Chapter 1: The Legend of the Ghost Phone

Kate opened her eyes. It hurt to do such a simple thing. The curtains were still drawn in her room but she could see daylight filtering in. She had overslept, that much she could tell, the mystery was by how many hours. What really made it hard to get her bearings were her eyes themselves, which were swollen from crying and plastered with an unladylike amount of gunk.

She remained on her back and groggily groped for her smartphone next to her pillow and held it up. The power button had been battered from use and she had pestered her parents endlessly for a trendier model, but Christmas and New Year’s had come and gone and still no love. Kate held the phone upright. Thanks to an app called the Magic On and Off, she didn’t need to crush her thumb just to wake her phone up. The app detected the orientation of her device and could tell when she wanted to use it.

Kate had downloaded the app weeks ago and had been telling everybody in school about how indispensable it was. Sure she had to free up some space in her old-school smartphone with the peanut-sized memory. She had to delete other apps such as Tinder, which was creepy, and Pokemon Go, which was good while it lasted. Kate loved apps. It amazed her how there was an app for absolutely anything and, best of all, they were absolutely free (okay, maybe not absolutely).

Her eyes popped in realization of the time. She had slept until almost lunch and skipped two-thirds of the school day, which basically meant all of it. She groaned and buried her face in her pillow.

Wait…

She checked her phone’s screen again. This time she registered all the unread SMS and the events of yesterday came flooding back to her brain. An ice-cold fist clutched her heart and froze her veins.

Josh. That monster.        

She plopped back to bed and dropped her phone next to her pillow. Suddenly, she didn’t feel like getting up. Ever. The morning felt as dark as the morning right before a storm even though she could hear birds chirping outside.

She winced as she recalled her ordeal yesterday, how she saw Josh and Bernadette holding hands at the canteen and his whole gang smirking at her, her trip to the bathroom from which she didn’t come back out till evening, the dim creek where she threw her…

Her eyes flew open.

Kate slowly turned her head towards her phone as though she was seeing a ghost.

She screamed.

****

Mrs. Lapuz came up the stairs and into Kate’s room with equal parts alarm and calm. There had been plenty of times Kate’s emergency turned out to be just a minor bug sighting. Mrs. Lapuz was wearing her apron and holding a spatula.

Mrs. Lapuz took one expert look at Kate, who had fallen off the bed and was all tangled up on the floor in her blanket, and lowered her spatula. Without saying anything, Mrs. Lapuz walked towards where Kate had landed at the foot of her bed, sort of squashed between the bed, a chair and a bookcase. Mrs. Lapuz felt her daughter’s forehead.

Finally, she said: “Why am I not surprised that you’ve made a miraculously quick recovery.”

Kate tried to speak but no voice came out of her mouth, only wheezing sounds. Her eyes were as big as plates and all the blood had drained out of her face. She raised her trembling hand and pointed at the phone on her bed.

“Puh-puh-puh-phone…” she said.

“Oh THAT,” her ma realized what Kate wanted to say. “One of your classmates found it and returned it to me at the diner. But I know you, Rapunzel Kate Lapuz. It was really immature of you to try and pretend to have lost it. I know you’ve been wanting to get a newer phone but you didn’t have to throw away a perfectly good one just so you can get what you want. I mean, don’t you realize how much your father and I sacrificed…”

“Who returned my phone?!” Kate suddenly, finally found her voice again. Her shout startled her ma. 

“Just one of your classmates. He was wearing your school colors.”

“Did he look like a gangster?” Kate pressed.

“A gangster? No, of course not. On second thought, I did think he looked a bit unkempt.”

“N-not clean-cut?”

“Well, yeah, he could be. Maybe he’d been playing basketball or something because he looked quite scruffy. Like he’d been rolling on the ground or something.”

“That’s impossible!” Kate screamed again.

Her ma placed her beefy arms on her wide hips. “Now listen, Rapunzel Kate Lapuz! Don’t you raise your voice at me. Who do you think you are coming home so late and sleeping in your school uniform? Then in the morning you had a fever and a headache and mumbling about God and super glue!”

