Volume I Chapter 8

"Well, I do hope that you're having a fun time with her when she could be annoying at times."

"Trash talking me now, shorty?" The subject of our conversation suddenly popped out from the door and made us silently jump from fright. "Told you I'll be back in a jiffy." She addressed to me as I rolled my eyes at the blatant haughtiness in her tone. Behind her was a tall tanned man with a goatee similar to an anchor, and a beautiful woman that had disheveled hair.

"Want to know what happened to them?" The girl who was with them two minutes ago, nudge me at the sides as she gave a hand to make me stand. I gave her a small glare, sending a message that I didn't want to pry in other people's business, and slapped her shoulders as I follow her intention to stand.

"They were just sleeping. Don't worry." I couldn't help but scrunch up my face as she laughed at my reaction when I heard such unnecessary words from her mouth. "I'm not worrying... In fact, I probably won't care if you walked in your boss having a fun time." I've already deducted the fact that she somehow works here based on the conversations and familiarity of people around her inside the small shop. The only question that I have is the reason why she works here in the first place but it probably won't be answered for a long time.

"What if I told you that I already did?" She whispered to me and I couldn't help but raise an eyebrow on her way.

"Brother, please make some snacks for our dear guests. I'll be in the room with these two, if you need me for business." The man with a goatee said to David, and ushered the two of us inside the room behind his door. Inside was a bed situated on the right corner of the room. Stacks of papers, taped boxes, unused monitors, and rolled up tarpaulins was placed on one corner of the room, while the lockers were put in between of the materials and a large wooden closet. In the middle was a table coupled with chairs situated on its sides, making it an area where the employees can take breaks and eat in an organized manner.

"Sorry for the mess. My office is currently inaccessible at the moment." He says to us, sending off the beautiful woman by the doorway with a kiss before settling himself in the seat across from ours.

"It's fine, Bert. We're only here because I'll be quitting my job for a few days." Vanessa told him her purpose.

"What? I can't have my best editor quit her job. What would happen to my fans?" He exclaimed and I thought to myself what exactly was he talking about.

"Well, you better start looking. Ah- I was just joking, geez." She rubbed her side when I gave her a hard jab. I was already feeling guilty from the fact that she had to be a bridge for me and the others, now, she needed to take a time off of her job just so she can attend council meetings.

"What time do you think you'll finish at school?" The man in front of us asked.

"Probably seven. Depends on how much sucking up I need to do to get dismissed early. We're having an event you see. Tree planting." She shrugged her shoulders lightly and tipped her head left and right. I heard the door open and heavy footsteps followed through. David went inside with a tray full of snacks and placed it on the table.

"An event you say. I see. Thank you, David. Mind if I could visit this event of yours?" He asked us, eyes darting left and right on our faces.

"I haven't gotten the specifics yet-" "I'm sensing a but-"

"But, you could even participate in it if you'd sponsor some of the seeds that we're trying to acquire." My eyes flashed with recognition as I remember the topic of meeting earlier.

"So, here's the rundown on the duties left unsupervised. We've been assigning collections on class funds to purchase seeds that'll be needed to be planted by our fellow students. So far, the juniors and far down had already purchased a couple of bags in the catalogs that the dean provided." The student council president handed us a long list of seeds and list that contained information about the seed-buying business.

"I'm guessing that the senior representatives haven't done their part in this yet?" He gave us a nod and interlaced his fingers in a business-like manner. "There are more things actually, but we should at least get you started with these." It wasn't much of a plea for help, rather, it was a challenge.

"Understood?"

"Do you understand?" I looked at the new Vanessa Pearson that I'm seeing beside me, thinking I've underestimated her again. Bert, her boss, laughed joyfully at us and placed a hand over the table for a shake. "Oh, I think I've understood well enough." The two of them shook hands, and before I knew it, we were out on the streets again.

"Well, I don't understand." I say to her, clutching my bag as we headed to a nearby convenience store to eat.

���Understand what?" She asked as we neared the store that was a few steps away.

"How you convinced someone to buy some useless seeds for teenagers, just so, he could attend some silly student event. Thanks for that." I replied as she held the door open for me to pass through.

