GEODIE
Prejudice.
It was not often spoken in this almost perfect institution. It was not often talked about. It was, honestly, an undefined word to us. And if Hamlet Creek University had its own dictionary, prejudice would surely be the only thing that cannot be found in it. But that didn’t mean we don’t have it in us. Just like Clarens’ case, Keiciara was transferred with no definite reason. Abrupt and unceremonious. That’s how I would describe their eviction from the Star Section, knowing that they both suffered from the same fate. But really, what were the rules that they violated?As I sat on the armchair next to the bow windows of the music room located at the second floor of the Star Sections’ Building, I shot my eyes like arrows off a crossbow to the third floor of the four-storey building parallel to where I was. The view was clear to me. I need no telescope only to see Keiciara’s face crumpled because of nonstop weeping, while beside her were two unfamiliar girls trying to take the sting out of her. I felt her pain. Being moved out as unexpected and blistering as that would really feel very agonizing. Now, there’s no way she could come back to us anymore. The decision was final, and she had to deal with it whether she wanted it or not. After all, it was only the penalty she had to go through after doing something ungrateful—which was still a secret up until its third hour now. I ate the remaining spoonful of my lunch; rice and bacon. When I’m done, I quaffed a quarter from my pineapple juice. My eyes were still unmoved, one blink per minute, even until when I placed my storage container back into my lunchbox. A minute had passed. And then another one more. And then another one. And then another one. And then on the fifth minute, the time when I unconsciously looked down on the pavement that connected the two buildings was also the time when I saw a group of Star Section Sophomore girls walked past a group of First Section Senior girls. There was a lot to digest from that picture. There was a lot to compare. The longer they stayed in my horizon, the more I understood the concept of prejudice in this institution. And the more I understood it, the clearer I saw the imaginary line that separated the star sections from the others. If I was to translate it in Mathematics, the star sections would be the numerator, the lower sections would be the denominator, and this University would be the fraction bar. We would always stay on the top, and they would always stay at the bottom. I know. They, the denominators, should have higher value than us, the numerators. But that rule doesn’t work here. Because as long as the bar between us remains the Hamlet Creek University, we will forever be an improper fraction. Other than the change itself, this will also be a constant thing in the world.I focused to the two group of girls. Their uniforms showed how clearly different they were to each other. The star sectioners’ blouse was fit and clean white, with a ribbon of black and brown stripes across the neck. It also had two small pockets in the front, and the buttons were wrapped by a thin cloth that went with the same color as the ribbon. Their skirt, which was only above the knee long, also had the same color and details as well. Overall, they looked like a bunch of stewardesses of a private plane that only catered celebrities and popular icons. Meanwhile, the lower sectioners uniforms were completely the opposite. Their blouse was plain, loose, and not as bright white as the star sections’. They don’t have pockets in the front, and the buttons were big and inappropriate. It was very itchy in the eyes. As per their undergarment, they wore black leggings instead of skirts. Staring at them was like staring at a diamond and a stone put together inside the same jewelry box. The value was clear; one was over the odds, and one was cost next to nothing. But how did these barriers, and prejudices, and separations, and unfair treatments started? No one knew. However, I was able to absorb at least a pinch of the atrocious facts about this school. How do you make it in the Star Section? Simple. You just have to be either smart, or talented, or good-looking, or sports-minded, or gifted in particular in order to get a scholarship. But if you have money, just like Janvic and the twins, you don’t have to worry about not having any of the mentioned requirements. You just have to go to the Principal’s Office, talk to the Principal, negotiate, and once it’s done, proceed to the Finance to pay. The next day, you can walk off the Hamlet Creek’s ground like you own it. And once you make it in, the rest will be very worthwhile. Trust me. In star section, we have an entire building exclusive only for us. We have our different uniforms, our own cafeteria, our very own gym, a whole wide sports arena, a music club, a theatre, and a private school bus that drives us to and from the Hamlet Creek University. But there will always be a set of rules to balance the agreement. Though the life we have as star sectioners was indeed easy, the set of rules we had to follow was tyranically hard. For the smart ones, they had to maintain their best grades. For us athletes, we had to be consistent gold medalists and defending champions. For those who were great