Page 12 of Signal No. Us

“Kapitan pushed for the elevated foundations after the last big one,” Robby noted, catching Allan’s look. “Expensive, yes, but cheaper than rebuilding everything every time there’s a storm.”

“You people really did rebuild the whole town while I was gone.”

“Not all of it,” Robby said. “A lot of it’s still the same as before.” He nodded toward Cine sa Isla’s distant, crumbling silhouette, still visible from where they stood. “Like the cinema. There are things we left behind because we didn’t have the time, or the money, or the right people.”

“Or the right artist,” Allan said, only half joking.

“Or the right artist,” Robby agreed, utterly serious.

They stopped at a small carinderia near the health center, where the owner, a stout, cheerful woman who greeted Robby by name, called out “Dios mayad, mga iho!” the second she spotted Allan trailing behind him, and, before he could even place the greeting properly, had already rounded the counter to hug him like a favorite nephew, insisting on feeding them both for free “para sa Wonder Kid, bumalik na.”

“Manang, please stop calling me that. No longer a kid and no longer wonderful,” Allan said, around a mouthful of rice.

“We’re not going to stop,” the woman said cheerfully. “You grew up here, then you left, then you came back. You’ve earned the nickname.”

“See,” Robby said. “The whole barangay agrees.”

“This is a conspiracy.”

“You know they only do this because they love you,” Robby said, quieter now, less teasing. “That’s why they do it. Not to embarrass you. To remind you, you have a place here, no matter how long you were gone.”

Allan looked around the small carinderia, the owner already fussing over another customer, the health center’s fluorescent lights humming steady across the street, the evacuation building standing solid against a sky that, someday soon, would test it again, and felt something settle in his chest that had been unsettled since he’d stepped off that ferry.

Not just nostalgia. Not just guilt for having left. Something closer to belonging, offered freely, without him having had to earn it back first.

“Thank you,” he told the owner, on their way out, and meant considerably more than the free meal.

“Anytime, iho,” she said. “Just tell your friend to bring you back here again sometime.”

“Always,” Robby said, before Allan could answer, and slung an easy arm around his shoulders as they continued down the road, past more houses, more small proofs of a town that had kept surviving and rebuilding without waiting for him to come back and notice.

The weight of Robby’s arm landed heavier than it had any right to, warm through his thin shirt, and Allan’s whole body seemed to recalibrate around the fact of it: the easy, deliberate press of Robby’s hand at his shoulder, the accidental brush of a thumb near his collar, the specific, humiliating way his own pulse picked up over something as small as an arm. He almost laughed at himself. He didn’t move away.

This is Robby, he reminded himself, like reciting a rule he wasn’t sure he still believed in. The boy who used to make his ears go hot just by smiling at him, and also, inconveniently, the reason he’d spent a decade flinching at his own name. Some old, self-protective part of him wanted to read nothing into it, wanted to file it under friendly and walk on. The rest of him, the part that had apparently not gotten the memo in ten years, was already busy memorizing the exact weight and warmth of Robby’s arm, filing it away for later, for the late-night replay he already knew was coming.

Allan let himself lean into it, and into the whole loud, patched-together, stubbornly hopeful shape of the place he’d spent ten years insisting he didn’t miss.

He had, though. Achingly. He just hadn’t let himself say so until now.

CHAPTER 5

By his fourth day home, Allan had accumulated one part-time mural, one dog who now slept diagonally across his feet every night like a self-appointed bodyguard, three separate marriage prospects he’d been shown photos of against his will, and a very precise, deeply inconvenient awareness of exactly where Robby was standing in any given room.

He was trying very hard not to examine that last one.

“You’re doing the thing again,” Ver said, arriving home for the weekend in a whirlwind of luggage and wedding errands, watching Allan watch Robby cross the yard with a coil of rope over one shoulder.

“What thing?”

“The thing where you stare at Robby like he’s a word problem you’re trying to solve.”

“I do not stare.”

“You’ve been staring since you were nine,” Ver said, not unkindly, dropping onto the porch step beside him. “When we were kids, you’d say, ‘Kuya, why are Robby’s eyes so pretty,’ and I’d say, ‘ew, don’t tell him,’ and you never told him. Nineteen years now. At least you’re consistent.”

“That’s slander.”

“That’s memory,” Ver said. “There’s a difference.”