The waft of cold air from the air-conditioner in the ceiling permeated my still and warm body. Rows of different products lined up fully appeared in my vision as I strode pass by an empty cashier on the left and several occupied tables on my right, looking for an empty table for the two of us to rest in. Seconds of still searching for an empty seat, a couple went pass me murmuring some things about today's misfortune as I hurriedly looked to the direction that they came from. I saw them took a turn from the back, and so, I led the girl with me to see if there were any vacant tables on the back. There we saw two chairs stationed across from each other, and one square marble table full of empty drinks and tissues in the middle. I grabbed the two empty cups and threw them on a nearby trash can, while Vanessa took the unused tissues to use by wiping them for any spills left on the table. After cleaning the small area for a little, she plopped her bag unto the seat across from where I chose to sit in and turned to grab a cup of noodles on the nearby shelf. She then asked me what flavor would I have if I were to eat one cup on her hands, and I could feel what she's about to do next.

"Oh no, I'm not eating-" "Pick one and eat, or, I won't answer your questions." She gave me an I won't settle for a no expression when I gave her a stubborn expression.

"Oh, and I'm paying for these."

"Then I'll just have to settle with not getting my questions answered."

She ignored me, and for a second I thought I got my point across from her when she said, "Then would you like if we went to a fast food chain instead? After all, by your wise words moments ago, I was the one who kidnapped you after school. I even had the gall to make you stay outside your curfew at eight in the evening. So, behave and take up my offer to please the guilty conscience in my brain, okay?"

I looked at her, confused, on how she found out I had a curfew in the neighborhood. Totally ignoring her plea about her guilty conscience and said, "How do you know that you-"

"Have a curfew? Uh, cause we live in the same neighborhood but always seem to not cross each other's path for some reason?" She said as she went towards the counter with a seafood and beef flavored cup. I was about to say something along the words of 'stalking' but the question was shut down before it even finished slipping out of my mouth.

Seeing as she was paying for our dinner treat, I thought long hard about the fact that we never seem to cross paths when we lived near each other. The thought about how I never realize that I had a neighbor with her last name on it, was utterly baffling. Like, I knew it was there. But I didn't even bother putting two and two together. Almost as if, the name itself was charmed to be non-existent. Weird. But if we were to think of it mathematically, there is a possibility of not meeting each other for five consecutive years. It's just that, it's probably lesser than 0.0000001 percent. Am I making sense?

I couldn't help but massage my temples of the throbbing pain that I had inflicted on myself from thinking too much. I thought to buy off something in the store for my headache when I heard someone say, "Here, I have some left-over aspirin for that. Take it after we've eaten something." I looked over the speaker and saw Vanessa in front of me, handing out a bottle of water and medicine on her hands.

"Thanks. You know, I still can't believe that you're my neighbor and not my stalker. Because I'm beginning to think that you're being too good to me." I say to her and stored the tablet on my pocket as she stripped open the two flavored packets of the two cups, while sitting quickly on her seat.

She had her face scrunched up on a playful scowl, offended of what I said to her, before dumping the contents of the packets on their respective cups while saying, "Firstly, you call me weird. Then, a stranger. After that, was a kidnapper. Now the next thing you call me is a stalker? Excuse your Anglo-Saxon ass! I'm too beautiful to be someone else's stalker." She gave me a snort and I looked at her with a sarcastic expression, wondering when did she have the time to find the origin of my surname for.

Silence flowed in the atmosphere, simmering the momentary jolt of feelings that we had once again. I propped my chin on my right hand for some balance, thinking on what a day this has been, not knowing that I've been absentmindedly staring at her attempts of cooking easy ready noodles in a fast-paced manner. My thoughts went to and fro and finally settled on her words of guilt-tripping me to accept her treat this evening. Having the sentence 'my kidnapper' at my head, made me imagine her wearing an ugly pantyhose on her head.

It took me several minutes before I realized that I was already smiling at my ridiculous thought. I saw her gave me an incredulous look as she eyed me with a concerned look. "If I didn't know better, I'd say you have terrible mood swings when you're hungry. Want some snickers?" She said.

I could only playfully roll my eyes at her joke, and asked if she was done cooking the two noodles on their cups. "I'm done, was only waiting for you to wake up from daydream land and pick out the flavor that you liked." She then pushed the two cups on the middle of the table and waited for me to take one cup than the other.

