Interim Goddess of Love

by Mina V. Esguerra

  It was another one of those days when, just before six p.m., the setting sun would turn the sky into a bright orange. A minute later it would be blood red, and then it would dip into the horizon and just be gone.

  Almost pretty enough for me to forget that there was a very angry god scolding me that very moment.

  Blah blah you shouldn't have done that Diego is irresponsible and never thinks ahead you know better than to mess with destiny while you know nothing about your power blah blah blah…

  Of course, Quin being angry didn't mean he actually snapped and lost it. It was more of the anger of a preschool teacher, trying to convey to a four-year-old (that would be me) in a measured tone just how disappointed he was.

  "Well it's not like I can un-know what I know, right?" I said. "I already found out who it is. So I just need to bring the two of them together, and it's happily ever after, and we can move on to the next project."

  "'Moving on to the next project' is not the point of all of this."

  "It's not? Shouldn't I be helping as many people as I can?"

  "Do you seriously think it's your role to pair everyone up? That you'd be given this kind of power just to make sure everyone has a date to the next party?" He said this with so much disdain that I wondered if the original goddess of love quit because she didn't want to be picked on by the second-generation gods anymore.

  "What am I supposed to do?" I said. "They open up to me, and this is what they want. And I'm their advocate, right? Diego just… showed me a shortcut. It all works out the same way in the end!"

  I wasn't sure if Quin had telepathic powers but I could swear that with everything I said, I knew just what his response was going to be.

  You're wrong, Hannah. You don't know what you're doing. That was not what you were supposed to do. I was wrong picking you for this -- you obviously can't handle it.

  "I'd be better at this if you trusted me more," I said, without even hearing his actual response. "You chose me because I had instincts. And I do believe that Kathy and Jake belong together. I've seen how they both feel about each other. It doesn't matter how I found out, right? What matters is that I make it happen somehow."

  "What matters, Hannah, is that you learn how to do this the right way."

  "What way? Your way? Because Diego and Vida get to have their own way and I don't, right?"

  Okay, so I said that because I was goading him. Maybe I wanted to see him actually angry. I was still jazzed up from my day with Diego and was in the mood for a cathartic screamfest.

  "We'll talk when you've calmed down. And when you're ready to do this properly again."

  Not the reaction I want.

  "Whatever, Quin. They'll be at the Bash together, even if you don't want to help me."

  I turned on my heel so I could leave him up there on the roof of the North building alone.

  And then, a second later:

  Shit. Now I don't have a date to the Bash. Not that I was hoping he would ask me… but yeah I was hoping he would ask me.

  Which made me even angrier, and all the more eager to get Kathy and Jake there together. I mean, someone should be there with the guy she liked.

  I didn't stop walking.

  Chapter 17

  Personality Test Result for Katherine Martin:

  You are naturally pleasant to work with, mainly because you like to avoid conflict and tend to work on making sure that people are comfortable around you. You are able to earn the trust and admiration of people and are well-suited to roles that put you in charge of someone's well-being. You express yourself best through writing or conversations within a small group, but may have trouble completing tasks because of a tendency to want perfection.

  Kathy Martin's most recent personality test result was exactly the same as mine. (Truthfully these weren't as personalized as they seemed to be. A student usually got one result out of a possible sixteen.) Still, assuming that we were that similar, I asked myself then what I would do next, if I were Kathy.

  If I secretly liked someone, and then found out without a doubt that he liked me too, what would I do?

  Sure, Jake Lalisan was popular right now for being Vida's boyfriend, but that was probably just goddess smoke-and-mirrors at work. Nothing that can't be defeated by destiny. He liked her, she liked him, and didn't the world deserve to be less lonely?

  I knew what I would do. I would make the world less lonely. So I decided to call Kathy and tell her that her most secret wish was about to come true.

  An hour later, when Tita Carmen walked into the dining room, which I used as a study area most nights, I probably still had the look of confusion on my face.

  "I think I was just hung up on," I said, before she asked.

  "Who were you talking to?"

  There was a basket of baked goods in the middle of the table. She picked out a mamon and sat at her usual seat.

  "This girl I was helping with something," I said. "We started to disagree, and suddenly the line was cut."

  "Bad signal?"

  "I don't think so."

  The mamon smelled great. She tore bite-size pieces of it, and I got hungrier with each bit of sponge cake she put in her mouth. Tita Carmen paused to chew, and said, "I miss the old phones. Now you can't properly hang up on someone. Back then you could really bang a phone and make your point."

  "I don't know what her point was," I said. "I was helping her with something, and I thought that I just gave her exactly what she was looking for…"

  "You just reminded me of your mom, just now," Tita Carmen said.

  "That's weird. I've wanted to tell you that a few times now."

  Despite this, I must say that Tita Carmen, my mom and I didn't look that much alike. We all looked related only to people who knew we were, and that didn't count. But what we lacked in physical resemblance we probably made up for in mannerisms and other habits. There was something about the way Tita Carmen always reminded me to turn off the light at bedtime, and the way she greeted my visiting friends. It might have been her voice, and her choice of words.

