I hated being in the high school hallway. I hated it so much. They were much cooler and popular and I felt like they would judge my every move. Standing in front of them made the ground spin underneath my feet. And yet, I was spending my lunch break here. By choice.

"Aerronnn!" I whined, slipping past two tenth graders and chasing Aerron. "You say it to him!"

"He's your friend!"

"It's your plan!"

"And you're going with him because of how close you are!"

I groaned, stomping my foot. I probably looked immature, but I was too pissed off to care and too stubborn to get along with Aerron.

"Hi, Diana. Excuse me." Philip was standing behind me and I realized I was blocking their classroom's doorway. I followed Philip into their room to go to Aerron.

"Aerron naman!" I protested as he hoisted his bag up and onto his desk. "I don't want to be the one to tell Gabriel to do it!"

He rolled his eyes and pulled out a frayed piece of paper. "Diana, he doesn't like me."

"You don't have to like someone to receive a message!" I followed him outside.

Someone from the 8th grade tapped his shoulder and handed over an old but handsome guitar. Aerron thanked him and turned to me. "It's still better if you do it, whether you like it or not. So go! After school! Don't you have free time? I don't care if hindi kayo magkabati, sabihan mo lang siya para makapunta tayong lahat sa McDo!" ("I don't care if you haven't made up, just tell it to him so we can all go to McDo!")

Scowling, I grabbed the guitar from his hand and I strummed the G chord. "There's this boy named Aerron and he's being a real—"

He snatched it back, not gentle at all, and stared me down. I stepped back out of fear because he's Aerron Dela Cruz, the big, quiet kid of Grade 7 who never smiled but kept eye contact. I stepped back until we were out of the hallway and at the bottom of the stairs leading to the third floor. Then we were alone, and he pointed at me.

"You do it. This is our secret, he's your friend and I decided that I'm not gonna do it."

He turned and left, leaving me no choice but to accept. I made sure to mouth a "fuck you" before storming down the stairs.

Elize was already there at our classroom, waiting at the door. "Ang hirap kausapin ng jowa mo." I violently shoved my lunchbox onto the shelf. ("Your boyfriend's so hard to talk to.")

When I got home, I changed out of my uniform and picked up my phone. Boys are stupid, I thought.

I'm stupid sometimes, too.

Hmm.

...People are stupid.

That was a time when I spent more time on Wattpad than what was good for me, so I went and posted a message on my best friend's message board, just a "Hiiiiiii". Excessive i's, I know. I remembered she wasn't really active at the time, though, so I went to her on another messaging platform and spammed Liz with "hey"'s and "Liz"'s.

I got left on sent.

Sighing, I went back to Wattpad but didn't really feel like reading, so I went to leave a private message for another one of my friends on the app. Just another "Hi".

Oracle_In_Disguise replied.

The Oracle
Hello.

Honestly, I was a little surprised since a lot of people I knew on the internet weren't in the same time zone as me. I didn't want to keep her waiting, so I asked the first question that popped up in my head.

You
How weird do you think peculiar birds can get? Aside from ymbrynes, if they count.

The Oracle
Hm. I don't know.
What do you think?

You
What about
Uh
Half bird half something else?

The Oracle
What something else?
Like a hybrid?

You
Yes
Like dogs with lion heads, too
Those remind me of the Chinera from Percy Jackson
Chimera

I waited for a reply, but she seemed to go offline. Oops. Maybe I had said said something wrong? It was a short conversation, sadly. Background check: she wrote a fanfiction about Millard Nullings and we kind of...met there? She likes breaking the fourth wall. Y/N and Millard follow Jacob's story after their own and go on adventures there. I wondered if me and the others would go on adventures too.

"Mia!" I called. "Uh, Mia?"

I stood in front of her house's gate in shorts and a t-shirt, as always. I was looking around way too much.

You see, I actually left my house, by myself, without permission. But Mia's house was barely 3 minutes away. It couldn't be that dangerous, could it? Yeah, well, that didn't stop me from glancing back every few seconds.

Why was I here? So as you probably know, Laurence and I fought and recently it was Elize's birthday. Elize's birthday is on December 9, and today was 19, so it's Christmas season or something. Yay! Well, Laurence has a little sister named Celeste and her birthday is on 20. Having close families, we're going to the celebration, which is today, which would also double as a Christmas party. Even after more than a week of ignoring each other or seeing Laurence pass by my house, we still haven't talked. How would the Christmas/birthday party go?

"Mia!" I could see a bit of her kitchen through the screen door, but nothing else. Finally I heard the slap of slippers against tile and Mia appeared.

"Oy! Hi."

"Hey. I don't know if anyone told you yet, but Aerron told us to go to—"

"McDo on January 7, yeah. He told me already."

I nodded and mumbled okay. "Hey, do you want to go to the Christmas party later? At Laurence's house."

She stepped back. "Oh. Sorry, uh, me and my family are going somewhere."

Well, it was worth a try. I said goodbye and went back to my house. Sometime later, my mom came home and brought me to Laurence's house. I found him in the parking lot, going in circles with his scooter. He avoided my eyes.

