I didn’t mean to kill her.
It just happened — a fateful accident that was not entirely ideal but was destined to come to pass anyway. Perhaps this wasn’t the best way to start my story. Made me sound like a murderer and all, when I truthfully am far from it. But there’s no other way of putting it: I killed her. I killed me.
I’ll paint you a picture: a clueless six year old, fresh out of kindergarten and eager to further her education, an unemployed mother, an underpaid security guard for a father, a wallet that thins faster than it can be replenished, and a crumpled enrollment form tossed in the trash.
If you couldn’t tell, I was the clueless six year old, and my father had spent an agonizing thirty minutes trying to tell me in the softest way possible that school just wasn’t for an impoverished kid like me. We only had enough money to scrap by, he’d said. Barely enough, even, to pay the cost of living. They couldn’t fund my education. “I’m sorry, Georgie,” my tatay had told me.
Six-year-old me had been heartbroken, then. She wanted to learn more, be more. And in a country that wasn’t kind to poor kids who couldn’t even study elementary school, she could hardly amount to anything in that state.
The younger version of me had been kind and gentle. She was carefree and didn’t believe that all the world was just a stage for vicious competitions. She would have hung her head low and stepped aside obediently, succumbing to her fate without so much as a complaint.
So I killed her. That night, after my mother put me to sleep, something in me had broken loose, a strange hunger I didn’t know I had bubbling beneath the surface of my skin. I wanted to study, to amount to something other than this. It wasn’t my fault I wasn’t born fortunate. It wasn’t my fault I didn’t have the generational wealth to be an acceptable person in society without having to wield education as a sword. So why did I have to suffer? The hunger changed its shape, then, from an intangible dark blob to a violent burst of red — anger. And with that odd feeling, I killed the younger version of me, the one who would have accepted the way her life was going downhill like gospel, and morphed into someone else, someone stronger and more determined.
When I woke up the next day, I was a changed girl. At breakfast, I told my parents I was going to work in kuya Erwin’s junkshop. My nanay had been against it, protesting that children like me shouldn’t have to work. But my father had seen the fire in my eyes, and with a small nod he told me to go. And so I went and told kuya Erwin I wanted a job. He laughed at my face, said I was too small to be of any use, but I didn’t let that stop me. I hung around the shop until he grew exasperated at my presence and gave in.
“You can be my assistant, I guess,” he’d said with a sigh. I worked there the whole summer, but because the world was merciless and unkind, even that hadn’t been enough to get me to school.
“Why do you want to earn money so badly, anyway?” kuya Jun asked me one day as he and I were cleaning up. “You’re still a kid. Aren't you supposed to enjoy your childhood first?”
I pressed my lips together. “I want to go to school,” I said, voice barely above a whisper.
Kuya Jun's face had been sympathetic. He pursed his lips and knelt to my height so we were facing eye to eye. “Why didn't you just say so?” he said. His smile was kind and patient. “I think I might know someone who can help,” he continued. “Would you like to meet her?”
“Really?” I had asked, clasping his hands excitedly. “Can she really help me? She’ll let me go to school?”
“Of course,” he said, standing to his full height so he towered over me. I hadn’t recognized it back then, but looking back at that day now, even though he was still smiling, there was an underlying uncertainty in his eyes and something that resembled sadness. “You know I have a sister, right?”
I chewed on my lip. “Yes, kuya. Why? Didn’t you say that you two don’t talk to each other anymore?”
“Well, that’s going to change now,” he said, wiping the grease off his hands with his jeans. “She’s the one who can help you.”
As it turned out, his estranged sister was the principal of their town’s most prestigious school that provided both elementary and high school education. Lake Academy, it was called, because it was built around a large lake that people back in the old days had believed was enchanted. Apparently, kuya Erwin’s sister, Principal Emily had been awarded a scholarship at Lake Academy when she was in high school, and she moved out of town the second she graduated, only to come back and assume the role of principal.
I didn’t know how kuya Erwin did it, but he managed to convinced his sister to give me a scholarship, too, and being a kid, I didn’t really have the guts to eavesdrop after kuya told me to give them some privacy, so I waited outside the principal’s office, sitting on the wooden bench and fiddling with my fingers. My legs were too short to reach the floor when I leaned back on the seat, so I swung them back and forth and watched as one leg disappeared while the other came to view.
On that day, two things happened that changed the course of my life forever, even though I didn’t know it at the time. One: I had been granted my scholarship. Two: I met Samantha Anderson, the girl who ruined my life.
