You in the front row

One-thirty in the morning. The streets are teeming with spectators of the tricycle drag race along Katipunan. I walk from the dorm to McDo, either because I was feeling a little masochistic, or I didn't want to spend twelve bucks. Or maybe most of the trikes are revving up their engines, and the rest are parked all over the road, their bets in their pockets. Or a combination of the three.

*

The girl at the counter asks, "Can you wait?"

I've drifted off, traipsing once again into La-La Land. I ask her what she means -- "Ha?"

"Yung fries po," she says.

I nod. She looks like that girl in elementary whose face welcomed a projectile Reader's Digest Condensed Books, thrown by one mentally unbalanced (yet to be diagnosed and medicated) classmate. I'd been sitting behind that girl when that happened, trying to memorize Joyce Kilmer's Trees for a graded recitation, when the book whizzed by. The first instinct was to look towards the direction of the attacker.

"Sige, I'll wait," I said. I turned to look through the glass doors, waiting for the tricycles to roar by, along, through.

*

The woman tending the newspaper stand calls for me to be careful. "Miss, may gang war ngayon. Ingat kayo."

I only smile at her warning, the token concern given to passers-by. I walk through the boys wielding pipes and balisongs, wondering if I die with a Quarter Pounder meal in my arms tonight. Tomorrow's headline might read, Babae, tatanga-tanga, pumagitna sa gang war. A picture of me with a two-by-four sticking out of my eye, footprints on my Minotaur shirt will be in black and white. And the lady selling the papers would say, "I warned her" and shake her head. "Yosi, sir?"

Five minutes later, nearing home, I think: Apparently not.

*

PS - Paramore and Feist got nominated for the Grammy awards. Yey. :)