Life and Its Whatnots

Chapter Two.

Chapter Two.

Dad and I only got six days left at Cateel and it seems like everything’s happening so fast now.

*** 

I will be leaving town by the end of first week April for Dad and I need to settle our things in our new home at the Metropolis. This reality brings my high school friends into deciding to throw me an early send-off party.

Even high school was not all glamour in my eyes, there was this group of people who I will forever treasure in the upcoming months, years, and decades upon decades upon decades (you get the point) of my life. I’m glad I made friends with this bunch of crazy, weird but always lovely Dorkos. They hate it when I describe our group as lovely, I don't mind, I just think we're lovely for no reason at all.

We're Dorkos not because all of us are “dorks” in a mainstream kind of way. However, we believe that each person has their own dork sides they’re only afraid to show for the fear of being labelled as Uncool Kids of this generation. And we happen to be embracing our dork sides ever since our inception.

We are seven in the group –

*Dillon Enriquez: Team Captain of Soccer Team and a Math wizard. He's Parker's best bud along with Ellery.

*Ellery Foire: if we have a Team Captain, we also have the Head Cheerleader and a video games geek at that. She's the only girl I know who can play Call of Duty and NBA Fantasy and understand every detail of it smoothly. I don't even know how she understands it, that is what I call talent. 

*Cloud Torres: Band Vocalist of Mudslide. His dorkiness is a take away for he enjoys being liked by people and his band is actually a one-man band because he knows how to play all the instruments he needed when composing his own songs.

*Luke Gomez: member of the Glee Club and our resident Joker. He’s got this witty humor that would make him, one day, famous and be a guest at Ellen or in some late night show which I'm betting is Punch Me - the show where only genius comedians deliver real comedy.

*Cerah Montee: dresses and always looks like a fashion model. She’s a bubble gum girl a.k.a everything’s-bright-and-beautiful-and-sunny-and-full-of-rainbows-and-pixie-dusts kind of girl. Yup, that kinds of girls exist! And that girl happens to be my best friend too!

*Then, there's my brother, Parker: you already know what he's capable of aside from the fact that he's addicted in combining all the chemicals in the Periodic Table. He happened to beat up cancer - not because he was cured from it and survived it - but he became the banner of the word Fighter while at it. I miss him every day.

*The last Dorko is me, Pilar Simons: editor-in-chief of Sparrows, Cateel's school paper. A wanna-be writer who secretly loves to be a motivational speaker someday.

There's only six of us now. Four of us - me, Dillon, Ellery and Cerah - will be leaving Cateel to study at Aeon Colleges in the Metropolis 900 miles away from our beloved town. Two of us will be staying in Cateel to study in one of the top universities in our province and in the country which happens to be Cateel National University (CNU).

CNU is one of my dream schools. I love it. It's so grounded and very local. Students from our town - regardless of status in life - can enter CNU once they were able to pass the nerve-wracking college entrance exam. Luke and Cloud had a tough time reviewing for it but I always knew they could get in. 

CNU classify their students according to the degree of their resources. Students who will be classified on Hannai A and B will have to pay the total tuition of their preferred courses, Hannai C pays on average, while students on Hannai D to F will be granted scholarships. I like that our town and the people in it value education and the art of Helping Each Other Out. Luke's great great Grand Dad, CNU Chairman and President at that time, was behind all of these brilliant schemes when he was elected by the School Board of Directors. And imagine, Luke still took the exam because the school only recognizes students from what they do and who they are and their potentials of who to be, not because of who their families in town are. This school is such a catalyst and it is the very reason why I got it listed down as one of my dream schools. It is included in one of those schools which produced the top students especially in the area of Engineering, Business and Medicine.