She did not say anything else as she walked me back to the porch, nor did Mommy Seleng when she returned to join us. Our family went about that visit without mentioning my uncle again as I pretended to read a book and controlled the urge to ask about him, even though I was afraid of the answers I would get, since I knew that Amang, like Jembong, was related to me in a way I couldn’t entirely name. I was also different from everyone else, and even though people thought I was beautiful most of the time, there were those who thought I was cursed, and no one knew my secret that I might be like Jembong, even though I had not quite figured out if I truly was. As I stared inside my book, I remembered suddenly how I’d cried for so long the first time I woke up in the middle of the night, only to find the door to my bedroom locked. I had to imagine that I was actually the ghost people sometimes told me I resembled, that my body didn’t feel fear because it wasn’t really there. It was the only way I could get back to sleep. Seeing Amang, I wondered if my parents would have stayed with me had I just been a normal child, if they would have loved me and not sent me to my grandmother to be raised. Seeing Amang, I realized how being different could get you locked up in a room all your life.

—

Since my family decided to wait a year to put me in first grade, I didn’t have school in Talacsan, so I spent my days finding ways to entertain myself. I often lay on our common room floor, made of bamboo slats that were cut by hand, and ran a finger down the surface of the wood, searching for knots my eye might have missed, then used my thumb and forefinger to measure minute differences in the thickness of the bamboo. I looked up to the top of our ceiling, trying to pick out details from that distance, the variations of brown in the bundles of thatch that formed our roof, the long strands of leaves that held those bundles together, and the bamboo poles that met at the top, which gave that part of our house its triangular shape. I was just any other kid in our village whiling away the time, until I sat up and noticed the color of my legs, remembered that no, I would always be different, and tried as best I could to talk myself out of my sadness, with reassuring words about my beauty and intelligence.