Roman à clef (cont'd)

A few lights had gone out in the old Chinese restaurant, but some of those that still lit shone on Lyn Pascual’s small frame and her shiny black hair, with the diffused light softening the shadows of sleeplessness over her the pale skin of her face. Her steady composure that evening belied the grief still evident in the red traces within her chinita eyes. Across the table sat Rey Avicenna, one of her classmates that semester, who had volunteered to treat her out for dinner after she called him up that afternoon. The food that Rey had ordered for her remained untouched for the past hour, so intent was she upon recounting the frustrations of her four years in college before Rey’s seemingly sympathetic ear. She had stopped her narration for a moment, to catch her breath, and then turned her gaze to the glass window beside their table.

A strand of noodle dangling from his pursed lips, Rey took the casual opportunity to lower his gaze down from Lyn’s face, unto her heaving chest. With the critical eye of a connoisseur (in a manner of speaking), he had always valued her breasts as a pair above the rest, given their exquisite form and apparent softness, ever since they became acquainted at the start of the semester. However, for that evening, her fascinating bosom did not present itself as just another object for his usual fantasies and wolf whistles, but as a puzzle instead. Rey asked himself: How on earth could such a small chest contain so much lung?

He immediately turned his gaze back to his plate when Lyn asked, “Where was I?” Rey’s spoon stopped in mid-air as he tried to recall nearly an hour’s worth of words that had never really registered in his memory; he had zoned out when she started telling him about her lonely years as a sophomore outcast. Wishing to escape what could have been another hour’s worth of her wretched memories, he jumped straight to the issue. “You were telling me about your problem with Miss Bea. The removal exam thing…” He took another mouthful of rice, hoping that her helplessly mind-numbing talk would end soon.

“It’s just so awful, Rey!” The unhappy reminder broke her last ounce of self-control as she tried to stifle her sobs. She raised her hand to her face in an effort to conceal her outburst of sorrow from the public. “I’m sorry if I sound so pathetic. I must look so pathetic to you now, crying like this.”

“No, of course not. That’s okay, Lyn,” Rey said, in the most loving and tender voice that he could muster. The two other diners at the far end of the room had turned in their direction askance upon hearing Lyn cry, and Rey realized that he probably looked more like a girl-pestering scoundrel in their eyes, rather than a consoling friend. He hurriedly switched seats to Lyn’s side of the table, putting his arm around her shoulder as she tried to stifle her sobs. Ah, perfect execution, Rey thought in delight, as he relished his tight embrace around her trembling body, in the classic gesture of friendly sympathy.

Her closed eyes brimming with tears, Lyn alternated her cheerless account with the occasional pause for a sniffle. “I needed a good grade in that class because I already got a tres in Creative Writing from Sir Zapatista. There’s no way that I’ll make it to the honors if I get two barely passing grades in the same semester! How can I make it to the honors now? Yes, I’m not a writer, I didn’t write that well for that subject, but doesn’t she know that I’m running for honors? She had my future career in her hands and she just wrote it off without mercy. She’s a cold, heartless woman who doesn’t know what it’s like to run for honors.” Lyn continued to weep, oblivious to Rey as he started picking off the pork rinds from her plate before popping them into his mouth.

Not true, Rey replied in his thoughts, while munching on Lyn’s untouched food. The dragon lady had earned her reputation thanks to her baccalaureate cum laude, as one of his more knowledgeable classmates had informed him. He was about to tell her so when Lyn’s miraculous lungs kicked in once again. “She’s so cold and ruthless when she edits my essays. If you only read the remarks that she wrote…. I really tried my best, Rey. I really did. Couldn’t she at least have given me a better grade for my effort? I worked so hard for four years, Rey. Every semester I pushed myself to work harder just to get a good grade. And now, just when I’m about to graduate…. I just can’t believe that… that bitch… could take it all away just like that without a shred of proof to back it up. How could I not graduate with honors after all I’ve done? It’s so unfair.”