I grabbed the beef, not exactly in the mood for some seafood, and quickly put my cold hands around it for some comfort because it was very cold inside the 24/7 store. I tore open the cup's insulated cover and gave of a whiff, trying to come up with something to tease the girl who bought my dinner for me. "Smells nice, chef."

She gave me a small shrug, like it couldn't be helped, and grab hers in one hand for a sip. It took a few more minutes before we finally go back to the topic of someone easily selling some seeds, like some kind of illegal drugs, to an overgrown adult who pretty much didn't need it.

"Well, you already know that he's my boss, right?" I nod at her to continue.

"But you see, he's not exactly the only owner of that small internet cafe that we were in. The cafe's being managed by the two people that you've already had the chance to meet upon in one day, David and Bert. The cafe's the only business that David had, so you would see him always on hand, or in the shop every day. Bert, on the other hand, has more businesses that he handles all over the city. So, you could say that even I, don't have much of a chance to meet him in person quite often. If you're going to ask on how his own business thing started, then you're asking the wrong person for the job. My mom was the one who introduced me to him after all. I needed a job to make myself busy in summer and he just happens to be one of mom's acquaintances in the city. I'm as new to him as you are a long time ago, and it obviously changed for the better when a couple of years passed. On my third year on the job, Bert hired me to be a semi-part-time video editor on some of his company's promotional advertisements online. And throughout all the assignments he's given me for the past two years, I could confidently say that there's plenty of information that he's had some fair share of dealings as a consumer to some farms and gardens outside the city." She explained after having slurped her cup clean.

"So, he's like some big shot in the city then? But why haven't I heard of someone named Bert on the news? Unless-" I tried to conclude the things I've just heard from her mouth when she cut me off once again to confirm my thoughts.

"Unless…. That's not his full name in the first place. Bert is just the nickname I call him because of his long ass mixed Spanish name of Roberto Almo Salamanca. He's, you know, the owner of that perfume brand establishment near the busiest block of the city. The one called Mi Sueño. At times, he would vlog about it on his own Youtube channel and make me edit the heck out of it for some laughs. Probably showing off that he's a CEO with a good personality and looking for a date, but he denies it by saying that it was his new strategy for advertising new products in the Mi Sueño fall line. I can't help but think of the times he'd order several professional streaming equipment in the shop, only to store them until it caught dust in the back of the green room. Tsk. Waste of money!" She gnashed her teeth as she ranted of all the wasted things that her boss had bought online with his money.

Well, it was a little interesting to listen to. Especially when I get to see how money conscious the girl in front of me was getting at. The topic kept straying further and further away from its original course so I quickly interjected her words with a question. "So, the dealings of the seeds and farms that you were talking about would be the materials he'd always use in Mi Sueño?"

"Yep! It's a win-win situation anyway. He gets to have a new vlogging video that he can advertise his products with, because charity is usually really good for click baiting, and we get to have good seeds and one generous sponsor on one go." She wriggled her fingers left and right at the statement of her ingenious plan and added, "Besides, we can't exactly be rest assured that everyone on our year would be in on this whole tree-planting thing, you know? We're already set to leave school for college next year anyway. We wouldn't have much time with all the worrying about entrance exams throughout the whole semester." I could only agree with her statement as I finish eating the cup noodles on my hand with a last sip.

"Even if we had somehow gotten everyone on board with the event, the date of submission would be a tremendous pain in the ass when it practically coincides with the one-week cramming deadline of the major subjects in class. I mean, it is possible that we could've whole-heartedly participated in this event. But that's only if the deadline would be move further than the end of next month. Oh wait, I stand corrected. We still won't have the time when we have mock exams to study for in that period of time." I said to her, quietly fetching the aspirin that Vanessa gave me earlier in my pocket to drink. She stood up, carrying the empty plastic cups near the trash can and dumping them in the appropriate boxes for recycling so that we could leave with no further worries.

"What's this? Didn't know you'd be a goody two shoes on proper waste disposal in town." I teased her when she came back in our table for her bag. "Well, I couldn't really give you more of a negative impression and call me a litterer or slob next. Right, Ms. Collins?"

I just rolled my eyes, knowing that this would be our inside gag and she probably wouldn't let it go. "Right, Ms. Surname-is-all-I-know-to-address-a-person-with." She just laughed and held the door open for me to get out off in the cold and open street. The moon was shining brightly on the sky, glinting its uncommon yellow hue on the darkness of its surroundings.