When I was about ten or eleven years old, my sister Inday and I had seven close friends; regular playmates who lived within a house or two from either direction of our house in Sta. Cruz, Manila. Two of them were sisters — Baby who was the same age as my sister, and Nena who was a year my junior.

Whenever we had no school, we played from morning till lunchtime. We’d rendezvous again around four o’clock when it began to cool off a bit. Sometimes, when we couldn’t wait until the late afternoon, we’d play inside our house. Hide and seek was our favorite. And since it was our house, I knew every nook and cranny where I could vanish without a trace. When the taya or “it” guy started counting off to twenty, everybody would scramble off to find a place to hide. I would take advantage of this frenzied commotion by grabbing Nena’s hand to take her with me to my secret hiding place.

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