Thursday, July 22, 2010
Chapter Eight: Malicious Rumors
Pie? How are you? What has happened? Katrin stared at the text message for a long while before sending it. It was only nine o’clock in the evening, but she was already in her room. The two boys had agreed to stay downstairs until their parents arrived. She had gone up to her room and had turned off the light, but switched on the rarely used night light on the table beside her bed.
It was a long time before Pie answered. Katrin was already in her malong and was trying to fall asleep when the cellphone vibrated.
I’m okay. Mommy was really angry at Betty, and wanted Daddy to send her back to Manila.
Will she be leaving then?
No such luck. Daddy told her that since she’d come for a week, she could stay the week, but she would have to behave, and he’d tell her parents about her behavior.
Argh. One whole week of Betty?
You said it. Can I move in with you, do you think?
You know you’re always welcome here, Pie. How is Michael, BTW?
Again Pie took a long time answering. Katrin could almost imagine her staring at her cellphone and thinking of answers.
Moody as usual. Look, Kat, I hope you didn’t take seriously what Betty said. It wasn’t like that at all.
Why, Pie? What really happened?
Long story. I’ll tell you tomorrow.
Okay… did your parents go to the wake?
Oh, yes, with Jenny. Betty wanted to go along, but Daddy banished her to her room. She’s to stay in there till tomorrow. One good thing is, he says I don’t have to hang around to entertain her.
LOL, good. Okay. See you tomorrow then. Good night, Pie.
Night, Kat.
Katrin put the cellphone down on the table, turned on her side and fell asleep.
Coming downstairs early the next morning, Katrin found her mother nursing a cup of coffee in the kitchen and looking worried.
“Morning, Mama,” she said, getting herself a mug of Milo.
“Morning, dear,” her mother said.
“How was the wake last night?”
“There were a lot of people,” her mother said absently. She looked at her daughter for a long while. Katrin came to the table and sat down beside her mother.
“Kat, I overheard some of the young people talking last night. There was a bunch of them at the next table; one of them was Eddie’s sister Ella. She said something about Michael Nolasco.”
Katrin stared at her mother, and put her mug down quickly.
“Ella was telling the others that Michael had been kicked out of school in Manila for being a thief.”
Katrin closed her eyes and said a word she had never uttered before. Her mother didn’t reprimand her.
“I don’t know where she got that idea, Kat. It’s a good thing the Nolascos didn’t hear her. If that rumor gets to other people, though, it could be dangerous.”
“I know where she got it, Mama.” Katrin told her mother about Betty.
Her mother looked at her.
“I met that child last night,” she said. “She was polite enough.”
“Good thing,” Katrin said. “She was perfectly horrid to me. I expect Aunt Anna gave her a tongue-lashing.”
“Betty’s parents are in Hong Kong for a week, that’s why Betty is here,” her mother explained. “She has nowhere else to go since her other relatives are either living abroad or away for the summer.”
“You’d think she’d be nicer, then,” Katrin said.
“Hush, Kat,” her mother said
"None of her cousins like her, Mama."
"You think Betty doesn't know it? How would you feel if none of your cousins liked you?"
"But I wouldn't do anything to make them not like me, Mama," Katrin said.
Her mother laughed.
"So you think Betty is doing things to deliberately make her cousins not like her?"
"Well, she made them all mad at her for some reason or another. Pie even asked me if she could stay with us till Betty goes home."
Mrs. Perez patted her daughter's arm.
"Betty just has her own problems, I suppose. How would you feel if your dad and I went away on vacation for a week and left you alone?"
"But I wouldn't be alone, I'd have Andy and Aian," Katrin said. "Even if you took Kyle with you, that would be because he's the youngest. And anyway, we know you'd bring us with you if you could." She thought for a minute. "But Betty doesn't have anyone else to keep her company and her parents could have brought her with them but they didn't."
"Exactly, Kat."
"So maybe she's mad at them but because they're not here she's mad at us?"
"I knew I was raising an intelligent child." Her mother smiled at her and gave her a hug. "Don't let Betty get you too mad, okay?"
"Yes, Mama."
At that moment her father, still in his house clothes, came into the house wiping at the grease spots on his hands.
"I think another cup of coffee would be in order, Mama," he said, and Mrs. Perez got up to make him one while he went over to kiss his daughter. "Morning, baby."
"Morning, Papa." Katrin looked at the clock on the wall. "You're not going to the office today?"
"No, Kat. Mango harvest starts today. I expect there are already people at the orchard, so I better hurry and get over there."
