i believe we're the enemy
Imagine an audience, filling up these three hundred something auditorium seats, with their faces bathed in the yellow stage lights. They're teary eyed, listening to your every word, and absolutely brimming with joy. Your speech will transport them to the day they dropped off their child for their child's first day at high school and you’ll walk them down memory lane, through every heartache and tender moment as their child struggles and overcomes high school. And then bring them back to the present, here, in this auditorium, about to witness their child graduate and accomplish one of the biggest milestones in their life.
At least that's the mental image Amy wanted Noah Martelino to work with. The auditorium was currently empty and Noah was going over his speech for the fourth time that afternoon. He had slipped up somewhere near the end, and Amy, ever the slave driver, told him to start from the beginning.
Noah was easing back into a humorous anecdote, making sure to gesticulate where appropriate and to make eye contact with people that weren’t even there, when something caught his eye.
There’s that girl again, standing in the auditorium balcony and right in Noah Martelino’s peripheral vision. It must be getting late; she never shows up when classes are still in session. There’s always something about knowing that someone else was in the room with him that made Noah uncomfortable. He just wanted to breeze through the last of his speech and get the hell out of there.
He was still half-way through it, talking about growing pains as part of the successes of high school. Noah wasn’t originally going to include that bit, but Amy thought that it resonated with the teenage angst that was the core of being a teenager. Give parents something to tear over. Now that Noah had an uninvited guest standing on the auditorium balcony, he wished he didn’t listen to Amy and left that part out entirely.
Noah had gone through this speech before, more times than he could count. The words had been set into his mind, but Amy insisted his delivery and his body language could use a whole lot more work. Noah was valedictorian, he should at least be able to deliver his speech as easily as he breathed.
Noah had never been more thankful for Amy’s coaching, because Noah’s mouth was running on auto-pilot now, albeit probably way too fast to be casual and engaging. Something about how his graduating batch certainly couldn’t have done it without their siblings, whatever, he was going to get this done right and get off the damned stage. Amy's advice had been drilled into his head, however, and he found himself dawdling against his will. Remember to move your head, glance from spot to spot, talk to your audience, and, shit, he was looking up at the balcony in some automated attempt to lock eyes with the absent audience there. Now he couldn’t tear his eyes away.
The girl wasn’t just standing there anymore, she was climbing the ledge with a determination that just couldn’t end well.
Noah’s mouth was still moving, but he wasn’t even sure if there were words coming or if he was just fluttering his lips like a goldfish, when the girl leaned forward and let gravity do its work. Instinct had Noah looking away, mouth shut, teeth grit, the moment right before she hits the ground.
“Hey! Noah, I don’t recall telling you to stop.”
Noah practically jumped when Amy Ngo tapped the front of the podium with her rolled up plastic folder. He cracked an eye open and met her glare through her large tortoise shell glasses. Noah only realizes that his hands have been clutching the podium’s sides and that his knuckles are white, his palms sweaty. Noah lets go and wipes his palms on his slacks as Amy makes her way up the stage steps.
“What was that about? You sounded like you were being chased by a dog.” She delivers her next tap on his shoulder. “You okay? Off your game today.”
Noah bites the inside of his lip hard, a bad habit he developed in bringing himself back to focus, and mustered his best smile. It wasn’t very effective. “Kind of distracted.”
Amy’s brows are knotted as she raised her hand to plant it on his forehead. When she leans away, she taps him square on the chest. “Take ten. Your voice is starting to get hoarse.”
Never had Noah been more thankful of Amy’s leadership skills. What Amy said, went, and Noah was definitely going. He turned on his heel to head backstage, just as he hears Amy set up her wooden step at the podium. She was nearly a head shorter than Noah but had found ingenious ways of working her height disadvantage into nearly every activity she was the star of. Naturally this included her salutatorian speech because, as she put it herself, “if there are people taping this event, they better remember me as the funny one and not for my lack of height.”
As Noah stepped around large heavy panels of stage curtain, he could still make out the balcony. The girl was standing there again, about to climb the ledge and reintroduce herself with the floor.
The stage curtains, as well as backdrops left behind from previous school productions, muffled Amy's voice but it also blocked out the fresher air from the open auditorium windows. Backstage smelled like smelled like dust, makeup and hairspray. A certain corner, however, all too conveniently placed en route to the washroom, was practically a nuclear wasteland. Noah highly suspected that a rat had died behind the some of the costume boxes. What better tomb and softer grave than some unfortunate person’s The Winter's Tale costume.
