✎ academia ✐

♞ v ♞

Catarina is known to turn heads of all sorts. Which is kind of ironic, since she wishes she was prettier.

Look, she knows she's not ugly. And yes, of course there are worse problems to have. Like starting tenth grade, and being forced to wear an emerald green blazer that doesn't go with anything, not even her best shoes.

She's always been particular about the way she looks, a habit that can't be helped since her blood-borne Talent has everything to do with saying "Look at me..." in the most convincing way. With practiced prettiness, looks can linger. And then others' thoughts of desire can be spun into hers instead—Help me with my homework. Invite me to your party. Be nicer. Go away. Kiss me, maybe.

    No. No, not that last one, ha-ha. Definitely not that last one.

    It's just that Catarina's a very specific kind of pretty. And this kind can't seem to inspire affections deeper than momentary make-outs and after-party rendezvous. It sits on her skin, a temporary glow, an interesting layer that peels back and reveals... something dull? Entirely uninteresting? She can't say for certain. All she knows is that the boys who came around in the summer each left, eventually. They always leave. She deduces whatever's there, then, must repel—or at least fail to intrigue past midnight.

It's just that it's her sixteenth birthday. And when she gets up at the crack of dawn, there are already two gifts, Spell-mailed, on her doorstep. Maligayang kaarawan Kitty, reads the card attached to a basket of freshly-harvested eggplants. Her favorite. The second gift is an unmarked blue box from another sender entirely—in it, a brand new charm for a decade-old Tiffany's bracelet. She turns it over around her wrist, sulkily, but doesn't take it off. She hasn't in years.

The thing about both these gifts is that they each make her heart ache a little different, make her yearn a little more. Their senders have played key roles in her understanding of prettiness, dictated her grasp on the concept of desirability. And what's yearning if not wanting? Wanting for more, for better?

    She grills and salts some of the eggplants for breakfast. They're sweeter than the ones from the grocery store down the street, of course. Creedean vegetables always come with a depth of flavor to them, another kind of bite. When she finishes, she takes her phone and rings the first number on speed dial—a landline for a terribly important house.

    She tells the answering operator in impeccably monotonous routine, "Catarina Delgado for Arko Cade, please," and paces around for a little over ten minutes while they keep her on hold and try and find him. It is 2PM in Creede, which means he's likely long finished with lunch and is already grazing grass somewhere along the Ilog Anito.

    "Hello, Kitty?" He picks up eventually on some extension line, voice crackly but still all kinds of heartwarming. Catarina imagines him sun-kissed, wiping the sweat from his brow, in an old, loose T-shirt that does nothing for his lanky frame. She thinks of stubborn jet-black hair, twisting and coiling beneath one of his straw hats. Green eyes that look beady and black in the shadows of a nipa hut.

    "Hi," She hums, voice honeyed. "Thanks for the eggplants."

    "No problem. Happy birthday! School starts today, right?"

    "Yeah. Shitty, huh?"

    "Not if you don't want it to be." He sighs, meaning to say more, but somebody far away calls his name. He argues with them for a while before coming back to her. "Hey Kitty, sorry, I gotta go in a sec. But mama says if you want to host a birthday thing here like last year, we can do that on Thursday. If that works for you, of course."