Chapter 7
Robby was already there when Allan arrived, sitting at the same corner table they used to claim as teenagers, back when the library had been less about books and more about being the one place in town where nobody’s mother could walk in unannounced.
He stood when he saw Allan, which felt, somehow, more nerve-wracking than if he’d stayed seated.
“Hi,” Robby said.
“Hi,” Allan said back, and sat down across from him before either of them could decide this was a terrible idea and leave.
For a moment, neither of them said anything. The fan turned. In some corner of the stacks, a librarian who had also not changed since 2009 coughed once and went back to ignoring them, same as always.
“I rehearsed this in my head all night,” Robby admitted finally, laughing a little, humorless. “And then I forgot everything.”
“Starting with ‘sorry’ usually works,” Allan said, and it came out gentler than he meant it to, an offering rather than an attack.
Robby nodded, and his shoulders dropped, like he’d been given permission to stop performing composure.
“Sorry,” he said. “I mean it. Not just to get this over with, not just to end the conversation. You know, that night, right? In the locker room.”
“I know,” Allan said quietly. He’d never once, in ten years, forgotten it.
“You had a notebook back then,” Robby said. “Your sketchbook. It fell out of your bag at the lockers while we were changing after practice.” He stopped, jaw working. “You’d written something about me. A drawing too. Miggy saw it and read it out loud. In front of the whole team.”
Ten years ago.
The locker room after Friday practice smelled like every locker room in every movie about boys who peaked in high school: rubber, sweat, and Axe body spray applied like a dare. Allan had ducked in only to grab his brother’s forgotten gym bag, in and out, thirty seconds, tops.
His own bag caught on the bench as he turned. The zipper had been broken for a week. He knew that. He still hadn’t fixed it.
The sketchbook hit the tile with a sound too small for what it was about to cost him.
“Oh, what’s this?” Miggy said, already crouching, already too fast for Allan to lunge past three other guys and get there first.
“Miggy, give it back—”
“Relax, ano ba.” Miggy flipped it open with the offhand cruelty of someone who had never once in his life had anything to hide.
A page fell open on its own, like the book had chosen the worst possible moment to cooperate: a careful, unmistakable drawing, a boy mid-laugh, varsity jacket slung over one shoulder, and underneath it, in handwriting Allan would spend the next decade wishing he’d never let exist on paper: R.
— the way he laughs when he thinks no one’s watching.
I don’t know what to do with how much I notice him.
The room didn’t go quiet. It got louder, the particular loudness of boys who’d just found something to be loud about.
“Oh my God,” someone said. “Oh my God, Robby—”
Robby was three lockers down, half into his shirt, and Allan watched—would keep watching, replaying it at 2 a.m. for the next ten years—the exact second Robby’s face processed what was happening.
The flicker of something real. Fear, maybe, or recognition, or just seventeen years of not knowing what a varsity captain was allowed to feel in front of his whole team.
And then Robby laughed.
Not loud, not even really cruel. Just enough. Just enough to close the distance between himself and the rest of the room, just enough to make sure nobody looked at him next.
“Read it again,” someone said, delighted, and Miggy did, doing the voice, doing the “notice him” like it was the funniest thing that had ever happened in that building, and Allan stood there in the doorway with his brother’s forgotten gym bag still in his hand, waiting for Robby to do literally anything else, and Robby didn’t.
Allan didn’t remember walking out. He remembered the concrete outside tilting a little, and the exact, humiliating clarity of understanding, all at once, that he’d have to sit next to these people in homeroom on Monday, and the one after that, and the one after that, for an entire year, and that the boy he’d written that page about had just decided, in under four seconds, exactly where Allan ranked against being laughed at.
He didn’t go back for the sketchbook. Someone left it on the bleachers that night, rain-damaged, half its pages fused together. He threw the whole thing out without opening it again.
Three days after graduation, he was on a bus to Manila.
Back at the library table, Robby’s voice had gone rough in a way Allan had never once heard from him, not even now, not even close.