Nothing could prepare Noah for the stench of the washroom. Located at the rearmost area backstage, the washroom was deprived of proper ventilation and apparently archived weeks, maybe even months, of odors. People who came around to use it had obviously never heard of the word ‘flush’ and if they found themselves acquainted, they probably never learned to properly aim for the bowl.
The one saving grace was that the faucets were running and although they spewed rusty water for the first few minutes, the water was cold. Noah splashed several handfuls on his face and combed his wet fingers through his hair. Amy might have been right about him being off his game, but Noah hadn’t exactly been lying about being distracted either.
Everything was a distraction. God damn peripheral vision as a survival tool with no off switch. Noah supported his weight on the sink, fixing his eyes on the mirror in front of him. It was too cracked and dirty to actually reflect anything; it might as well have been a wall. All the same, it was helpful to stare at, especially when Noah's eyes were picking up things in the corner of his vision and his brain was actually supplying things with names. Such as that large dark puddle on the filthy floor, running alongthe spaces between the cracked tiles; too thick to be water, too red to be rust and certainly too dark to be paint. Noah’s brain was certainly putting together an idea of what thing was dangling from the window bars in the toilet stall farthest from the door.
It seemed to be human shaped. That was something Noah had no intention confirming or debunking.
Noah forced himself not to turn his head as he left the washroom and he definitely did not allow himself to run. If anything, this old auditorium had excellent accoustics and the last thing he needed was Amy noticing that he was scrambling back there like a spooked chicken.
By the time Noah had wandered out from behind the stage curtains, the auditorium was darker. The sunlight that had been beating through the frosted auditorium windows was fainter now, and the auditorium was slowly slipping into colder temperatures.
Amy was leaning over the podium, rubber frog topped ball pen in her hand as she scribbled something on her copy of her speech. Her concentration was definitely something worth commending.
“It's pretty late,” Noah said as he wandered back over to her side. He had aimed for casual, and ended up with mostly anxious.
Amy hummed in agreement and didn’t seem to pick up on his tone “I’ve still got ballet,” Amy said a moment later. “Let me just get this and we can go.”
Noah leaned in a little to look at her copy. It was covered in purple and pink ink, with the occasional baby blue bubbles around words Amy should emphasize in her speech. “Can your speech get any longer? I think you’re topping mine by a whole five minutes.”
“That's only because yours is short, dismal and uninspiring.” Amy punctuated this with a pink heart. “Come on, you look absolutely starved. Let’s get you something to eat and maybe let me bribe you into walking me to the jeepney stop.”
On their way out through the entrance, the from the balcony had just hit the floor again and Noah couldn’t stop himself from looking at the awkward splay of her limbs and into her wide bloodshot eyes. She had vanished a beat right before he looked away, leaving not even the slightest trace of her landing on the auditorium’s floor.
*
It turned out that the way to Noah’s heart was fishballs dipped in sweet and spicy sauce. Amy laughed and called him cheap before she purchased a stick of fishballs of her own.
With the sun steadily dipping further in the sky, Cebu City practically glowed gold and bathed everything in warm shadows. From the hill upon which St. Jerome’s Academy was perched, you could see the dying sunlight glinting off building windows and roofs. At five o’clock, a large portion of St. Jerome's student populace had already been fetched by their parents or drivers. Noah and Amy lingered at the waiting shed right outside the school's guardhouse, taking small bites of their steaming hot food.
“Maybe you should get some sleep,” Amy said, the moment after she dumped their barbecue sticks into an overflowing trashcan. She made a disapproving hum at the gross neglect of the general population for sorting instructions before she reached for Noah’s arm and tugged. “Come on.”
“I get plenty of sleep.” Noah was still waiting for his bicycle to be lowered from the bicycle tree. The moment it was within arm's reach, he unhooked the rope from around the front of his bike. “Six hours of sleep a night, mom, as a minimum. I solemnly swear. Don’t send me to bed without dessert.”
Amy rolled her eyes and tugged harder on is wrist until Noah started walking with her, his bike going click-click-click beside them. “Real sleep. At a human hour. Stop staying up all night, fapping over Bradley Cooper.”
Despite himself, Noah chuckled and bumped his shoulder against hers. She bumped back, harder than necessary, and flashed him her worst glare. “You’re worse than my Atsi Anne, do you know that? I’d feel sorry for your kids.”