"Hi," I said nervously. He nodded. "Um, Aerron...he told me to tell you—"

He stopped. "What?"

I was going to start again but someone interrupted and called us inside. There they sang the birthday song for Celeste, made us eat, then let us back outside. It all went surprisingly fast. I went outside first to get a cup I had left, but the screen door opened behind me and Laurence came out.

He held out a book. "I got this. Tell me if you like it so you can read it first."

"Come outside with me first."

"We're already outside, Ana."

I closed my eyes and sighed. "I'm being serious."

"You're never serious."

"Come on," I whined, taking his wrist and the book and pulling him back to the parking lot. I sat against the wall and waited for him to follow.

He looked over my shoulder as I flipped through the pages. "...So?"

It was an Archie comic. I don't really read comics, and what I saw didn't really interest me, either. I only knew what it was because I would see these comics on the shelf in the waiting line at the grocery store. There was someone named Archie, of course, and Bettie, or Betty; I don't remember, and someone else named Jughead. That was a weird name.

I closed it. "It's okay, but I don't really read a lot of those."

"Okay," He said calmly, taking it back. He didn't look the least bit disappointed or sad, which was a relief.

"But hey, Aerron said we should meet at McDonald's on January 7 at 5:30 or something. Can you go?"

"For what? With who?"

"For a meeting, I guess. With the others from Circle Park."

"What kind of meeting?"

I shuffled my feet. "For plans and stuff. And to get weapons."

Gabriel frowned. "Weapons for? 'Ana, full answers, please."

"Weapons for fighting those things! Um, monsters, if you want to call them that. Because we got attacked again, remember? And Aerron and Philip were there because it was at school but that time they didn't have Aerron's bolo or Philip's hwando—"

"You got attacked?!"

"Yes, and as I was saying, that happened and we had to hit it with a freaking mirror, like I told you—"

"Wait, wait, wait. Diana, you didn't tell me any of this."

I stared at him. "Wait, I didn't?"

"Not at all! What fucking happened there?!"

"Language," I muttered.

"You swear more than I do."

"Yes, yes, I know, but back to the point!" I slapped the ground and pulled out my phone from my pocket. "I just went upstairs and I heard shouting and they were trying to hit something. Elize, Aerron and Philip, I mean," I told him.

"Did you see what it was?"

"Of course," I said, searching for my gallery. "Then it scratched Elize's face—she's fine now—and we went inside a bathroom and ended up hitting it with the mirror, because again, no weapons. Them, I mean. There were two. Then we did something with the CCTVs so we wouldn't get in trouble. After that we cleaned up the place and went home. That's what it looked like," I said, tapping the picture I took before going home.

He grabbed my phone from me, but I didn't mind. "Woah," he said as he zoomed in.

I hadn't had the time to process what the creature or whatever it looked like. I just took a picture for future reference and never thought about it again. I never open my gallery because I don't take many pictures except for those of food I find appealing and occasionally those of RenRen and the things we find when we roam around the barangay.

It was weird, for starters. It was a regular Maya bird like we always saw in the area, brown feathers with black lines and lighter bellies. Then just at the top of the wings were pincers; dark and shiny. Where the head of the bird was supposed to be sprouted the upper half of a scorpion. Yikes. And like I said earlier, these were bigger than they were supposed to be, as in the scorpion's body grew to match the bird's body and the whole thing was magnified to twice the size of my hand.

"So..." RenRen turned to me. "Those things attacked you?"

"Yeah."

He glanced down and frowned deeply. "Did the bird do that?"

I looked down at my hand and saw the fine line drawn on the skin from where I scratched it. It didn't sting anymore and the scar was nearly gone (even if it didn't bleed at all) but it still hurt a bit when I pressed it. "Oh, no. That's from the door."

"Okay. I'll try to ask if I can go."

I nodded. The conversation was still dry and secretly I really missed how we were before we argued. Was it really that bad?

"I hope you can."

When I got up, he said, "Your mom's asking if we're making new friends from high schoolers."

"I'll...I'll just tell her he lives in the area and we bumped into him," I replied.

"Who, Philip?"

I rolled my eyes. "Both of them."

"Mia asked if you have a bolo knife, too. I met her at the store the other day. She said if you can, go to her house and bring Elize, too."

"Oh. Okay."

"And by the way, does Elize really have a katana?"

I shrugged. "She said she did."

"Does she know how to use it?"

I shrugged again and sat back down beside him. "I won't ask why you're always ready to bicker with her because I already know you find her annoying and she sees you as a killjoy, so okay. And are you in on this? The whole fighting the animals and stuff."

"I wouldn't say animals. Maybe...hybrids or mutants. That thing you showed me wasn't pure animal."

"Technically it was, if we're not being specific. Birds and scorpions are animals."

Laurence sighed. "What about the dogs at Circle Park?"

"What about them?"

He stared blankly. "The blood?"

"Oh." I looked down. I had a pretty weird memory, as if it randomly picked what to remember and what not to remember. "Sorry, I forgot."

"It's okay."

So, I had to go to Mia with Elize, and go to McDonald's with the rest of them. Something wasn't quite right about what was happening, and maybe we could fix it. Maybe.