Icon of the Indecisive (2 page)

Chapter 2

I can't believe he likes her. She's so fake!

Quin held out his arm and I touched it, sort of gave it a curved swish with my finger, and my response to that message for the Goddess of Love was sent right through the cosmos. Or at least up the classroom four rows behind me.

Yeah, this was the second class of mine today that Quin sat in on, taking the seat beside me, making sure he was within re
ach as the Goddess received pleas and responded to her people. The thoughts were coming every few minutes, and I pretty much gave up on learning anything that day. I could barely keep up with listening to the teacher, taking notes, listening to a love plea, thinking of a response to it, and then sending it out through Quin.

And touching his skin a lot.

That was fun. I tried a bunch of ways to do it, to avoid boredom. I tapped. Drummed my fingertips. Swished with my index finger. Bumped with my knuckles. Flicked with my pinkie. Drew a check on his forearm. Hey, I'd had this unrequited thing for him for over a year, could not be blamed for taking advantage.

Since he was a senior (and a god) and these classes were of no use to him, he doodled. On a single slip of paper he bummed off the guy in front of him, using a pencil, the only school item he had with him.

He drew trees. And birds. And what looked like delicate female hands. The way he drew them reminded me of shadows.

It's my birthday and I don't think he's going to greet me. I hope he greets me.

He heard that too and bumped his bare elbow to mine, and my response
Happy birthday, you look beautiful
bumped right out and landed where it should, somewhere in the hallway, where a fussy college girl was thinking too much and too loudly.

This was what Ford River's students thought about. I thought I would be surprised, but I guess I shouldn't be. Teenagers everywhere were probably having the exact same th
oughts. To another person it would sound shallow and selfish, so many didn't say what they really felt. They exaggerated it for some people, downplayed it for others, but admitted the truth only to the Goddess.

Yeah, it all sounded selfish, and shallow, and petty, and unreasonable... but when these thoughts bounced around unresolved for too long they became more trouble for everyone.
Rejected. Again. Why do I bother?

That was really near. It was coming from Raph, just two seats away from Quin on our row, and we both looked in his direction. I worked with him in a group assignment once. He seemed like the slacker type, couldn't even be bothered to check his email. He obviously had other worries.

I came up with this:
You're going to find someone who enjoys everything about you. Be patient.
And then I sort of raised my pinkie finger to be cute but Quin was reaching toward me already, and... Fingers. Tangled.

And then he
half-smiled.

What. Is. Going. On.

Chapter 3

"Have lunch with me," Quin said.

That wasn't headline news. Quin and I hung out, he "trained" me to do goddess work nearly every day, and that always included a meal after. Or maybe I was just spooked by what today was, but I was seriously considering which Tagalog mythological figure could shapeshift. Did Quin want to hang out with me this much before? I couldn't remember.

I was going to joke about it, but then bit my tongue and kept it in. Why tempt fate?

"Sure," I said instead, "Let me just leave this in my locker first."

We walked together, all casual, to the same spot we had just come from hours earlier, but this time when I opened it, a red envelope fell into my hands.

Dear Hannah,

I was reading up on risk for my exam this week, realized that I needed to take one myself. It made me think of how afraid I was to call certain things by name because it might expose what I've been thinking.

But screw that. I'll start.

I like it when we hang out, just the two of us. I think our DATES are really fun.

I would like to be your BOYFRIEND.

I hope you would consider agreeing to be called my GIRLFRIEND.

Happy Valentine's Day. I know you have plans tonight with Sol, but how about going out on a DATE with me tomorrow?

Robbie

P.S. This is a LOVE LETTER.

The thing about having the power of the Goddess of Love: I knew things. I knew what people were thinking and feeling, if it was related to love, and if they were open enough to share it. They didn't know they were sharing it with Hannah, sophomore Psych major. They were just beaming those feelings out onto the universe without knowing who was listening.

