Page 70 of Chasing Mr. Prefect

“Fuck’s sake, Vinnie,” he said. “I was so worried!”

My eyes darted everywhere but at him. There was a brown manila envelope on top of his car trunk. The next-door neighbor’s dog was clanging its feeding basin against its steel cage.

“Sorry,” I said, distracting myself from the nasty feeling that had been lingering in my stomach since I talked to Summer. “I lost track of things.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” I replied shortly, still unable to get Summer’s words out of my head and they joined the roots of what she, Miss Mikayla, and Dad said in the past, where they festered and grew. “Do you want to go inside?”

He took the envelope and locked his car, following me inside. I closed the gate and entered the house, feeling my hands grow clammy as I tried to think of how to open up about what was bothering me.

“I was about to surprise you after you came back from the bulletin board,” he told me, handing me the envelope. He looked unsure. I stared at it.

“What’s this?” I asked in a low voice.

“Why does it sound like you already know?” he asked, looking. “Okay, spill. Who among my siblings or siblings-in-law told you?”

I blinked, hardly daring to believe this. Were they in on this? Egging him on, maybe, to change me into something they could show off to their Angkong?

“Cholo, you should have told me first.”

He looked surprised, shaking his head.

“Vinnie, I know it seems like a lot,” he exhaled, trying to reach my hand with his. “I thought you’d be happy?—”

“Didn’t you think I could handle it myself?” I asked. Cholo now looked confused.

“What are you talking about?”

I shoved the envelope against his chest.

“My BA 199 and Feasib class slots!” I replied. “You got me an internship? Signed me up for subjects without my knowledge? You can’t do that, you know.”

“Vinnie, I promise I can explain?—”

“No! You can’t just do things behind my back and manipulate me to get what you want.”

“Manipulate?” he repeated, his eyes growing dark, more sad than angry. “Vinnie, I just wanted?—”

“What? To make sure I don’t mess up?” I cut him off. I should have seen it then, how his eyes pleaded with me to stop and listen, but I was too busy wallowing in my own anger and insecurities to even notice. “To ensure I won’t choose an internship that wouldn’t be up to your standards?”

“Not up to my standards? God, Vinnie, can we pause right there, please, and not get ahead of ourselves,” said Cholo, visibly confused and hurt but still trying regain control of the conversation. “I don’t understand why you’re so upset.”

“‘Yun na nga, eh. You don’t get it! You don’t know what it looks like when you go around doing things behind my back, to find out from other people that you’re working to get me to look like something that would fit your needs?—”

“Vinnie, when did I ever do that? I never asked you to become anything for me,” he said, his voice sounding weak and vulnerable.

I would forever hate myself for not seeing that and for where I let my pride lead us. “You’ll never be okay, will you,” I began, shaking my head and waving a hand between us. “With who Iam. You’ll say that this is okay, that you can deal with it, what I can and can’t be. But I’ll never be enough for you, will I?”

A pause. Cholo looked like I just slapped him.

“Enough?” Cholo let out the word like it was something poisonous. The fight in him was returning and I could see the walls come back up all around him. “Vinnie, you know that all my life I’ve struggled with what that word meant and entailed, don’t you think I would know what it’s like to have someone insinuate that you’re not enough? How can I even think of doing that to you?”

He ran a hand through his hair, his face tired, jaw clenched in an attempt to control himself. “You think I wanted you to turn into something else? God, when we met, you were the opposite of me. You didn’t care what people said or wanted, you breezed through everything and did things effortlessly. You think I forgot about that quiz bee? You were that amazing, smart girl and when we met again, I thought that maybe it didn’t have to matter. Maybe I didn’t have to be so uptight to prove myself after all because you had this I-don’t-care-fuck-you-everybody-manigas-kayo attitude and ended up okay anyway…”

The conversation was going off the deep end, I knew it, but we were way past the point of stepping on the brakes. It was me who had led it off the rails and I stared at him helplessly, not knowing what to say.

“But at the same time you were alone because no matter how tough you wanted to be, you did need company,” he went on. “Well, of course you’d rather die than admit that you were lonely but you were. All I wanted was to be there for you and make you realize what you were capable of, not because you weren’t good enough but because I knew what it was like to grow up alone and have no one to do that for me. I wanted to believe I could do that for you, that I could be needed, but apparently I wasn’t.”

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