"Yay! I better tell Pie, then. She wants to see." Katrin clapped her hands. Mr. Perez looked at his wife. She looked back at him.
"I better go cook then," Mrs. Perez said. "Kat, I need you to help me."
"Can't I text Pie first, so she can come over?"
"All right. I'll go get vegetables from the garden. And go see if the boys are already awake; I need them to get some rice from the bodega."
"Okay." Katrin drained her mug, took her cellphone from her pocket, and wandered off in the direction of the stairs.
Thirty minutes later, Katrin was chopping vegetables on the kitchen table while the boys dug a fire pit in the back yard and maneuvered hollow blocks and rocks around it. A couple of tricycles arrived, and Kyle opened the gate to let them into the yard. They parked beneath the trees in the back yard and disgorged two of Katrin's schoolmates and their families. The mothers immediately went to help Katrin and Mrs. Perez while their husbands and children went to join Mr. Perez, who was bringing out baskets and nets from the storage shed. He then opened the gate into the Barrios orchard, and everyone went through to join the harvesters who had come in by the shortcut. Many of them were people from Riverside and the nearby Purok Pioneer; some of them were laborers from the rice mill who wanted to earn some extra cash.
"We didn't think to check the storage shed," Aian whispered as he carried a pail full of rice to his sister at the sink.
"Why?" Katrin asked, measuring out the rice into the huge pot they had borrowed for the occasion.
"Andy and I found that one of the sacks had been opened and part of it had been taken away. Some of it had spilled on the ground. You know that when we open a new sack, Mama fills the container we use for the house and sews the sack up again. The sack that had been opened was just tied with a piece of string."
"Papa will be mad when he finds out."
"He doesn't know yet. He's too busy at the orchard."
"Kat! Is the rice ready? Aian, if it's ready, take it out to Andy to cook," Mrs. Perez said.
"Coming right up," Katrin said, pouring water into the pot and measuring with her hands. "Over to you, bro."
"Help me get this outside, will you. It weighs a ton," Aian said, lifting the pot off the counter. Katrin obligingly caught the other side of the pot handle and, balancing the pot between them, the twins carefully carried it out of the kitchen, almost bumping into the Nolascos, who were just about to enter the door.
"Let me get that for you," Michael said, taking Katrin's side of the handle immediately. "Where are you taking this, Aian?"
"Over there to Andy," Aian said, "And let's hurry."
"Hey, Kat," Pie said.
"Hey, Pie, come on in. Let's leave the boys to the dirty work," Katrin said, gesturing her inside.
Today, Pie wore blue stretch capris and a blue t-shirt, and had her hair up in a twist secured by a blue lacquered chopstick with dangling blue transparent beads. Katrin looked down at her own clothes, a loose white shirt over green cargo shorts, and grimaced-- even when she'd already taken a bath before knuckling down to work, the front of her shirt was already covered with spots of water, grease, and vegetable juices.
"Good morning, Aunt Marge," Pie said as she came in, stopping short at the sight of many people filling the kitchen.
"Come in, come in, Pie," Mrs. Perez called. "Don't be shy."
"Can I help?" Pie asked. Katrin looked at her in surprise.
"It's okay, Pie, you don't have to," she began.
"I can at least slice vegetables, Kat," Pie said. "Tiya Cora lets me help when I hang around in the kitchen, you know." She slid onto the end of the bench beside Mrs. Perez.
"Here, Kat, get something to cover Pie's clothes with," Mrs. Perez said, but Katrin was already headed for the stairs. She came back almost immediately with a cheesecloth apron and a sheepish look.
"I knew I'd find some use for my home economics projects eventually," she said, helping Pie to put it on.
"You mean you made this, Kat?"
"Had to, Pie. It was our last requirement in home ec."
"Ooooh. I wish we had projects like this," Pie said, sitting back down again and taking the knife Mrs. Perez handed her.
It was eleven o'clock by the time they'd finished chopping and preparing all the ingredients for the harvesters' lunch. Katrin and Pie then helped to haul the ingredients outside to the boys to cook over the fire pits. The women and girls who'd helped with the ingredients now also took over the cooking.
"Mama, do you need us for anything else, or can Pie and I go to the orchard now?" Katrin asked.
"Us, too?" Aian added at once.
"Oh, run along, girls, we can cope. Boys, you can go after you get the big table out of the house and put it here under the trees," said Mrs. Perez. "Kat, mind you keep an eye on Kyle if he's not with your father."
