Sol called the first week of classes “Syllabus Week,” and she said it with the solemn voice of someone naming a natural disaster.
“Nobody teaches anything,” she explained while she tied her hair into a messy bun.
The fairy lights above her bed were still glowing, and the sky outside our window had turned the soft gray of early morning.
“Every professor walks in, hands out a paper, reads the whole paper out loud, and goes home. We spend five days listening to people read.”
“That sounds relaxing.”
“It sounds relaxing until the fourth hour of the same voice. By Thursday you will pray for a quiz.”
I laughed and pulled my damp socks off the radiator.
The rain had finally stopped during the night, and my first sleep in Normal Hall had been deep and long.
The aircon rattled every few minutes like a tiny machine gun.
I had decided to love it.
My schedule lay on the desk, printed on a crinkled sheet.
History of the Hiraya, Foundations of Education, Hirayan Literature, Social Dimensions of Teaching, and a PE class at six in the morning that made me want to cry.
I read the list three times to make sure it was real.
“You picked the six a.m. section?” Sol asked, peeking over my shoulder.
“It was the only slot left.”
“Then you have my respect and my prayers.” She snatched her notebook from the desk, snapped the rubber band around it, and pointed at the door.
“Come on, Transferee. Today I teach you how to survive PNU.”
* * *
Sol’s survival guide began with the morning walk.
She taught me which gates opened early, which hallways flooded, and which stair landing held the only working outlet on the second floor.
She introduced me to a statue whose nose was polished from decades of students rubbing it before exams.
She showed me the bulletin boards, where every org had pinned posters with fonts that made my eyes hurt.
“Join one,” she advised.
“Any one. Orgs feed you.”
“They feed you?”
“Free merienda during recruitment week. I have eaten seven days of pancit canton from the Math Society. I do not even like math.”
The campus looked different in daylight.
The Main Building shone in the sun with its pale columns and clean steps, and the Acacia trees threw wide shadows across the quadrangle.
Students sat in groups on the grass, comparing schedules and sharing earphones.
Everything felt warm and alive.
I kept glancing at the doorway at the top of the steps.
Nothing stood there.
The wood was brown, the glass was clean, and a janitor was mopping the floor.
Still, my eyes returned to it again and again, the way a tongue returns to a sore tooth.
“You’re staring at the quad again,” Sol said without turning her head.
“I’m admiring it.”
“Admire faster. Your first class starts in ten minutes.”
* * *
History of Hiraya met in a long lecture room on the third floor.
The windows faced Taft Avenue, and the traffic made a steady hum under the professor’s voice.
He was Professor Anselmo Ibarra, a plump man with a red bow tie and a habit of calling every student “my dear.” He read the syllabus out loud, just as Sol had promised, and paused every few lines to tell a story about his own undergraduate days.
I chose a seat in the middle.
Sol sat beside me and doodled flowers in the margin of her notebook.
Around us, forty students shifted in plastic chairs, some writing, some yawning, some sneaking glances at their phones.
That was when I noticed the back row.
Most of it stood empty.
Students seemed to avoid the last seats, as if the shadows there belonged to someone.
In the far corner, beside the window, a young man slept with his head resting on folded arms.
A gray hoodie hung loosely on his shoulders, and a worn canvas bag lay at his feet.
His black hair fell over his eyes, and his breathing came slow and even.
I had no reason to look twice.
Plenty of students slept during Syllabus Week.
Yet my gaze stayed on him, and a strange stillness settled inside me.
Something about him felt familiar, though I had never met him in my life.
“Who’s that?” I whispered.
Sol followed my eyes and made a small face.
“Oh, him. Aris Valeriano. Senior. Secondary Education, I think. Irregular student.”
“Irregular?”
“He takes a different load every semester. He should have graduated two years ago.” She lowered her voice even more.
“People say he sleeps through everything and still passes. The professors never wake him. Nobody knows why.”
“Does he have friends?”
“He has a hoodie.” She shrugged.
“He’s in the canteen sometimes. Always alone. Always looking tired.”