I was. So I knew this. I knew Robbie Carlos, very cute, very nice, very
human,
junior Applied Math major, felt this way about me. He might not have felt like he was risking anything before, but every time he went near me it was like he was holding out his heart, even though he had no idea what I'd do with it. I could have torn it up, and some days I knew he did feel that way, but he was still at it. He was still trying.

That was braver than me and I had actual power over things.

I did a normal thing, I guess. I blushed. My face turned really warm, and my stomach fluttered in a happy way, and I coughed and tried to hide it from Quin who was right there watching it happen.

I stuffed the letter in my bag, probably creasing it several times over, and then said I was ready to go.

"So are you going out with him tomorrow?" Quin asked, twenty seconds later.

"Seriously. Did I give up privacy when I agreed to this goddess gig?"

"Huge handwriting," he said. "But yeah, I think you should see him. You really will learn a lot about how people love from experiencing his feelings firsthand."

"Ugh, stop."

"It's true." He wasn't kidding! His face was totally not kidding. Quin didn't
kid.

"I know, but stop being icky about this. He's not an experiment."

"Hannah," Quin said, smoothly stepping around a study group sitting in a circle in the middle of the hallway (that was annoying of them, by the way), "you know that this will happen to you. A lot. Something about us attracts people to us, even though they don't need us for anything. You're experiencing this now, and you'll just have to get used to it."

I of course had this al
l plotted in my mind already. Quin and I both knew for a while now that Robbie liked me, but he hadn't done anything as obvious as this yet.

This sounded horrible, but I was hoping for an obvious moment like this so I could shove in Quin's face just how desirable I was.

And Quin would go, "I'm sorry. Here's a sunbeam. And a diamond ring. It's always been you, Hannah."

Since becoming Interim Goddess, I'd been having dreams with Quin in it. As the Sun God. I mean, he didn't
look
like this college boy in front of me, but I just knew it was him. Something about the way he spoke, the words he said. It occurred to me that I was seeing him through another goddess' eyes, because this person in the dream didn't feel or look like me, and yet I was
experiencing
her really intimate moments with him.

My whole "relationship" with Quin, including what might have been my first kiss ever, happened in my dreams. Pathetic.

So of course this actual reaction to Robbie was a letdown.

"Whether I go out with him or not is none of your business," I just said, huffing.

This conversation thread was cut short, thankfully, because during the short walk to the cafeteria we had to respond to three calls to the Goddess. Quin helped transmit my response by nudging my elbow with his, which looked cute in theory but had become a tiny bit annoying because of what he just said.

And then a moment later, his elbow wasn't there, because he had broken into a jog, trying to catch the attention of someone who had just come out of the classroom on our left.

Ms. Cabral.

Denise Cabral, young, pretty, and everyone's most favorite history teacher ever. Someone Quin had apparently been spending a lot of time with, not that he bothered to mention it to me. She was just a handful of ye
ars older but I might as well have been a child compared to her, as my achievements paled next to her traveling and studying and philanthropy. She wasn't
that
much prettier (than me), or taller, or more shapely, but something about the way she walked, that twenty-something walk of hers...

Ugh.

He caught up with her just a few feet away from me, so I could hear everything they said, and I was stuck there not knowing whether to join them or not.

"Are we on for tonight?" Quin asked her.

"I don't think so," Ms. Cabral said. "Traffic's going to be really bad."

"I'm driving, don't worry."

"I'll think about it."

"What time's your last class?"

"You don't think I have other plans?"

"I'll pick you up at five."

"I'm not free at five."

"I'll pick you up at five."

At this point I fixated on a smudge on the tip of my right shoe. I just kept looking it, poking the concrete with it, trying to get the dirt out.

Unbelievable. It was like my dream scenario for February 14 was happening, except I was in another universe and I was seeing it happen to someone else right in front of me. They did that banter thing for a few more minutes, and then it seemed like they were saying goodbye. I couldn't help it; I peeked.

Ms. Cabral was smiling as she walked away. Great.

Quin sort of whirled around, checking for me, and then motioned for me to catch up.

"Did anyone summon for you just now?" he asked.