“I’m being serious, Noah Martelino. This is my serious face. You're off your game. I thought you had memorized your speech.”
Noah resisted the urge to deny it but denial only provided jet fuel to Amy. He was definitely regretting his suggestion for her to pursue Law. Woe to all members of the court. “I have,” he said. “All one thousand something words of it.”
“Then what's the problem?”
Ghosts, Noah's mind supplied before he beat it back into silence. “Nervous, I guess.” At Amy's raised eyebrow, Noah quickly continued. “Look, it’s a big deal. High school graduation.”
“Being valedictorian.”
“Exactly. I’m going to have to open the ceremony with a speech and provide the buffer for your extremely moving and awe-inspiring tale.”
Amy laughed and punched him in the side. For someone her size, she could really land a hell of a blow. “Flattery will get you nowhere, Mister Martelino. You still need to get your act together for Monday.”
“Jesus, were you born into this world a mom?”
“Watch your language. Your Atsi needs to beat some sense into you. I can’t even begin to imagine the kind of guy you would be without me to guide you.” Their feet had carried them to Amy’s usual jeepney stop. The sun had dipped lower into the horizon, sharpening and darkening the shadows around them. Despite this, Amy’s features were softer. Dare Noah consider it, actually worried. “When we get to practice, you better upstage me. Bring your damn sparkle with you.”
Noah's eyebrow twitched upwards. “Sparkle?”
“Of course. Because you don’t have a hint of charisma.” Amy turned towards the incoming traffic and raised a hand. A moment later, a jeepney rumbles to a halt next to her. “Mark my words,” she says as she tiptoes to peck Noah on the cheek; Noah has to lean down to meet her half way. “There will be consequences.”
Noah smiled and shooed her off. “Go on, before people in the jeep think we’re shooting a telenovela.”
Amy climbed into the jeepney, hefting her large backpack behind her, and waved at him from her seat. The jeepney starts again, rumbling as it blends into the traffic flow and disappears into the sea of evening traffic.
Standing alone at the jeepney stop, Noah heaves a sigh and starts to mount his bicycle. Amy could fuss over him all she liked but her fussing wasn’t exactly going to exorcise the spirits of the auditorium. He had sensed them before, that gut-deep knowledge that you are not alone, even if your eyes tell you otherwise. Noah's always had a sense for the unseen but it was only recently that he started actually seeing them. Occasionally there was the disembodied cry, sometimes footsteps and even doors suddenly closing with a force stronger than just a breeze. But to be able to behold spirits with his own eyes unnerved Noah in ways that he couldn’t begin to explain.
If they kept that up, who knows how badly Noah was going to slip up at his actual graduation ceremony. He hated getting on stage other than for competition purposes and to be expected to impress an audience was simply not in Noah’s job description.
Above him, the dying light prompted the street light to activate and Noah found himself standing in the middle of a spotlight. Great, even the street lights were mocking him. Even worse, if his watch was anything to go by, he was running late. He had promised to get home before six thirty but with how slow everything seemed to be going, Noah would be thankful if he arrived home by seven.
Noah cursed under his breath and looked up to check the traffic lights. The red light seemed to stare back at him like an eye with too much iris, steady and unblinking. In spite of himself, Noah shuddered. The last of the afternoon heat wasn’t quite lost to the rapidly darkening sky yet but that light raised the hair on the back of Noah's neck. It was suddenly too bright, rivaling a spotlight, and fixed on him.
No, wait. It wasn’t the light. Time seemed to have slowed down to a snail’s pace. In front of him, the traffic was flowing like a river, a great big blur of motion and sound. Everything blended into a thick syrup of sensation and hyperawareness; every effort felt like it was underwater.
Noah was aware that there was something behind him. A mist that had settled, right on his back and it seeped through his clothes, through his skin and into his bones. Noah was not superstitious, but he had learned a long time ago that one should never look over their shoulder if they felt like someone was staring at them. Unfortunately, Noah was never good at following his own instructions.
Noah turned his head and he could practically hear his bones and his muscles moving under his skin. Right outside the halo of the spotlight, there was a tall and gangly figure. Noah squinted through the streetlight and could make out scraps of cloth that was supposed to pass for clothes and long dirty and matted hair. A taong grasa, one of Cebu City’s homeless, quite literally a person covered in grease. Noah could make out dark smudges on the man's legs, his bare arms and all over his chest. The longer he stared, the more that he realized that these weren’t just smudges; they were too long and sweeping to be anything but done with intent. Almost as if the person had been drawing on his chest and he’d come up with...
