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I had been dating a doctor for a while. A Moroccan doctor who came here a year or two ago, not because he found Manila particularly interesting or attractive, nor its people or customs, but because he wanted to go somewhere, anywhere but where he was, and he found that Manila was the most accessible. There was a program in his medical school that allowed for graduates to work in Manila for the experience, with opportunities for graduates to become naturalized citizens. Which was not especially hard, given that there was not really much competition when it came to becoming a Filipino citizen.

We met at a gallery opening. I had been dragged into it by Juno, whose friend at the law firm she worked for was also an artist. I had always wondered how this friend Annie had time to be a legal assistant as well as an artist, but my curiosity was satisfied when I got there. The gallery was called Silver Linings (a dreadful name for a gallery that is supposed to be a cultural paragon of taste, but there you are), and her art hung in the main gallery through which people entered. Various passages led to other, smaller exhibitions.

Annie’s exhibition was called Fell, and was supposed to be a “celebration” of the most brutal, most terrible yet most essential parts of life, through mixed-media art. Most of them incorporated very textured oil painting with sculpture that used unconventional material, like refuse or combs glued together or rolls of toilet paper dissolved in glue and then molded.

There was much effort, certainly, put into the works, although I had very profound doubts regarding their merit. Very profound, cosmic doubts. First of all, although she attempts to draw in a style that is supposedly “bad on purpose,” one cannot help but feel as though the “bad” part is too adept or natural. It is almost as if an actor who played a bad actor played that bad actor badly. It is an aesthetic experience, surely, that one had to experience firsthand—I suppose like any enduring work of art.

And of course Annie, being a charming woman, already had collectors: rich, old, lonely men who hoarded her work, driving up the prices as well as hopefully bringing her work to wider attention. By the time that we had gotten there, only a few hours after opening, all but a handful of the works had already been sold.

I was looking at one, named “To Ray, Whom I Loved, But Did Not Love Me Back.” It was a painting, but its canvas had been bent, so that a part of it served as the floor, onto which was perched a sculpture of a doll shaped like a girl, falling through space, held up by a thin, black wire. The painting on the canvas that served as the floor was painted in harsh, terrifying reds and browns, like a vortex that was a portal to hell, and as one traveled up the canvas, it transitioned slowly—never abruptly—into light blues, whites, and greens.

On the face of it, the idea was interesting, although it was not especially so, and the execution was worse. There was no real form or idea to what served as “heaven” and “hell,” apart from the muddled colors that were supposed to suggest the concepts. And the very opposition of these concepts is so immature, trite, and repetitive that I felt no work under such a simple and childish theme could surpass being merely interesting.

In the end, all of her work merely bored me.

I walked around, not saying much of anything, as I was wont to do when I did not find anything noteworthy, and then sat down. Juno walked with me, and then sat with me, and then Annie passed by and recognized her.

Juno introduced me. Annie had artificial red hair and was wearing contacts that turned her eyes a shade of green and gray. She was thin and beautiful and her pale skin and prominent features gave her the aura of an elven, otherworldly woman. It was apparent that she would be the type to have superior intelligence as well as an artistic streak. She was very nice and had a glowing smile.

“Juno’s told me a lot about you,” Annie said.

That surprised me, but I didn’t know why. Juno is one of my closest friends. We spent a lot of time together.

“Thank you,” I said. “Although I don’t know what she would be saying about me. I’m nobody.”

“She says you’re a writer.”

“I suppose in a very general sense.”

She smiled wider and nodded and did not say any more.

And it was here that someone walked up to her and wrapped an arm around her and kissed her and handed her a cup of the spiked punch from the buffet table. I looked at who it was, and it was the most handsome man I had ever seen. The most handsome man, even then, that I knew I was ever going to see.

“Babe,” Annie told this man. “This is Juno. She works with me at the law firm. And this is her friend, Arya. She’s a writer.” She turned back to us. “This is Youssef.”

He shook hands with Juno, and then he shook mine. And I was overcome then with a sense of destiny. An overwhelming sense of destiny.