The turn that the conversation took made Rey uncomfortable, enough to make him shift in his seat. Delinquents like him, for whom the dreams of cum laude held no special meaning, had no place in the squabbles of honors students, certainly not between the never-breathless Lyn and the scorching-smart dragon lady. Besides, he had already seen Lyn’s tears many times before, year after year, in the faces of countless honors hopefuls who had lost their chance to make the cut. Wallowing in their grief, they had moved on with their lives after graduation, leaving him and his fellow irresponsible associates with one more semester in college, and one more layer of apathy over the merits of standardized education. There was definitely more to life than graduating with honors, he thought. Like simply being able to graduate, for one thing.

“Rey, I don’t know what to do anymore.” Lyn turned to face him with her tearful eyes, paying no attention to his soft caresses on her shoulders. “I still have to get my practicum manuscript from the printer’s next morning, and she wants me to submit this stupid essay for my removal exam tomorrow afternoon, or else she’ll have my head for plagiarism!” Her last word caught Rey’s attention, and his fingers stopped their gentle ministrations in surprise. “I can’t write the essay the way she wants me to, Rey. And if I don’t make her standards, I might not even graduate…”

“Plagia-…?! You?” Taken aback by this sudden news of Miss Bea’s decree, Rey stared at Lyn, more astonished than anything. He knew what plagiarism was, and what it was not, probably more than anybody else whom he knew, with the exception of his roommate, Trevor. The university reserved some of the harshest penalties for what it considered to be the ultimate offense in the academe. The idea, that an honors candidate’s status as a scholar was in danger, totally bewildered him. His plans for a romantic evening forgotten for the moment, he asked in earnest, “Wait a minute. Why on earth would she think that?”

“She thinks I didn’t write the last essay we were supposed to submit.”

Of all the people, Rey mused, that would be accused of plagiarism, Miss Bea just had to single out the hard-working student, Lyn Pascual, and to totally pass up the real target by miles. He knew plenty of people who were the guilty of the act, he knew two people in particular, and his perception of Lyn so far just didn’t warrant inclusion into that category of intellectual thieves. He continued to gawk at her, dumbfounded.

“I never plagiarized a thing in my entire life, swear to God. I have no idea what she’s talking about. I didn’t plagiarize that last essay, and I don’t know why she would think that way either.” Mistaking Rey’s stare for doubt, Lyn sought an explanation to reassure him. “Okay, so I didn’t really write that essay all the way, but I didn’t plagiarize either. I did my research and I really, really worked hard on that essay, promise.”

“Aha! So you didn’t really write it…. Huh?” Her confession quickly added to his confusion. “What does that mean? You said that you didn’t write it, and now you say that you did. Did you... uh... really… uh...” The subject had assumed anathema status between him and Trevor, to the point that the simple term found undue difficulty finding its expression from his tongue. “… plagiarize?”

“No, I absolutely didn’t! I swear to God that I never plagiarized a single word of that essay. Miss Bea said…” Lyn’s words trailed off, her head bowed towards the noodles and pork rinds on her plate. In the few moments of silence that passed, Rey handed her a glass of water, which she accepted without looking at him. While she drank, Rey let out a long sigh, realizing the irony between his situation and that of Lyn’s. Who would have thought? Rey mused.

Her voice barely registered above a whisper when she finally said, “I think Miss Bea found stylistic discrepancies between my last essay and my previous work, Rey. Some of those words were my cousin’s, you see. I don’t know how Miss Bea found out the difference between my cousin’s and my writing style, but I guess she immediately judged it as plagiarism. Rey, what’s the matter?”

Rey’s brow had furrowed in incomprehension over the mention of the term “stylistic discrepancies”, but immediately unfurled upon hearing Lyn’s question. “Of course,” Rey set aside Lyn’s worries with a grin and a wave of his hand. “I know all about those styli-whatchamacallits. Go on, I understand completely.”

