Chapter Eight — The Girl Behind the MaskXiarya's POV
At night the boys' house settles into small, familiar sounds—pipes tick, the fridge sighs, controllers stop clicking one by one, and Mark's snore drifts through the hall like a badly tuned aircon. Somewhere down the corridor, Gelo's door closes with quiet certainty. That little click always feels like a hand on my shoulder: We got it. You're safe.
I lie awake anyway.
The ceiling is a pale square that reminds me of hospital sheets. I tug Adra's jacket up under my chin like a shield. It smells faintly of soap and something colder—mint tea, maybe; winter air. People say scent is memory's shortcut. For me, it's a tunnel. One breath and I'm back in rust and sirens. One breath and a hand is gripping mine, dragging me out of a corridor that could have ended me.
I keep my breaths even. I practiced that: even breaths mean even steps; even steps mean no stumbles; no stumbles mean the mask does not crack. But there's another rhythm under all that now, a syncopation I don't know yet—quickening whenever Gelo's voice dips gentle or firms with command. I can copy Adra's posture, his silence, his cool. I can't order my heart to stand down.
When I can't sleep, I rewind. It helps to press play on my own life. If I don't, the mask starts feeling like my skin.
Saint Brigida Home
I grew up at Saint Brigida Home for Children, a pale-yellow building with paint scabbing at the corners and a yard of stubborn grass that nicked your feet in summer. People imagine orphanages as cold, gray boxes. Saint Brigida was loud. Babies cried in choir. Toddlers screamed in every key. The bigger kids learned to shout to be heard over both. You learn volume first: how to make yourself known.
Then you learn economy—a small market of favors and secrets. Who trades dessert for extra drawing time. Which caretaker looks the other way when you slip an extra blanket under your shirt at lights-out. Where the back fence loosens just enough to squeeze through when you've scraped together coins for sweet ice from the sari-sari.
The third lesson is names.
When you don't know your family, names are anchors. Mine came on a fading hospital tag: Xiarya Erranya Buenavista. The letters always looked like a dare: Be hard to erase.
Sister Pia taught me to write them in block then in script. "Letters are like people," she'd say, guiding my hand. "They're themselves, but they hold hands to mean more."
Sister Lila—no relation; everyone was "Sister" in there—spoke five languages and never bragged. "People bring words with the rice sacks," she'd laugh. "You listen long enough, your mouth learns the shapes." She handed me my first manga and then slid a stack of K-drama DVDs across the table like contraband. "Read the subtitles," she said. "Don't just watch. Your brain will steal the grammar if you let it." I did. It did.
Hair was our fourth lesson. To other people it's accessory; to girls at Saint Brigida it was currency. We traded ribbons like stocks. We braided before exams for luck. We didn't cut unless lice won the battle and we surrendered whole lengths of ourselves to start clean. Maybe that's why I grew mine long: ankle-length defiance—living proof I could keep something growing in a place where most things weren't guaranteed to stay.
Visitors sometimes tilted their heads at me. "She looks like someone," they'd murmur, but never finish the thought. I learned to shrug that away like I shrugged away birthdays without cake and Decembers without family photos. What mattered was Miri's hand in mine when we ran to the guava tree, a bucket swinging between us. What mattered was our bunk-bed arguments about who'd be a dentist, a driver, a pilot, the President. Miri always picked "family." She'd marry a man who cooked and "adopt a whole classroom," she'd say, like it was a line item you could add to a grocery list. I called her ridiculous, and then whispered her dream into the dark on blackout nights just to hear how hope sounded in my mouth.
We didn't know, then, how names can be stolen, how blood can be snipped by paper. We didn't know about a decades-old feud that started at a dinner table and grew teeth—two branches of a wealthy family clawing at each other while the rest of us slept. We didn't know about the hospital corridor where a nurse went to fetch a form and returned to find a crib empty and then full again with a different crying. All I had of that night was its echo: a tag, a name, and a rumor that spread later. A baby disappeared. A record was erased. An orphanage gained a child.
I don't know if there's a word for being wanted by no one and someone at the same time. I grew with that question braided into my hair.
The Night of Rust
I met Adra because I refused to be caught by the men who followed me. The warehouse was all angles—iron beams and shadows, forklift teeth and the sharp triangle of fear pinning me under it. I narrate when I panic. Turn left. Breathe. Don't drop the phone. I aimed for light and ran into winter. He stood there like the air forgot to be warm where he was. His eyes didn't land on me; they went through me, mapping exits. "Move," he ordered. I did, like some part of me had been waiting forever to be told out by someone who meant it.
You know the rest: rust, blood, sirens. A hand that didn't let go. He never asked why they wanted me. He didn't need a reason to save. He only asked if I could run, where the nearest light was, and whether I knew how to keep pressure on a wound. There's mercy in that—being treated as a person worth saving without an essay.
Later came the impossible ask: could I be him, just for a while?
I said yes because life had given me a debt and a talent: I had his face, and I owed him a future.
The Announcement
The school posted the outreach schedule on a glossy board near the student center: Alcantara University x Saint Brigida Home — Donation Drive, Mini-Program, Q&A. The band would show up to thank donors and hand over boxes. Cute PR, real good behind it.
"Full circle," Steve said, flipping the flyer. "We're adorable."
The name Saint Brigida vibrated in my chest. It's strange what words can do. My fingers tightened on the strap of Adra's jacket until it creaked.
