Summer meant work before syllabi. Sheryl became good at being useful in places that did not know her yet. She nannied in La Huerta for her father's cousin before they migrated to the U.S.—a season measured in naps synced with airplane takeoffs, grocery lists taped to a fridge, and learning how to be present and invisible at the same time. Another summer, she helped in Tita Beth's sari-sari store, where heat collected under the awning and people paid in coins like decisions.
Men noticed her beauty the way men do when boredom has time to gossip. One boy, all future and swagger, studied to be a seaman and made a project of her. His chin was too proud for his face, his mouth never quite closed, a glisten at the corners that made Sheryl tuck her revulsion into a smile. It wouldn't have mattered if he'd been a saint—his mother had decided Sheryl was a "katulong" aiming for her son's imaginary ship money. The neighborhood chorus made it worse: whispers that Sheryl was trapping him, accusations tailored from scraps.
No one bothered to know she was an education major at the Normal, hauling a full day on two fishball sticks and a notebook from the discount bin.
What broke her wasn't the names; it was how small her world felt under them. One afternoon, after smiling through a purchase and a slur, she placed both hands on the counter to steady them and said, "Tita Beth, puwede po… I need ₱290 for enrollment." She said it like a person asking for bail.
Tita Beth didn't ask for the story. She reached into the cash box, counted careful, and put the money in Sheryl's hand with a hug that made Sheryl stand straighter afterward. "Enroll," she said. "Tapusin mo."
Sheryl did not tell her mother. When asked later, she shrugged and said, "Hindi na ako kailangan ni Tita Beth." It became a closed topic, folded in the back of her closet with other clothes that didn't fit anymore.
At the university, Sheryl found a megaphone for the ache that had been pressing on her ribs since the hospital week. She joined student protests, learned the choreography of placards and petitions, and read theory under the dim romance of dormitory bulbs. She didn't shout because shouting felt like a leak; she spoke from the throat where grief lives and made it sound like instruction. The poor and the overlooked were no longer headlines; they had faces that looked like neighbors.
She graduated into a contractual teaching job at a public high school in Parañaque, the kind where classrooms had more chairs than breath and the faculty room's electric fan decided morale. Her first chalk dust on her black skirt felt like a badge.
Home, the math got meaner. Lawsuits bred like rumors. Bills took numbers personally. Sheryl's mother, once the queen of the switchboard, looked at flyers for Practical Nursing programs at night, tracing the schedules with her finger. "If I study," she said, as if confessing a plan, "maybe I can work in a clinic. Kahit maliit. I'll help with the bills." It humbled and scared Sheryl that the woman who had taught her how to answer the phone like a promise might go back to school because life had made her young again in the wrong way.
Her sisters pulled, each in their own gravity.
Sharon, second-born, was the pretty one with a knack for literature who'd secured a private-college scholarship with library duty attached. When a grade dipped below a line no one bothered to explain kindly, the scholarship vanished with the kind of bureaucratic shrug that ruins a month. Sheryl covered her enrollment after that, assembling pesos like a mosaic—but Sharon often didn't pay the full tuition, registering for partial loads she never mentioned. Four years later—four years of Sheryl telling herself hope was a better use of air—Sharon said she couldn't graduate because she lacked units.
Sheryl laid a crumpled receipt on the table and did the math twice, then a third time for mercy.
"Why are your units short?" she asked, keeping her voice even so it wouldn't cut.
Sharon stared at her hands. "I didn't enroll full every term."
The words landed like small stones. Sheryl thought of jeepney coins lined by tens, rice bought by kilos not brands, and the way hope is measured in units. She nodded once, because nodding cost less than breaking, and any breaking would have to be cleaned up by the person who worked weekends anyway.
Susan, the third child, had a mind like a neat desk. Their mother's persistence—knocking on doors until knuckles ached—found a Rotary scholarship for her. Paperwork became prayer. Susan studied as if grades were the ladder out and she was responsible for every rung.
Savier, the youngest and only boy, still wore backpacks that made him look like a turtle. He needed merienda, notebooks, a mother who didn't have to duck when someone said "sheriff" like an omen. Sheryl kept a jar for his school projects and another for emergencies and wrote DON'T TOUCH on both like a joke that wasn't.
Her colleagues invited her out for halo-halo after payday, for one cheap movie on a Friday, for karaoke that promised to make the week behave. Sheryl smiled and said, "Next time," until "next time" became her alibi. The truth was simple and unsentimental: a night out could be two kilos of rice and tomorrow's jeepney fare. She chose to be boring. It was cheaper.
At school, she was the teacher who knew how to stretch photocopy paper and how to speak to the kid who smelled like cigarettes without making him feel like a headline. She kept a little mirror in her drawer to check if her face looked like someone you could ask for help. Students loved her in the way teenagers do when love is a verb—by showing up to class, by trying on the days it rained, by remembering her birthday without asking Facebook.
At home, she kept a separate ledger for things she didn't want hope to see: the case numbers on envelopes, the names of people who loaned without smiling, the dates for hearings shuffled between parent–teacher conferences. She wrote "BREATHE" at the top of one page and laughed at herself for the drama, then left it there anyway. Some pages deserve better titles than bills.
Sometimes, late, she replayed the moment when Tita Beth counted out ₱290 without being told the story. That hug had been a bridge. She walked it again when the day had no other crossings.
She did not have a province. She had Parañaque, and a mother who remembered where every cable used to run, and a house that kept its dignity with a clean floor even when the roof leaked. She had a father whose shirts still smelled faintly of cologne if you buried your face in the back of the closet where nobody dared touch. She had English that could slice or soothe, learned in classrooms where girls were taught to occupy space without apology.
And somewhere beyond the perimeter road and the malls that named themselves after seasons they didn't have, there was a number on a florist's card she had scribbled once in a hurry because fairness asked for it. She was not thinking of it now. Not while adding three columns that refused to be friends. Not while rinsing rice and pretending the sound was rain.
But the city remembers you when you're too tired. It keeps the paths that want to cross again.
Tomorrow she would face another room of high school students, still unaware of how much chalk cost, and teach them like it didn't matter.Tonight she would sleep with the window open to catch whatever wind Parañaque could spare. In the morning, the lawsuits would still be there, and the siblings, and the tiny dramas of a public school with a broken printer. And she would put on her sensible shoes and go.
Because eldest daughters know: you go.