draft324

Barely a second has passed after the lights went bright in the theatre, yet Noah, his teeth chattering in faint bursts, has already pushed his body up off the seat. It folds with a thunk, as neatly as the backpack he brought inside is rumpled, and begins the long walk from the top-most row to the exit to his right.

The bag doesn’t have much inside; clothes, laptop, and the merchandise that he just saw whiz about on the silver screen, some assembly required. Of course, only a super-fan would dare invest this much money and time on plastic toys and the world that surrounds the robots such toys replicate. But given that there were about a hundred-fifty others like him sitting inside the theatre too, who’s there to judge him?

Besides, the franchise is slowly getting popular, at least if the long and noisy line in the ticket booth two and a half hours earlier was any indication.

Now, that same ticket booth is almost empty. Noah spies a lone teller cleaning up the counter; only she, a security guard and a janitor were left to see the moviegoers off. He is the last one to leave, as usual, but he doesn’t mind. It’s always been that way — first to arrive, last to depart.

With some mellow jazz playing over the air, Noah picks up the pace slightly, the bag swaying and occasionally hitting his left thigh as he passes those who left the theatre before the credits rolled. He checks his watch. 10:45 pm. “I’m gonna cut it super close again, am I?” Noah mutters under his breath. Typical.

It’s not until his leap off the escalator that Noah starts to jog, snaking through the men’s clothing section, accessories aisle, and makeup cases, careful not to make the heavy bag swing. His sneakers squeaked against the glinting floors, eyes darting to find his markers in the now dark mall.

Noah has had to plan ahead to navigate this shopping centre, a sprawling glass jungle unlike his old stomping grounds near eAcademy. There are more floors, wider halls and taller stairwells set in free-standing towers, which he found more palatable than escalators on a packed day.

And yet, even with the night-glow signages, it’s actually harder to find any way around, especially if one doesn’t go through the main entrance, as Noah tended to do back then, when he wasn’t feeling like being a good boy. Still, with frequent visits comes adaptation, and more times than not, he’s in and out just in time for the next class to start.
In just five minutes, he makes it out and onto the street, waiting for a jeepney to make a stop where he stood.

But there hasn’t been a jeep yet. For ten minutes, Noah gradually quickens the tapping of his right foot, before gritting his teeth and turning to his right. “Just gonna walk it, then.”

It has worked before because jeeps on this line run past the stroke of midnight to pick up some call centre agents on graveyard shifts and other stragglers desperate for a ride home, which means the drivers crawl through this street to accommodate as many as they can.

Finally, an empty jeepney pulls alongside. Noah doesn’t even wait for it to stop. He enters bag-first and tosses up the fare in one beat before slinging his backpack to his lap.

Another person boards. Sitting opposite him, the woman in braids scoots to the front to pass exact fare, sighing as she slides back. For a turn, their eyes meet, but Noah’s muscle memory makes him look at his watch again. He frowns. Gonna take a while now, huh?

The jeep complies, but Noah still can’t help but look out the window. The only people walking the sidewalk are some shabby children and a couple of suits who aren’t even giving this rickety jeepney a second look. Nearly every door he can make out with his sagging eyes is locked shut at this point; only the odd convenience store shines a bright white beam against the burnt-orange glow of the road.

Mesmerizing though it may be, however, the buzzing inside Noah’s jacket pocket is getting harder to ignore. A jolt. The lock screen shows twenty notifications. Not that any of them looked like they were worth opening his phone for. It must have switched to data. Noah scrolls down, swipes the screen clean, then puts the phone back in.

Two glitzy lovebirds hail the jeep, boisterous in their slurring pillow talk. Noah sees them go on the same side of the jeepney as the office worker, who stirred with a start before snuggling deeper into the railing. For his part, Noah can only curl his lips and roll his eyes at the display of affection (at least they paid straight away -- “and keep the change, ‘nong”).

He’d been like that before, moons upon moons ago. It was the sort of thing that can warrant a suspension at the roll of a dice, so they did it in secret, during weekend sales or movie premieres, intentionally losing themselves in the crowd before finding each other’s hands once more. Usually, it was Noah who pulled the arm, just as he did when they first met. There’s always someplace to be, something to buy, and some spectacle to behold, and he had to be sure she was still by his side. For a time, they were satisfied with window shopping, as they barely even had enough money to buy fries for two.