Allan’s face went hot even now, a decade later, the memory arriving with the same physical force it always had, the fluorescent lights, the laughter, and that particular way the concrete floor had seemed to tilt under him.
“I laughed,” Robby said, and this was the part his voice actually broke on.
“I didn’t; I didn’t stop them. I laughed with them.
Because I was seventeen and varsity captain, and I was scared they’d think I had something to do with it, or that I knew, or I don’t know.
I don’t have a good reason. I was just scared, and I chose my fear over you. ”
“You didn’t just laugh,” Allan said, low, the old anger finally surfacing after years of being carefully filed away under jokes and deflection.
“You didn’t say anything after. The whole summer, the whole next year, nothing.
You avoided me. I ran off to Manila three days after graduation, and you never once reached out to ask if I was okay. ”
“I know. I want to say I was scared too back then; that’s why I didn’t reach out, but I also know that’s not a reason.
It’s just an excuse so I wouldn’t have to face how badly I messed up.
” He looked down at his hands, at the scarred table between them.
“I thought about you every day, at first. Then, little by little, I just trained myself to stop. Then Ver told me you weren’t coming back, that maybe you really weren’t. And I just accepted it. Wrong.”
“Ten years, Robby.”
“I know,” he said again, and this time his voice actually shook. “Ten years I’ve owed you a ‘sorry,’ and I just kept waiting to be caught off guard into saying it, because it’s easier to be scared than to actually come find you.”
“I have to tell you something else, too, while I still have the nerve,” Robby said, not quite meeting his eyes.
“I liked you back then. Before the locker room, even. I used to invent reasons to walk the long way past your house. And some part of me knew, or at least suspected, that you liked me too. I was too scared of what that would mean about me, in front of everyone, to ever do anything about it. So I didn’t.
And then the locker room, and it made things so much worse I didn’t know how to fix it. ”
“I don’t know how to promise you it won’t hurt like that again,” Robby continued, quieter, like the admission cost him something on the way out. “I know I don’t want to be the reason it does.”
Allan sat with that for a long moment, letting it settle instead of reaching immediately for a joke, the way he usually did whenever something got too heavy to hold with bare hands.
“I blamed myself too,” he admitted, quiet, surprising himself.
“Not just you.” He turned his bag a quarter turn on the table, needing something to do with his hands.
“Before any of this, before you, I already had a whole system in my head for how careful I was supposed to be. I grew up hearing what people said about the boys who weren’t careful.
‘Mag-parlor ka na lang.’ ‘Ano ba, ang lambot mo naman.’ Nobody ever said it about me, specifically.
But I heard it enough times about other people that I built an entire personality around never finding out if they’d say it about me too. ”
Robby didn’t do the thing Allan had half-braced for, some too-smooth, therapist-careful reassurance. He just went quiet and actually listened, the way he’d learned to, apparently, somewhere in the last ten years.
“I couldn’t even say the word out loud for the longest time,” Allan went on, quieter now.
“BAKLA. I’d think it and flinch. Like saying it about myself made every ugly thing I’d ever heard said about somebody else suddenly true about me too.
” He laughed, short and humorless, and was immediately embarrassed by the sound of it. “Sorry. Reflex.”
“Shame,” Allan said finally, like the word had been sitting behind his teeth the whole time. “That’s—yeah. I was so ashamed of who I was that I made myself small before anyone else even opened their mouth.”
Robby just nodded.
“It took me embarrassingly long to figure out the problem was never the word,” Allan said.
“It was everything I’d watched people use it to punish people like me.
I just inherited the fear without ever once being the actual target of it.
Which is its own stupid kind of unfair, honestly, being scared of a thing that mostly happened to other people. ”
“I kept thinking, if only I’d been less obvious, if only I’d been more careful,” he said, “but I shouldn’t have had to be careful just to be respected in my own home.”
“No,” Robby said immediately, fiercely, the first flash of real heat in his voice the whole time they’d been talking. “You have nothing to blame yourself for. We—I should’ve been the one to change. Not you.”
“I know that now,” Allan said. “But you know how it is; knowing something in your head is different from knowing it in your heart. It took me a long time before I actually felt it.”