(Note: In the Philippines, the name Josh was pronounced like the word for God, especially because the letter J was not in the original Abakada alphabet and the vowel sounds were much shorter.)

At first, Kate was bewildered by what her ma said but soon realized she was still wearing her middy blouse, necktie and skirt. She took a reflexive whiff of her underarms to check if she still smelled like a girl. The sour smell that assaulted her nose reminded her of the long walk she took coming home last night, because she skipped taking the jeepney, a staple mode of public transportation in the country. She had worried other passengers would see she had been crying or, worse, some CITS teachers coming home late would turn up on the same ride.

“…your father coming home tired without dinner on the table. If you were gonna be late you should’ve at least…” her ma was still nagging as she was wont to do when Kate was acting extra weird or just teenagery.

Kate was only half-listening. She couldn’t take her eyes off the apparition of the phone on her bed. It was the exact same one. The same purple cellphone case printed with Snoopy. The same scratches and scuff marks from all the countless times she had dropped it.

But it was insane or she was cray-cray because the last time she saw her phone, it was at the bottom of a gully.

****

Kate’s school, Concepcion Integrated Technology School – High School (CITS-HS), sat partly on an island-like plateau and was interspersed with rugged land. The whole city itself was part lowland and part hill. One naturally formed creek ran through the school and, during especially long days of rain, it would overflow. But in the typical Philippine climate, the creek was as shallow as a brook, stagnant and no more than two meters wide, occasionally bringing in curious smells from the neighboring subdivisions. The long school drive had been built perpendicular over it but it retained its heavily shaded gully which was several meters deep.

The creek had fed the rich imagination of many generations of teens and was the favorite setting of a whole lore of urban legends. The most notable of said legends featured the mythological "tikbalang", a local monster that was an anthropomorphic horse and smoked a long fat cigar, and the junior high student who committed suicide by throwing himself down the creek and bleeding to death. When Kate finally got out of the girls’ bathroom at six pm yesterday, it was getting dark but she made a long detour to the infamous landmark.

Kate wasn’t particularly brave. Heck, she couldn’t even kill a spider, pick up the clump of hair clogging the bathroom drain or look under her bed and all the stuff and dust that had gravitated and accumulated there. Yesterday evening though, she felt like she could punch a ghost if one dared to show itself. She was just so angry at Josh and Bernadette.

Like a suspect coincidence in a romcom, at the exact moment Kate stood on the steep sides of the creek gully, her phone started ringing. It was Josh. The ring tone she had assigned to him was John Legend’s All of Me. Nuff said. She answered the phone filled with hesitation but also hope.

Imagine her surprise when she didn’t hear Josh’s voice but Bernadette’s. She wasn’t saying anything. She was just making these incomprehensible noises and weird moans. Kate’s eyes widened when she realized she was making out.

“Ugh, that’s disgusting!” Kate screamed as she threw her smartphone down into the gully. She hadn’t completely made up her mind about what she intended to do but the call clinched it.

“Oh fudge!” She covered her mouth as she watched the device hurtle down the several-meter drop. It landed with a soft thud on the creek’s muddy bank below. Kate couldn’t decide if it was lucky or not that her phone just missed the water.

“No no no no no no no,” Kate whispered as she thought about all her contacts, apps, games and saved notes, which contained important school stuff.  There was still a tiny glow from the phone screen and it looked like an orphan firefly in the darkness. 

Kate did the only thing left to do. She stood above the gully and reminisced precious memories with her fallen comrade. Indeed she felt like a soldier who had fought alongside the bravest gadget. Her phone was a true friend who was always with her and never complained, who endured a lot of spilled beverages, drops, bumps and hard-hits.

They had been through a lot together. Stayed up late to play Candy Crush, listened to a ton of music, preserved memories, laughed at the most viral posts and hilarious chats.

“RIP my phone,” Kate said and bowed her head.

Eighteen hours later, the phone was on her bed.