After that, I kept thinking about this person, if only because they were handsome. Naturally, I told my clone about it, and the first thing we did was try to find his social media. We found nothing. Then, we tried to find out if we could somehow scour public records of medical practitioners in Manila. Surely, they have those? Doctors are licensed, and we need to have some type of way to check whether a doctor we’re seeing is legitimate. If any such list exists, then we did not find it.

At some point, we realized that Raziel has all sorts of ancient and mystical knowledge. We reasoned that, perhaps, in his angelic form, he had knowledge of all things. These days, Raziel spent his time working. He volunteered at several organizations and charities and was building up a kind of portfolio. He had an Instagram channel where he posted both informative and thirst content where he showed off, although surreptitiously and under the guise of coincidence, his almost mythical physique.

I followed him, of course, and even helped him with technology, which he did not know how to use. He was a fast learner and pretty soon was doing everything himself. One time, when he invited me for dinner, and we were eating at the Hong Kong cuisine restaurant behind our house, I said: “You are teetering on the line between virtue and sin, no? In that you use your beauty to tempt. Even if it is for ultimately good ends.”

He was eating congee, as he was still not very accustomed to eating. He liked things like soup and other soft food, so that he could simply slide them down his throat.

“I tempt nobody, Augustus,” he said. “If they appreciate my beauty, then let them. God is the source of all things beautiful.”

“And if they long for you sexually?”

“That is natural. Very natural.”

I could have contradicted him, but I shrugged and continued to eat. I enjoyed going through his material. It would have been against my interests to convince him to stop, not that I would have succeeded. Despite his terse and easy responses, Raziel was an ancient creature created during the dawn of time. The wise thing to do would be to trust him. Although angels were also susceptible to catastrophic folly, as evidenced by Raziel’s fallen brother…

I moved the conversation along to Youssef. Raziel said that he did not know. He also said that he could not be expected to know every person on Earth; that was not within the domain of angels. They were not omniscient like God.

I sighed.

“Why don’t you ask Juno’s friend about him?” Raziel said. “Are they together? You shouldn’t butt into their relationship if they are together.”

“I don’t know if they’re together.”

“But you’re not saying they’re not together.”

“He gave her a glass of punch. He had his arm around her. I think maybe they were dating. She didn’t introduce him as her boyfriend, which she would, if they were together.”

Raziel considered this. “I suppose.”

We ate in silence for a while. I went through my phone. Raziel went through his as well. He took a selfie of himself with his food. The moment he posted it, I got a notification on my phone, which made me laugh. Although he already knew that I followed his material closely. He found my affection for him funny, probably because it was so predictable.

Then, Raziel broke the silence. “How’s David? Weren’t you with David?”

I swallowed and drank water. “We are no longer in touch.”

“I’m sorry, Augustus,” he said. “But that is just so typical.”

“He broke up with me. And then he vanished. When he came back, he had another girlfriend.”

“He was here only a few weeks ago. Something else must have happened.”

“We might have had a little argument.”

“He was very good to you.” He poured himself another glass of water from the pitcher and shook his head. “He was very, very good to you. He wasn’t perfect, as no man is perfect, but whenever it was within his power, he tried to be good to you.”

I shrugged. “What we had was not so important that I could overlook how annoying he was being right around that time.”

“What did he do that annoyed you so much, then?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Raziel was not used to being visible to ordinary humans, and he had not yet mastered the art of hiding his feelings, so they showed on his face. He raised a single eyebrow and then rolled his gray eyes as he returned to his meal.

My clone was going through God of War. He was playing on the television in his room, and I was sitting on his bed watching his playthrough. I enjoyed having someone who shared my interests. Although it bothered me how many opinions we did not share. If we were essentially the same person, then shouldn’t we both have the same perspective? But we decided that there were minute, infinitesimal factors at play we could not even start to consider. Especially not while he had to go through the list of games he had to experience for himself.

He was having difficulty with the soul eater, an enemy made of stone. He needed to deflect its projectiles, pick them up, wait for an opening when the hole on its torso was exposed, and then throw the projectile back in. He was having trouble being fast enough. I was the same way when I first played it.

He was grumbling when he died again. “Annoying… The timing is too quick. There’s no time to maneuver.”

“You could use your axe,” I said. “It’s slower, though.”

“I don’t want to…”

He eventually beat it after a few more tries. He huffed. “Fucking finally…” And then he went back to a more leisurely pace exploring the area where the dark elves lived.