“I was so afraid of Miss Bea, Rey. I didn’t want her to give me a low grade again because I had received low grades all semester, and I didn’t think that I’d get a high enough grade to make the honors all by myself. So what I did, I know it wasn’t exactly cheating, I asked my cousin to take a look at it. He edited it for me, and he helped me with that essay. So now you know why I said that I didn’t write it all on my own.”

Were it not for the seriousness behind her secretive whispers, Rey would have laughed. In relief over her admission, what at first looked like forebodings of his own fate now appeared as simply the result of a comedy of errors. “God, Lyn, is that it? And here I was thinking of casting you alongside my other scummy friends. There’s nothing wrong with what you did, silly girl!” His smile was now full of sincerity. “Hell, I ask my friends to read and edit my works all the time.” It was a half-truth, Rey knew, but the return of the sparkle in Lyn’s eyes made the counsel worth the sham.

To Rey’s inner delight, Lyn had turned to meet his gaze, and they shared the intimate moment in silence. Their proximity allowed him to catch the faint aroma of her perfume, and the scent of her hair, which made his pulse rate shoot up by several degrees.

Rey could barely control his excitement over his triumph that evening, although he had already seen it so many times before in the faces of many a young and nerdy but repressed girl, whom he considered as the easiest quarries to conquer during their times of weakness. It didn’t matter how brusque his usual manner was; he knew that Lyn’s defenses could never hold against the warmth of his contrived sensitivity, though he didn’t expect his clever strategy to work as well as it did that night. And now, he imagined her melting like putty in his arms, simply because he had the eyes of an astute stockbroker, ready to pounce on opportunities, especially with damsels in distress.

I’m the smoothest criminal you’ve ever known, sister, thought Rey. No wonder she’s getting a cum laude; the poor girl’s naïveté about education, her trusting nature, her fear of punishment from authorities… Rey knew that, even though such kinds of people usually flourished in the academe, wolves like him would easily devour them once they step outside into the real world.

Confident in his victory, Rey volunteered what he considered to be a simple solution for Lyn’s dilemma. “Your problem’s easy enough. Miss Bea thinks that somebody else wrote it, right? Why don’t you just tell her the truth, that you had your cousin edit your essay for you? She’ll understand. She may be the dragon lady, but she can’t condemn you for plagiarism just because you asked a friend to help you rewrite. ‘The truth will set you free!’ That one’s from the Bible, I think.”

To his disappointment, Lyn shifted to the center of the seat, away from his embrace, upon hearing his suggestion. “I can’t do that!” she exclaimed.

Damn, Rey cursed his loss of headway in his thoughts. “Why not, Lyn? What’s wrong with that?”

“She won’t understand. Miss Bea never does. You know how strict and scary she is. She’ll probably say that, since I didn’t write it on my own, I don’t deserve a better grade from her. Even worse, she’d probably still call me a plagiarist for using my cousin. If that happens, I won’t just lose my cum laude; I might even get dismissed!” Lyn’s loud frantic voice dropped back to a whisper after she noticed the questioning glances from people at the other table. “I can’t tell her, Rey. Please don’t tell anyone, especially her.”

That could get you dismissed? Rey looked at her quizzically, questioning her instinctive caution. He had committed innumerable felonies, such as stealing computer programming books from the library, graffiti chalk from the Humanities department, and whole paragraphs from Internet articles; still, the thought of getting caught, and subsequent dismissal, had never crossed his mind. He hurried to placate her fears, hoping that she’d return to within range of his outstretched arm, for another cozy hug.

“Hey, I won’t tell anyone, promise. And why on earth would I tell Miss Bea? It’s not like we meet outside class, anyways.”

She turned her eyes away from him, back to the evening sky outside the glass window. “I don’t know. Maybe you’re friends with her. Of all the people in our class, you were the only one who didn’t give her as hard a time with the essays as the rest of us did. She likes you, you know. I heard her say so, once.”