Was that an eye?
Noah blinked and forced himself to look somewhere else. Anywhere else. He ended up looking at the man's face. Behind a thick and unruly beard, there wasn’t just grease smears on this man’s face. There was nothing at all, just one big black smear; like someone drew a face in pencil and smudged it out with their thumb. There were no discernable features, nothing that even resembled a face, just an abyss and out of it, stared two wide eyes that made Noah want to bolt. Sclera so blood shot that from where Noah was standing, they appeared to be completely red and irises the color of blank paper.
Look away right now. Noah was sure he commanded his body to turn his head away as fast as he could but the air was practically jello. It felt like minutes before Noah was locking eyes once more with the traffic light, still staring at him with its single red eye. In the cage of Noah's ribs, his heart is racing and practically pounding to be freed. Each breath he took was horrible; too thin, not enough to fill his lungs, but packed with so many smells. The garbage from the sewer, the exhaust from the cars speeding in front of him, the heat from the asphalt.
With each passing second, the sun was sinking lower until Cebu City’s sky was inky purple and the shadows around Noah were as black as ink. Noah's senses were overloaded; it shouldn’t even be possible but he could practically hear each step the taong grasa took in his direction. The man's bare feet scraped on the dry cement of the sidewalk. Scrape, thud, scrape, thud.
Noah had never been more aware of someone standing behind him in his life and he couldn’t help but wonder if this was what wild prey felt like out in the jungle. The cold that had been running down Noah’s spine was now a fist clamped around his heart. The taong grasa exhaled, a rattling breath like it was sick, and opened his mouth. Noah can hear the flex of his jaw, muscles straining and lips pulling back--
Something penetrates Noah's veil of hyperawareness. A distant engine roar, steadily getting louder until its rumble was the only thing Noah heard, like thunder rolling across the sky. A giant black motorcycle sped past Noah, light singing off the perfect polish. It sped past cars and darting in and out of traffic like a rebellious fish and was gone before Noah even had a chance to follow it with his eyes.
Noah released a breath he didn’t realize he was holding in and his brain finally catches up to him. The air is no longer cold and time no longer had the consistency of molasses. And more importantly, the taong grasa was gone.
Certain amounts of Yoav and My Chemical Romance may have been consumed during the writing process. Oops. Nothing screams teenager more than MCR.
At least that's the mental image Amy wanted Noah Martelino to work with. The auditorium was currently empty and Noah was going over his speech for the fourth time that afternoon. He had slipped up somewhere near the end, and Amy, ever the slave driver, told him to start from the beginning.
Noah was easing back into a humorous anecdote, making sure to gesticulate where appropriate and to make eye contact with people that weren’t even there, when something caught his eye.
There’s that girl again, standing in the auditorium balcony and right in Noah Martelino’s peripheral vision. It must be getting late; she never shows up when classes are still in session. There’s always something about knowing that someone else was in the room with him that made Noah uncomfortable. He just wanted to breeze through the last of his speech and get the hell out of there.
He was still half-way through it, talking about growing pains as part of the successes of high school. Noah wasn’t originally going to include that bit, but Amy thought that it resonated with the teenage angst that was the core of being a teenager. Give parents something to tear over. Now that Noah had an uninvited guest standing on the auditorium balcony, he wished he didn’t listen to Amy and left that part out entirely.
Noah had gone through this speech before, more times than he could count. The words had been set into his mind, but Amy insisted his delivery and his body language could use a whole lot more work. Noah was valedictorian, he should at least be able to deliver his speech as easily as he breathed.
Noah had never been more thankful for Amy’s coaching, because Noah’s mouth was running on auto-pilot now, albeit probably way too fast to be casual and engaging. Something about how his graduating batch certainly couldn’t have done it without their siblings, whatever, he was going to get this done right and get off the damned stage. Amy's advice had been drilled into his head, however, and he found himself dawdling against his will. Remember to move your head, glance from spot to spot, talk to your audience, and, shit, he was looking up at the balcony in some automated attempt to lock eyes with the absent audience there. Now he couldn’t tear his eyes away.
The girl wasn’t just standing there anymore, she was climbing the ledge with a determination that just couldn’t end well.
