Chapter 4

Larry was a chimera. He said he fused with his twin in his mother's womb during conception. I'd read about chimera from the Greek Mythology. They were monsters made up of other monsters jammed in one body. A stuff of nightmare! In the tales of the greek hero Hercules, he had to kill a chimera who'd been snacking off of human flesh, picking unlucky greeks one by one like they're sort of livestock. This man-eating mythical monster had a body of a lion, a snake for a tail and hooves of a goat. I did not believe him at first. For starters, Larry and a killing machine did not go hand in hand. I looked it up in the library and man was I stunned! Human chimera was really a thing! They're genetic marvels. It was said that only ten percent of the human population were chimera. Larry for one, did not have two heads of a beast and a snake for a tail but he did have two skin tones. He undressed his shirt and there was his twin's caramel colored skin in one half of his torso from chest to waist, a direct contrast to his naturally fair skin tone. There was a hint of sadness in his voice when he said he would have loved for his twin brother to be born alive. I imagined it would have been weird as hell to live with some part of your unborn twin brother carved in your flesh like that. Larry was also a hetero-chromatic. For starters, he had two eye colors, one blue the other brown. I did not know the science behind it, whether it's the chimera thing or a different case altogether. Larry believed it's the former since his mother, an American, had blue eyes and his father, a Filipino had brown eyes. I would have told him his eyes were beautiful nonetheless to console him but flattery isn't one of my strong points. Besides, he's not proud of it himself I could tell, that's the whole point of him wearing blue contact lens to cover his unborn twin's brown eye. In one of his never-ending life stories, he told me he was born in California. His father was a native of this town who had finished his medicine studies as a university scholar in the US. He had lived and married there since after graduating. He said his father wanted to immerse his only son to his Filipino roots so when he heard about the school's exchange student program he never wasted time and enrolled Larry involuntarily. Larry was not big about the cultural immersion thing but his father said it was for his own good. I smiled because that's exactly what nana would have said. Filipino parents are authoritarians.

Being the only Fil-Am guy at school, Larry was incredibly popular. He had a knack of getting his way around people. The teachers, the students, even the nuns all fell victim to his innocent charm as if entranced by some mystical, unworldly means. Maybe he's a demigod too. A bastard of Aphrodite. I dunno. Honestly, after knowing all these things about Larry, nothing could surprise me anymore. His campus die-hard Larry fan club gave me the green eyes when we're together. I returned the favor by flipping the bird at them. I did not mind this new-found notoriety brought about by this unusual friendship with Larry, for all its worth I could forget about everyone's existence in a blink without breaking a sweat if I wanted to, that's the only special thing about me: I'm an asshole.