Notebook No. 3, continued.
Property of Marisol Dimaculangan.
* * *
Marisol Dimaculangan, present.
*Monday.
Window Six.*
Window Six is called Dean’s Pleasure, and I’d like to file a complaint about the name.
It’s a little alcove at the end of the Corridor with a velvet rope, a green lamp, and a brass plaque that says PLEASE BE PLEASING.
There’s a tall desk behind the rope.
A young man in a gray suit sat there, so stiff and so neat that I thought he might be a mannequin.
He didn’t look at me.
He looked at the form, and then at Lira, and said, “Applicant. You will say something about Rizal. Three sentences. Do not exceed three.”
Lira went pale.
Professor Ibarra had warned her the night before, but she hadn’t had time to practice.
She took a breath and said, “Rizal wrote his last poem the night before he was shot. He hid it inside the base of an alcohol stove so the guards wouldn’t find it. A teacher does the same thing every day, because she hides the best things inside the ordinary ones, and hopes someone will lift the lid.”
That was three sentences.
I counted twice.
The young man in the gray suit stared at her.
Then he said, in a voice that cracked a little, “The Dean will be pleased.”
He stamped her form.
The stamp was gold again.
Aris stood behind us the whole time with his arms folded.
I saw him glance at the stove detail and then at Lira, and he looked as if he’d swallowed a lemon and liked it.
I’m going to guess he wrote it down later.
* * *
Marisol Dimaculangan, present.
*Monday.
Window Seven.*
This is the entry I’ve been dreading, and I’m going to write it very carefully.
Window Seven is at the end of the Corridor.
The linoleum stops there, and the floor turns into old wooden boards.
There’s no frosted glass.
There’s no grille.
There’s only a small desk, a green-shaded lamp, and an inkwell with a goose-quill pen, set on a table that looks like it came from a monastery.
A single chair stands in front of the desk, wooden and plain, with no cushion.
A small brass plaque on the desk says one word.
*WITNESS.*
Lira stopped in front of it.
She looked at the plaque, then at me, then at the empty room behind the desk.
“There’s nobody here,” she said.
“Maybe the clerk is on break.”
“The form says the seventh signature needs a witness. Who’s the witness?”
“The adviser?” I guessed.
Aris shook his head.
“Not the adviser. The Window decides.”
“Decides what?”
“Who it needs.”
That was when the ticket machine, the little red one by the green door, a hundred and seventy steps behind us, made a noise.
I want to explain how strange that noise was.
For seven days, I’d pressed the button on that machine at least twenty times, and every single time, nothing happened.
It never buzzed, never blinked, never spat out so much as a scrap of paper.
I’d started to take it personally.
I’d told it so, out loud, on Wednesday.
Now it dinged.
It was a small, bright ding, like a bicycle bell.
We all turned around.
At the far end of the Corridor, the red machine was glowing, and a long pale ribbon of paper was rolling out of its slot and curling onto the floor.
“What is it doing?” Lira whispered.
“I don’t know,” I said.
The ribbon of paper kept rolling.
It ran down the corridor on its own, a long cream-colored strip, gliding along the linoleum like a snake.
It slid past Window One and Window Two and the canteen’s half-door.
It slithered between Aris’s feet.
It went around Kalasag, who lifted his paws politely to let it through.
And it stopped in front of me, curled up on the toe of my sneaker, and sat there.
I picked it up.
It was a ticket, thin and soft.
A line of type was printing itself across it as I watched, the way letters appear on a screen.
WITNESS NO.
001.
NOW SERVING: MARISOL DIMACULANGAN.
I read it three times.
Then I read it a fourth time, because my hands were shaking and I thought the words might change.
* * *
I can’t describe what happened next in a way that makes sense, so I’ll just write what I saw.
The clerk from Window Two came down the corridor.
She was the tiny old woman with thick spectacles who stamps without reading.
She had left her post.
She walked the whole way down the hall on her own legs, using a cane, one slow step at a time, with her little stamp clutched in one hand.
When she reached me, she stopped.
She tilted her head back, because she was very short and I’m not very tall, and she looked up into my face.
Right at me.
“Now,” she said.
I stood still.
“I told you not yet,” said the old clerk.
Her voice was thin and dry, like leaves in a drawer.
“That was five days ago. Now.”
Then she did something I’d never seen anyone in the Corridor do.
She smiled.
“Go on, child,” she said.
