Yuna's POV
Dinner at Aunt Rosa's house had become one of those things I had learned to brace for the same way you brace for a wave when you see it coming — you know it's going to hit you, you know you can't stop it, and the best you can do is stay standing when it does.
Uncle Ramon was already deep into a story by the time I sat down. Something about a tricycle driver who had apparently tried to race his ancient van on the way home from the market, which had resulted in a confrontation at a junction that he was now recounting in real time, complete with sound effects and hand gestures that nearly knocked over his glass twice.
"— and I told him, I said, pare, this van has been running since before you were born, you think your tricycle is faster? Ay nako—"
Aunt Rosa passed me the rice without looking up from her own plate. "Eat. You barely touched your lunch, I can tell."
"You weren't at my school today, Tita."
"I don't need to be. You have the face of someone who didn't eat lunch."
I took the rice.
Lily, sitting across from me with both elbows on the table in a way Aunt Rosa kept telling her not to do, was already watching me with the focused attention of someone who had decided I was the most interesting thing in the room. She had a smear of something orange on her chin that nobody had pointed out yet and probably wouldn't until after dinner.
"Ate Yuna," she said. "Did anything funny happen at school today?"
"No."
"Are you sure? Your face looks like something happened."
"My face always looks like this."
She tilted her head, unconvinced. "Hmm."
"Lily, elbows," Aunt Rosa said, without looking up.
Lily moved her elbows approximately one centimeter off the table and considered it handled.
Uncle Ramon was still going. "— the nerve of the guy, honestly, I was this close to getting out of the van—"
"Did you make any new friends?" Aunt Rosa asked me, switching lanes without warning.
"I have friends."
"Good ones? Or just the kind you nod at in the hallway?"
I thought about Erika, who had shoved a cracker in my direction that afternoon when she caught me staring at my notebook instead of eating. I thought about Marco, who had spent most of third period trying to convince me that the pattern of water stains on the ceiling of our classroom spelled out a warning. "Good ones," I said.
"And your grades? Are you keeping up?"
"Yes, Tita."
"Because if you need tutoring—"
"I have someone who helps me."
She hummed in a way that meant she was reserving judgment. Uncle Ramon finished his story with a dramatic conclusion involving a traffic enforcer and what sounded like a near-miss with a carabao, and the table broke into the kind of laughter that only makes sense if you've been listening from the beginning.
Lily used the distraction to put her elbows back on the table.
I ate. I nodded at the right moments. I answered the questions that had answers and deflected the ones that didn't. By the time we were clearing plates, I felt the particular kind of exhausted that came not from doing too much but from being around too many people for too long — a familiar low-grade drain that I had learned to just accept as part of living here.
Tomorrow, Aunt Rosa had said, she was making sinigang. Lily had already requested extra kangkong. Uncle Ramon had already requested extra pork. Life in this house moved forward with the steady, unstoppable momentum of a family that had been doing this together for years, and I was slowly, quietly learning to move with it instead of against it.
I was halfway to Lily's room when my phone vibrated.
Then again.
Then three times in quick succession.
I stopped in the hallway and pulled it out.
The notification screen was already full, all from the same contact. My manager.
YUNA. ARE YOU AWAKE. YUNA ANSWER ME. THIS IS URGENT. NOT JOKING. YUNA I NEED YOU TO READ THIS RIGHT NOW.
I stared at the screen for a second, then typed back: I'm here, what happened.
The response came before I had even pocketed the phone.
BIG CLIENT. HUGE. THEY NEED A SONG. ASAP. AS IN YESTERDAY. THEY'RE DESPERATE AND THEY SPECIFICALLY ASKED FOR YOU WELL THEY ASKED FOR YOUR WORK BUT SAME THING.
Then another message, before I could respond.
CALLING YOU NOW.
My phone rang.
I answered it, already walking faster toward Lily's room, pushing the door open with my shoulder and stepping inside. "What? Who is it? What's happening?"
"YUNA." My manager's voice hit me at full volume, that specific pitch he got when something had gone sideways and he was somehow both panicking and thrilled about it at the same time. "Okay. Okay, listen. I need you to stay calm."
"I am calm."
"Good. Good. So. Big celebrity. Huge. Their comeback single fell through — don't ask me why, it's a whole thing — and they need a replacement track in less than two weeks. Their team reached out to three writers. One of them is you."
I sat down on the edge of the bed. "How big are we talking."
He said the name.
The room went very quiet.
"Say that again," I said.
He said it again.
I stood up so fast I nearly tripped over a pile of stuffed animals. "ARE YOU JOKING RIGHT NOW—"
"SHHH—" he started.