"Yeah, sort of," I said. Hannah Maquiling. She needed the
Goddess of Love just then.

Chapter 4

I was so glad that I agreed to this Valentine's Day movie date with my best friend Sol. We had planned this months ago, way before there was any doubt or drama over Robbie and Quin. Sol's favorite romance novel of all time, something called
Day of Hearts
by Filipino author Ivy Mira Alonzo, was made into a movie, and we made a pact to see it on Valentine's Day, whether we had boyfriends at the time or not.

It worked out, because Soledad Delloro, my best friend, just recently broke up with her boyfriend Neil. I unfortunately had something to do with that. Neil had inexplicably picked up the power to command people (and gods, or interim goddesses) to do his bidding, and he became a concern for our resident deities. We only got to know about it because he spent the first few months of his new empowered state conning and robbing people. He obviously wasn't aware he could do so much more.

But we (I) handled that problem. He was still in school, but under the watchful eye of beings more powerful than me.

"I think you should go out with Robbie," Sol was saying, settling into her seat. "And not because Quin says you should. But do you really like him, like anyway?"

"Yes I do," I said, right after I checked the rows behind us if anyone we knew was there. But yeah, I did like Robbie, a lot.

My only problem with him, really, is that I was so sure he loved me. Would I love him the same way if he were unreadable to me? Would I be as comfortable, as confident in his feelings, if I could only go by his words and actions?

I couldn't tell. But Robbie was hot, too. It wasn't a looks thing.

"Then do it!"

"How are you though?" I asked. The breakup was less than two weeks ago, and I didn't try to ask too much about her. Sol, strangely, was what Quin called "immune" to us—meaning she could not be affected by any of our divine powers. Not her controlling boyfriend's, not mine, not Quin's—only Bathala, Quin and everyone's father, could influence her in any way. I hadn't even told her I was Interim Goddess yet. Not on purpose, but after a few months I didn't know how to bring it up without sounding crazy. But her not knowing anything about this was a relief, because that meant she and I could be best friends like normal people.

"I saw him yesterday, and he really tried to avoid me," Sol sighed. "It's so weird."

"He's ashamed and stuff. Don't feel sorry for him."

"I'm not... I just miss him."

"I hope you enjoy this movie then."

"Oh no, this movie won't help."

"What are you talking about?" I asked. "I thought this was a feel-good romcom!"

She gave me a look. "It's not! I've talked about
Day of Hearts
like dozens of times. You never paid attention? You never even
looked
at the summary thingy on the book I gave you?"

"I didn't know there'd be a test!" I retorted. "Here I thought I was going to have some mindless fun with you. What is this about?"

Sol rolled her eyes. "It's about the Philippine god of the sun discovering that this beautiful artist-social worker living in modern day Manila might be the reincarnation of his great love, so he becomes human again to try and reunite with her! I wrote papers about this for school! Do you not read anything I send you?"

So it went like this: Mikey Jones Curtis, one of the top three hottest movie stars under thirty, was playing Apo, God of the Sun. The movie started with a scene in what seemed like heaven, all fluffy clouds and white columns. It looked really cheesy onscreen, but I remembered my own goddess dreams where I seemed to be impossibly high up... Maybe there was something to it.

And then for reasons that I never fully grasped, Apo was participating in the Philippine revolution, fighting alongside kickass warrior woman Maria. She ended up dying in one of the battles, and there was awkward crying and yelling "Nooooo!" into the heavens, but he managed first to tell her that she will live again and he would find her.

And then it was the twenty-first century, and I was looking at the story of a saintly provincial teacher/sculptor/singer Anna Rosa (played by ingenue Trinalee Tesoro, who couldn't convince me that she had created anything beautiful with clay in her life). Apo was convinced that she was Maria reincarnated, so he turned human and, as Arturo, put himself back into her life.

They taught rural children ABCs. And ran in the rain. And then she revealed that she was engaged to someone else, her childhood sweetheart, who was working as a nurse in New Jersey. He almost gave up, maybe because he didn't think he was better than a nurse in New Jersey, but she chose him anyway. In the rain.

