It was raining the day I arrived in Manila.
The jeepney driver told me that the rain on Taft Avenue lasted all through July.
He said it with the tired voice of someone who had repeated the same line to a hundred passengers.
I nodded and held my bag tighter on my lap.
Water dripped from the roof onto my left knee, and I let it drip.
“Are you a student, Miss?” he asked through the mirror.
I answered, “Transferee po. Hiraya Normal University.”
“Ah, HNU. So you would be a teacher in the future”
“Yes, po. I hope so.”
I smiled politely while my stomach turned over.
I had left the provincial state college where I spent two years, my friends, and the small apartment my grandmother had paid for with her last savings.
I carried one scholarship letter and a bag that smelled like fabric softener.
Nobody waited for me in this city, and I had decided to accept that.
The jeepney stopped near the LRT station.
The noise hit me all at once.
Horns, vendors, the screech of the train above, and people squeezing past each other under their umbrellas.
I stepped down, and my sneakers sank into a puddle much deeper than it looked.
“Welcome to Manila, Lira,” I muttered to myself.
I had expected the city to feel heavy.
Lola Pacita used to say that Manila was a place that remembered everything.
She said it while she peeled sweet potatoes on the porch, and I took it as one of her stories.
Everything she said sounded like a story.
The old gods who lived in the trees, the soldiers who walked at night, the names nobody wrote down.
“If you ever go there, apo, listen carefully,” she told me once.
“The ground will talk to you.”
At that time, I laughed and told her the ground had no mouth.
She only smiled and kept peeling.
I walked along the wall until I reached the gate.
The Hiraya Normal University stood in front of me, and for a moment I forgot about the rain.
The Main Building was bigger than it looked in the photos.
Its pale neoclassical front had darkened with water, and the columns rose up as if they were holding the gray sky on their own shoulders.
In the quadrangle, old Acacia trees spread their branches wide, and the wet leaves shone under the lamp posts even though it was only afternoon.
So this is where I’ll learn to teach the next generation, I thought.
It sounded too grand for a girl standing in a puddle with a soaked bag.
I showed my ID to the guard and walked inside.
The students around me carried folders and cheap umbrellas, and they complained about quizzes and enrollment lines.
It was an ordinary school day.
I felt relief wash through me, and a little embarrassment that I had been so nervous.
That was when it happened.
I was halfway across the quadrangle when every sound vanished.
The change came instantly, as if someone had pressed a button.
Rain kept falling in front of my eyes, and I watched it hit the ground in complete silence.
I stopped walking.
The sky above the Main Building turned red.
The color was dark and thick, like something that had been spilled across the clouds.
The columns cracked from top to bottom, and long black stains ran down the walls.
The Acacia trees burned with flames that gave off no smoke.
Between their roots, shapes lay on the ground, and I could not tell whether they were soldiers or students.
Someone screamed far away.
I could not tell if it was a man or a woman.
My mouth opened, and no voice came out.
Then I saw it.
At the top of the steps, in the doorway of the Main Building, stood a tall and thin figure with a smooth blank space where its face should have been.
Its body bent forward as if it were smelling the air.
The head turned toward me slowly.
It knew I was there.
Run, my body said.
Run, run, run.
My legs stayed rooted to the ground.
“Miss? Miss, are you okay?”
The noise returned like a wave breaking over my head.
I heard the rain, the chattering students, and a motorcycle somewhere outside the gate.
The sky was gray again.
The columns stood pale and clean.
The walls were spotless, the trees were green, and the doorway at the top of the steps was empty.
A girl with a yellow umbrella held my elbow.
She had a round face and bangs cut a little too short, and she watched me with pure concern.
I realized I was breathing like I had just run a kilometer.
“Sorry. I’m fine. I just…” I swallowed.
“Did you see that?”
“See what?”
I looked at the steps.
Students walked up and down, laughing and shaking water from their bags.
Everything looked ordinary.
“Nothing,” I said.
“I think the trip made me tired.”
The girl tilted her head.
She seemed unconvinced, but she smiled anyway.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost. It happens. This school is old.”
I forced out a laugh.
“Do you say that to everyone?”
“Only to people who stand in the middle of the quad and stare at the building like it owes them money.”
That was how I met Marisol Dimaculangan.
She insisted that I call her Sol.
She also insisted on carrying half of my bag, even after I told her three times that I could manage.
By the time we reached the registrar, I had learned that she was a second-year Education major, that she came from Batangas, and that she had a younger brother who ate soap when nobody watched him.
“The soap part was a joke” she added.
“Which part is the joke?”
“The eating part. He only licks it. For the taste.”
I laughed for real this time.
The sound surprised me.
It was the first moment of that day when my fear loosened its grip.
The enrollment office was chaos.
The line stretched out the door, and the clerk sounded like she had given up on life.
It took two hours to settle my papers, and Sol waited the whole time.