singers, and writers, and dancers, and actors and actresses, they had to win different contests from the Qualifying Round up to the Nationals. And for those who were nothing but only beautiful lambs, they had to ace the world of pageantry. But again, you could just skip the pressure of any of these by paying a reasonable amount of money. Money. Talent. Skill. Something that the lower sectioners never had. Something that brought them to where they truly belong. In addition to the strict rules of the Star Sections that I condemned very much, we were also forbidden to do several things; We were not allowed to hang out with the lower sectioners, we were not allowed to initiate conversations with them (the very reason why I never talked to Clarens a while ago. I was afraid someone from the star section might have seen us), we were not allowed to be gay (yes, the Star Sections’ Board was tolerating homophobia), we were not allowed to fail given tasks (which explained why I was here, in the music room, waiting for Jermaine and Chuck to brainstorm ideas about the song we’ll perform for the funeral service), and above all, we were not allowed to do silly things that would damage the school’s reputation and the star sections’ itself. Before I finished enumerating all the negative habits and exposed all the wrong doings in this make-believe never-never land, I heard a clicking sound coming from the unbolting of the flush door of the music room. It opened eighty degrees, followed by the entering of a guy and a girl, both of which were coming from the star section. When they walked past the drum set few steps from the right side of the door, it’s when they began talking. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” said Jermaine, the popstar princess of the University. Jermaine was a short girl with a short hair, but had an amazing nose bridge. Her teeth were whiter than the sclera of her eyes, while her cheeks were pink and glossy. Her lips were tinted red, and her ears had decorations of two black pearls on each side. She was the only girl singer in the class that didn’t belong in a band. However, despite being a solo artist, she had spent a very undeniably big career. She was known for playing the piano while singing. She was the grand champion of the Nationals, and already had a lot of offers from different studios out of the country. She was sweet and charming, but loved singing and writing songs about love and breakups. Every time she would sing them, she could bring people into tears. That’s why there was no wondering when people would call her, ‘The Sweet Heartbreaker.’ The guy walked towards the nearest table and placed his matte black guitar. He went back to us and asked, “Have you eaten your lunch yet?” His name was Chuck. Chuck Furrow. He was half American and half Japanese, and that made his visual very unique in a good way. His face was as smooth as a porcelain, and his jaw was bony and surprisingly sharp. Although he wasn’t as toned and as muscular as the other guys in our class, he was still hot (I couldn’t believe I said that), in his own features. He had long, black hair that was only long enough to be tied at the center of his head. In terms of fashion, Chuck was a little out of place. He was a total sucker in dressing up unlike Vhynz and Travis, and he was so simple to an extent that a pair of white, plain shirt and a skinny jeans would be good to him. He played as the main vocalist of a band called The Black Chain, and that explained why all of them in the band, including him, had these chain accessories—from ear piercings, down to necklaces, down to bracelets, and down to anklets—that were all colored in sophisticated black. Together, they moved two monoblock chairs closer to me and sat on it. Jermaine took a harmonica out of her pink knapsack and placed it on her lap. “I don’t know if we could use this, but this sounds pretty good! I learned playing this last night and now I can’t stop using it!” she said, making a blow out of the instrument. It produced a beautiful melody which convinced me that just like what she said, it really sounded nice. “I doubt if that’ll blend well with my guitar, but yeah! We’ll gotta make use of that,” Chuck replied in his American accent. I pulled out my notebook inserted between my P.E. uniform and my pad of paper. I turned it to the fourth page, and showed them my untitled song composition. “Here’s what I wrote,” I said, “If you think like it’s too short for a song, feel free to add something to it.” “Let’s give it a look, shall we?” Jermaine suggested. And so, to begin the brainstorming, we formed our chairs into a triangle position—Jermaine was on the right, Chuck was on the center, while I was on the left.Normally, based on what I observed from The Black Chain every time they composed a song here inside the music room, Chuck would often position himself on the drum set and prompt a beat out of the instruments. He would write the chords, take down the keys to be used, and if the result seemed to be good in the ears, they would then try to fit it with the lyrics. He would sing the lines together with the beat, and if something sounded a little off, he would either add something or remove something from the composition. They repeated the process over and over until