“Me?” Realizing that Lyn had no intention of resuming their propinquity earlier, Rey brought his hand around from the back of the chair, to join its twin on the table in front of him. The defenseless noodles on Lyn’s plate suffered Rey’s sublimated frustration as he toyed with them using the Lyn’s fork. “Are you serious? Hey, I’m the guy who sleeps and snores in class, remember? I’m the worst student that she ever had. I mean, come on, look at me; how on earth could she like me? She’d sooner take to an angel like you than to a rascal like me, right?”

“You still wrote good essays, Rey. She thinks that you’re a good writer. She likes your writing a lot.”

Trevor’s smiles had proved rarer than diamonds, and Rey imagined one of those plastered on his roommate’s face if Trevor should ever hear of Lyn’s last remark. The fact that the dragon lady’s esteem meant little to him proved in his mind what he had guessed at all along: that the cosmic forces’ e-mail system had posted his soul and Trevor’s as mismatched e-mail attachments to the wrong bodies upon their birth. Such faulty delivery happens over buggy computer networks all the time; Rey saw no reason why the universe should be exempt from those kinds of errors as well.

“And I think that you’re a good writer, too,” Lyn continued. “Some of my friends said that you were also good in English 5. It means that you have a unique talent, see? You’re a good writer.”

Lyn’s fork finally ended its merciless dissection of the noodles, as Rey basked in his classmate’s praises. Rey smiled wickedly, saying “Of course I am! I’m Rey Avicenna, the best writer that ever walked this earth… or, at least, this restaurant.” Completely ignoring the frightened stares from the other late-night diners, as well as that of the restaurant attendants behind the counter, Rey stood up and walked over to a nearby chair. Placing his foot on the seat, he took two steps up to stand on top of an empty table, before shouting “Jack! Rose! I’m the king of the world!” His performance, complete with the upraised arms and matching facial expression, got both the attention of a worried busboy, and giggles from Lyn. After a brief admonition from the management, Rey cautiously retreated to his seat opposite his slightly embarrassed friend.

“You’re crazy, Rey. You’re totally crazy.” Despite her discomfiture, Lyn smiled; the cheerful sparkle returned to her eyes again, replacing the sorrow that had disturbed him only moments before.

“All great writers are,” said Rey, as he smiled back at Lyn. He took another piece of pork rind from Lyn’s plate and started munching on it eagerly, his manners totally forgotten. The lack of truth behind Lyn’s remarks didn’t really matter to him; he felt obligated to keep up the farce for his deluded classmate, to further lighten the mood.

“That’s why I need your help, Rey,” Lyn explained. “If I did it all on my own, I wouldn’t know if I’d pass or not. But you’re a good writer, and you always passed Miss Bea’s criticisms with flying colors. I need your help to pass Miss Bea’s removal exam. Will you help me? Please?”

“Sure,” Rey agreed, brimming with self-confidence, as he swallowed another bite of pork rind. “Hey, Lyn, you know who’s the man, right? Who’s the man? I’m the man! So, how can I help you then?”

Upon hearing his assent, Lyn began rummaging in her bag, producing two sheaves of papers with print on them. Even before she told him what the papers were, danger alarms had gone off in his brain, making him think twice about what he had agreed to do for her. For the second document’s margins bled with that familiar red ink, filled with comments in what could only have been the dragon lady’s handwriting.

“Woah, woah, hold on there!” He held up his hands before him, as if to ward off the vague yet impending danger in posed by those papers. “Are those the papers that you submitted for English 103? Uh… am I supposed to help you with that? I can’t help you with that. What the hell is that?” He pointed to the relatively clean article beside the marked ones.

She pushed the papers across the table towards him. “I need somebody to edit this,” she said. “It’s the essay that I have to pass tomorrow for Miss Bea. Will you please check it for me? Please? Okay? It would really help if somebody like you would check it for me. As it is, I don’t think it’ll pass Miss Bea’s standards, like the rest of my papers. Please, please, say yes. It’s my only chance and the essay’s due tomorrow and my practicum manuscript’s due tomorrow too and I don’t know anyone else whom I could rely on for this.”

