My Heart Faint

I wrote this exactly ten years ago. About friends who don't look at each other as friends do.

***

“Hoy, Cassy!” Boggs called out from behind, obviously annoyed that his sleep was interrupted by the inertia of her sudden brake.

Cassy only chuckled and upped the car’s speed from ninety to well over a hundred. Boggs sat up, alarmed, while I only stared at her in amusement. She had never acted this reckless before. No, she had never acted reckless at all. We didn’t even know she could drive a car, let alone treat one like she was on a racetrack. Thankfully, we were driving on an empty highway that early Sunday morning after spending most of Saturday night drunk on vodka. Our little dorm Christmas party got a little out of hand, you see.

“You probably should slow down, Cass,” I told her nonchalantly, or at least I tried to sound as matter-of-factly as I could. She was the type who didn’t like to be told off, and I was the type who always kept his cool. This was Boggs’s car, and truth be known, I was getting worried that we might run into a rogue motorcycle and spend Christmas with broken bones in a hospital. I didn’t trust Cebu’s traffic, not even when the road seemed deserted. Vehicles and pedestrians alike are known to pop out of nowhere, and with Cassy’s less-than-sober condition, it was best to assume the voice of reason.

She stuck out her tongue. “Boo. Don’t be such a grandpa.”

 

***

 

Something jerked at the back of my mind, a memory that had pushed itself to the surface, beckoning me to remember it. It was the night when we were left alone in the dorm common room after everyone had left for summer vacation. She missed her ship earlier that morning, and I was waiting for my parents to arrive from the province the morning of the following day. She had knocked on my room on the second floor (the boys were housed on the second floor while the girls were on the third) and suggested—in that half-playful, half-self-conscious way of hers—that we watch a movie in her room. I immediately said no, painfully aware how a “movie” might turn out to be something else between two young adults left alone in a room. I remember vividly the shadow that overcame her face, and she didn’t bother to hide her disappointment (both at my instant refusal and the malice, which she rightfully detected, that I had attached to her invitation) when she said, “Boo. You’re such a grandpa.” She stomped her way back up to the third floor, her liveliness now completely snuffed out, leaving me to think about her suggestion more rationally.

Cassy wasn’t the type of girl to ask a boy into her room with indecent intentions. I should’ve immediately realized that. We had been friends for four years, and that should have assured me that her invitation was made in earnest and that she really only wanted to see a movie with some company. I started to feel the pang of regret in the pit of my stomach as I realized the subtle prejudice that I had formed against her innocent proposal, how baseless and unkind it was. So I followed her upstairs, my newfound courage awkwardly blending in with my constant dread whenever she is close to me.

 Cass had heard me behind her and promptly turned around, a grateful and teasing smile on her lips. Outside fireworks popped and crackled, but neither of us seemed to have noticed. All this silent space and the stillness of the night was ours, and for some reason or other, we decided we were going to partake in it.

 

***

 

“I’m okay, but Boggs is terrified.” I pointed at Boggs at the backseat, who was holding on to the car seat’s cushions for dear life. He really wasn’t supposed to be at the dorm party as he wasn’t a tenant, but he spent so much time with us at our common room after classes that all our dormmates treated him as one of our own and insisted that he come. He came with his dad’s car, along with five bottles of Smirnoff. Halfway through the last bottle—with the rest of our dormmates passed out on the stairs, the sofas, the bathroom, basically anywhere that offered a horizontal surface—we knew it was time to take him home. He lived in Talisay, and in the wake of the drunken wreckage, only Cassy and I survived, although barely. Between the two of us, however, she seemed strangely more alert, more present, and didn't appear like she had more than a glass worth.

Cass laughed her crisp, childlike laugh, a sound that I had come to associate with Saturday afternoons, when you open yourself up to adventures, when you let life surprise you. From Monday to Friday, Cass was the proverbial nerd, her lap always cradling a book of some sort, a colored pencil tapping her lips in rhythmic intervals. She liked to read like that in the common room, and she was always a lovely sight on occasions I passed by. I always wondered what she was reading that made her so entranced, that rendered that otherworldly gaze in her eyes as if she didn’t belong in this world, as if she was off somewhere in another space and time on a grand quest that only she could participate. Sometimes she would notice I was watching, and she’d raise her head, smile, and ask me (more out of courtesy than an actual desire to know) what I was up to. I would come up with some excuse, and she’d return to her book with such alacrity that it made me think that she was returning to reality, and I was the one who was fiction.

On Saturdays, she kept to her room in the mornings, only coming out in the afternoon to watch movies or play Uno cards with the rest of us in the common room. On occasions when our parents graced us with our allowances, some five of us, including Boggs, would go to the mall, eat at a restaurant, or just walk around. Then we’d sit at the granite steps and tease one another while capping off the day with ice cream. How she laughed like a bird who just learned how to fly.

