing.
Maffe looked into her plate with the expression of someone choosing kindness against her own instincts.
Mikee wanted to die.
Instead she tore a piece of het sandwich and put it in her mouth like a person behaving normally.
She was not.
After lunch, the eight of them spilled back into the covered walk in their usual loose formation. Steph and Sheryl went ahead talking with their entire bodies. Jess followed with a face like she regretted all her choices but had made peace with the worst of them. Maffe walked with Ger in that quiet, easy way she had when she was not performing for the rest of the group. Cleo drifted where she wanted because structure had never really taken with her.
Mikee moved slower with the crutches. Arianne matched her pace without asking.
Mikee noticed that.
Said nothing.
The covered walk was cooler now, shaded enough that the heat had finally stopped trying to punish everyone personally. Up ahead outside the PE department, Pams and a sophomore were hauling in newly-pumped basketballs. Mikee saw them and looked away on instinct.
Not because she wanted to be there.
That had been the ugly surprise of the injury. Somewhere between the pain, the brace, physical therapy, and the humiliation of watching other people do the thing she had built so much of herself around, something in her had gone hard and tired around basketball.
She was not going back to varsity.
Not this season.
Maybe not at all.
She had already made up her mind in the quiet, mean way people made up their minds about things that hurt too much to keep bargaining with.
Arianne caught the look anyway.
“You okay?”
Mikee shrugged. “Yeah.”
Arianne waited.
Mikee exhaled through her nose. “I’m not going back.”
Arianne turned to her fully. “To varsity?”
Mikee nodded once. “It’s too much. And nakakairita lang. Watching it, thinking about it, all of it.”
Arianne was quiet for a beat. Then she said, very simply, “Okay.”
Mikee frowned. “That’s it?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know.”
Arianne’s voice stayed even. “If that’s what you need, then okay.”
That landed harder than Mikee wanted it to.
So naturally she changed the subject. “Mom had Manong Danny start picking me up every day.”
Arianne looked at her. “No more bus?”
Mikee shook her head. “Mas madali umupo. And some days diretso physical therapy after.”
Arianne nodded once, filing it away the way she always filed things away.
Then a group of second years clogged the middle of the path carrying a diorama between them and Arianne shifted slightly closer to let them pass.
Her upper arm brushed Mikee’s shoulder.
Brief.
Almost nothing.
Except Mikee felt it with the kind of stupid clarity usually reserved for injuries and exam schedules.
Arianne did not move back to the original distance right away.
Neither did Mikee.
The moment lasted maybe three seconds.
Long enough.
Too long, probably, for a thing that was supposed to be ordinary.
Cleo turned back once from farther ahead, took in the spacing between them, and then looked away again like someone who had just checked on cargo she was weirdly invested in.
Mikee tightened her grip on the crutch handle and stared straight ahead.
Friday suddenly felt like another thing she was going to have to get through without acting strange.
At dismissal, her driver was already waiting by the gate. The afternoon had gone gold in that specific November way that made the school look softer than it actually was. Students clustered under the waiting sheds, parents’ cars crawled forward in uneven rows, guards already preparing for the end-of-day flood.
Mikee came out slower than most, navigating the crowd with the practiced irritation of someone who had spent enough days on crutches to know exactly how much space people only thought they were giving her.
At the far edge of the pickup lane, Arianne was standing near the secondary guard post with her folder hugged to her chest, watching the side driveway where her dad usually came through.
From here Mikee could only see her in profile.
Which should have helped.
It did not.
Arianne turned before Mikee could decide whether to keep looking.
Across the distance and noise and the whole ridiculous school day, their eyes met.
Arianne lifted one hand.
Small.
Easy.
Like it was nothing.
Like it was exactly enough.
Mikee lifted two fingers off the crutch handle in answer.
Then Manong Danny called, “Ma’am Mikee,” and the moment broke the way school moments always did, into movement and sound and logistics.
She got into the car. The interior smelled like the absurdly expensive variant of California Scents her father prefers. Katipunan Avenue moved past the window in the usual mix of jeepneys, sidewalk sweet corn stalls, and traffic that had already committed to being rude before five.
Mikee rested the crutches carefully at her side and looked out.
Nothing had happened today.
Not really.
No dramatic scenes. No public disasters.
Arianne had said hi. They had touched elbows over lunch. They had walked back from the canteen shoulder to shoulder for a few seconds more than necessary. Mikee had survived.
That should have counted as a good day.
Instead all she could think, with growing and entirely unwelcome certainty, was that she was in trouble.
Not immediate trouble.
Worse.
The kind that built slowly.
The kind that made ordinary things unusable.
The kind that turned hallways and lunch tables and even the idea of another school day into something she could no longer approach normally.
Mikee leaned her head back against the seat.
Tomorrow, she thought.
God help her.
Then, because apparently that was not bad enough, she smiled into the window like an idiot.
That was when she knew the spiral had already started.
Friday morning did not fix anything.
If anything, it made Mikee more aware of the problem.
Not because she was expecting anything.
She wasn’t.
That was what she told herself, anyway.
By the time first period was about to start, she had already looked once toward the doorway of their classroom, then once more, then decided both had clearly been about corridor traffic and not one specific person.
Home Econ had not started yet. Prof dela Pena was still not in the room. Half the class was only half seated. Someone near the windows was borrowing a ruler like it was a life event.
Mikee dropped into her chair, shifted her injured knee until the brace sat right, and pulled her notebook onto the desk.
When she opened it, there was a yellow Post-it stuck to the first page.
Mikee stopped.
Just for a second.
Then another.
Small square. Slightly crooked. Bright enough to look almost cheerful against the blue lines of the notebook page.
For one stupid instant her brain offered nothing useful.
Then the answer arrived all at once.
Yesterday. Lunch. The canteen table.
Her things had been there before class while she went to the CR with Sheryl, who then immediately got distracted by her own reflection.
Arianne had stayed at the table.
Of course.
Mikee looked at the Post-it again.
Not magic, then.
Just nerve.
And timing.
And the fact that Arianne Agustin apparently had no intention of making this easy for her.
Mikee peeled the note back carefully with one thumb.
Arianne’s handwriting on a sticky note was somehow even neater than usual. Smaller. More deliberate.
It said:
Hi.
Just in case hallways feel too public today.
- A
Mikee stared at the note.
Then read it again.
Then once more, slower, because apparently this was her life now.
Just in case hallways feel too public today.
That was it.
Three lines.
That should have made it small.
It didn’t.
Because this was school now. Her notebook. Her desk. First period. Arianne had found a way into all of it.
Mikee looked up at the doorway on instinct.
The corridor was still busy. A blur of girls moving to class. White blouses. Blue skirts. Bags, books, noise.
No Arianne.
Of course not.
Mikee looked back down at the Post-it.
Then, despite herself, smiled.
Not much.
Just enough that if Cleo looked over now she would absolutely become intolerable about it for the next three days, including the weekend.
Mikee peeled the note free and slid it into the inside pocket of her bag.
Not the loose front one.
The safer one.
Then she sat up straighter, opened her notebook, and stared at the board like a person whose life had not just been permanently complicated by a Post-it.
Prof entered two seconds later.
Mikee copied the date at the top of the page.
Friday.
And just like that, Arianne was no longer only a hallway problem. Or a lunch-table problem. Or a thing Mikee had to survive at dismissal and then think about too much at home.
She was in first period now.
In Mikee’s notebook.
At the start of an ordinary school day Mikee was no longer going to be able to treat as ordinary.