Our van arrived right before morning exercises, so I didn’t get the chance to talk to any of my new classmates, as we stood in a neat line to sing the national anthem and say our morning prayers. I followed the other students to our classroom on the second floor, a perfectly ordered rectangle with a blackboard on one short end, windows along one wall, and five long rows of dark wooden desks, alphabetically assigned except for mine, since I had to sit in the front row because of my eyes. My first-period English teacher simply noted that I was the only new student in my section, before she assigned a composition on our summer vacation, and I wrote about returning to my beloved Talacsan but left out the part about fleeing my own mother.

The lessons seemed similar enough to my old school as several periods went by, until midmorning when we came downstairs for PE, and the boys were separated from the girls as we merged with another section. The teacher told us we would start with a game of basketball, our class against the boys in the other group.

The dozen of us gathered around to form a huddle, and a boy named Samuel Dominguez asked us who would like to start. Several hands went up, and he picked four other students to join him, as our tallest player got to the middle of the court and the teacher threw the ball in the air to start the game, while the rest of us sat on benches under an awning.

I usually couldn’t tell people apart from a distance, but I found myself tracking Samuel’s lanky frame from the speed with which he weaved through other players and the way he ran down the court with the ball after the other team scored, but invariably passed it to someone else on our team to make a shot. Because basketball was such a national obsession in the Philippines, I’d watched games on TV with my grandfather and knew that Samuel played a position called point guard, which Tatay Gaudencio told me was the most important player, because he determined what everyone else was going to do. Our team jumped into a several-point lead in the first few minutes, before Samuel took himself out of the game to give someone else a chance to play.

“You’re new, right?” Samuel asked as he sat next to me on the bench. His face was flush with exertion, and I could smell his fresh sweat. “What position do you play?”

I turned my head to look directly at him, his smile open and lopsided, a dot of a mole above the left side of his lip, the part of his mouth that was more upturned.

“I don’t play basketball.”

I grinned when his forehead crinkled and his thick eyebrows disappeared under his bangs, as his eyes bulged out in shock.

“What do you mean?”