Page 13 of Chasing Mr. Prefect

“This, here,” Miss Co exclaimed, pointing towards me with her palm up. “Temper.”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, realizing my voice got louder.

“Sorry, let me try that again. I’m temperamental, not lazy, and I’m doing my best.”

“I know that. From the looks of this, Cholo does, too.”

“Then why are you all acting surprised?” I asked, pouting a little. “I know Cholo wrote me off that day, but I didn’t expect you to do that, too.”

Miss Co stared at me for a bit before folding her arms and leaning back into her office chair.

“Okay na? You’re done?” she asked me, the way a parent would address a tantrum-throwing child.

I made another face at her.

“I just said I’m proud of you. I didn’t say you were hopeless, and for the record, I never wrote you off. I’m just happy with your progress. That’s all. Pwede ba ‘yun?” Miss Co said, leaning towards me now with an affectionate smile.

I looked away because it made me a bit uncomfortable.People in my life usually looked at me with only three expressions: indifferent (kids from school), patronizing (authority figures), or scared (my family). Seeing affection was unfamiliar and daunting to me.

I acted out when I thought my favorite teacher in the world wrote me off. Now that I knew it was the other way around, my instincts were telling me to run.

What the fuck, Vinnie.

“Sorry. I jumped to conclusions. It’s probably the hunger talking. I’ll go home now,” I said, thoroughly embarrassed and leaving my seat in a hurry.

“Vinnie?”

“Yep?”

“There are people who believe in you,” she said, which made me look back. Miss Co, always the wise soul, must have noticed how uncomfortable I was earlier that she avoided my eyes now, focusing instead on the rest of the document. “I hope you do, too.”

“Thank you, Miss Co,” I replied, not knowing what else to say to that.

She gave me a warm, encouraging smile before I made my way out.

CHAPTER 8

This joining-a-club thing was turning out to not be such a bad idea after all.

It was difficult at first, seeing how I was not visible at all the past two years, but I saw what I was missing out on. I now had lunch buddies who were not Gian Magsaysay, a better schedule that forced me to be more efficient with my workload, and a social life.

Asocial life.

That was mostly due to Cholo, Gian, and the Ephemere kids insisting on tagging me along during the weekends. They were not in the same circle but it seemedthe club had a different event every other week. It looked like it was normal for them to be present at every single thing. Cholo and his team would always use the line“I have some Ephemere things to discuss with you, Vinnie, is that okay?”and I would have the excuse that I lived far away. However, Gian heard that one time and volunteered to drive me because he was always present anyway.

Eventually, I ran out of excuses to not go and just didn’t bother. I would rather eat my own foot than admit it but I started liking it at some point.

And then there was Prefect Brat who was just everywhere. He would appear out of thin air like a mushroom and talk to me about Ephemere and then academics. He would grill me about my answer to the latest seatwork in 170 and ask if I had read this article, if I heard about that new guerilla campaign for this product, if I thought a certain approach would work differently for the event, and so forth.

I first tried to assess if he was just trying to annoy me like before but I found myself enjoying the conversations as I genuinely loved marketing management and intended to do it for a living once I graduated. He also started dragging me along to these pre-exam refreshers that my orgmates did for the major subjects.

“See, I told you that wasn’t so bad,” Cholo said as we were walking away from the posted scores of the most recent Accounting exam on the bulletin board. “Taas ng score mo, o!”

“Excuse me, it wasn’t like my grades were bad,” I said.

“I didn’t say they were! I just thought you could do better and I was right!Look at you, top 3!” he said, as Cholo just loved being right. “And didn’t you say you could still get cum laude with your current standing?”

“Yes, I could, but I have Finance 2 this sem, too, and that’s a big—hold on,” I said, stopping in my tracks. “I don’t think I ever told you that, Prefect Brat. How’d you know this?”