"I can't write a song for them in two weeks, I'm in the middle of nowhere with no proper setup and I haven't written anything new in a month—"
"You finished a full track three weeks ago—"
"That was different, I had time for that one, this is—" I stopped, lowered my voice, and turned toward the wall, because Lily had appeared from under her blanket and was now sitting up in bed watching me with enormous eyes and the alert expression of someone who had decided to be fully awake for this.
"What's happening?" she whispered loudly.
"Nothing," I whispered back. "School stuff."
"You don't look like it's school stuff."
"Go back to sleep, Lily."
"I wasn't asleep."
I turned back to the wall. "I'm here," I said into the phone, quieter. "Okay. Tell me everything."
My manager told me everything. The timeline, the brief, what the celebrity's team was looking for — something with a specific emotional weight, something that felt personal without being too exposed, something that could carry a whole comeback on its back. By the time he was done talking, I was pacing a tight circle around the small clear patch of floor in Lily's room, which was approximately one and a half steps in any direction, my brain already pulling the brief apart and turning it over.
"This could change things for you," he said, quieter now. "Seriously. If this lands the way their team thinks it will, people are going to start asking questions about who writes this stuff. That's good for you. Even from the background."
"I'm always in the background."
"For now. That's the whole point."
I pressed my free hand against my forehead. "Okay. Okay, I'll do it."
"I know you will. You always do." He paused. "Also the deadline is firm. Don't be late."
"When am I ever late."
"Three weeks ago—"
"Goodbye."
I hung up and stood in the middle of the floor for a moment, phone in hand, staring at the wall.
Two weeks. A full track. For someone whose name I still couldn't quite believe I had just heard in that sentence.
"Was someone crying?" Lily asked, from the bed.
I turned around. She was sitting cross-legged now, fully committed to being awake, looking at me with the focused curiosity of a small person who had decided to be interested.
"Nobody was crying."
"You looked like you were going to cry."
"That's just my face."
She squinted at me. "Is it bad school stuff?"
"It's not school stuff at all," I said, which was technically true. "Go to sleep, Lily."
"But—"
"Goodnight."
She flopped back onto the pillow with the theatrical suffering of someone who had been denied something important. I waited until she stopped moving, then sat at the edge of the bed and opened my notebook.
Two weeks. I could do this.
Probably.
The next morning, Lily's alarm went off at its usual hour with its usual aggressively cheerful pop song, and I woke up feeling like I had been run over sometime during the night and nobody had told me.
I had stayed up far too late staring at blank pages, trying to coax the first line of something out of my brain and getting nothing back but the low hum of pressure. The brief was still sitting in my head, unresolved, the way briefs always did at the start — too big to hold all at once, not yet broken into anything workable.
I needed time. I needed quiet. I needed a space where nobody was going to ask me questions or hand me things to carry or chase me down the hall.
School, historically, had not been that space.
But it was what I had.
I made it through breakfast on autopilot — Aunt Rosa's commentary about my appetite, Lily's morning report on a dream she'd had about a unicorn kingdom, Uncle Ramon finding his keys in three different wrong places before locating them in his own pocket — and walked to school already planning.
First break. Empty classroom. Twenty minutes of actual writing. It was a simple plan. A good plan.
I spotted Erika the moment I turned into the main hallway.
She was walking toward me from the other direction, notebook already under her arm, glasses slightly adjusted the way they got when she was paying attention to something. The moment she saw me, something in her expression shifted into the particular look she got when she thought I was about to do something inadvisable.
I was not going to let that happen.
I turned on my heel, walked quickly in the opposite direction, and ducked behind the nearest trash can before she could reach me.
It was not my most dignified moment.
"Yuna."
I closed my eyes.
Her footsteps stopped in front of me. I looked up. She was standing with her arms crossed, looking down at me crouched behind a trash can in the middle of the school hallway, with the expression of a person who had been dealt a very specific kind of hand by the universe and was choosing to be professional about it.
"Why," she said, "are you behind the garbage."
"It smells nice here."
She stared at me.
"Fresh," I added. "Earthy."
"Get up."
"I'm comfortable."
"Yuna."
I stood up, brushing off my skirt, and straightened to my full height, which still wasn't as tall as her. "I'm fine. I'm not avoiding you. I have things to do. Important things."
"What things?"
"Things."
Her eyes moved over my face in that way she had — quick, assessing, filing. "You look worse than usual. Did you sleep?"
"Yes."
"How much?"
"Some."
