Keebs started demanding they each clock in four solid, uninterrupted hours every day inside Andres’s Manila penthouse (really just the only unit on the topmost floor of his dorm along Cayco Street). Sen-sen found this scandalous. So scandalous in fact that she developed severe allergies in response. But there really was no way around an adorable but overbearing slave driver.

That night, the sound of glass breaking burst through the alien fog that had just entered Sen-sen’s field of vision. Sen-sen had been blacking out like a chronic narcoleptic for the last half hour. It’s always amazing what a tiny octagon tablet can accomplish.

“Sen-sen, baka may riot sa labas!” Dante yelled, running outside to look over. Dante was wearing the tattered Empowered Women’s Gym shirt he had been alternating with the abominable but still very much alive Avoid the Noid tee. Sen-sen often wondered whether Dante deliberately wore stupid shirts to distract people from how handsome he really was given the chance.

Sen-sen lifted herself in her mind first, and then convinced her real-world body to follow. She sobbed half-heartedly walking zombie-like through the door.

She moaned a tiny, “What the hell?” at what could only be a gang-related scrimmage: dark, angry faces, conjoined eyebrows visible from where she was, pointing fingers, extremely tense body language, and dark brown bottles of Red Horse flung from opposite directions.

Dante and Sen-sen watched until Sen-sen’s alien fog dissipated into the sidelines of her brain, until she can start a conversation that inevitably began with what was bothering her for the last couple of days.

“You like Nirvana.”

“I’m sorry?” Dante lifted his head slowly in her direction.

“Why don’t you ask her out?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Sen-sen rolled her eyes at him. “Tseh! Hindi ako tanga! I just don’t understand how two incredibly attractive people with that much earth-bound chemistry can stand not being together. It’s crazy and sick and a sad waste of energy.”

“I don’t ruminate, Sen. Whatever’s not happening isn’t happening for a reason.”

“And what could this golden reason possibly be?”

“Why aren’t you out of college yet, Sen?”

“Hey.”

“It’s not because you’re not trying, is it?”

“Hey!’

“It’s because you’ve assigned a meaning too deep to graduating you just need to know it’s going to work out the way you want it. And somehow that just never seems to happen.”

“Damn you.”

“Think about it. You’re smarter than most of your batch mates that have graduated ahead of you. And yet you’re still here. What’s up, Sen? What’s making you stay?”

Sen-sen fought a very real urge to hit Dante smack in the face.