Noah’s mouth was still moving, but he wasn’t even sure if there were words coming or if he was just fluttering his lips like a goldfish, when the girl leaned forward and let gravity do its work. Instinct had Noah looking away, mouth shut, teeth grit, the moment right before she hits the ground.
“Hey! Noah, I don’t recall telling you to stop.”
Noah practically jumped when Amy Ngo tapped the front of the podium with her rolled up plastic folder. He cracked an eye open and met her glare through her large tortoise shell glasses. Noah only realizes that his hands have been clutching the podium’s sides and that his knuckles are white, his palms sweaty. Noah lets go and wipes his palms on his slacks as Amy makes her way up the stage steps.
“What was that about? You sounded like you were being chased by a dog.” She delivers her next tap on his shoulder. “You okay? Off your game today.”
Noah bites the inside of his lip hard, a bad habit he developed in bringing himself back to focus, and mustered his best smile. It wasn’t very effective. “Kind of distracted.”
Amy’s brows are knotted as she raised her hand to plant it on his forehead. When she leans away, she taps him square on the chest. “Take ten. Your voice is starting to get hoarse.”
Never had Noah been more thankful of Amy’s leadership skills. What Amy said, went, and Noah was definitely going. He turned on his heel to head backstage, just as he hears Amy set up her wooden step at the podium. She was nearly a head shorter than Noah but had found ingenious ways of working her height disadvantage into nearly every activity she was the star of. Naturally this included her salutatorian speech because, as she put it herself, “if there are people taping this event, they better remember me as the funny one and not for my lack of height.”
As Noah stepped around large heavy panels of stage curtain, he could still make out the balcony. The girl was standing there again, about to climb the ledge and reintroduce herself with the floor.
The stage curtains, as well as backdrops left behind from previous school productions, muffled Amy's voice but it also blocked out the fresher air from the open auditorium windows. Backstage smelled like smelled like dust, makeup and hairspray. A certain corner, however, all too conveniently placed en route to the washroom, was practically a nuclear wasteland. Noah highly suspected that a rat had died behind the some of the costume boxes. What better tomb and softer grave than some unfortunate person’s The Winter's Tale costume.
Nothing could prepare Noah for the stench of the washroom. Located at the rearmost area backstage, the washroom was deprived of proper ventilation and apparently archived weeks, maybe even months, of odors. People who came around to use it had obviously never heard of the word ‘flush’ and if they found themselves acquainted, they probably never learned to properly aim for the bowl.
The one saving grace was that the faucets were running and although they spewed rusty water for the first few minutes, the water was cold. Noah splashed several handfuls on his face and combed his wet fingers through his hair. Amy might have been right about him being off his game, but Noah hadn’t exactly been lying about being distracted either.
Everything was a distraction. God damn peripheral vision as a survival tool with no off switch. Noah supported his weight on the sink, fixing his eyes on the mirror in front of him. It was too cracked and dirty to actually reflect anything; it might as well have been a wall. All the same, it was helpful to stare at, especially when Noah's eyes were picking up things in the corner of his vision and his brain was actually supplying things with names. Such as that large dark puddle on the filthy floor, running alongthe spaces between the cracked tiles; too thick to be water, too red to be rust and certainly too dark to be paint. Noah’s brain was certainly putting together an idea of what thing was dangling from the window bars in the toilet stall farthest from the door.
It seemed to be human shaped. That was something Noah had no intention confirming or debunking.
Noah forced himself not to turn his head as he left the washroom and he definitely did not allow himself to run. If anything, this old auditorium had excellent accoustics and the last thing he needed was Amy noticing that he was scrambling back there like a spooked chicken.
By the time Noah had wandered out from behind the stage curtains, the auditorium was darker. The sunlight that had been beating through the frosted auditorium windows was fainter now, and the auditorium was slowly slipping into colder temperatures.
Amy was leaning over the podium, rubber frog topped ball pen in her hand as she scribbled something on her copy of her speech. Her concentration was definitely something worth commending.
“It's pretty late,” Noah said as he wandered back over to her side. He had aimed for casual, and ended up with mostly anxious.
Amy hummed in agreement and didn’t seem to pick up on his tone “I’ve still got ballet,” Amy said a moment later. “Let me just get this and we can go.”
Noah leaned in a little to look at her copy. It was covered in purple and pink ink, with the occasional baby blue bubbles around words Amy should emphasize in her speech. “Can your speech get any longer? I think you’re topping mine by a whole five minutes.”