Then they got married. It was a lavish wedding and they laughed and kissed and rode a horse-drawn carriage.

Throughout the two and a half hours of it, I couldn't help thinking that Mikey Jones Curtis did not look like the God of the Sun at all.

"Oh my god," I said, when the lights came back on. "This is your favorite novel ever?"

Sol was blinking at the screen still. "They changed it."

"What did they change to make it bad,
everything?"

She couldn't hit me of course, so she instead grabbed my bag, sitting right there on my lap, and shook it. "It was really romantic and tragic and... there was no wedding."

"Well this was a wedding, with horses."

"They ruined it," Sol wasn't even talking to me at this point. She was muttering her own disappointment to herself. "How hard is it to stick to the story? They have tragic endings in soap operas all the time..."

"I want chocolate," I said. "And you should buy it for me."

The mind-blowing thing about this? I didn't realize that Sol was an expert on Philippine deities all along.

"I'm not an
expert,"
she insisted, as we sat down to have the oily but justified katsu dinner that she insisted on paying for. I was so glad she had the presence of mind to reserve a table, because so many couples apparently thought fried Japanese food was romantic.

Sol continued, "I just got into it a bit in high school because I really loved that book. Read some myths, and books about myths..."

"You know more than I did. I mean, do. I do," I said. "So... is this actually a thing? This story about the Sun God falling in love with a mortal?"

"Well, that part is a bit hazy," Sol said. "I don't think I actually found a good reference with that particular story with that much detail. But I just assumed that Ivy Mira Alonzo just filled in the blanks with fictional stuff."

"So we have no evidence that the Sun God's One True Love is a teacher-social worker in the province somewhere?"

She gave me a look. "Are you making fun of me? Because I loved the book and all, but I don't think it's
real.
I'm not crazy."

"Of course," I said, blinking. And I lost another moment when I could have told Sol about me.

"So tell me how the movie should have been done," I generously offered her that opening. "And tell me about the other gods too."

Sol was all too happy to give me a list.

She told me, first of all, that she wished the God of the Sea had more screen time. In the movie he was portrayed as nothing more than an extra in the "heaven" or somewhere scenes, but Sol said that he actually figured more in the book. Aman, the God of the Sea, long held a grudge against Bathala for forbidding his own love affair with a mortal.

"...and he vowed to spend eternity preventing Apo from ever finding his mortal love."

What the...

"Did he?" I managed to squeak.

So this Sun God loving a regular girl thing, it was a story I'd heard before. In fact, I had heard it right from the mouth of the God of the Sea himself, currently walking around as Diego Simon, senior, basketball varsity, and Quin's best friend. While Quin ruled over the order of things, and I handled love (at least the few issues I could actually deal with), Diego was the god you summoned if you needed help with work, and journeys.

Diego was not like Quin. He was, well, he actually showed emotions.

He was also my first kiss. The non-dream-state kind.

Not that anything was ever going to really happen between us. It was a one-time thing, and strangely enough,
work-related.

Also, Diego was
not
my type. He yelled a lot, got into fights. Quin would restrain him when he got out of control, and in fact I actually thought they must have been brothers or something, the way Quin tolerated Diego's behavior. It definitely seemed like Quin was older-brotherly in that relationship.

It didn't look like they had this long-standing grudge.

And then I remembered that they had an old fight over something. They didn't want to tell me what it was.

I mean, you think I'd read up on the old gods when I got this gig, and I tried, but life got in the way. And also, any books that would have helped me were missing from the Ford River library. I probably should have tried to educate myself more, but I figured that I could just
ask
the actual gods anything.

A stupid move. Quin was master of the Not Saying Important Stuff if he felt I didn't need to know it. Diego was more open and liked saying stuff, but could I really trust him? Vowing to spend eternity on a grudge and all? If I had paid attention to the stuff Sol was fangirling about, I would have known more, and earlier.

It was all hearsay, but what wasn't?

I just suddenly really really
really
wanted to hang out with Robbie.