While playing, he said, “Did you ever find out about that hot guy?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again.”

“There’ll be others. There always are.”

“I guess.”

“Do you remember Claud?” He was looking at the widescreen television, navigating. “When you were in high school? And then Rex in college? And a long while after college, actually…”

“I loved Rex.”

“And when things got so bad he decided he wanted nothing to do with you anymore, didn’t you think you’d never love again or some stupid shit like that?”

“This is different.”

“Only difference is it’s more recent.”

The king of the dark elves appeared in the game, and my clone had to deal with him. Like me, he had built his Kratos as a tank. He took a lot of damage because we do not have very fast reflexes, but he was adept enough and was surviving the encounter, many times even parrying accurately.

I watched him for another hour or two. Right about this time, Juno sent me something, some meme that she wanted me to see. It was a joke about exercising and about how we always spoke about doing it but never did. I watched it, reacted, and then said: How is that friend of yours, Annie? I enjoyed her art. I saw more of it on her webpage.

She said that Annie was okay, that she had met her only a while ago because she had come from the office. Usually, Juno works from home. I realized that I absolutely had no more leads, and so I asked: Do you know whether that man she was with was her boyfriend?

Juno said that the man was a doctor whom Annie dated for a while, but they were no longer together. Annie had spoken much about it, Juno said. Annie was distraught about having lost him, given that he was such a good prospect. But things were “not meant to be.”

I said that I had a crush on him and wanted to see him again. Juno said that she was going to try to find out more about him, but she didn’t know if Annie would want to talk more about that guy. So I said: If you don’t want to ask her, I will. Why don’t you invite Annie to have dinner with us?

Juno had known me long enough to know that I was not being absurd. In my life I had done many things for men that others might consider excessive. My clone had complete access to my past, being essentially myself, and knew that my life has been characterized and punctuated by desperate acts in the name of manly affection. Juno knew this, too, since we had known each other for a little over 20 years at this point.

So, she said yes.

Annie, Juno, and I met that weekend at Café Breton, which was beside Café Havana, in the open-air area of Greenbelt 5. This place was the legendary haunt of many whores and expats who sought to do business together. My friends and I enjoyed watching the drama that unfolded, as business of this nature was conducted. The food in Café Breton was good, too.

Annie was a very intelligent person. She was a lawyer, like Juno, and then studied fashion and art overseas in some New York institute. Despite this, there was no pride about her at all. Under different circumstances I would have liked to be her friend, especially since she did much to advance her career on both fronts: the legal and the artistic. Whatever the limitations of her creativity, I knew that such grit was infinitely more valuable. She was good, although not great, and with such perseverance she was bound for success, as with the same perseverance even the mediocre succeeded. And without the same perseverance, even the brilliant failed.

We were already having our dessert by the time I brought up the man I saw at the gallery. We were talking about love and about the future and about getting married, and casually I said: “You have a boyfriend, right? That man you introduced us to? What was his name?”

“Youssef,” Annie said. “I really liked him. But…” She was twirling her hair. “It just wasn’t meant to be.”

It was here that I learned he was a doctor at Makati Med. That he was from Morocco, and that he was voracious for success. He was pathologically ambitious. And Annie could not keep up with the constant tug of war she had to engage in against Youssef’s ambitions. She wanted to travel, to meet people, to go to the beach, to take a cruise, but Youssef was unwilling to ever miss an opportunity to advance his position at the hospital.

I could tell that she was really broken up about having lost him. Which led me to believe that it was the man, rather than her, that broke it up. And whatever excuses she might have for being better off without him were white lies she told herself to ease her pain. I was familiar with these tactics of self-consolation; she was as adept at them as I.

Because of this I could not bring myself to ask her directly about him. I knew, somehow, that she would be suspicious, and would think it low of me to have invited her, and to have consoled her, when in fact I sought to have Youssef for myself. I suppose in some way it could be seen as a sort of treachery.

Still, she said: “It’s a pity. I was going to come with him to the Harry Potter Yule Ball. He was my date.”

She was talking about the event that was going to be held at Muso World Manila. Some stupid, overpriced event where people pretended they were in the movie.

