dirty secret #1

sophomore year in highschool, our class president eloped with our class adviser.she was our class president,he was a jesuit regent.she was 14,he was twice her age.i guess you could say it was a "class-ic" affair.
this incident of padre-turned-padre-de-familia is not so uncommon.previously, two jesuit regents assigned to our school also quit - both for love, one for a fellow teacher, another for a student he had in college.i ran into father teacher who was happily married, recently finished with his doctorate abroad and currently teaching in the ateneo.
because of these, there was a joke that zamboanga is cursed for jesuits in training because most of them ended up leaving the priesthood.this phenomenon is not uncommon, but what made this incident more shocking was 1.)it happened to someone we knew well, 2.)it happened in a controversial, dramatic fashion.there were already speculations about their relationship - the extra-special attention he was giving her and vice versa, frequent sightings of the two of them in places outside of school and what were supposed to be secret trysts that somehow managed to leak through the grapevine.people talked of course.but they denied it, of course.and since he was a class adviser capable of yielding his academic authority over us and she was a sensible, smart honor student and leader, we believed them.well, most of us.
then during the second week of december, just right after her 14th birthday, they disappeared.just the day before, some of her close friends and i were at her house for her birthday party.he dropped by when everyone else have left except for another guy classmate who was her confidante and keeper of their secrets and me.her parents weren't around that day so they disappeared to her room where they "talked" for a while.then he left and finally, us.that was the last i saw of her and him.
the next thing i knew, her parents were frantically looking for her until the guy confidante a.k.a. star-witness confessed that they hied off to naga, the guy's hometown.afterwards, there were lots of talks - of lawsuits that would be filed, of pyschological counselling our class might need from the trauma the event brought to us and more importantly, of the affair that happened right under our noses!
the best thing about the whole event was that we skipped a lot of classes for "post-traumatic" counselling sessions in one of the airconditioned audio-visual rooms.i remember we even made a parody of a game chant for them:

si maria cristina, pumunta sa naga,mellow-yellow chip-chip-chip, mellow-yellow chip-chip-chip

when i graduated from college, i heard they got married when she turned 18, that she was president of their student council, still an honor student set to graduate a year after us.the last tidbit i heard about her was that she graduated from college and was reviewing for the cpa board exams.the last time i saw her was last thursday, when i was having dinner in jollibee in glorietta.at first i wasn't sure if it was really her when she passed by our table.but when my gaze followed her to the cashier, i was certain it was her.she was taller, there was a more determined look in her face and lesser laughter that used to be so frequent, her eyes were perpetually crinkled.but i just sat there, averted my gaze and pretended not to have seen her.on the way out, when she passed by my side to her seat, i kept my eyes straight ahead.
i don't know if she saw me.i don't know how her relationship with our former teacher is.or if they have a kid already.i don't know if she's happy, if she regretted the choice she made.i didn't know a lot of things.but most of all,i don't know why i didn't walk up to her and ask.