The secret club

“Walang hiya ka!” One, two, three. Pause. The famous teleserye brick red multi-purpose vehicle. I stayed here Monching’s kindness. “Ako pa? Ako pa?”

No, we weren’t brawling—even if you’d think third-grade kids would actually be able to pull each other’s hair already. The teleserye line remains a teleserye line in our school service. Wearing double-layered uniforms in the scorching Manila heat, with smeared iskrambol slowly dripping from our lips, we re-enacted a scene from Maria Flordeluna, props included.

A big chunk of my childhood rests on the moving entity that started its engine once the last bell rang. It saw countless elementary kids trying to grow up fast, and high schoolers wanting to be kids again.

It’s striking how we got together just two times a day: before and after school. What more? How my servicemates saw what my classmates didn’t. It was 5:45 a.m. and our my then-alive tito from our house to the service. The tallest in the gang said I looked like a baby. Everyone laughed.

The laughter was louder when my closest service pal, Chelsea, turned tomato red after my servicemates read her entry in my slambook. “Josh,” she had written in the secret crush portion. “It’s not a secret now,” our resident bad boy blurted out. But who were we fooling? Our school service was like a secret club. We’d slide our windows and slam our door if someone hijacked the fun.

But we’d open the door sometimes for the little things: When the manang restock the pink Hai candy. When there was a new set of two-peso rubber rings. Or when the squidball cart beside us had a new batch ready. If only our school nuns had seen that one time moving crib. But the school didn’t see us there. I guess that was the best part.

We cried, sang, screamed, danced. We shared personal stories our homeroom subject would never hear. We played games our teachers wouldn’t want to see. There were Pogs, Teks, Pokémon cards. And of course, there were reenactments from our favorite shows, from Agua

Bendita to Bituing Walang Ningning. “Walang hiya ka!” The teleserye line remains a teleserye line.

But our school service was also a show.

Before and after school were the only times we got together—and the only times we interacted with each other. Inside the school, we were like strangers. There was no trace of the secret club anywhere else outside the service.

I guess we felt a certain degree of humiliation at school—a limiting, conservative environment—when we’d see each other, thinking that we knew everyone’s true, uncontained selves.

But just like all great friendships, ours would continue like it had never been cut off, right after the last bell of the day. “Mukha kang

itlog,” one would say, and the club would start its session again. We were truly walang hiya.