“He’s going to be there?” I instinctively looked at Juno, who was also looking at me.

“I don’t know if he’s still going if I’m not going,” she said. “But we were going with a few other friends, and he did pay for a ticket. And he would never spend money on something he wouldn’t use… That was one of the things about him. At the time, I hated it. But looking back… It was charming, really. It was very charming.”

“You’re not going?” I asked.

“I already gave my ticket away. I couldn’t bear to see him again. Especially not there.”

My clone and I bought tickets to the Yule Ball, and when Raziel learned about what we were doing, he bought tickets, too. Emily was a fan of Harry Potter and came with us. She was going to go as a Gryffindor. My clone and I wondered together if we should both go as Ravenclaw or Slytherin, or perhaps one should go as Ravenclaw and the other as Slytherin. Finally, we decided that he would go as Ravenclaw, whereas I would be Slytherin.

Raziel had not read the books. He read the first one and was so enamored with it, despite his misgivings regarding the writing (“What a downgrade from Tolkien… Not even at the level of Le Guin…” he said), that he read all of the books and watched all the movies within the span of around three weeks. He basically did nothing else but think about the franchise around that time, and we had many interesting discussions regarding the characters, objects, concepts, and events there.

At one point, while reading the sixth book, The Half-Blood Prince, Raziel was interested in how Dumbledore sacrificed himself and tasked Snape with killing him. It reminded him, of course, of The Lord. But he was very critical of the comparisons because Dumbledore sacrificed himself when he was about to die in any case, and about to die as a result of a selfish and abominable act: Attempting to bring his sister back to life. Necromancy, Raziel called it, with disdain as if such a thing were even possible. Perhaps he had lived through times when it was.

Emily was at the house, then, and we had just finished watching a movie. We decided to order food, and we were eating it in my room.

Raziel was sitting Indian on the bed with chopsticks and a cup of noodles. He was saying: “I find nothing especially noble in Dumbledore. He is benevolent and supposedly the most powerful wizard who ever lived. He is supposed to be very wise. But he doesn’t seem very wise to me.”

“I don’t think he was very wise, either,” I said. “I mean, even putting the alleged necromancy aside, I don’t think he put enough of an eye on Harry, given Harry’s destiny. And many things that went awry were directly the result of his not minding this young and stupid boy. I mean, throughout most of the series Harry is barely 18.”

Emily said, “I think Dumbledore didn’t want certain information to be out there, so he was very secretive. I think maybe he was watching from the sidelines.”

“Even in the first book,” I said, “he let Harry, Ron, and Hermione go into the hidden place where the mirror of Erised was. How well hidden was that thing, that three kids were able to get to it? And even if you put aside the fact that these children almost died, how were these first years able to get to the philosopher’s stone? And of course by that time even Voldemort himself had gotten to it first.”

Raziel was shaking his head while scooping up noodles into his mouth. When he had swallowed, he muttered, “Incompetence…”

Still, Raziel found it enjoyable and fascinating. We asked him about his House, and he said Gryffindor (“Of course,” he grumbled). I said that he was more of a Hufflepuff to me.

“Excuse me?” Raziel said. He was prone to being deeply offended. He never acted irrationally or became cruel as a result, but his lofty dignity as one of the angels meant that he was aware always of his stature among God’s creatures. Especially among us mortals. “Nothing against the Hufflepuffs, including noble and short-lived Cedric Diggory, but I am more than a mere jolly and loyal friend. I am fierce like a lion. Perhaps sometimes foolhardy. As when I was beckoned into that cursed box created by your hell-bound friend Elmer.”

“That’s Slytherin talk,” Emily said.

Raziel’s brows furrowed at this. “I don’t think I even need to entertain that idea.”

“I hope not,” I said. “I don’t want you to be in the same house as me at the ball. You’d steal the spotlight.”

Raz finished his meal and threw his cup noodles in the trash. He sat on the couch in front of me, situated at the front of my bed, and looked through his phone. “Reminds me. I should check whether the custom robes I ordered are ready. Are your costumes ready?”

“Need to get my nails done,” I said. “Fix my wig. Get a wand. I don’t want one of those cheap wands…”

“I’ll send you the place where I had mine made,” Raz said. “Real wood. Custom. Bespoke.”