“What?” Rey looked at her in shock, amazed at both her unbroken exhalation and her absolute credulity. Good lord, he thought, this girl really has no idea of what she’s asking me to do. Dizziness washed over him without warning, and he struggled for self-possession against the nearly uncontrollable urge to pass out. In addition, the immediate crescendo of the imaginary warning sirens deafened him, rendering him senseless and unable to hear the rest of Lyn’s lengthy explanation.

“Wait a minute, I can’t do that!” He cut her off in mid-sentence, as his senses slowly revived from their daze. “What if I don’t edit your paper correctly? And do you really think that, if I do this for you, Miss Bea will give you a better grade?”

“Yes. If you’re a good writer, you’d make a good editor, and if you could edit your own papers, you could also edit those of others.”

“What about your cousin, the guy who edited your last essay? Why don’t you ask him to do it?” With an air of ersatz revulsion, he shifted in his seat, backing away from the forbidding papers in front of him. “I bet he’s an even better writer than I am, and he can better edit those papers for you, right? Come on; don’t look at me like that.”

He had glimpsed the puppy-dog eyes on Lyn’s beseeching face, and it sickened him to the point that he had to turn away. “He went back to America after his two-week stay,” Lyn replied. “I had to write the final version by myself.”

From the corner of his eye, he noted the departure of the other remaining diners, leaving him and Lyn all alone within the restaurant. A busboy scurried over to the abandoned table, attended to the dirty dishes, and cast a knowing look in Rey’s direction, reminding Rey of the lateness of the hour. What the hell, Rey thought; he took the papers in front of him and then started to read.

Ten minutes of silence elapsed while Rey burrowed his face in the Lyn’s essay and scanned the lines for errors, in a mien of deep concentration. He had noticed the look of expectation and hope in Lyn’s face, even as his brain hopelessly dug up dusty and unused grammatical rules, straight from the graveyard of memories during his freshman years in English 1. For all his fruitless scrutiny, he was about to hand the paper back to Lyn as fault-free, when his eyes finally alighted upon an error so cleverly camouflaged that its discovery made him proud.

“What’s wrong?” Lyn asked, noticing the change in Rey’s expression. I shouldn’t go overboard with my criticism, Rey said to himself, not like the dragon lady. His finger casually pointed out the erroneous word as he showed the page to Lyn. “So far, that’s the only error that I can see, for now. Otherwise, your paper’s perfect.”

Lyn’s chinita eyes squinted as she examined Rey’s correction. “Are you sure that’s it? The word ‘weird’?” She looked at Rey quizzically, having failed to grasp the significance of her classmate’s assessment. Not bad for my first work as an editor, Rey chuckled, entirely pleased with himself for having proven his writing prowess once again, this time without any help from his genius friend, Trevor.

“Yeah, you misspelled it. It’s supposed to be spelled W-I-E-R-D, right? ‘I’ before ‘E’, except after ‘C’, remember?”

Mayday! Mayday! The warning sirens in his head blared at full blast at the sound of Lyn’s gentle laughter, and nearly drowned out the rest of her unexpected reaction. “You’re just so funny, Rey! And here I was thinking of the worst, that you’d rip up my paper like Miss Bea, and then, just like that, you make this really nice joke, and you’re just so sweet, Rey. You have the flair of a comedian. You really know how to make me laugh.”

Rey nodded, forcing a smile to conceal his embarrassment. “Yeah, of course, I was joking, silly girl.” Lying through his teeth, Rey shrugged, and then forced a display of nonchalance. Shudders ran up and down his spine at the realization that he had been misspelling the word his entire life without knowing it. So what if I can’t spell the word ‘weird’, Rey thought. At least he knew somebody who did.

"Roman à clef", part three

Roman à clef (cont'd)

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