Chapter 8

CHAPTER 8

T his joining-a-club thing was turning out to not be such a bad idea after all.

It was difficult at first, seeing how I was not visible at all the past two years, but I saw what I was missing out on. I now had lunch buddies who were not Gian Magsaysay, a better schedule that forced me to be more efficient with my workload, and a social life.

A social life .

That was mostly due to Cholo, Gian, and the Ephemere kids insisting on tagging me along during the weekends. They were not in the same circle but it seemedthe club had a different event every other week. It looked like it was normal for them to be present at every single thing. Cholo and his team would always use the line “I have some Ephemere things to discuss with you, Vinnie, is that okay?” and I would have the excuse that I lived far away. However, Gian heard that one time and volunteered to drive me because he was always present anyway.

Eventually, I ran out of excuses to not go and just didn’t bother. I would rather eat my own foot than admit it but I started liking it at some point.

And then there was Prefect Brat who was just everywhere. He would appear out of thin air like a mushroom and talk to me about Ephemere and then academics. He would grill me about my answer to the latest seatwork in 170 and ask if I had read this article, if I heard about that new guerilla campaign for this product, if I thought a certain approach would work differently for the event, and so forth.

I first tried to assess if he was just trying to annoy me like before but I found myself enjoying the conversations as I genuinely loved marketing management and intended to do it for a living once I graduated. He also started dragging me along to these pre-exam refreshers that my orgmates did for the major subjects.

“See, I told you that wasn’t so bad,” Cholo said as we were walking away from the posted scores of the most recent Accounting exam on the bulletin board. “Taas ng score mo, o!”

“Excuse me, it wasn’t like my grades were bad,” I said.

“I didn’t say they were! I just thought you could do better and I was right!Look at you, top 3!” he said, as Cholo just loved being right. “And didn’t you say you could still get cum laude with your current standing?”

“Yes, I could, but I have Finance 2 this sem, too, and that’s a big—hold on,” I said, stopping in my tracks. “I don’t think I ever told you that, Prefect Brat. How’d you know this?”

“It’s in your feed,” he replied, looking like I had just asked him whether two and two made four. “Like, fifty percent of your whole feed is just you stressing about your honors standing and there’s hardly any Juhyun content on it these days?—”

“You follow me?” I asked, eyes widening.

Cholo laughed his head off at my reaction. “Yeah!” he said. “Your tweets are funny. Especially when you refer to Jennifer as Jhemerlyn .”

“You’re on stan Flitter ?” I sputtered and he put an index finger on his lips to signal me to be quiet.

“I guess to someone like you with five thousand plus, it’s hard to keep track,” he said, teasing. “But I’m surprised you never noticed it was me. I’m always replying to your surveys of which fancam song to do next and quoting your awesome comebacks to antis?—”

“How on earth did you even end up following me?” I said, feeling light-headed now. “It’s a fan account!”

“Why are you so upset about this, Lavinia? I mean, you’re not the only one here who likes Era of Maidens. As much of a snob you are about it, there are people here who also have good taste.”

My jaw hit the floor. That was a well-kept secret of mine—not even Gian or Liana knew that I was running an account on stan Flitter. Never mind that Era of Maidens was a group that the three of us all listened to; they were more on the casual listener side while I was the type who picked a fight with stan trolls who dared to criticize even a strand of hair on Hyoyoon’s head.

I was mortified.

“Don’t worry. You’re my favorite Hyoyoon stan so you can call me Prefect Brat all you want,” he said, his smile now genuine. “I’d appreciate a follow back, though, senpai.”

“Don’t you ever call me that again,” I warned.

“Joke lang. I know you hate it. Anyway, I’m grabbing merienda before the Ephemere meeting later. Do you want siomai?”

“No,” I said, too embarrassed to even think of food at the moment. I made a mental note to go over my own posts the next hour so I can delete all the compromising tweets I had in there because I was sure I called him things much worse than prefect brat.

“Okay. I’ll see you at the meeting later. You better not be late!” he replied.

I grabbed his sleeve before he ran off. “You better not tell a single soul about this.”

“Don’t worry,” he teased, leaning closer to me and dropping his voice. “It’s our little secret, vinniexcalibur .”

He gave me a small wink and I was so weirded out that I immediately let go of his sleeve. Cholo laughed away as he walked off towards the cafeteria and I was left in the corridor, still gaping.

I took my phone out and shook my head. Cholo, an Era of Maidens fan? Who knew?