Her expression said she already knew the answer was not enough and was deciding whether to push it. "Are you in some kind of trouble?"
"No."
"Are you failing something?"
"That's not — no. I just need to find a quiet place for a few minutes, okay? That's all. Nothing dramatic."
She looked at me for another second. Then, in the tone of someone making a note: "After class. You're eating an actual lunch today."
"That's not related to anything I just said."
"It's related to the fact that you look like you're running on nothing." She turned and walked away before I could respond, which was a technique she had perfented.
I watched her go, then turned back toward the far end of the hallway.
First break. Empty classroom. Simple.
"YUNA!"
I turned around.
Marco was standing in the middle of the corridor, ten feet away, staring at me with an expression of dawning horror. He was pointing at me. Several students had already glanced over.
"What?" I said.
"You're running away," he said, in the specific tone he used when he thought he was uncovering something.
"I'm walking."
"You're walking fast and you have the face of someone who is making a decision they can't take back." He pressed a hand to his chest. "Oh my god. You're dropping out."
"I am not dropping out."
"You're dropping out." His voice went up. "After everything — all the tests, all the group projects where you did all the work and let me take half the credit—"
"You've been my seatmate for one month—"
"That's a LONG TIME in school years, Yuna—"
"MARCO, I AM NOT DROPPING OUT, I JUST NEED A QUIET PLACE—"
But he was already not listening, already building to something, already drawing the attention of everyone within a fifteen-foot radius. "DON'T THROW YOUR LIFE AWAY!" he called after me, loud enough that three second-years turned to stare and a prefect looked up from across the hall. "YOU'RE SMART! YOU'RE CAPABLE! YOUR HANDWRITING IS BAD BUT THAT'S FIXABLE—"
"SHUT UP," I hissed, grabbing his arm and pulling him close enough to whisper. "I am not dropping out. I need twenty minutes to work on something private. That is all that is happening."
He blinked. Looked me over. "Like, to cry?"
I let go of his arm. "Goodbye, Marco."
"Was it the vending machine? Because I told you, those things are—"
I was already walking.
By some minor miracle I managed to shake him at the bathroom corridor and made it to the far end of the building, where the traffic thinned out and the noise dropped to something manageable. I found the stairwell — the one tucked between the old science room and a storage closet that nobody seemed to use — pushed the door open, and sat down on the second step.
Quiet.
Actual quiet.
I pulled out my notebook, found a fresh page, and uncapped my pen.
The brief was still sitting in the back of my head where I'd left it. Something with emotional weight. Something personal without being exposed. Something that felt like it had been lived in.
I pressed the pen to the paper.
My phone buzzed.
I glanced at it. A message from my manager: just checking you're working on it.
I turned the phone face-down.
Okay. First line. Anything. Just start.
The screen of my phone lit up again through the back. I ignored it.
First line. Come on.
I wrote three words, crossed them out. Wrote four more, stared at them, crossed those out too. The problem with writing under pressure was that pressure had a sound, a low-grade hum that sat just behind everything else and made it very hard to hear the thing you were actually trying to listen for.
I flipped to a different page. Sometimes starting somewhere else helped. I wrote a fragment of a melody direction in the margin, then a word that felt right, then another.
My phone screen lit up again.
I reached over to flip it back face-down and accidentally knocked it off the step. It clattered down two stairs, landed face-up, and the screen stayed on just long enough for me to see the battery indicator in the corner.
One percent.
"No," I said. "No, no—"
I grabbed it. Tapped the screen. The battery icon blinked once, the way it did when it was making a final statement.
Then it went dark.
I sat in the stairwell, holding a dead phone, notebook open on my lap, pen in my other hand, first line still not written.
For a long moment I just sat there.
Then I got up, tucked the notebook under my arm, and went to find a charger.
The library was the best option. There were outlets along the back wall, and at this hour it was usually quiet enough that nobody would bother me. I slipped in through the side entrance, scanned the room, and spotted an available outlet near the study tables at the back.
There was already someone sitting at the table next to it.
A senior. Lanky, with the slightly haunted look of someone who spent too much time thinking about things that couldn't be confirmed. He had a phone charger plugged in that was currently not charging anything, which felt like it had been left there specifically for me.
"Hey," I said, stopping beside him. "Can I borrow that charger? Just for a bit — I'm dying here."
He looked up. Looked at me. Then looked at the charger. Then back at me, with the expression of someone deciding whether to extend trust.
"You're not going to tell anyone I'm here, right?" he said.
I blinked. "You're in the library. During school hours."
"Exactly." He lowered his voice. "That's what they want you to think is normal."
