The Love (Dis)connection

Chapter 1

“Does he know?” A soft voice jolted me out of my reverie, and I realized I’ve been sitting on the floor at the basketball court staring at my best friend Jack Tolentino, for the past five minutes.

I’ve staved off the same question, with different variations, several times over the past two years that I immediately fell into pattern.

First: Play dumb when asked. This step does not, by any means, work.

“Know what?” I turned to find one of my good guy friends, Dante Constantino, looking at me solemnly from under his bushy eyebrows while he squatted down behind me.

He gestured impatiently to Jack. “That you’re in love with him!”

Second: Deny, deny, deny, with the “He’s my best friend, for God’s sake!” thrown in for good measure. I used to snort in disbelief but one of my previous ‘interrogators’ told me he didn’t believe me because of that snort. I was too emphatic in my denial, leading him to, correctly, conclude that I was, in fact, in love with tall, guitar-playing, poetry-enthusiast yet sporty, Jack.

I tilted my head back just a bit and laughed, not too loud, not too soft—everything in moderation. “Hahaha! I’m not in love with him. He’s my best friend, for God’s sake! You know that, Dante.”

“Anyone who sees you looking at him can see it, Aurelia Tiengco.”

Third: Well up in tears, which usually got people to back off, especially when I explained that I was still grieving over my ex, Ken de la Cruz, who dumped me two years ago for a popular cheerleader. I didn’t believe he was going out with her until the ‘fact’ spread throughout the university that Mr. Ex was quite good with his tongue in various places. A squirming Jack, already a good friend of mine at that time, had to explain that to me, as Ken has never even tried to get past first base with me. I felt like a cow afterwards. So Jack, being the kind of guy you take home to meet your parents, made me feel like a very beautiful girl—inside and out—and I promptly fell in love with him.

Call it cliché, or transference of feelings, or whatever you want to call it. I simply called it torture, and sometimes, utter stupidity.

Right on cue, I welled up in a few tears, making my lips tremble. “I’m still not over Ken, Dante. How can I be in love with Jack?”

I expected Dante to give up, to back off like the others did. But oh no, he didn’t. He rolled his eyes and threw a piece of clean tissue on my lap, which he produced from God knows where.

“Dramatic as always. You’ve been over Ken in ages. You’re not fooling me, Aurelia. So? Does he know?”

Immediately, my tears dried up and I glared at him. “No, Jack doesn’t know, and you will not tell him!” I clutched at the front of his shirt when he made as if to stand up.

Usually, I wouldn’t admit so easily to anyone; but this was Dante, and over the past few months, we have talked—mostly about academics—but enough to know he’s kind and trustworthy, and not the type to start gossiping about me and my pathetic feelings for Jack.

He gingerly removed his shirt from my grasp. “I’m won’t,” he said, sounding annoyed. “I’m going to sit more comfortably beside you.” He put his backpack on the ground and sat down, Indian-style, beside me.

I turned away from Jack for the moment. “What are you doing here anyway? Shouldn’t you be cooped up in the library, working your way through your paper about Shakespeare?”

Dante was our resident genius, and he was almost always at the library working on whatever has been assigned for the day. He hated procrastination and being late on any of his papers. I don’t know how he did it, with our twenty-six unit per semester workload, but he got the job done.