"You okay?" Gelo asked, tying his sneaker too tight and then loosening it—his ritual for making things trustworthy.
"Yeah," I said. My mouth delivered Adra's calm. My hands told on me.
Gelo took the flyer from Steve and read the line again, slowly. "Saint Brigida," he said, and his eyes found mine. Something softened. It was relief I didn't earn and didn't deserve and wanted anyway.
"We can swap you out of the Q&A," he offered. "You can sit in the van. Steve can talk for all of us, as usual."
"Hey," Steve protested. "I'm a gift."
"I'm fine," I said, and the lie felt sturdy. I've used it before. It holds a surprising amount of weight.
"Okay," Gelo said, not pushing. In the elevator he stood nearer than usual, a quiet guardrail I didn't lean on but almost did.
The Drive
We took the old van—the one that rattled like a drumline and smelled like coffee and touring and fifteen versions of us who thought we knew what we were doing. Mark drummed the window in triplets. Steve filmed a faux-serious vlog for fans ("Adra on the way to deliver canned goods and devastation; he blinked; the girls will scream"). I held the two-paragraph script Gelo printed for me: safe gratitude; a line about education; a line about hope. Adra doesn't say much at these things. I can do two paragraphs without ending the world.
"If you want to skip the tour, say it," Gelo said, eyes on the road. "We can drop the boxes and bounce."
"If I see the yard," I said, "I'll know whether they cut down the guava tree."
"Okay," he repeated. That word from him means I hear you, I'll be there, and we leave when you nod. It's weirdly enough.
Saint Brigida, Again
The gate had new paint. The hinge still squealed like it remembered rust. The steps were the same; my feet knew their distance. Someone had painted a mural of paper cranes down the corridor. I wanted to trace each wing with my finger like a rosary.
Sister Pia's hair was whiter, her arms wider. She hugged Gelo, then Steve, then Mark. When she faced me her eyes argued with themselves. "Adra," she said at last, and it was both a welcome and a question.
I bowed a fraction the way Adra does. She nodded back, the way kind people do when facts don't add up but love proceeds anyway.
The director—new, efficient—walked us through the schedule: relay games, mini-program, Q&A, handing off boxes, photos. "If Mr. Torres would like to say a few words..." she added.
I felt the boys' attention turn like a tide. Gelo didn't look at me. He stood close enough that I could feel an okay radiating off his shoulder.
"I'll speak," I said. It surprised me, too. But some truths don't want to be outsourced.
We played three acoustic songs because acoustic hides edges; because the courtyard makes everything sound like it's already been sung once and just came back to visit. Kids leaned forward like we were TV they were finally allowed to touch.
When the guitars faded, the mic found my hand. My pulse answered from my throat. The old yard took the panic's teeth.
"Thank you for having us," I said, quiet and even. "Places like this... make people. I was made by a place like this." Not this one. Like this one. Truth with edges rounded. "It teaches you how to be loud when you need to be heard and quiet when someone else needs the noise. It teaches you that names are promises. Even if you don't know all of yours yet, you can keep the ones you do."
I felt Gelo become gravity beside me.
"We brought boxes," I added, nodding at the neat stacks of soap and notebooks and rice our fans had funded. "But what we're really trying to bring is a reminder you already carry: you're not less because the world didn't arrange itself around you at the start. You can build your center."
The clapping rolled up like wind through tall grass. I set the mic down before my voice could shake. That's when the challenge walked in wearing a press lanyard.
The Reporter
Alcantara invites campus media to outreach events—win-win content. Near the back stood a student journalist with her phone on a gimbal and everything about her posture saying prepared. Her badge read Juno.
"Mr. Torres," she called, polite, clear. "Question for The Beacon. Fans online say your tone's changed lately—more rasp in the lower notes. Style choice or...?"
Or was a cliff. I stepped to it too fast. "Style," I answered, clipped.
"Could we grab five seconds?" she asked quickly. "Just a line into the phone for our reel—anything in your natural register."
Clever. "Natural register" sounded harmless. It was a trap. Pick the wrong weight or pitch and ten comparison videos would sprout by dinner. Fake a face on a livestream; the voice logs keep score.
"I don't do takes," I said with Adra's frost. "We came for the kids, not clips."
It should've ended there. But a younger, sharper part of me bristled—the part that hates being turned into evidence. "What would you use it for?" I asked. "Splice it with last year's reels?"
Juno froze—caught between ambition and ethics. "Comparisons... perform well," she admitted. "People like to hear growth."
Growth. Or damage.
"Don't trick people into performing their medical records," I said, softer than my anger, sharper than my fear. "Find another angle. These kids skipped snacks to buy soap for other kids. Write about that."
Silence spread, the good kind—the kind that makes space for someone to change their mind without losing face. Juno exhaled. "Fair point," she said, cheeks warming. She lowered her phone. "Thank you."
"Do your best story," Gelo added, not unkind.
She did. Later, her post showed kids squealing through relay races, a boy clutching crayons like treasure, a line about how campuses hold up their cities. No soundbites. Just faces and facts.
At the time, the director ushered us toward snacks, a potential crisis redirected before it hit anyone's feed.
Gelo's knuckles brushed mine. It felt like someone tightening a loose bolt. "You didn't need me," he murmured.
"You stood where the wind would've hit," I answered.
He didn't argue.