“That's only because yours is short, dismal and uninspiring.” Amy punctuated this with a pink heart. “Come on, you look absolutely starved. Let’s get you something to eat and maybe let me bribe you into walking me to the jeepney stop.”
On their way out through the entrance, the from the balcony had just hit the floor again and Noah couldn’t stop himself from looking at the awkward splay of her limbs and into her wide bloodshot eyes. She had vanished a beat right before he looked away, leaving not even the slightest trace of her landing on the auditorium’s floor.
*
It turned out that the way to Noah’s heart was fishballs dipped in sweet and spicy sauce. Amy laughed and called him cheap before she purchased a stick of fishballs of her own.
With the sun steadily dipping further in the sky, Cebu City practically glowed gold and bathed everything in warm shadows. From the hill upon which St. Jerome’s Academy was perched, you could see the dying sunlight glinting off building windows and roofs. At five o’clock, a large portion of St. Jerome's student populace had already been fetched by their parents or drivers. Noah and Amy lingered at the waiting shed right outside the school's guardhouse, taking small bites of their steaming hot food.
“Maybe you should get some sleep,” Amy said, the moment after she dumped their barbecue sticks into an overflowing trashcan. She made a disapproving hum at the gross neglect of the general population for sorting instructions before she reached for Noah’s arm and tugged. “Come on.”
“I get plenty of sleep.” Noah was still waiting for his bicycle to be lowered from the bicycle tree. The moment it was within arm's reach, he unhooked the rope from around the front of his bike. “Six hours of sleep a night, mom, as a minimum. I solemnly swear. Don’t send me to bed without dessert.”
Amy rolled her eyes and tugged harder on is wrist until Noah started walking with her, his bike going click-click-click beside them. “Real sleep. At a human hour. Stop staying up all night, fapping over Bradley Cooper.”
Despite himself, Noah chuckled and bumped his shoulder against hers. She bumped back, harder than necessary, and flashed him her worst glare. “You’re worse than my Atsi Anne, do you know that? I’d feel sorry for your kids.”
“I’m being serious, Noah Martelino. This is my serious face. You're off your game. I thought you had memorized your speech.”
Noah resisted the urge to deny it but denial only provided jet fuel to Amy. He was definitely regretting his suggestion for her to pursue Law. Woe to all members of the court. “I have,” he said. “All one thousand something words of it.”
“Then what's the problem?”
Ghosts, Noah's mind supplied before he beat it back into silence. “Nervous, I guess.” At Amy's raised eyebrow, Noah quickly continued. “Look, it’s a big deal. High school graduation.”
“Being valedictorian.”
“Exactly. I’m going to have to open the ceremony with a speech and provide the buffer for your extremely moving and awe-inspiring tale.”
Amy laughed and punched him in the side. For someone her size, she could really land a hell of a blow. “Flattery will get you nowhere, Mister Martelino. You still need to get your act together for Monday.”
“Jesus, were you born into this world a mom?”
“Watch your language. Your Atsi needs to beat some sense into you. I can’t even begin to imagine the kind of guy you would be without me to guide you.” Their feet had carried them to Amy’s usual jeepney stop. The sun had dipped lower into the horizon, sharpening and darkening the shadows around them. Despite this, Amy’s features were softer. Dare Noah consider it, actually worried. “When we get to practice, you better upstage me. Bring your damn sparkle with you.”
Noah's eyebrow twitched upwards. “Sparkle?”
“Of course. Because you don’t have a hint of charisma.” Amy turned towards the incoming traffic and raised a hand. A moment later, a jeepney rumbles to a halt next to her. “Mark my words,” she says as she tiptoes to peck Noah on the cheek; Noah has to lean down to meet her half way. “There will be consequences.”
Noah smiled and shooed her off. “Go on, before people in the jeep think we’re shooting a telenovela.”
Amy climbed into the jeepney, hefting her large backpack behind her, and waved at him from her seat. The jeepney starts again, rumbling as it blends into the traffic flow and disappears into the sea of evening traffic.
Standing alone at the jeepney stop, Noah heaves a sigh and starts to mount his bicycle. Amy could fuss over him all she liked but her fussing wasn’t exactly going to exorcise the spirits of the auditorium. He had sensed them before, that gut-deep knowledge that you are not alone, even if your eyes tell you otherwise. Noah's always had a sense for the unseen but it was only recently that he started actually seeing them. Occasionally there was the disembodied cry, sometimes footsteps and even doors suddenly closing with a force stronger than just a breeze. But to be able to behold spirits with his own eyes unnerved Noah in ways that he couldn’t begin to explain.
