Rebuilding the World

12 Camp Makiling

I left Majella on the couch and then sat by the door. As I boredly polish the knife she gave me earlier, I noticed how it is glinting in the moonlight and how it casted a golden glow that other knives don’t normally do.

“Hey, Majella?” I asked opening the door but Majella was dead asleep on the couch, slightly snoring.

I approached her and checked if her wound isn’t bleeding; satisfied, I slumped on the floor beside the couch, too tired to go back to my post.

“You’re asking too much.” Majella said, sleep talking.

I curiously looked at the sleeping demigod. Her tired face shows many hardships that I once thought were results from overworking herself between her studies, baseball and working after class. Maybe some parts of the story I know about her are lies or maybe partly true, but whichever the truth is, Majella had a hard childhood.

When I met her on our first year in high school, she looked pretty much intimidating with her tall and lean stature and her then always ponytailed long black her. But her eyes, those were what really scared me at first; Majella’s eyes are somewhat hard to discern, one moment you’ll find it blue, the next thing it looks like a shade of gold then it will return to her normally light brown color. They say that the eyes are the windows to our souls and Majella’s eyes seems to be trying to tell so many things all at once without losing Majella’s real emotions. She was too quiet and almost friendless; half or maybe even all of us in class were afraid of her. Not until after a few months after she started socializing with her now best friends did I became close to her.

I remembered when we once had this project in class and she was my partner, I was scared at first but she cracked this really corny joke and I started to warm up to her. While we were working, she brought out a faded Rubik’s cube and started playing with it while she was discussing something to me. I dunno how she does that but it amazes me how she can focus on doing two things at the same time. After working we still had some free time so I decided to just hang around her while she was doing some papers.

“Resume?” I asked her

“I’m going to look for a job.” She answered, not looking at me.

“What for?”

She looked up with a grin, “I can’t afford the tuition here. Even with the discount I have for being in the baseball team isn’t enough.”

I was amazed how she could even smile when she was facing a rather big problem for a 13 year old. So I told her I knew this office where they were looking for someone who can do a part time typing job. What she doesn’t know is that we own the office and when I got home, I immediately told my dad to help her. I think she never found out about what I did for her because she never said anything to me.

I can’t say we were that close enough because we belong to different cliques but I can say that she’s a friend that I cared for. Maybe we did drift apart and lost communication after graduating high school but seeing her again after a year, we still had this kind of bond that even if I teased her several times, she doesn’t get angry at me or what.

I smiled when I realized that I’ve been staring at Majella’s face for too long.

She’s greatly changed from when we met; she cut her hair short to her shoulders just before graduating high school and she ditched the tight ponytail, her eyes are much less intimidating and I’ve now gotten used to the weird color changing, she’d gotten even more taller, and how should I say this, even more cooler? Okay, Majella really is cool, from her attitude to her style, although she never really cared about how she looks as long as she’s comfortable with what she was wearing. She’s kinda beautiful on her own unique way, maybe that’s a Zeus thing?