The drive is smooth until you hit EDSA again, just past the Magallanes Station. For some reason, the stretch is filled with heavy-loading trucks and busloads of people on their way north, and half of the avenue is blocked by workmen and piles of rubble. Kian swears and swerves to another lane, only to be hit by another tangle in the mounting traffic jam.
"I don't think we'll get you back home so quickly, Chel," he says sleepily. You can recognize the warning signs from when you were younger-Kian would become more talkative in an effort to stave off the drowsiness. "I'm sorry."
"You can just drop me off at the next station," you say nervously. "At least you can go home and sleep, right? Not a problem."
"What kind of a best friend would I be if I don't bring you home properly?"
You laugh. "The kind that would kill us in a traffic jam because he could barely keep his eyes open."
"Well, either way, your parents would kill me," he says, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hands and leaning to the front (Sign Number Two). "I can't leave you here, but I sure as hell don't think that it will clear up soon."
"Who knows?" you tell him, falsely optimistic. "Maybe it will clear up after this stretch."
But thirty minutes later, the car barely moved ten meters. The world seems to have stopped. Kian is staring straight ahead. You adjust your skirt modestly around your thighs, clasping your hands in the middle like a proper Catholic schoolgirl. The air conditioning sputters and spits out small clouds of cool air. The CD has stopped; the interior is quieter than what you imagined a tomb to be like.
Kian peers outside. "My turn's coming up soon. I don't think this traffic will clear up."
You shrug. "If you have a couch and a spare toothbrush, I don't mind crashing over at your place."
He looks exceptionally relieved that the suggestion came from you. "If you're sure…" he says, his voice trailing off hopefully.
You nod, your fingers surreptitiously trailing across the fabric of your shirt, right above the scar. He knows about the operation, but he has never seen the scar. You hope the night won't come to that.
You were fifteen and stupid, and already three months into the pregnancy when you discovered the situation. The boy was also fifteen and stupid, and promptly stopped returning your increasingly panicky phone calls and text messages. Twice, you went to his house, but the maid answered both times and denied emphatically the presence of the Drs. Hernandezes'
único hijo.
Desperate, you remember the story of one of your friends about the illegal clinics that litter the side streets of the city, and resolve to visit one of them. You bring three thousand pesos and the girl who told you the story, and take a jeep to Sta. Mesa. It started raining lightly then, making the streets look like pea soup, the street canals carrying with it the vestiges of the city: candy wrappers, plastic wrappers of all colors of the rainbow, dead rats and bloody cats gutted by careless drivers.
You didn't know what pain was until you fainted from it. Later on, you remember your friend telling you that there was blood, too much blood, and they had to give you a transfusion. But it was a black market clinic, and the blood was tainted, and it was only three weeks after the operation that you realized that it wasn't just any kind of disease known to man, but something other than of this world.
At first, the bleeding refused to stop. You had to buy rolls of gauze and change your bandages every hour just to avoid staining your clothes. Suspicious, your parents assigned a chaperone, Ate Babing, who spent more time chatting up the tricycle drivers at the corner store than watch you go off with your friends. There was no pain, which surprised you, just a damp feeling around your midsection, like a patch of grass after a summer shower.
And then you learned about others of your kind. They came to you just as the clock struck midnight: all women, with hair flowing like forest vines around their faces and leathery, batlike wings. All of them were also able to separate their upper halves from their lower halves, the edges of their stomachs distended and glittering from a night's frenzied feeding. You wanted to weep when you saw them, floating outside your window, looking at you with dead eyes, calling you forward. You knew what they were, you knew the stories, half-whispered to children in order to fear the dark, the beat of shadow wings. You thought that being in the city would make you safe.
But you had to accept it. A part of you knew that this was all your fault, and you had to learn how to accept consequences. And if this was punishment for that one night of bliss, then so be it.