  I didn't see her much when I was growing up, so it was easy to forget that she and my mom came from the same place. Of course they'd have similar habits, share the same vocabulary.

  "Why do I remind you of her?" I asked, almost expecting her answer to be similar.

  "When we were younger, I was always getting into trouble, and your mom would always try to help me," Tita Carmen said. "But I wasn't always happy about it. And she'd ask me why I was so annoyed, when she was only trying to help."

  Yeah, that was my mother. She was always doing right by someone, offering good deeds even if they didn't want them. There was this one time --

  "Wait. You think I've turned into my mom?"

  Because wait one second! My mom was the ultimate "will martyr myself for friends and family and bitch about it to my daughter when I'm punished for my good deeds." I love her, but it's true, and I sat through one too many of these conversations. It was exhausting sometimes, getting that peek into my mother's life.

  Tita Carmen was obviously thinking of the same thing. "Don't worry, you're a mild case," she said. "No one carries the burden of the world like your mom."

  I laughed. "Thank you. That sounds like her."

  It was nice to talk to someone who knew her like I did. It had been just mom and me for a long time.

  "Why'd you get hung up on?" she asked, grabbing another pastry.

  Now that Tita Carmen was being uncharacteristically chatty, I wanted to be able to share with her that it was kind of my job now to help people like Kathy Martin. I wasn't in it because I was a serial do-gooder, or thought going around playing Cupid was fun. They found me.

  But Quin said I shouldn't tell people. It wasn't forbidden or anything, but he just thought that it would freak people out.

  "It's this friend," I said to Tita Carmen, trying to be vague. "I just told her that I'm about to give her exactly what she wanted, and instead of being happy…well there."
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br />   "I'm probably the expert on people who reject things they say they want," Tita Carmen said. "Be patient with her. Some people aren't used to getting what they want -- their first instinct is to think there's something wrong with it."

  "You're right." I knew that, but was pleasantly surprised to hear my tita speak this candidly to me. Since I wasn't speaking to Quin at the moment, I needed help processing what to do next. "I shouldn't give up on her. Because I'm the one who knows both sides, right? I know better."

  Or maybe Quin set it up that way again, made my tita chatty so I'd have someone now that I was ignoring him.

  Still ignoring you, Bossypants. Just in case he was listening.

  Chapter 18

  The Original Goddess could have decided your fate in less than a second. You didn't have to meet her at school and take her out for a snack at the cafeteria. She could listen to the hearts of all the world's people and pass judgment on every request in the same moment.

  I apparently was still bound by the laws of time and space, unlike Original Goddess. I couldn't even imagine being able to do that, be responsible for the happiness of so many. But Original Goddess had a head start of, well, millennia. I didn't feel the pressure to be just like her right now.

  On this particular morning, though, I was beginning to imagine what it might be like. Maybe it just happened to be a clear day, or it was so early and quiet. I was sitting on the curb of the circular driveway that served as the main entrance to Ford River, and I was alone.

  But I could feel things.

  They were just flashes of feelings, so quick that if I stopped to think about one, five more would zing right by. They were over before I could figure out what they were or who they were from.

  Or maybe I was imagining it.

  As seven o'clock neared, more and more people walked past me, making their way to their first class. SKs usually entered the campus on foot, because public transport only stopped a block from here. RKs either drove in with their own cars, or were dropped off by their drivers. The first bell sounded, ten minutes to class, and the morning rush into school peaked.

  The flashes stopped.

  Kathy's car pulled up into the driveway, and I pounced.

  "Hey," I said.

  Annoyance fluttered in her eyes and it confirmed right then that she did hang up on me last night. "Hannah."

  "What was that about, huh? Did you even hear what I was trying to tell you? I hope that was just a horrible signal and a dropped call."

  "I have a class in five minutes," Kathy said curtly.

  "You're freaking out. Don't freak out. This is it, Kathy."

  She shook her head. "Stop saying that. I don't believe you."

  "It's true!"

  "I'm not sure what I was thinking, telling you all that," she said. "It's embarrassing and you want me to make an even bigger fool of myself."

  "You won't. Jake absolutely positively likes you, and if you show up at the Bash you'll find out."

  "He has a girlfriend. Everyone knows that." Kathy tried to take a step forward but she couldn't get past me.

  "You just have to trust me on this, Kathy! He likes you."

  Even as she rejected the things I was saying, I felt her hope. It was frail now, because it was being stomped on repeatedly each time it tried to get up.

  Kathy's World History Teacher had all of their slips of paper with their "Five Things We Don't Know About You" in a mug. When Kathy stuck her hand in, to randomly find out more about a classmate, she picked out the list of a certain Mandy M. Cho. No offense to Mandy, the smart, soft-spoken and perfectly lovely Korean student, but Kathy looked over her list and tucked it into her bag without really thinking about it.

  Then, right before she left for class, she saw the piece of paper on the floor, the list that her own seatmate had carelessly tossed aside. Jake Lalisan's Five Things. He had her at #2 -- "I used to want to be a spy when I grew up."