If they kept that up, who knows how badly Noah was going to slip up at his actual graduation ceremony. He hated getting on stage other than for competition purposes and to be expected to impress an audience was simply not in Noah’s job description.
Above him, the dying light prompted the street light to activate and Noah found himself standing in the middle of a spotlight. Great, even the street lights were mocking him. Even worse, if his watch was anything to go by, he was running late. He had promised to get home before six thirty but with how slow everything seemed to be going, Noah would be thankful if he arrived home by seven.
Noah cursed under his breath and looked up to check the traffic lights. The red light seemed to stare back at him like an eye with too much iris, steady and unblinking. In spite of himself, Noah shuddered. The last of the afternoon heat wasn’t quite lost to the rapidly darkening sky yet but that light raised the hair on the back of Noah's neck. It was suddenly too bright, rivaling a spotlight, and fixed on him.
No, wait. It wasn’t the light. Time seemed to have slowed down to a snail’s pace. In front of him, the traffic was flowing like a river, a great big blur of motion and sound. Everything blended into a thick syrup of sensation and hyperawareness; every effort felt like it was underwater.
Noah was aware that there was something behind him. A mist that had settled, right on his back and it seeped through his clothes, through his skin and into his bones. Noah was not superstitious, but he had learned a long time ago that one should never look over their shoulder if they felt like someone was staring at them. Unfortunately, Noah was never good at following his own instructions.
Noah turned his head and he could practically hear his bones and his muscles moving under his skin. Right outside the halo of the spotlight, there was a tall and gangly figure. Noah squinted through the streetlight and could make out scraps of cloth that was supposed to pass for clothes and long dirty and matted hair. A taong grasa, one of Cebu City’s homeless, quite literally a person covered in grease. Noah could make out dark smudges on the man's legs, his bare arms and all over his chest. The longer he stared, the more that he realized that these weren’t just smudges; they were too long and sweeping to be anything but done with intent. Almost as if the person had been drawing on his chest and he’d come up with...
Was that an eye?
Noah blinked and forced himself to look somewhere else. Anywhere else. He ended up looking at the man's face. Behind a thick and unruly beard, there wasn’t just grease smears on this man’s face. There was nothing at all, just one big black smear; like someone drew a face in pencil and smudged it out with their thumb. There were no discernable features, nothing that even resembled a face, just an abyss and out of it, stared two wide eyes that made Noah want to bolt. Sclera so blood shot that from where Noah was standing, they appeared to be completely red and irises the color of blank paper.
Look away right now. Noah was sure he commanded his body to turn his head away as fast as he could but the air was practically jello. It felt like minutes before Noah was locking eyes once more with the traffic light, still staring at him with its single red eye. In the cage of Noah's ribs, his heart is racing and practically pounding to be freed. Each breath he took was horrible; too thin, not enough to fill his lungs, but packed with so many smells. The garbage from the sewer, the exhaust from the cars speeding in front of him, the heat from the asphalt.
With each passing second, the sun was sinking lower until Cebu City’s sky was inky purple and the shadows around Noah were as black as ink. Noah's senses were overloaded; it shouldn’t even be possible but he could practically hear each step the taong grasa took in his direction. The man's bare feet scraped on the dry cement of the sidewalk. Scrape, thud, scrape, thud.
Noah had never been more aware of someone standing behind him in his life and he couldn’t help but wonder if this was what wild prey felt like out in the jungle. The cold that had been running down Noah’s spine was now a fist clamped around his heart. The taong grasa exhaled, a rattling breath like it was sick, and opened his mouth. Noah can hear the flex of his jaw, muscles straining and lips pulling back--
Something penetrates Noah's veil of hyperawareness. A distant engine roar, steadily getting louder until its rumble was the only thing Noah heard, like thunder rolling across the sky. A giant black motorcycle sped past Noah, light singing off the perfect polish. It sped past cars and darting in and out of traffic like a rebellious fish and was gone before Noah even had a chance to follow it with his eyes.
Noah released a breath he didn’t realize he was holding in and his brain finally catches up to him. The air is no longer cold and time no longer had the consistency of molasses. And more importantly, the taong grasa was gone.
Certain amounts of Yoav and My Chemical Romance may have been consumed during the writing process. Oops. Nothing screams teenager more than MCR.