Patron Saints of Nothing: Chapters 1–10

The oscillating fan hummed, blowing warm air on us every few seconds.

When we arrived, we found that their dog—an unnamed mongrel chained to the cacao tree out back—had just given birth to a litter of puppies.

Seth takes up about twice as much space as me because he's basically a bear in human form. The kind of white kid who’s been shaving since middle school and who’s spent the last four years rebuffing the football coach’s recruitment attempts.

The school's only two stories high, so if we jumped we'd probably only sprain an ankle or something. But it was high enough to make me feel scared back then, high enough to make me feel philosophical now.

He holds the smoke in his lungs for longer than seems possible and then exhales slowly, letting the thick smoke unfurl into the evening.

With spring break around the corner, and then only a few more weeks after that until graduation, the future is a wall of fog obscuring the horizon.

Without telling me what the mod does, he goes on and on about the specifics of the coding and all the iterations he had to try before it worked.

I shuffle downstairs in my joggers and an old T-shirt, and after what I’ll generously call brunch, sink into the living room couch, and fire up my PS4 to make some progress in this one-player game where you battle massive robot dinosaurs in a post-apocalyptic Earth.

He’s still wearing his nurse’s scrubs, and his salt-and-pepper hair is disheveled like he’s been running his fingers through it.

I try to process the information. Jun is dead—his life has ended. And here I am, sitting in my living room on the other side of the world, a can of Coke on the coffee table, playing a video game on an enormous, wall-mounted flat-screen TV, college on the docket.

This shoebox contains all of them stuffed inside haphazardly, each one written on the kind of yellow paper from a legal pad.

As tears well in my eyes and a new wave of nausea roils in my stomach, I put down the mug and turn away from Mom.

My eyes gravitate toward the shoebox under my bed.

Maybe it’s because everyone else is so willing to pretend that it didn’t even happen that I'm starving for certainty. Or maybe it’s my penance.

Most suggest that these killings are crimes against humanity, including a note about the international community’s condemnation—but inaction.

She was apparently one of the most vocal critics of the drug war and chairing the investigation into the extrajudicial killings—and then was imprisoned on drug-related charges based on Duterte’s accusation.

Ms. Mendoza gives me a curious look, as if gauging whether I’m being sarcastic or not.

“Look, dude,” Seth says, “you're clearly in some kind of funk. Maybe you're feeling late-onset senioritis. I don't know. But look at it this way: you've only got to survive a few more days and then it's spring break. We'll play so many video games that not only will this stress fade away, but your eyeballs are going to fall out of your skull. And then after spring break, we're basically done with high school.”

He’s quiet for a few moments. “No wonder you're getting existential all of a sudden. If you don’t mind my asking, how?"

First, to assume white is default. Second, to imply that difference equals bad instead of simply different.

Except it's not. The majority are, for sure, but his generalization—spoken with such confidence, such ease—makes me feel like he's erasing the rest of us.

It’s partially a primer on what's been going on and partially a journalist sharing his observations and photos after spending a month in Manila, during which time almost sixty people were murdered by the police or by vigilantes.

It’s partially a primer on what's been going on and partially a journalist sharing his observations and photos after spending a month in Manila, during which time almost sixty people were murdered by the police or by vigilantes.

Five friends playing pool. A mother out late buying medicine for one of her kids. A teacher eating at a canteen. And more.

The article goes on to talk about the mass incarceration; the imprisonment of Duterte’s political opponents on drug-related charges that lack credibility, such as with Senator de Lima; the system in which police officers earn certain amounts of money for killing specific types of suspects, creating an economy of murder—especially since there are no bonuses for arrests.

"It’s fine,” I say. “That’s a quirk. It’s quirky and lovable.”

“It’s easy to romanticize a place when it’s far away," he goes on, making this officially the most I’ve heard him speak at once in a long time. "Filipino Americans have a tendency to do that. Even me. Sometimes I miss it so much. The beaches. The water. The rice paddies. The carabao. The food. Most of all, my family.”

"He was assigned to a parish in Bicol a few years ago, so you’ll see him when you are with your lolo and lola.”

This is the same position he was in when I fell asleep, making me wonder at his ability to do nothing for hours on end. No book. No in-flight movies. No small talk. Just a rosary clutched in his hands.

I’m sure he has all kinds of connections, so maybe he leveraged one of them to keep Jun’s name out of the press.