When I asked her why she stayed, she shrugged and said that I looked like someone who would get lost.
“You read me well,” I admitted.
“I’m an expert on getting lost. It’s my talent.” She said it so seriously that I could not tell if it was a joke.
When we finally came out, the rain had softened into a drizzle.
The sky had changed from gray to deep blue.
Sol pointed at a long building at the edge of the campus with warm lights in its windows.
“That’s Normal Hall,” she said.
“Women’s dorm. Your scholarship housing, right?”
I checked my paper.
“Room 212.”
“Oh my God.” Her eyes widened.
“That’s my room.”
“Are you serious?”
“Very serious. My roommate left last month, and nobody wanted her bed because the aircon makes a noise.” She grinned.
“Now it’s yours. Congratulations.”
“That sounds like a warning.”
“It’s the best congratulation I can offer.”
Normal Hall was older than I expected.
The hallways smelled like floor wax and damp wood, and the stairs creaked under every step.
A dorm supervisor with a clipboard checked my name and handed me a list of rules.
Curfew began at ten.
Visitors left by eight.
Cooking stayed outside the rooms.
“Rice cookers count as cooking,” she said without looking up.
“If someone owned one, I would pretend I never heard about it.”
“I own nothing like that,” I said.
“Wise choice.”
Sol covered her mouth to hold in her laughter.
Room 212 was small.
It held two beds, two desks, and a window that faced the quadrangle.
Sol had decorated her half with fairy lights and notes pinned to the wall.
A thick, worn notebook sat on her desk with a rubber band around it, and stickers covered the whole cover.
“My journal,” she said when she noticed me looking.
“I write everything down. What I ate, who I met, what the professor said. I’m a forgetful person.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It’s better than forgetting.” She said it more quietly than the rest of her sentences.
Then she brightened again and pointed at the empty bed.
“That one’s yours. Leave the aircon alone.”
I put my bag down and sat on the thin mattress.
My body finally relaxed.
The window beside me stood open a crack, and I could smell rain and old leaves.
Below, the Acacia trees swayed under the lamp posts.
I stared at them for a long time.
What had I seen?
What was that thing?
I wanted to believe it was exhaustion.
People saw strange things when they were tired, and a sensible person would accept that explanation.
Yet I could still feel the heat of those burning trees on my face.
I could still see the way that blank head had turned toward me, as if it had been waiting for me all along.
It knew me.
I shook my head and told myself to stop.
“Lira?” Sol asked.
She sat cross-legged on her bed, looking at me over the edge of her notebook.
“You’re doing the thing again.”
“What thing?”
“The staring-at-the-quad-like-it-owes-you-money thing.”
“I’m just thinking.”
“About what?”
I hesitated.
If I told the truth, she might think I was crazy.
If I lied, I would be lying to the first person who had shown me kindness in this city.
In the end, I chose a piece of the truth.
“My grandmother used to say that Manila remembers everything.”
Sol’s pen stopped moving.
For a second, her face turned completely serious.
It was a strange expression on someone who had joked all day.
Then it vanished as fast as it came.
“Your grandmother sounds smart,” she said.
“She was good at stories.”
“Then maybe she’s right.” Sol shrugged and wrote something on the page.
I could not see what it was.
“Come on. Let’s eat. You haven’t had dinner, and the canteen closes soon. I’ll show you the best siomai on campus.”
“Is it really the best?”
“It’s the only one. So yes.”
I laughed and followed her out the door.
We went down the creaking stairs and out into the drizzle.
Sol opened her yellow umbrella, and we walked close together to share it.
The campus had gone quiet.
The lamp posts glowed like small moons, and a few students hurried back to their dorms with plastic bags of food.
As we crossed the quadrangle again, I felt something new.
A thread tugged at the back of my head, gentle and steady.
I stopped under the Acacia nearest the Main Building and looked up.
At the very top of the bell tower, a small blue light flickered in the wind.
Beside it, a shape lay stretched out on the roof with one arm thrown over its face.
Someone was sleeping up there, in the rain.
“Lira?” Sol called from a few steps ahead.
“Coming,” I said.
Before I turned away, something warm and damp brushed against my ankle.
I looked down and found a scarred gray cat sitting in the wet grass, gazing at me with eyes far too sharp for an animal.
One of its ears was torn.
Its tail curled slowly around its paws.
The cat stayed silent and watched me, the way a guard watches a visitor who has finally stepped through the gate.
[A hidden Degree has been detected.]
[Subject: Espiritu, Lira. Location: Prime Nexus.]
[Observation has begun.]
I had no idea where those words came from.
They sounded clear and cold, as if someone had written them for another reader and I had overheard by accident.
My heartbeat rose into my throat.
“Lira! The siomai!”
“Yes! Coming!”
I ran after Sol and kept my eyes forward.
Behind me, I could feel the cat’s gaze following me until I disappeared into the rain.
Bear with me..
I’m cooking something — a masterpiece.