I had several follow-up questions and chose not to ask any of them. "The charger?"
He unplugged it and handed it to me. I plugged my phone in, set it on the table, and opened my notebook.
"Have you noticed," he said, quietly, leaning slightly in my direction, "that the vending machine near the gym has been out of the same flavor for three weeks?"
"I don't use that vending machine."
"Nobody does. That's the point. It's not for us." He paused for effect. "It's for them."
I wrote a word in my notebook. Then another. "Who's them?"
"I don't know yet. But I'm close." He tapped the side of his head. "Also, if I'm not in school next week, you'll know why."
"I'll know why because you probably got sick."
"Or." He held eye contact for a beat too long. "You'll just know."
My phone screen flickered on — six percent. Enough.
"Right," I said, gathering my things carefully. "Thanks for the charger. Truly. I hope you don't disappear."
"That means a lot."
I grabbed my bag and got out before he could tell me anything else.
I spent the rest of the day carrying the brief around in my head like a stone I couldn't put down, turning it over during class, during lunch, during the walk home — feeling the shape of it, looking for the way in. Sometimes songs started with a feeling. Sometimes they started with a single word that pulled everything else behind it. Sometimes they started at three in the morning when your brain had finally gotten quiet enough to hear what it was actually trying to say.
This one started at eleven forty-seven at night, in Lily's room, while she was asleep and the house had gone quiet.
I was sitting at the edge of the bed with my notebook on my knees, pen moving slowly, and then a little faster, and then faster still. The first line came, and then the second, and then the bridge that I had been circling around for days just appeared, fully formed, like it had been waiting for me to stop trying so hard to find it.
I wrote until my hand cramped. I kept going.
By the time I reached the last line of the final chorus, the room was dark except for the small lamp on Lily's desk, and the house was completely still. I read back through what I had, marking the parts that needed adjusting, making small notes in the margins. Then I read it again, slower.
It was good. Not perfect — there was a line in the second verse I'd want to look at again with fresh eyes — but it was good. It had the weight the brief was asking for. It felt like something real.
I sat with it for a moment, just sitting, in the quiet.
Then I took a photo of every page, compiled the document on my phone, and sent it off.
Sent: 2:57 AM.
I set the phone down and leaned back on my hands and stared at the pink ceiling with its unicorn stickers and its glow-in-the-dark stars and its slightly crooked horse poster. Lily was breathing slowly beside me, completely at peace with the world, blankets pulled up to her chin.
It was done. It was actually done.
I let that sit for about thirty seconds.
Then I looked at my desk. At the schoolbag slumped against the chair. At the homework assignment I had been given two days ago that I had fully intended to do after finishing the song.
I looked at it for a long time.
Then I turned off the lamp, pulled what edge of blanket I could reach over my shoulder, and closed my eyes.
The homework could explain itself in the morning.
It could not, as it turned out, explain itself in the morning.
I walked into class looking like I had survived something — uniform slightly wrinkled despite my best efforts, eyes carrying the specific weight of someone who had seen 2:57 AM from the wrong side of it. I sat down at my desk, put my bag on the floor, and rested my forehead on my arms.
Marco, already in his seat, leaned over immediately. "You look terrible."
"Thank you, Marco."
"Like, genuinely. Did you sleep at all?"
"Some."
"How much is some?"
"Marco."
"Right, right." He leaned back. Then leaned forward again. "Is it the vending machine thing? Because I've been tracking the—"
"It's not the vending machine thing."
The teacher came in. The class settled. I sat up and arranged my face into something that approximately resembled a person who was present and functioning.
Roll call moved through the names. I answered mine correctly this time, which felt like personal growth.
Then came the moment.
"I'll be collecting the assignments now," my teacher said, moving between the rows with her hand out. "Please have them ready."
Around me, notebooks and papers came out of bags. The sound of things being prepared, organized, handed over.
I sat very still.
She reached my desk. Looked at me. Looked at my empty hands.
"Yuna. Your assignment."
I opened my mouth.
Closed it.
Opened it again.
"Miss," I said, with complete sincerity, "I am going through something."
The room went quiet.
My teacher stood there, assignment sheets from the rest of the class already in her hand, and looked at me with the expression of a person who had been teaching long enough to have heard most things and had still somehow not heard this delivered quite this way. She rubbed her temple once.
"Of course you are," she said.
From my left, I heard Marco make a sound that was very clearly him trying not to laugh and failing.
From three seats away, without looking up from her notebook, Erika brought her palm down flat against her forehead with a quiet, conclusive slap.
I stared at the front of the room and accepted my fate.
To be continued.