So when the first thousand pesos began pouring into Noah’s Gcash account on a rainy Monday, he bought two cheeseburgers and tall shakes at the food court by Friday after classes resumed. It wasn’t much, but those — and fresh new shirts for them both — made their term paper even more glorious than the 95 it got from Mr Ortiz, who they dreaded seeing the whole week.

“To think that we nearly could’ve gone to hell if we turned it in late,” Carla cajoles with a slap on a hunched Noah over sips of strawberry shake.

“Yeah,” replies Noah, sucking air in for another bite. “That was, what? 30 minutes before the cutoff, right?”

“No wonder you wanted to run with half the paper while I waited for my print order.”

“Because I had to be in the faculty room.” This time, Noah takes a big gulp, pearls shooting up the straw. “Mm, I mean if it wasn’t for my printer shorting out on me so late at night...”

“I mean I told you to just wait for me but...” Carla pats his right shoulder. “That’s fine. At least we saw it through.”

“No, you did, silly. You marathoned 20 pages in 4 hours, on my notes, too. Could have sworn I was writing gibberish at that point!”

“But it’s your gibberish, so I can still read it,” and Carla shakes with each laugh, getting louder each time.

It’s why Noah had his in-ears on now, his feet tapping more than it did while he stood waiting for this jeep, but the noise only barely cancels out the squeals and guffaws from lovey-dovey scenes he’s witnessing. Maybe peering to the windshield can distract him. The station is still too far away to make a run for. Noah sucks his teeth. He pulls his phone out again. Twenty more notifications. One missed call. Noah doesn’t even bother swiping.

I really shouldn’t have gone to the last full show.

It was right in line with the advice that Carla gave him before, “or else you won’t have a ride home.” Given how far from home the old mall used to be, how shady the sidewalks were at night, and Carla’s curfew, the both of them only had so much time in the afternoons where they can get away with bailing the last subject to stroll by and enjoy some air-conditioning. But that was enough, and the two found themselves hopping between shops, eyes glazed over stuffed toys and G-Shock watches and the latest gadgets only to squint at the sticker prices before moving on.
It was almost the perfect escape from the druthers of trying to achieve something great in such a small computer college, which demands 60,000-peso tuition for subpar lessons in Python and minor subjects with absentee teachers.

Almost.

The real getaway came from the hurried rides home, where the stories continued into meandering asides and baseless rumours that were nevertheless enjoyable because it was coming from the both of them. Sometimes Carla reminds him of projects to complete; sometimes Noah would point out errors in her code. But there was never a moment of silence between them, even as they got off, even as they walked near their homes, even as they peeled off into their own forks in the road.

It made the chilling silence weeks later hurt even more.

Only the two of them were left inside the cabin. Merely craning his neck to look at her drained him, Noah remembers. And even if he did, the emotions only triggered acid reflux.

“I’m just… just so sorry…”

“You still shouldn’t have pulled that shit.”

Truth is, they’d already gone after each other’s throats hours ago. He screamed at her till his vocal cords tore; she backhanded his face in retaliation. Nothing could change the fact that it was her face on the monitor. I’d just gone to pee, chrissakes, but the moment he couldn’t even contact her or find her in the stores she’d regularly visit, he feared the worst. The extra citation on him didn’t help. Neither did the ID card.

“So what’s next then?”

Carla could barely control her sobbing. “I don’t know.”

Noah shakes his head. “Me neither, but we can’t keep this up forever.”

“Maybe.”

“No, we really can’t. Not yet. We’re just tired.”

It was Carla who left first, earlier than she was supposed to. It took all of Noah’s willpower to let her be little more than a silhouette in the dark before he stomped on the jeep’s tin floor.
He’s still stomping now, a week later, trading intensity for frequency. The jeep still trundles on, the couple still cuddles with gusto, the office lady is still soundly sleeping. Carla must have looked a little like her to the other passengers whenever she dozed off and Noah was gazing forward into the sunset-lit boulevard. He’d begin to talk about that robot franchise by that point, knowing it all flew past her, but because she found his voice through a mask soothing, he’d simply carry on talking till they arrived at their destination.

The jeep lurches to a halt as the yellow signal turns red. Noah snaps alert, blinking. He looks at the timer, then his watch. Mulling over what to do, he props his bag up. The station is a block away, but the last train from there is about to leave in a few minutes. Can I run there? But with a bag this heavy—

His phone keeps him in the seat for a moment. This time, Noah doesn’t let the buzz finish.

It’s Carla.

She’s been pinging him throughout the trip.

[Train’s still here. Where are you?]

Noah nearly pushes off a bald man as he runs off the jeep.