I looked at him again.
A thin shaft of sunlight cut across his shoulder, and for one second I thought I saw a faint blue shimmer along the edge of his sleeve, like light caught on a thread.
I blinked, and it vanished.
Exhaustion, I told myself.
You slept eight hours and you still see things.
“Miss Espiritu?”
My head snapped forward.
The professor stood at the front of the room, holding his paper, with a bright smile on his round face.
“A transferee, I understand. Welcome, my dear. Perhaps you can tell us why the study of history matters for a future teacher?”
Forty faces turned toward me.
My heartbeat jumped into my throat.
I stood slowly.
“Because teachers decide which stories the next generation hears, sir. History lives inside the people who remember it, so a teacher holds that memory in trust.”
The room fell silent.
The professor’s eyebrows rose.
“Well,” he said.
“That is a better answer than I expected before lunch.”
A few students clapped lightly, and Sol grinned at me with both thumbs up.
I sat down with burning cheeks.
From the back corner, a soft sound reached my ears.
It was a low breath, almost a chuckle.
I turned my head just enough to look.
The young man had not moved.
His arms still cradled his head, and his eyes stayed closed.
Yet the corner of his mouth had lifted a tiny amount, and I had the odd certainty that he had heard every word.
* * *
By noon my stomach felt hollow, and Sol hauled me toward the canteen.
The canteen sat at the edge of the campus under a tall tin roof.
Long tables lined the floor, and steam rose from rows of metal trays behind the counter.
The air smelled of garlic rice, fried egg, and simmering adobo.
Students pushed through the line with plastic trays, shouting orders over each other.
Behind the counter stood a broad, gray-haired man in a white apron and a hairnet, holding the longest iron ladle I had ever seen.
He looked up at Sol before she had opened her mouth.
“Marisol Dimaculangan,” he said.
“Tapsilog. Siomai on the side. Extra rice. Iced tea, less ice.”
Sol sighed happily.
“How do you do that, Mang Tonyo?”
“Forty years, hija. I remember everybody’s usual.” His small brown eyes moved to me and stayed for a moment, as if he were reading a menu.
“And this one is new. Give me until Friday. I will guess it.”
“Same as mine,” Sol told him.
“For both of us. And two iced teas.”
“Sol, I can pay for my own,” I said.
“First-day tradition. You can buy me lugaw next week.”
I accepted, because arguing with Sol felt as pointless as arguing with weather.
We found a table near the back wall, beside a cracked window that looked over the tin roofs of the neighboring shops.
The food tasted wonderful.
The beef was salty and tender, the egg yolk ran golden over the rice, and the siomai burst with hot pork in my mouth.
Sol had not exaggerated about the siomai.
It was the best on campus, because it was the only one.
“So,” she said, mouth full of rice.
“Verdict on PNU?”
“The people are kind. The halls are old. The sixth-floor stairwell makes sounds.”
“It’s haunted,” Sol said cheerfully.
“Is it really?”
“Everything here is haunted a little. It’s a hundred-year-old school. Ghosts are part of the tuition.”
I laughed, though a small chill crept along my spine.
Sol watched me with sharp, friendly eyes, and then she opened her notebook and wrote a line.
I tried to read it upside down, but her handwriting looped too fast.
“What do you write about me?” I asked.
“Only good things.” She smiled.
“Such as: Lira Espiritu, transferee, ate three pieces of siomai in under a minute.”
“I ate two.”
“Three. I counted.” She tapped the page.
“That’s why I write it down.”
Her words were light, yet her pen lingered a second longer than the joke required.
I picked up my iced tea.
When I lifted my eyes to drink, I found the cat.
It sat on the windowsill beside our table, one paw tucked beneath its chest.
The same scarred gray cat from last night.
One ear was torn at the tip, and a thin white scar ran across its nose.
Its yellow eyes were fixed on me with a steady, unblinking attention that made the hair on my arms rise.
Cats look at people all the time, and this one looked at me as if it were reading me.
“Oh, that’s Kalasag,” Sol said, following my gaze.
