You called the goddess of love with a song. Quin actually hummed it for me.
"It sounds like a lullaby," I said. I must have heard it from my grandmother.
It's the sound that the heart makes. It calls you to hear it, and when you do, you will be able to see, and feel, and remember, someone's pain or joy with such clarity.
Over the next few weeks, Quin and I met at the roof of the North building and he explained how things worked. The goddess of love listened to people. She received requests, pleadings, demands, and her job was to decide what happened next.
"How exactly do I do that?" I couldn't comprehend it. So maybe I selfishly agreed to do this because I wanted to be closer to Quin, but this was serious business. Maybe a little too serious. More than once, I started to panic.
And every time, Quin would find a reason to brush a hand, a fingertip, an arm, against my skin, and I felt instantly reassured. Even if I didn't understand it all just yet.
"Don't worry about it. It'll start with words, conversations. Those are simple, easy to handle. The rest will come when you're ready, I'm sure you won't even notice that you're different."
"Different how?"
"You'll be able to do more than listen. It's like... enhanced empathy."
"Will I have powers?"
"Let's see how you do with listening first."
"Okay." I was hoping there would be powers. "Is it because of those people who keep telling me their love stories? Is that why I'm qualified to fill in as goddess of love?" I asked him.
"You're qualified because I chose you."
I wanted to ask, you mean you chose me because I'm qualified, right? But it wasn't the time for nitpicking, or for second-guessing Quin, the sun god of the Tagalogs. (Technically my people, based on ancestry.)
Instead, I asked, "When will it start?"
"One of these days. You'll be summoned, but don't feel like you have to help everyone who does. Take it one person at a time."
"Like a project."
"Yeah, something like that."
So I wasn't going to be expected to solve the love problems of the billions of people in the world. (Good to know.) I guess I was on a Goddess Probation Period.
* * *
Kathy Martin claimed to have a special power too.
"I'm invisible, I swear," she moaned.
I didn't react immediately.
"I'm kidding," she added.
"Of course, I knew that," I said. I hoped that becoming goddess didn't mean having to lose my sense of humor. Then again, Quin never laughed at anything. In my defense, I got thrown off by "invisible." I mean if the Sun God was walking around on campus, anything else was possible, right?
"I mean, I might as well be. I don't really get noticed."
On a bench in front of the cafeteria, Kathy told me about herself while I chewed on the turonâthe kind with langkaâthat she bought for me.
I totally got what she was all about, within seconds. She, too, was a sophomore. She, too, was okay-looking but was a makeover away from being really attractive. She, too, wore her nice-enough outfits with about as much flair as a clothes hanger.
I also picked up something else.
...When Kathy was nine years old, a boy in her class decided that he liked her more than any other girl there, and he would show it by being an annoying little man every day that he saw her. It would start from when, after getting off the school bus, she would cross the open field to get to the entrance closest to the grade four classrooms. He was always hanging out there, outside the doors and near the drinking fountain, in any kind of weather. And he would call out a new insult as she passed. Not that he was the finest specimen himselfâhe was skinny and his teeth were crooked.
She knew he liked her. She wasn't like some of her friends who studied in all-girl Catholic schools that never offered regular boy interactionâshe wasn't fooled by this at all. It was why the first time, she just gritted her teeth and ignored him. Besides, pointing out to the dozen other people within earshot that her hair looked unwashed wasn't as humiliating as he thought. Neither was noticing the rash she had on her neck from the heat. But on the third day, he yanked at her bag, and started to say something about it being the kind of bag that a grade one kid would have, and she hit him.
It was instinct, and also the pent-up rage from the other two days. As soon as he pulled at her backpack, her other arm (the one that had a lunch bag at the end of it) swung in his direction and a container of fried chicken and rice hit his head. He was surprised, and maybe slightly injured, but he never reported it.
Kathy only got a moment's satisfaction from this because she immediately saw that he liked it.
Yikes.
The next few days, he continued to stand there as she passed, and sometimes made a move to touch her bag again. She tried so very hard to be casual and unaffected by it, but that walk from her school bus to the building, the act of crossing the field, started to give her stress.
She started to wish that he wouldn't notice her. If he could just, well, be distracted by something else as she passed. Nothing even had to happen to him. She just wanted him not to notice her.
And then one day, as Kathy crossed the field and came closer to the drinking fountain, he just... turned to one side and started talking to someone else. She passed by him without incident.
He never bothered her again.
* * *
"Whoa."
That was a memory. An actual memory of someone else but I was there. Like it was my own, and I saw it, felt it, lived it. It left me reeling a bit, and I steadied myself against the bench. If she hadn't been so into her story she might have noticed that I stopped chewing for a second and my eyes kind of glazed over.
If it affects you, just hold on to something strong and steady. They won't notice, Quin told me. People in the middle of their joy or pain are oblivious to anything else anyway.
Whether or not this memory passing on from Kathy to me was helpful, it at least gave some context about her. The way she was comforting, non-threatening... which were of course just horrible words to use to describe a teenage girl. But I guess she wanted it that way.
"I just fade into the background, I know it," Kathy said. "I could tell, earlierâyou didn't even know I was there."
"Filing can really make me lose my focus," was my flimsy excuse. Apart from the overwhelming flashback that lasted a millisecond, I was also still trying to wrap my head around the fact that an RK (Rich Kid, or people who were not on scholarship, like Kathy) had this kind of insecurity.
She tucked a stray lock of hair underneath her hair band, and I noticed just then that it was a fiery orange as well. "You don't have to pretend. I know that people don't really pay that much attention to me."
Which was precisely why the gift came as a surprise.
Students at Ford River had an extra perk of not just having a locker, but an internal mail delivery service as well. That meant if you wanted to send something to a student that couldn't fit in the slit that people shoved locker notes into, then you could put your item in a labeled, clear plastic bag and leave it at the Student Services desk. The student will receive a text message about the package, and can choose to reply with the time and which building to send it to. Handy for lending and borrowing books, notes, and a bunch of other random things, although the school highly discouraged using it for things of actual value like laptops, cellphones, dogs. (Yeah, one time someone used the mail service to send a dog.... Anyway. Rich kids.)
When Kathy got the text, she dropped by Student Services and picked it up herself.
"Who is it from?" she asked, because there was no note.
"Sorry," the guy at the window, no doubt a student employee too, said. "I wasn't here when it arrived."
Inside the Ziploc bag that was handed to her was...Vikas Swarup's novel Q&A, the basis for Slumdog Millionaire.
She said it with such drama that I thought I missed something. "And?"
"It's my favorite movie. Of all time." Kathy said that as if I should have known it all alongâand I kind of did get that, the realization rolling in a beat before the words did. Like the lightning before the thunder.
"Slumdog? Who knows this?"
"A few people. I don't have that many friends here."
"Was there a note?"
"It just said 'Re-read when bored.' Didn't say who sent it."
Kathy was trying her best to sound casual. Understandable, even without the whole heightened empathy thing. She had never been in a relationship before, and while one part of her was telling herself to be careful, the greater majority was just tingling with excitement.
She has a secret admirer. This was why she sought me, interim goddess of love.
"Is this anything? Am I wrong to be thinking about it?" she asked me.
At the same time, I felt her other question. The real one: Do I dare hope that someone here likes me?
Even though she didn't have the book with her, I could see it now, as she did in her mind. It was brand new, carefully packaged, and the note was simple and sincere (not creepy). Someone here did like her. And as long as I didn't screw this up, I just might be able to lead them to each other.