Anyone who has ever read Harry Potter, or even had a casual interest in it, was curious about their house. The matter is trivial, of course, because the Sorting Hat makes it clear to Harry that if the student being sorted wanted to be in a certain house, then the Sorting Hat would grant that request. But one does wonder, like Harry, about one’s inner essence, one’s tendencies and one’s predispositions. One’s objective self. Which is why online quizzes, no matter how stupid, have always been popular, along with horoscopes and personality tests (which have always been bunk but touted as science).

I’ve always been sorted into Ravenclaw. When the website came along, everyone tried to sort themselves using the quiz there, and every time I was sorted into Ravenclaw, even if the questions seemed like non sequiturs. Later, I asked Elmer’s AI Quibble (which was several hundred orders of magnitude more powerful than ChatGPT or Claude) to sort me based on everything it knew about me, after using it for a time and inputting other psychometric data I’ve gotten from Dr. Tal, and still it sorted me into Ravenclaw.

But many times Quibble also told me that Slytherin is a close second. The life of the mind was central to me, and that pushed it towards Ravenclaw, but I also had powerful tendencies that were characterized by ambition, purity, and self-interest.

Elmer, interestingly enough, was a Gryffindor. I wasn’t entirely convinced he hadn’t manipulated Quibble to say that.

I had to go to Elmer’s to talk to Quibble, because I wanted to determine my wand. I could have just made it up, but I wanted some kind of basis, some kind of authority. At least, something outside myself that had knowledge of these things, just as the witches and wizards of London went to Mr. Ollivander when they wanted to buy a wand.

In Harry Potter, people were always looking for some kind of authority that would tell them who they are. Their first experiences at Hogwarts are about being told what kind of person they are, with their wands and their Houses. It disappointed me that Harry came to completely accept and become this throughout the series, rather than raging harder against it. Does this teach kids that they have some kind of unalterable destinies? That Harry was one thing at the moment his parents were murdered, and he could not help but fulfill this destiny to the very end? There are story reasons for these, but one must think of what message this sends to the children. Won’t anybody please think of the children?

Mrs. Gatdula said hi and didn’t pull me aside. I had brought Raz with me, and she exchanged a few words with him after me, telling him that she followed his social media. She squeezed his arm and said that he was doing good work at the gym. Elmer was already downstairs, so we went up to his room. Quibble only worked locally. Files from the Internet were “funneled” into it, as Elmer did not want it to be scouring the Internet, doing things of its own volition.

Elmer had a work station that was in his room, rather than the lab, and he had seven monitors, like one of those massive stations at the New York Stock Exchange. He let me sit down on his computer chair (which alone cost around Php 350,000), and I switched over to Quibble, which was already open. I think Elmer had been working on it.

“Hi Quibble,” I said aloud. It worked so well that talking to it like a person was the best way to communicate with it. Typing was as inefficient and ridiculous as texting someone who was already in front of you. “Just wanted to check up on my Hogwarts sorting and wand. We have a Yule Ball next weekend.”

“Hello Augustus,” Quibble said, in its positive but not necessarily gleeful way. It did not have a face or avatar in its user interface, but I’ve told Elmer many times to include some type of face, maybe generate one. It was certainly powerful enough to do it on its own. But Elmer said that it was unnecessary and possibly dangerous; we might begin to think of it as a living thing, which it was not.

“Where do you want to start?” Quibble said.

“I’m going as a Slytherin,” I said. “My clone is going to be going as Ravenclaw. I’m thinking that maybe because I’m going as Slytherin, we could emphasize in my next questions that side of me.”

“Perfect,” Quibble said. “I’ll focus on your Slytherin-related aspects.”

“Good. Tell me about my wand.”

It thought for a while. I could see on the user interface that it was gathering the data I had fed it before as well as going through our previous interactions. It took around six minutes before a file opened with its conclusions.

Wood — Hornbeam
Hornbeam becomes closely attuned to its owner’s magical style and personal principles. It suits your insistence that a work fulfill its intended purpose, alongside your strongly individual sensibility. This would become a highly personalized wand, difficult for someone else to use effectively.