"Yes, Mama," Katrin said. "Come on, Pie, I'll change my shirt and you can take off that apron."
Inside Katrin's room, she took the apron Pie handed her and draped it on the side of the laundry basket.
"You said you'd tell me the truth about what Betty was saying yesterday," she said. "Spill." She opened the door of the aparador and hunted for a fresh shirt.
"Well..." Pie heaved a sigh. "I suppose I should've told you about it sooner at least... but well, it really is Mike's secret to tell, you know? He once remarked that if anyone here ever knew about it, it would rake everything up all over again, and that if Daddy had to go and take him away from all his friends in Manila because of it, he wished it'd be worth it."
"But then Betty brought up the subject anyway," Katrin said, pulling out a yellow blouse that she hadn't worn very often because it was too "girly girl" for her.
"Yeah," Pie said. "So. We talked it over last night, and he said we'd better just tell you the whole story, since it was out anyway."
"So," Katrin said, changing her shirt, "What really did happen?" She purposefully kept her back to Pie so she wouldn't have a chance to see the pain on her friend's face.
"This is all based on what Mike told us, of course," said Pie, "but, well. And I could kill Betty yesterday... part of it was really her fault anyway, but her parents wouldn't believe it of her."
"Why?" Katrin asked.
"Because those guys were her friends. She just introduced them to Mike."
"Okay, you've got me confused," Katrin said, tossing her dirty shirt into the laundry basket and going over to sit beside her friend. "Start at the beginning and tell me who, what, where and why."
"Okay." Pie took a deep breath and told Katrin that apparently, Michael's friends at his old school had been daring one another to do crazy things. It had begun with cutting classes and skipping school, and had progressed to playing pranks on people. As the group got bigger though, they had become more daring, until one day they dared one another to shoplift from a store inside a mall.
"Only they got caught," Pie explained. "The way Mike tells it though, he hadn't really taken anything. He was still looking at the display, because he had been thinking that he didn't want to do it. Before he knew it, one of the store's security men was holding a friend of his by the arm. And since the store security had seen them all come in together, he also got grabbed and taken to the manager's office along with the others."
"And...?" Katrin asked.
"The security guard couldn't find anything on him, though, and Daddy was able to talk to the store manager about it and convinced him to let Mike go. Mike's friends all got mad at him, though, because they thought he'd tattled on them to save himself. And it was all over the school the next day, their parents got called to the rector's office and everything, and it was a huge scandal."
“So what happened?” Katrin asked. “Did they get expelled?”
“Strangely, no,” Pie said slowly. “I heard that some of them were the sons of government officials and military officers. None of them got expelled.”
“But the school told Daddy that maybe he should put Mike in another school the next year.”
“But that’s unfair!” Katrin said.
Pie shrugged.
“The other boys ignored him after that. Rumors began spreading that Mike was the mastermind, that he was just clever enough not to get caught. Then one week there were some unexplained thefts in the school. One girl complained that her gold necklace was missing.”
“They found the necklace in Mike’s bag. So my brother really got kicked out of school for good.”
“And you know what’s the worst thing about it, Kat?” Pie clenched her fists. “The girl was the sister of one of those boys. Mike had a crush on her. She was also a friend of Betty’s.”
“Oh, Pie.” Katrin stared at her friend, then hugged her.
“So I was just so happy to move here, far away from them. Why did Betty have to come along and spoil everything?”
“It’ll only be for a week, Pie, and almost two days have passed,” Katrin said comfortingly. “And today we have mangoes to harvest, so let’s go!”
Pie smiled tremulously and stood up from the bed.
The two girls found, when they left the house, that the boys were waiting for them outside the kitchen door.
“What took you so long?” Aian complained. “Oooooh, Katkat changed! Did you stop and preen, sis? That would be a miracle.”
“Shut up, anchovy-brains,” said Katrin, bopping him on the head.
“Wow! I didn’t know anchovies were good at math!” was the retort as Aian danced away from his sister’s hand.
“Shut up!”
“You wouldn’t think they were twins, would you?” Andy observed fondly, picking up baskets from the shed and distributing them among the group.
His brother and sister glared at him in tandem.
“Yup, twins all right,” Andy declared, running through the gate with both his siblings in pursuit, leaving the Nolascos to follow the three of them, laughing.
“Ate Pie!” Kyle came running to meet them, his baseball cap turned backward on his head. “Kuya Mike! You’re here!” He looked at his three older siblings running around chasing each other. “What happened to them?”
