Story excerpt turned sudden fiction:

Then there was that time when she, thirteen years old and sulking, refused to eat her meals but for a few bites, staring, instead, out the window and into the street, watching the neighborhood kids playing Patintero. She nibbled incessantly on her fingernails as she listened to a Kiri Te Kenawa selection over and over again, dark circles around her eyes for lack of sleep.

Her father started worrying.

“Don’t mind her. Just some growing pains, I’m sure. She’ll snap out of it soon enough,” Lola Amparing said, looking thoughtfully at her granddaughter, her mind turning like wheels.

That night, Stella found herself drinking—not too willingly—a colorless, bitter liquid, which her Lola Amparing had told her to take.

“That will do you a world of good, believe me. So drink. I don’t want a drop left in that glass, you hear me?”

Stella did as she was told, after little resistance. After the first taste, she grimaced, then finished the rest in one big gulp. She was not one to disobey her elders, and neither was her Lola one to take “no” for an answer.

She went to bed with a bitter aftertaste clinging stubbornly to her tongue. She fell asleep almost the same instant as when her cheek touched the pillow; and the face of the handsome, slightly rugged boy that had stuck itself to her mind for weeks quietly detached itself like a piece of yellowing leaf, blown away by some mysterious wind.