Core — Dragon heartstring
This supplies power, rapid learning, and the capacity for dramatic magic, with some temperament accompanying those strengths. It fits the creative energy of the combined portrait, particularly the intensity with which you can become absorbed in something you want.

Length — 12¾ inches
My chosen proportion allows for expansive, expressive gestures while retaining the balance of a slender instrument. Its shaft would taper gradually to a fine point.

Flexibility — Slightly springy
Responsive under deliberate pressure, with a definite return to its own shape. This represents firmness of purpose alongside an ability to explore, adapt, and become unexpectedly enthusiastic.

Appearance — Smoke-stained hornbeam with antique silver
Deep brown, with the grain visible. Shallow branching grooves run around the handle, settling beneath the fingers. A single narrow antique-silver band marks the transition from handle to shaft.

Magical character — Precise, expressive, occasionally exuberant
It excels at intricate charms and transformations: giving an imagined thing a convincing, detailed presence. Its characteristic excess would be producing an enchantment more elaborate than originally intended because its wielder became fascinated with the possibilities.

“An exacting instrument,” Quibble said. “It would learn your intentions exceptionally well. Although you’d still have to decide what those intentions are.”

Elmer was lying on his bed going lazily through his phone. “Nefarious ones, undoubtedly.”

I took a picture of the file with my phone. I turned the chair towards Elmer. “You’re not coming with us?”

“I don’t know anything about Harry Potter.” Elmer looked up from his phone, which he placed face-down on his stomach.

“You don’t need to,” I said. “It’s a ball. We’ll just dance and eat and drink and have a good time.”

“And why would I go to that overproduced shite, as opposed to some party or night club where I could go for free?”

“First of all,” I said, “we’re going to be pretending to be witches and wizards. That is going to be fun. Also, you don’t need to care about money. That’s one of the best things about being Elmer Gatdula.”

“And the massive cock?” Elmer said.

Raziel side-eyed him. He was sitting at the foot of Elmer’s bed. “Crude, faithless swine.”

Elmer laughed at this. “I’m just joking!”

“Disgusting joke,” Raziel said.

“Oh?” Elmer sat up. “And speaking of wands, how big is your cock, Raz? I mean, I’ve seen it flaccid, but I’m talking erect. At full power. Super Saiyan. Archangel style.”

“You will not speak about me in such a way,” the angel said, annoyed.

“Not as big as you hoped…” Elmer sighed. “Now, you are truly a human male.”

“You know what’s weird,” I said. “Raziel has seen my cock. He’s watched me shower and take a dump all my life. Right?”

Raziel said, “That follows from me being your guardian angel, doesn’t it? There’s nothing malicious about it, from my perspective. That is just what humans do. What animals do. They pass waste. They wash themselves.”

“Augustus has a tiny one, doesn’t he?” Elmer said.

“Yes,” Raziel said, quickly.

I blinked at him. “What the hell? Raz.”

Raziel looked at me with those big, gray eyes. “I only speak the truth.”

The day of the ball, I was laying down my clothes on the bed and preparing to go to the shower when I heard a lot of noise coming from downstairs. I came out just as my clone came out of his own room, and we both looked out from the mezzanine to see a group of people coming in from the front door. There must have been around six, seven, eight people all in all.

“What’s happening?” I called down to my parents, who were behind the kitchen island counter having a meal. The chatter was so loud that they did not hear me, and my dad joked with someone among the group.

People in the group laughed, and I realized that he was talking to Raz, who was seated on the couch in front of the television.

I said louder: “What’s going on?”

Raz and my parents saw me. Raz said: “I’m having my makeup done.”

“Oh god…” I sighed. “Should have known he was going to make this into some kind of a production,” I told my clone.

“Yep…” The clone turned his phone towards me, and there was a reel from Raz’s Instagram, with scenes from our house and a caption: “Get Ready for the Yule Ball with me!”

“Let’s get you done up, too,” Raziel said. People were now setting up ring lights around him. Someone was brushing his face, and another was inspecting his nails.

I took him up on that offer. I was going to the salon, but this was probably going to get me done up much better than anyone at the salon could.

