Cebu Nights – Part 1: One Karaoke Song

The karaoke bar in Mandaue was loud, hot and full of old schoolmates in matching class shirts. Someone had strung fairy lights across the ceiling. Someone else had spilled a jug of mango juice on the piano and everyone was pretending not to notice.

Paolo had come because his mother had made him promise. He stood near the bar with a bottle of San Miguel, pretending to be interested in the football on the screen.

"Paolo! You're late!"

He turned. Rico was pushing through the crowd, grinning, a tall, broad man in a crumpled white shirt with his hair longer than it had been at seventeen.

"I'm not late," said Paolo. "The party started without me."

"You always say that." Rico hugged him, quick and hard, and Paolo smelled sunscreen and coconut shampoo, and the familiar warmth in his chest flared up before he could stop it.

They had been best friends at Cebu Doctors' school, sharing a desk and a secret crush on the same girl until she moved to Manila. Then Rico had gone to university in Davao, and Paolo had stayed to work in his uncle's hardware shop. They wrote letters for a while, then messages, then nothing for years.

"You look happy," said Rico, pulling back to look at him.

"I'm fine," said Paolo. "And you look like you've been eating well."

"Davao is very good for food," said Rico, grinning. "And very bad for sleep."

The room was full of noise. Someone was singing an old Eraserheads song, badly, and the whole bar was joining in on the chorus.

Then the host called out Rico's name. "Rico Santos, come up here! Your friends told me you have a special song!"

Rico groaned. "I'm going to kill my classmates."

"Sing it," shouted someone from the back. "Sing the one about the boy with the bike!"

Paolo's stomach dropped. He knew that song. He had heard it once, in a shabby room in their school dormitory, sung softly by a seventeen-year-old who had been too shy to say the words out loud.

Rico looked across the room at him, and his face changed.

"Okay," he said. "But only for one person."

He walked up to the small stage, took the microphone and began to sing. His voice was rough and warm and not very well trained, and the song was simple and sweet, about a boy on a bicycle who always waited at the corner for someone who never came.

Paolo stood frozen by the bar. The room went quiet, one table at a time.

When the last note faded, Rico put the microphone down and walked straight across the floor, through the crowd, and stopped in front of him.

"That was for you," he said, very quietly. "I wrote it when I was seventeen. I never sang it to you because I was scared."

Paolo's throat was tight. "Why are you singing it now?"

"Because I'm not seventeen any more," said Rico, "and I'm tired of being scared. Can I ask you something?"

"Yes."

"Would you like to walk home with me? Along the sea wall, like we used to, and talk about everything we didn't say?"

Paolo laughed, shaky and bright, and set down his beer.

"Yes," he said. "Green. Let's go before the classmates start filming."