Robby reached across the table then, slowly, giving Allan every chance to pull away, and rested his hands near Allan’s without quite touching it, a question, not a claim.
“What do I need to do,” he said, “to earn your forgiveness? Just tell me. Anything.”
Allan looked at his hands for a long moment.
“Nothing,” he said finally. “You don’t need to do anything to be forgiven.
You already did it: you said ‘sorry,’ and you meant it; you didn’t run from it.
That’s that.” He exhaled, something loosening in his chest that had been clenched for a decade.
“What’s left is I still have to decide how I move from here. And that’s on me, not you.”
“I know,” Robby said. “I don’t want to force anything. It’s just, slowly, I want to try if you’ll let me. Friends first, at least. If that’s all you can manage.”
Allan’s throat tightened, but for a completely different reason than a minute ago.
“We can be friends, sure,” Allan agreed, and let himself, finally, close the small remaining distance and rest his hand properly over Robby’s. “Anything further, we figure out as we go. I’m not saying no. I’m just saying, not yet, not all at once.”
Robby’s mouth curved, cautious and real, the first true smile Allan had seen from him since arriving that didn’t have a joke loaded behind it as backup.
“Noted,” he said. “I’ll be patient. I’ve waited over ten years, what’s a little more time?”
“Hoy! Don’t go turning your apology into a kilig moment,” Allan said, laughing despite himself, wet-eyed and unsteady. “There’s a process to this.”
“Right,” Robby said, straightening, deliberately dialing the moment back down to something they could both survive standing up. “I can do that.”
They sat there a while longer in the old, familiar library, the fan turning overhead, the ghost of every afternoon they’d spent here as teenagers finally, quietly, allowed to rest.
It wasn’t a fix, Allan knew better than to expect a decade to dissolve over one conversation, however honest. But it was, for the first time since he’d fallen through that bathroom door four days ago, a real beginning instead of a rerun.
The library, before all of that, had also been the good kind of secret.
Back corner, third shelf from the wall, close enough to the outlet that they could get away with a contraband DVD player balanced on a plastic chair. Robby had smuggled the disc in his gym bag like it was evidence. Got 2 Believe. Pirated, scratched, freezing every eleven minutes exactly.
“Don’t tell your mom,” Robby had whispered, sixteen and delighted with himself. “She’ll make me watch a documentary instead.”
They’d split one pair of earphones, pausing at every footstep in the hall like it was a police raid.
On the tiny screen, Claudine and Rico fell in love in soft focus.
In the corner, two boys laughed at the same lines and very carefully didn’t discuss why their shoulders staying pressed together felt like the more interesting movie.
Allan had spent that whole afternoon quietly torturing himself, cataloging every inch of space between his shoulder and Robby’s like it was evidence in a case he never planned to file.
He wanted, badly, to ask what any of it meant, if it meant anything, if Robby’s pulse was doing the same humiliating thing his own was.
He never asked. Neither of them ever said the word crush out loud, not once, not that whole year, and Allan had told himself that not naming a thing was the same as being safe from it.
Allan had written that whole afternoon into his sketchbook that night. It was, he’d realize a decade too late, the first page in a very long pattern.
Cora, predictably, knew something had shifted the second he walked back into the house.
“Where’s Robby?” she asked, not looking up from the seedlings she was repotting on the porch, which was her version of casual.
“How did you even know—”
“The whole barangay knows,” she said, at ease, patting soil around a tomato seedling with the same precision she’d once used to grade essay exams. “I have one thing to say, and listen carefully, because I’m only saying it once.
” She finally looked up. “You and Robby, only do it because you want to, not because he’s here, not because you’re used to him, not because you liked him then. And yes, I knew, even then.”
“Ma.”
“That’s all I’ll say,” she cut him off, going back to her seedlings. “Now, help me here. This pot’s heavy.”
Allan knelt beside her on the porch, hands in the dirt, and thought, not for the first time since coming home, that his mother had a talent for saying the exact right thing and then immediately pretending she hadn’t said anything at all.