Page 10 of Signal No. Us

“Feels right to combine them, honestly,” Jake said. “Both scare people for a living.”

“I missed you, Jaworski Feliciano the Third,” Allan admitted. “I hate to admit it.”

“Shhhh. Just Jake. Let’s stick to the branding,” Jake said, and for one second, dropped the showman voice completely, just looked at Allan with real, uncomplicated warmth. “Me too. Just a shame it took ten years.”

“Yeah,” Allan said. “A real shame.”

The moment threatened to get sincere, so Jake, with the instincts of a man who’d built an entire personality around deflection, clapped his hands once. “Okay. Work time. Robby, tell Kapitan we’ll need a permit for the community screening once this place is fixed up. That’s not a joke, we need proper paperwork. We can’t just point a projector at the wall.”

“I know,” Robby said. “I’ve got Kapitan covered.”

“And you,” Jake said, turning the full beam of his attention on Allan, “you’re doing the mural. The new mural. Because this old one’s dead. Look, barely half of it’s even left.”

Allan looked back at the ceiling. At the rooster. At the sun with too many rays.

“I haven’t painted anything in ten years, Jake.”

“You didn’t exactly leave your own barangay behind for ten years either,” Jake said, with the easy brutality of an old friend who had never learned tact and never planned to. “But here you are. So you can do this too.”

Robby, a few feet away, was very deliberately examining a crack in the wall and saying nothing, which Allan understood, with growing, irritated clarity, was its own kind of vote.

“Fine,” Allan said. “I’ll look at it. I’m not promising a mural. I’m promising to look at a wall.”

“That settles it,” Jake said happily, already scribbling something in a battered notebook. “First on the list: ‘Allan, looks at wall.’ Then, ‘Allan, draws.’ Then, ‘Allan, gets famous.’ That’s the whole career path, just like that.”

“Please stop planning my life.”

“I’m used to planning other people’s lives,” Jake said. “It’s my job too, right, Robby?”

“So you say,” Robby said. “I couldn’t stop you if I tried.”

They spent the next hour walking the length of the cinema, Jake narrating a history that was probably sixty percent accurate and forty percent legend he’d clearly embellished for maximum drama: how the projector had briefly caught fire in 1998, how a former mayor had once proposed to his wife in the third row, how the rooster mural had, according to at least one tita, briefly “moved” during a particularly dramatic thunderstorm, which everyone agreed was probably just poor lighting and nobody was willing to fully rule out.

“And here,” Jake said, stopping at a narrow side door half-hidden behind a collapsed curtain rod, “was the most popular spot back then for students. Projection room. Small window, you could watch for free if you were smart about hiding.”

“You used to sneak in here?”

“All the time,” Jake said, entirely unrepentant. “With Robby, sometimes. Before he became Mister Serious Disaster Response Macho Man.”

“I was twelve,” Robby protested, from across the room.

“Twelve, sneaking into a projection booth. Already a delinquent.”

“It was one time,” Robby said. “Then the old caretaker caught us. A whole week, we washed the seats as punishment.”

“That explains the trauma response every time someone mentions cleaning duty,” Allan said.

“Not trauma,” Robby said, with great dignity. “Discipline.”

“Trauma,” Jake and Allan said, at exactly the same time, and Robby threw up his hands, unable to argue against a unanimous verdict.

Allan found himself sketching without quite deciding to, pulling a receipt out of his pocket and a stub of pencil from god knew where, roughing out the shape of a new mural over the old one: the same mountain, the same too-many-rayed sun, but bigger now, more storm in it, more sky.

Robby watched him do it from a few seats away, quiet in a way that felt less like distance and more like he was trying not to interrupt something.

“My question,” Robby said eventually, when Jake had wandered off to argue with the engineer on the phone about ceiling joists, “is why did you stop?”

“Drawing?”