  I would make a great spy, because I'm invisible, Kathy told herself. She wanted to be noticed more, but this guy wanted to be able to disappear. She wondered if they could trade issues. Oh, and #3, loving lions, she found that hilarious.

  By the next class, she was trying to guess who Jake was. Who looked like a guitar-playing, lion-loving military brat? Was it the chubby guy, second row? The tall, lean guy with long hair at the end of row 3? There was a really cute guy on the first row, but it couldn't be him.

  Why couldn't it be though? His perfect posture could have been imparted by his military dad. The restless tapping of his fingers might be because of that lack of focus, or a reaction to the broken finger. The choice of first row could be a move to force himself to pay attention to the class. She couldn't find evidence of spy or lion fascination just from watching him from across the room, and for two more class days she played this silly game in her mind.

  She wanted the cute guy to be Jake, and she felt a little smug for knowing these five things about him already -- but didn't want to get her hopes up. Even in daydreams, Kathy liked to keep herself in check.

  And then, anticlimactically, her teacher ended it by calling on him one time for recitation -- Jake Lalisan. So yeah, it was him. So what was she going to do about it?

  Apparently, nothing. Kathy was too shy to approach him, and in the weeks that followed she saw him get adopted into the popular barkada. She thought maybe, at the end of the semester, she'd tap him on the shoulder and say hello, how's the lion? But she didn't get to do it. (Plus it wasn't her style.)

  So she disappeared again. That was more her style.

  This was the thought that flashed right from Kathy and into me, and she kept clinging to it, to her self-proclaimed boo-hoo-no-one-ever-notices-me, as she spoke to me now. "Hannah, you're nice and I had a great time talking to you, but can you hear yourself right now? You're not making any sense. I don't believe you."

  Quin warned me that this would happen. Not just Kathy, but pretty much anyone else. He said: People have a hard time believing. Don't take it personally. Until they believe, you can't do much for them. Let them go until they find you again.

  How could I let this go when they were both so close? All Kathy needed to do was accept Jake's invitation.

  "Just listen to me a second--" I started to say. And then the bell rang, and Kathy said she was going to be late for class, and she just left me there on the curb.

  "How do I convince someone to do something for me?"

  Diego looked up from what appeared to be math notes, even though the open bag by his feet seemed to have nothing else but basketball stuff. "I'm not your teacher. Where's Joaquin?"

  I plopped down on the bench next to him. "I'm pretty sure he'll think my question is against his philosophy of letting things be."

  "You just have to ask. Your followers will do anything you ask of them." As if that was that, Diego went back to his notes.

  "Well what if she kind of doesn't believe me anymore?"

  He paused and looked at me.

  "I'm sorry if I'm bothering your… homework. Why you would even do this is weird to me."

  "Why I would do what?"

  "Math."

  "I like puzzles." Diego shut his notebook. "New Girl, there's no handbook. If you try something and it doesn't work, then you don't have it."

  "Arrrrrgggggggg. I think I may have scared Kathy off by telling her what I know about Jake. I mean, I can't even prove I know what I know."

  Diego did the boy equivalent of rolling his eyes. "No details please, I'm about to cry from boredom."

  "What, so you're not in the mood to help love struck kids today?"

  He gave me that look again, and I tried not to blink. "Every day is different for me."

  "I'm sure Quin just loves that about you."

  "You know what? Just tell me what exactly you want done. The longer I let you talk about this, the longer you'll talk about it."

  "Really?"

  "Yes."

  "You won't be breaking some sort of law if you help me?"
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  To emphasize his point he slammed his notebook shut, pulling me up standing with him. "Even if I were I'd still help you. Just to get you to move on already."

  Now see, Diego was proactive. I was starting to like that in a guy.

  Chapter 19

  On Thursday afternoon, the day before the basketball game and the First Quarter Bash, I found out that I wasn't going to the Bash with Sol, because she had a date.

  She didn't exactly get to tell me this though. Instead, she met me as I was closing the Guidance Office, and she had this look on her face -- and I knew what had happened.

  Sol was serious when she told me that she was going to start to date. And though I hadn't known her very long, I did know that Sol was super determined when she put her mind to it.

  …Neil was her classmate in chess, her PE class last semester. She noticed right away that he knew what he was doing, unlike the rest of the students who just seemed to have taken the class so they wouldn't have to change into gym pants and get all sweaty. He beat her on their first game (Ruy Lopez). She beat him on their second (Sicilian Dragon). They never got to have a third game, and whenever they saw each other on campus they'd jokingly refer to a "third game" but never really got around to it.

  Also, at the time she still thought she was in a long distance relationship, so if she had any thoughts about Neil she pushed them away quickly.

  But after her declaration to herself, to me, and the universe, that she was going to date again, she decided that she would take Neil up on that not-really-a-date offer.

  "You asked a guy out to the Bash tomorrow," I said, before she even said hi.

  "I'm sorry!" she gasped, hands to her face. "I was going to tell you. How do you even know about it?"

  Next time let them tell story first, Hannah. "I guessed," I said.

  "You should still go, of course. I mean, Neil has a car, and I'm sure he won't mind taking you with us."

  I was pouting. Actually pouting! Like a child.