Chapter 5

“So Lizzybet, you know, Elizabeth, texted everyone. So pretty soon your mom will know, then your father will know.”

“And then the gossip pages of the Philippine Herald will know,” Jojo sighed. But if he had to be honest, he preferred the press than his disapproving parents. It wasn’t what they would say, but how they non-verbally expressed their disapproval that their son, who was nearing thirty, was still unmarried. The gossip that their only surviving son sometimes played for his own team had followed him from CalPoly back to the Philippines, and if there was anything that his parents hated more than losing money, it was losing face because their son was bakla.If Jojo’s older brother had survived cancer, Jojo probably could have lived under the radar, here in the Philippines, in Spain, or back in the states. But the family’s loss of Julius, his older brother, four years ago to a rare bone cancer had changed things.