In the light of all that happened afterwards, it would've been more appropriate if we had come to Bagong Silang on a stormy, gloomy day, or at least at night. But we didn't. It was early afternoon, and the sunshine was warm and golden on the wide rice fields that stretched out on both sides of the road.
I didn't pay much attention to it at first. I was sulking, thinking about all the friends I'd left behind. One friend in particular- my on-again, off-again boyfriend Bryan. I didn't suppose that our already uncertain relationship would last through a long-distance love affair, even though Bryan knew my cellphone number and my new address and had promised to keep in touch. There are lots of pretty girls in our city, and Bryan is the kind who constantly needs a girl around. Without me to hold and keep his attention in person, he'd probably get lonely and find somebody else.
It didn't help matters any when my brothers started teasing me. Probably they were only trying to make me laugh, but I wasn't in a particularly receptive mood. Ay, sometimes being an only girl with three brothers -one older, one younger, and one twin- can be such a bad trip!
My name is Adriel de los Santos. I'm sixteen, going on seventeen, like in the song. My twin brother is named Adrian, and we call him Ian for short. Our older brother is Allain, and he's eighteen going on nineteen. Our younger brother is Averill, and he just turned eight.
We were moving to Bagong Silang, which is the barrio our parents grew up in, because there was no one else to keep up the farm and the old house that had been the family homestead ever since the first de los Santoses had come to Mindanao with the first batch of Christian settlers in 1939. Our grandmother, Lola Carmen had succumbed to old age at last, and after she died, my Aunt Alisa, who had been taking care of her, decided to pack up and join her sister, my Aunt Arlene, in California. Dad's four other brothers and sisters were scattered all over the Philippines and the world, everywhere except the one place I wished they were so Dad wouldn't move us all back to Bagong Silang and we could stay in General Santos City forever. Getting stuck in the provinces for the whole summer, not to mention probably the rest of my life, was just too dreadful to think about!
I was a very small girl the last time I visited Bagong Silang, and contrary to what they say in books, I didn't remember a thing about it! When Lola died, Mom and Dad and Allain went to the funeral, but Ian and Averill and I didn't make it because we were having our finals around then. So this was really my first glimpse of the place in a long, long time.
If only Dad didn't feel so responsible! He was the youngest and the one named after our grandfather, Lolo Alberto, and he adored the place where he grew up. He even decided to run his flourishing furniture and construction business by phone from Silang. Besides, he said, the city was only an hour and a half away by car if things were really urgent enough to need his presence. Mom, who is just about the only fulltime mom I know of- all my friends' moms have jobs or are businesswomen; Mom just stays at home and takes care of us, and does gardening shows on the side to keep busy-went wild with happiness when she found out she was finally getting all the space she wanted for the garden of her dreams. Seems there were really, really big gardens at the old house in Silang, which she'd always coveted while she was growing up there.
Allain is something of a loner; give him peace and quiet, a guitar, a chord book, and pen and paper, and he's in seventh heaven, never mind where his earthly body happened to be. Averill, on the other hand, was too young to miss his friends in the city. He was thrilled when Dad told him he was going to have lots and lots of space to play in and a huge house to explore, and he was already looking forward to making new friends in Silang. Ian, like me, had friends, but he has always been the good son and he never made even a squeak of protest. I guess I'm just about the only rebel in the family. I swear, if I hadn't been born with a twin, Mom would say I'd been left in the trash can by some lumad and she'd just picked me up. Oh, well, maybe I'm this way to provide a balance for my good boy brothers dearest. Although it seems like our roles are reversed- boys are supposed to be the rebels, aren't they? But then nothing's perfect, right?
