Oh, Marieton Pacheco!! by Adam David
cont'

2. Marieton Pacheco and I are on an air-conditioned bus to Novaliches, to meet her parents who financed her way through four years in MassComm. It is a sunny Saturday afternoon outside the window, the sort that invites bearded street preachers to bring the Word of the Lord into air-conditioned bus aisles. Our bus is parked near where People's Park used to be. Marieton is holding my hand, and I hers. Her grip is firm, like a little girl holding her brother's hand as they make their way inside a Star City funhouse. I'm contemplating about tickling the inside of her palm with my middle-finger when she asks me about my relationship with my father. "Are the two of you close?" she asks me. She waits for my answer with a pout.

"Well, we don't fish every other Saturday or anything as such. He knows who I date and he calls me up every now and then, but that's it." I half-lie to her. My father and I used to fish every other Saturday, by a stagnant lake whose shores he used to run motorbikes on back when he was a rebel without a cause. The lake had carp and catfish in it, not good enough to eat, so we kept them inside buckets filled with lake-water that we'd empty-out back into the lake by the end of the fishing day, fish and algae and all. We started the fishing trips when I was five years old and we stopped when the thicket got too thick for us to hack our way through. I used to joke my friends about how my father and I got acquainted with about five or six generations of fish all from one lake, back in those days.

"How does he look like? Does he look like you?" Marieton strokes my chin, where a few loose strands of stringy hair grow half-heartedly. I wrinkle my nose and slowly shake my head left-to-right, which makes her giggle. She recovers and then strokes my pathetic goatee again, asking "Does he have a beard?"

I stroke her hairless chin and wonder about what other body parts of hers don't have any hair, and I tell her how my father always believed that women love bearded men, as it suggests virility and makes women think of other body parts that have short thick curly hair growing around them. "That's what he tells me, at least. I don't believe him, personally."

Marieton takes all these information in calmly. She looks out the window, up to the giant inflatable Champola installation on a building's rooftop. It looks like it lost its taste a few months ago.

Still looking out the window, Marieton nods, as if to say "That's good". She looks back into the bus, turning to me, her grip on my hand growing stronger as our eyes meet. It's a staring contest for about half a minute, and then her pout breaks and she says "I don't mind you suggesting your virility with a beard, but promise me that you won't grow a moustache, please?" It takes me two seconds to decide my future. I take both of her hands and I hold them together with mine, as if praying in unison. I look into her eyes and I promise her that I will forever be moustache-free.

"Besides," I add. "I always have been a weak moustache cultivator." Marieton smiles and hugs me and kisses me where moustaches were meant to grow, in their place now grows Love. "Thank you for not asking why. Thank you for understanding," she tells me. I kiss and hug her back and I tell her "For you Marieton, anything."