“Sit.”
She patted my arm with a hand as light as a bird, turned around, and went back down the long hall with her cane tapping.
I watched her until she disappeared behind the frosted glass of Window Two.
I realized that I was crying.
I wasn’t sobbing, or making noise.
Tears were running down my face, and I couldn’t stop them, and I didn’t try.
Nobody had ever said that word to me in a tone like that.
Now.
As if I’d been expected.
As if it had been written in a ledger a hundred years ago that one day, a girl named Marisol would show up, and somebody would be ready.
* * *
I walked to the desk.
Lira and Aris stepped back to give me room.
Nobody spoke.
The wooden chair waited in front of the desk, with no cushion, and the plaque said WITNESS, and the lamp shone on the inkwell.
My legs felt like paper.
I put my hand on the back of the chair.
I want to write this part very exactly.
Nobody asks the witness to sit down.
I’ve been to enough meetings, enough group projects, enough orientation days to know it.
The people who matter sit in the middle of the room.
The one who takes the notes sits in the corner, or stands by the door, or holds the camera.
At school, I’m always the one who stays after to put the chairs away.
It doesn’t bother me, because I like to be useful, and I like the chairs.
But I’d walked up to that desk, and everyone had stopped talking, and for one second I didn’t know what to do with my hands.
Then Lira stepped past me.
She didn’t say anything.
She took hold of the chair and pulled it out from the desk, the way you’d do for a guest at dinner.
The legs scraped on the wood with a small friendly sound.
She stood beside it with her hand on the backrest, and she looked at me.
“Please,” she said, “sit.” New chapters come out on g.com first.
I sat.
Her hand rested on my shoulder for one second, light and warm.
Then she took it away and stepped back, next to Aris, and folded her arms, and I saw her look at the floor so that I wouldn’t see her face.
I’m not sure I can explain what that felt like.
I’ve been thinking about it for hours.
It’s very simple.
I’d been pulling out chairs for people my whole life.
Nobody had ever pulled one out for me.
* * *
The quill was heavier than it looked.
I dipped it in the ink.
A thin pale sheet of paper lay on the desk with a single line printed at the top, and under it a blank space, and under that a line for a signature.
The Witness attests that the Applicant has completed the clearance honestly.
Witness is requested to record one true thing that she has seen.
I held the quill over the blank space for a long time.
There were a hundred things I could have written.
I’d seen a girl cry for a plate of soup.
I’d seen a professor wipe his glasses.
I’d seen a boy in a gray hoodie laugh until his shoulders shook.
I’d seen a gold stamp and a green stamp, a cat that wouldn’t growl, a clerk who smiled.
Finally, I wrote the thing that mattered.
I saw Lira Espiritu pull out a chair for me.
I looked at the sentence.
It looked small on the page.
It looked like the truest thing I’d ever written.
I signed my name underneath, the way I always do.
Marisol Dimaculangan, present.
The ink glowed.
It was green first, then gold, then a color I don’t have a word for, a warm clear light that spread out from the letters and filled the paper.
The signature rose from the page and floated in the air for a second, as if it had weight.
Then it sank back in.
The paper rustled.
A voice came from nowhere, from the lamp and the walls and the old wood all at once.
It was soft and gentle, and it sounded a lot like the voice in my head when I’m doing something well.
Witness received.
Entered into the record.
Entered, said the quiet voice again.
* * *
I’m writing this on the bench outside the green door, with a cup of Mang Tonyo’s coffee going cold beside me.
Lira has seven signatures now.
She’ll hand them to the Dean tonight, and tomorrow there will be a ceremony beneath the Acacia trees.
Aris says it will be short.
He says it will involve an oath and a number.
He sounds nervous, which is suspicious, because Aris doesn’t sound nervous about anything.
I looked at the green door for a long time before I wrote this.
Here’s what I know, and I’m going to write it in plain ink so that I can’t change my mind tomorrow:
I’m a witness.
The Corridor says so.
The clerk said, “Now.” Lira pulled out the chair.
I used to think that being invisible was a talent, because it let me watch.
I still think it’s useful.
But for the first time, I’ve started to wonder whether I got so good at being quiet because nobody ever gave me a reason to talk.
I’m going to start talking.
I’ll start with this notebook.
Marisol Dimaculangan, present.
Marisol Dimaculangan, present.
Marisol Dimaculangan, present.
(I underlined it three times.)