Samuel blew air out of his mouth after I took a dig at his favorite basketball player, Robert Jaworski, who was both the point guard and coach for Añejo Rum but was slowing down as his team kept losing to their rival, San Miguel, that season. I grinned as Samuel defended Jaworski and assured me Añejo was going to come back, and I pretended to be interested. I just enjoyed being inches away from him, feeling his breath in my face as we continued along the newly paved road to the resort.

The wind from the open window drowned our voices when the car sped up, so I looked out onto brightness and the green rice paddies, freshly planted, until we reached a section full of potholes that the floods had eroded. As we negotiated this path, I felt Samuel harden underneath me, and I tried to keep my body from tensing up. Samuel was aroused in a way I’d never dared to expect, and even though I knew it wasn’t exactly me that triggered this physical reaction, that it was the car’s motion and the newness of his adolescence, I still hoped it was a little bit me, that part of him didn’t consider it so monstrous, the thought of being with a boy who was also his best friend.

I glimpsed the outline of his naked form for the first time as we changed together to swim, when he stripped down to his white briefs, though he wrapped a towel around himself to change into his trunks. It was also the first time I saw him shirtless as we swam in the pool, noticed the beginnings of hair under his arms like the hair under mine, except mine was barely visible, while his was a pattern of swirls I would muse over day and night, like knots I needed to untangle.

—

I returned to Talacsan for my grandmother’s funeral in October 2015. I’d only been back one other time since transition, and only for a couple of hours, to convince Papa to let his mother see the house she so lovingly built, after he claimed it for himself as head of the family when my grandfather died. By then, I understood that Papa hated Nanay Coro for forcing him to marry Mama, that she ruined his life for doing so, and his cruelty in her old age was revenge. If my grandmother was at fault, it was only in favoring my father and raising him to believe that he didn’t need to follow the same rules as everyone else. It was an upbringing I knew well, having spent plenty of energy countering its negative effects as an adult, even as I was grateful to Nanay Coro for giving me a sturdy sense of self through her unconditional love.