Pie laughed.
“Are you going to teach us to pick mangoes, Kyle?” she asked.
“Oh, it’s not hard to do,” the little boy answered. “Mainly some of us just stand under the tree with nets and others go up in the tree to shake the branches and pick the fruit.” He pointed towards the nearest tree, where such a process was underway. “See? Can you climb trees, Kuya Mike?”
‘I’m sorry, Kyle, I’ve never tried,” Michael said. “There weren’t that many trees for climbing in Manila.”
“Awwwwww,” said Kyle. “I can climb! Wanna see?”
“Oh, no, you don’t,” said his father, who arrived in time to hear his last remark. “You’ll stay here on the ground where I can see you. Aren’t you supposed to be my assistant?”
“Yes, Papa.”
“Hello, Mike, Pie,” said Mr. Perez. “Here, try some mangoes. The Barrios mangoes have really good fruit, if I do say so myself. Now where have my other children gone… ah there you are Andy. My baskets?”
“Here, Papa,” Andy said, quickly collaring his younger siblings and snatching the empty baskets they were trying to overturn over one another’s heads. Shaking his head at his offspring’s antics, Mr. Perez took the baskets and went off to replenish the steadily diminishing pile of empties underneath the center-most mango tree in the orchard.
“There’s Eddie,” Aian said, noticing their friend taking a drink from a jug beneath one of the mango trees.
“Ah, good,” said Andy, and went to join him. After an earnest conversation, he looked back and waved at Aian and Michael to come over.
“Well, there’s that,” Katrin said, taking Pie’s arm. “If there’s anyone they’ll listen to, it’s Andy. He didn’t get himself elected class president for eight years running for no reason.”
“You’re so good, Kat,” Pie said.
“Ah, come on Pie,” Katrin said, looking away. “What are friends for? And speaking of friends, come on, I’ll show you the Barrios house. It’s over here.”
The house the Barrios family had once lived in was surrounded by a hedge, so that no one in the orchard would notice it if they didn’t know it was there. It was a two-story, half-hollow block, half-wooden house with wooden jalousies in its windows, both upper and lower. The windows were all protected with decorative iron grilles as well, so that no one could get in even if they removed the windows from their frames. The doors were of heavy lumber and were all not only locked, but chained and padlocked shut as well.
“No one can get in without making noise loud enough to be heard over at our house,” said Katrin to Pie in satisfaction.
“Why did they leave? The Barrioses,” Pie said.
“Shy’s grandmother got sick,” Katrin explained. “She needed someone to help care for her, and Shy’s aunt and uncle were abroad. So Shy’s mom had to go help take care of her, and since she couldn’t leave her family, they all just moved back there.”
“Oh,” Pie said. “You must miss her a lot.”
“Yeah,” Katrin said. “Shy’s always been there for as long as I could remember. We were best friends and classmates from kindergarten to grade five, till they moved away. It’s still hard, because she’s always been there next door, and then suddenly she wasn’t. She writes at least once a month, though, so we still keep in touch.”
“Lucky you, Kat,” Pie said. “Friendships like that are hard to find.”
“Oh yes, Lucky Me Pancit Canton,” retorted Katrin. “After all, I had Shy, and now you. Come on, let’s go back there and see if we can cadge any mangoes.”
The two girls walked back around the house and emerged from behind the hedge. They unexpectedly came upon a man walking in their direction.
“Oh!” Katrin exclaimed. Taking a closer look, she saw that the man was one of the rice mill laborers who had hired on to help pick mangoes.
The man also looked taken aback to see them.
“Manong, this part of the property is off limits,” Katrin said.
The man glared at her.
“Oh, yeah? So why are you here, missy?”
“Because my father is the caretaker of this property, and people are supposed to stay only in the orchard,” Katrin pointed out. “So please go back there.”
The man still looked sullen.
“I was looking for a place to pee,” he said. “Can’t even do that?”
“You can, but you can’t go where you’re not supposed to,” Katrin answered, although her face was red.
“Yeah, yeah,” the man said, pushing past her. He stopped and glared at the two girls.
“What’s the matter, are you gonna watch?” he asked. The two girls fled.
“That was embarrassing,” Katrin said to Pie as they joined the pickers.
“He wasn’t a very nice man,” Pie said and frowned.
Just then one of the women who had been helping with the cooking came to the gate and called, “Lunch is ready!” Murmurs of appreciation came from the workers, who put down what they were doing to go over to the Perez house for lunch.
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