Sheryl Riegos was a Manila girl through and through—no province to run back to when the air turned heavy, no ancestral house with capiz windows waiting beyond a bridge. Her map was made of phone lines and bus routes, switchboards and sidewalks.
Her parents met before cell sites replaced patience—back when voices rode copper. In the 1970s, her father worked marketing at PLDT, all tie clip and optimism, and her mother sat at a switchboard with a headset, fingers nimble among blinking lights. He visited the operator floor on flimsy excuses—"coordinating with the team," "checking a poster run"—until it wasn't an excuse anymore. He learned her break times. She learned his stride. They dated over office cafeterias and pay envelopes, over cables that hummed with other people's stories.
She was a Caloocan girl, practical as a paperclip; he was Parañaque, charming, a little vain about his shirts. When they married, they moved in with his parents in Parañaque and filled the house with four children—three girls and one boy—plus six pairs of slippers by the door and the smell of frying every Sunday. Sheryl came first, an eldest who learned early where the ant traps were and which stair creaked before curfew.
Both parents resigned from PLDT when it seemed like a good day to bet on themselves. Her father took a job as a salesman for Fordlines car spare parts, hands always smelling faintly of rubber and ink; her mother became a housewife, running the family like a small, loyal country. Commissions fattened slowly, then all at once. Clients remembered his name. One afternoon he pulled into the driveway in a green Toyota Corolla, secondhand but glossy, and the children circled it as if it might purr.
For a while, life felt like a clean ledger. Uniforms were paid on time. There was weekend ice cream. The radio sang ads her father approved, and he turned up the volume like a boy showing off a trick.
Then a night split in two: before the impact and after it.
A drunk, unlicensed teenager took one wrong ambition at a corner and folded their ordinary evening into sirens. Sheryl remembered the hospital smell more than anything—antiseptic and tired coffee. Her father lay suspended in machines for a week that felt like a year the city refused to count. Friends arrived with food and optimistic phrases; relatives pressed envelopes into her mother's hands with kindness that stung. Sheryl watched as if good English could negotiate with fate, translating for her mother when the words got heavy. The line went flat before dawn, and the monitors went quiet like people who'd said too much.
Grief rearranged the furniture of their lives. Debt put its feet on the table.
Her mother, a high school graduate whose best work had once been measured in connected calls and clean, get-it-done mornings, learned to borrow without crying and to smile while being sued. She had friends who would not let the children lose school for the sake of pride; she had cousins with better luck and thicker wallets. With their help—and with interest that grew like mold—all four siblings finished high school at an all-girl private school in Parañaque. Sheryl's English sharpened there: crisp consonants, debate diction, essays that came back with check marks like confetti. She learned how to argue like a lady and carry a book like a shield.
But when tuition receipts stopped, bills started talking.
Lenders knocked, then filed. Her mother kept a folder so thick it developed a spine, and Sheryl learned to make herself small when strangers came to the gate with voices that didn't care about children's plates. On payday weeks she could pretend they were a family; on other weeks they were a case number.
She did not stop moving forward. She did not let the house learn despair by name. She set her alarm, gathered her report cards, and stood in line at a state university downtown that taught teachers how to keep a room listening. The cashier said, "Two hundred ninety pesos," like a miracle with a receipt. Sheryl wrote the number on her palm under the sum for rice.
Her mother watched her from the doorway that night and said, with a steadiness that warmed and chilled in the same syllable, "We will finish."
Sheryl nodded, because nodding was cheaper than tears.