I went down after showering. Raz was having his makeup and hair done. He told me to sit on the other side of the couch, and told the others to work on me. In their presence, despite their friendliness, I felt suddenly so ugly and beneath them. I could almost sense myself in their place, thinking: My goodness, what a lost cause…

A gay guy with thick, black-rimmed glasses sat on a chair taken from our dinner table in front of me. He had a thin layer of foundation on his face that made him look pale, in an artificial way. His pink lip gloss shone in the light.

“What would you like?” he said, with a smile.

“I’m going to be wearing this wig.” I produced my blonde wig. “I don’t know, really, what should go with it, in terms of my makeup.”

He looked at the wig. He took it in his hand and brushed the hair with his fingers. “Can you put it on?” he said.

I put it on my head. I tucked a lock of hair behind my ear.

“Beautiful!” my dad said, who was watching from the side. “My daughter!” He was being humorous and good-natured. He was like this when he did not know what to say. He had never wanted his son to become queer. I knew how much it took for him to be this way.

I stuck my tongue out at him.

“I think we can go for a Luna Lovegood look,” he said. “What House will you be?”

“Slytherin.”

“Oh…” He sucked air in through gritted teeth. This threw a wrench into whatever plans he had been formulating. “Maybe we can do something like a sexy, dark Luna Lovegood.”

“Luna Lovebad,” Raz contributed, while his eyes were still closed and he was facing upward so that the makeup artist could do his contouring.

Scattered polite laughter.

I rolled my eyes at Raz and nudged him on the shoulder. Then, I turned back to the makeup artist and said, “We can do that. Whatever you want.”

After around an hour and a half, the artist sat back up. He took a mirror from his bag and showed me my face. I barely recognized myself in my beauty. It was as if who I had always been emerged from the shadows of my being. As if I had beheld my reflection for the first time in my life.

Raziel opened his eyes after having someone brush his face. He saw me too, and smiled.

The Ball started at 8PM, and we were on the road by 6. We knew that trying to get in there was going to be a whole ordeal. I was surprised that Raziel didn’t have some kind of pass, but it seemed as though he was not a big enough celebrity to merit that. Nor was he the type to ask; he would see such a thing as prideful and therefore dangerous.

Emily drove us in her Montero. In the car, Raziel took selfies and made a reel with us. We made funny faces and waved. I went through Annie’s social media to check if, somehow, she and Youssef had made up and were going together. There was no activity on her Instagram.

We got there, and there were lots of people, but the venue was large enough to accommodate all of the hundreds of people there without it being crowded. The entire floor of the Muso World building had been closed off for the people waiting for the event.

As soon as we got off the escalator, people recognized Raziel and mobbed him. We said goodbye and left him there with his fans, where he took selfies and made reels. By the doors into the venue, there were stalls for robes, wands, books, toys, and all sorts of merchandise. I knew it was going to be a heavily-monetized event, but I could not help but feel that they destroy the magic.

We sat on a bench and took some selfies. It was nice to be beautiful. We took one of me with my head on Emily’s shoulder. One where we were pretending we were dueling. Another where I threw up my wand just as the picture was taken, so that it looked as though she disarmed me.

I could not help but scan the crowd, looking for Youssef. I was looking for Annie, too, in case she knew where he was.

At some point, the lights dimmed. A spotlight shone on a grandfather clock in the corner. The long hand nudged towards the 12: It was exactly 8PM. Music played, along with an announcement: “Welcome, students, to the Muso World Manila Harry Potter Yule Ball!”

I rolled my eyes at Emily, who was laughing, too.

“Brought to you by Muso International Corporation. Quality First. And Sunshine Plumbing and Air Conditioning. With Sunshine, you’re good to go.”

“Oh god…” I muttered.

The doors that led into the venue opened all at once, and the hosts emerged from the largest double doors. We could see that, even from here, the venue had been meticulously decorated.

The three hosts were two men and a woman: a Snape-like potions professor, a Dumbledore-like Headmaster, and a McGonagall-like witch. They did their little spiel, which was cute enough, and we then all had to line up and present our tickets to get in. Music began to play, and I realized that this was it. Whatever we were going to do was happening now…

And I think to myself: Didn’t I swear, a few months ago, to never leave the house? To imprison myself, as it were, into myself? And now here I am—released, free.

I couldn’t dwell on it. The line was moving.