“The canteen cat. Nobody owns him. He’s grumpy. He bites strangers. Mang Tonyo, the cook, feeds him leftover tapa, and in return the cat ignores everybody.”
“Kalasag?”
“Shield. Somebody named him years ago.” She leaned closer to the window.
“Hi, boss. You don’t like newcomers, remember?”
The cat ignored her completely.
Its eyes never left my face.
I set my glass down slowly.
The cat’s gaze dropped to my hands, then climbed back to my eyes, and in that brief motion I understood something I could not explain.
It had counted me.
It had measured the weight of me, the way a guard measures a stranger at the gate.
“I think he likes you,” Sol whispered.
“That’s terrifying. He has never liked anyone.”
“He looks angry.”
“That’s his resting face.”
I held out two fingers carefully, the way I used to approach stray cats in my hometown.
Kalasag studied them for a long moment.
Then he leaned forward and pressed his scarred forehead against my knuckles.
A warm pulse traveled up my arm.
For a heartbeat, the noise in the canteen faded.
I felt a vast presence behind the small body, patient and ancient and fiercely protective, like a great dark shape standing in front of me with its back turned to the world.
Blue fire flickered at the edge of my vision.
Then the sound of clattering trays crashed back over me, and the cat withdrew with a flick of his tail.
“Okay, that was weird,” Sol said slowly.
“That was very, very weird.”
“Very weird,” I agreed.
My hand tingled.
I tucked it beneath the table and tried to look calm.
When I glanced past the cat toward the entrance, a figure was walking into the canteen.
He wore a gray hoodie, with the hood half up and a canvas bag slung over one shoulder.
His hair fell over his eyes.
He moved with the loose, sleepy steps of someone who had never hurried in his life.
Aris Valeriano.
He walked past the line without looking at anyone.
At the end of the counter, Mang Tonyo slid a tray across to him before he could say a word: garlic rice, a fried egg, strips of dark glossy tapa, and a cup of black coffee.
The old cook did not ask what he wanted.
The boy did not say.
He nodded once, took the tray, and sat at a corner table by himself.
Then he laid his head on his arms and closed his eyes.
A regular, I thought, and it struck me that I could not remember anyone else in the whole room being handed a plate without asking.
On the windowsill, Kalasag stood up.
The cat’s back arched, the fur along his spine rose, and a low rumble came from his throat.
His yellow gaze left me for the first time and locked on the sleeping student across the room.
The rumble sounded like a growl, and it carried the exact flavor of old irritation.
“Interesting,” Sol murmured, writing quickly.
“He hates Aris. Everyone else gets ignored, but that one gets a growl.”
Across the canteen, the young man in the gray hoodie breathed in and out, slow and steady.
His eyes stayed shut.
Yet one hand rose from the table, lifted two fingers lazily in the air, and waved them toward the cat in a gesture that said, I know, I know.
Leave me alone.
Kalasag hissed.
“Okay!” Sol clapped her hands.
“I love this school.”
I said nothing.
My heart beat hard against my ribs, and my mind kept returning to a pale-blue shimmer on a sleeve, a quiet smile in a lecture room, and a presence like a guardian standing in front of me.
[Subject sensors have registered contact with a Familiar.]
[Proximity to Tier-1 Archivist: Valeriano, Aris.]
[Recording continues.]
The words slid across my mind like cold water.
I gripped the edge of the table.
Around me, the canteen kept its ordinary noise: chairs scraping, a rice cooker clicking, a radio playing an old love song.
Nobody else had heard anything.
“Lira?” Sol asked, still writing.
“You’ve gone pale.”
“I’m fine.” I forced a smile.
“Just thinking about the sixth-floor stairwell.”
She studied my face for a long moment.
Then she closed her notebook, pushed the last siomai toward me, and said, “Eat. Whatever it is, it looks better after dumplings.”
I ate.
The dumpling was still hot.
And across the room, a sleeping senior and a scarred gray cat went on ignoring each other with great, deliberate effort, while the first week of my new life continued to unfold around me.