 “I’m sorry, Boggs.” She slowed down to a forty, but not before I caught her looking at me.

I felt a strange sensation in my chest, like a cage had come unhinged in my heart and the monster living there had awoken, clawing its way out of my atria, threatening to reveal me for the wimp that I was, screaming at me until the sheer force of its cries almost drained me of color. I refused to look at Cass. By now, a lump had formed on my throat, as if unsaid words had found their way there and were slithering toward my tongue, only to stay on my lips like a snake. I immediately swallowed in discomfort, giving way to fidgeting that was so uncharacteristic of the “cool, disinterested” image I was trying to paint of myself.

There was only one other time when I experienced this kind of discomposure. It was the first time I repressed it, pushed down the monster back to the cage where it belonged, afraid that if she as much had a glimpse of it, she would run away from me, our friendship spoiled forever. It was that same night when we watched a movie alone in her room.

***

We were huddled together side by side, leaning against the wall where her bunk bed was propped against. We had set up the laptop on a chair in front of us. After spending quite some time deciding which movie to watch, we settled on Armageddon. As ridiculous as it sounds, we both had never watched it. I can’t remember the movie now. All I know was that she was very close to me, and she was crying, whimpering like a lost child on the blanket that she had draped over our legs. I turned my head to her, and the lights from the screen illuminated her tears and her pressed lips. I willed myself hard to keep my eyes on the screen, both mentally scolding my hands for wanting to reach out and touch her and frustrated at my lack of courage for doing so. In my mind’s eye, I could feel myself getting old, and I wondered if a boy my age should have better fears, more aspirations, even just to say that I tried, even if it didn’t turn out the way I envisioned it. Instead, at that moment, when the night afforded me so many opportunities, I just remained still, nerveless, my heart faint—a scene from one of those mediocre chick flicks.

After she had cried, she turned to look at me. There was a pressing question in her eyes, or perhaps it was an ache, a plea for me to once and for all address the silence that had settled uncomfortably between us. The tension had become almost palpable and had assumed a life of its own, a forbidding monster with its claws gripping my shoulders, crushing my heart, until I felt it sucking my lungs empty. Perhaps this is what it feels like to hold on to something for too long—everything is amplified, grotesque. Tell her. Tell her!

 

***

 

“You know what?” she said suddenly. Her remark jolted me back to the present. Her hands were gripping the steering wheel uncommonly tight.

“Yeah, what?”

“You look really beautiful in this light.”

             Her eyes were on the road as she said it. Without warning, and before I could contemplate if what I heard was real and what she meant, she accelerated again; and the sudden change in momentum caused Boggs to propel forward violently, hitting his head on the back of Cassy’s seat. She stepped on the brake in alarm and wheeled her head toward him. “Oh my god, Boggs, are you okay!” she almost about screamed.

We heard his moan gradually fade into silence. She maneuvered the car on the side of the road, and I made my way to the backseat to help him lie down again on the car seat. He was knocked out. I felt his head, and a sizeable bump began to materialize under my kneading. “He’s got a head bump, but he’s alive.”

I heard a sigh escape from Cassy’s lips as she started the car moving again, gently and more carefully this time. “I’m sorry for that,” she mumbled, her voice unsteady. Her hair was bathed with streaks of orange by the first hints of sunrise. At that moment, with Boggs’s unconscious figure in my arms, I wanted to tell Cass how beautiful she was.

When we reached Boggs’s house in a sleepy uphill subdivision that had not completely woken up yet, Cass didn’t immediately get out of the car after she parked. She just sat there, her back against me. Outside, the rustling of the leaves from nearby trees sounded like the sea, and she suddenly turned to look at me over her shoulder. I stumbled inside, my heart beating so fast—one clamorous beat after another—that it hurt. I was nervous, clammy. She was a glass in my hands, and like so many other times before this, I was afraid of dropping her.

She turned back and slid out of the car, and the urgency with which she performed this action let me know that she wanted me to do the same. I gently laid Boggs’s sleeping head from my lap to the car seat and followed her out. She was waiting on my side of the vehicle and put her hands on my shoulders before I could even shut the door. I thought of the warm ocean, the incandescence of the streetlights reflected in her eyes, and the nostalgic sound of church bells that were ringing in the distance. I could feel the dampness of the morning on her hair as they swayed loose from where she tucked them behind her ear, and where I instinctively reached out to regather them toward her face, tracing the warmth of her forehead as I returned the rogue strands behind her ear. I was amazed that it stayed soft and real in my hands. All of a sudden she kissed me, and I closed my eyes, thinking she had become the kind of girl who will not stand to miss a moment any longer. I brought my mouth deeper into hers, and I could almost taste her heart beating, now, now, now.

It was what I had always imagined, my breath steady even as I dared to slide my hand on her waist to pull her closer. I didn’t know what came after this. There had to be something—she didn’t feel like an ending.