it’s fine and ready to be recorded. But as of the moment, I couldn’t see any of those aspects of expertise within the Chuck that I and Jermaine was with. He was only staring at the pages of my notebook as if nothing was written on it, and that convinced Jermaine that something might have happened. “Is there anything wrong, Chuck?” she asked. The amount of concern in her voice was overwhelmingly high. Chuck leaned forward, his elbows locked on his knees as he clasped his hands to put them under his chin. From that position, I was able to comprehend that he was trying to think deep—very deep. After a while, he then recovered himself back into sitting straight and said, “Nothing. I just—I have this crazy idea in my mind.” “If that’s about the song, go ahead! Share it!” After listening to Jermaine, Chuck moved his head to face me. We had this short, awkward eye to eye contact for a while, but thankfully it ended after he began explaining something. “Umm, hey, Geodie. Listen, I like the song, really! It’s great! I love how it’s beautifully written, I love how you peotically tackle the concept of paradise after death, and I love how you mention that Mrs. Magada is not dead, that she’s just living another life. It’s very peaceful, calm, and hopeful from beginning until the end.”“But?” Jermaine and I said in unison.“But I don’t think that’s something the family needs to hear. It’s—I dunno! To me, it’s like we’re saying it’s okay that Mrs. Magada is gone. That we have nothing to worry about because she’s now in a safer place with God. I, well, I think it’s just unfair.” Chuck’s eyes shrunk, and his thin eyebrows moved closer to each other. “Her death was not peaceful. Do you get what I mean? She was murdered. She lose half of her leg. She bathed on her own blood. She died with her eyes opened. She must have surely seen her suspect but she had no chance to tell it to anyone. She was deprived of longer life. She was deprived of her own justice. That’s why we cannot just sing her a hopeful song because we all know that hope was never hers. She needs justice. And in order to serve that, we need to start it with this song,” Chuck explained.“We hear you, Chuck. Now, tell us. What should we do?”“We are writing another song,” Chuck answered with bravery and compassion, “Don’t worry. I now have the title in my mind. It’s quite long, but I’ll tell you in advance, it will wake up everyone.” He smirked. There was no reason for him to do that, but still, he did it.“And what is it?”Chuck took a deep breather. “The title is, ‘Kill Me Again. Maybe This Time I Get Jusctice.’”
It took us the whole day yesterday to finalize the composition of the song. I liked it. ‘Kill Me Again. Maybe This Time I Get Justice. Hearing it from Chuck’s very own mouth gave me the chills I didn’t expect to have at that very moment. The creeps that the title gave was beyond tolerable that I needed to open the nearest window for us to gasp for fresh air. The idea of the song, the message the lyrics was trying to convey, and even the tune and the melody when we sang it was very suffocating.I agreed to Chuck when he said we need to tell what people what really happened. The murder was brutal, so we need to say it like it was. No filters. No censors. But I was also brought round to the idea of Jermaine’s words. I thought she was right when she said that the song will not only produce controversies, but it will also bring people the fear and panic they shouldn’t have. To be honest, I was torn. But I have to set it all aside bec
TRAVISWe heard a shout.In the middle of our—their singing, we heard a powerful shout. It was clear to me whose voice was that. I wanted to panic and quickly dash out of the music room to check for it. But I didn’t know how to panic. Panic wasn’t my word.As the strumming of guitars and the piano dynamics ceased to play, I remained on my seat to observe a little longer. The humming of different voices were silenced, and the sound of pounding heartbeats replaced the melody in the air. The Black Chain moved out of the drum set. The Star Harmony stood away from the speakers. The twins moved to each other—both were confused. Yuri, Rabiya, Cylvia, and the rest near the windows rendezvoused on the center of the carpet. Instead of looking for the origin of the scream, they feared the scream.A minute after that strong holler was delivered to us by the brush of wind, I was left as the only one sit
Swear to God when I heard the siren of a police car wailing outside, the first things I thought of were being a prisoner, facing a sentence of twenty years, and everything in between. Like a cell. And bars made of steel. And an orange shirt with a giant ‘P’ in it. A whole new different world within a world less terrible than what I would live in.In three seconds, I froze. My feet were glued to the floor like everyone else’s. It was the moment I came to realize that I was too focused on thinking of possible solutions, without knowing I’m losing track of what’s more important. The problem.Few minutes ago, the question was supposedly just, ‘How do we get away with murder?’ But now, it turned out to be more difficult. ‘How do we get away with murder, if there’s a police waiting for us outside?’The vehement feelings that I had made me dash towards the window
The line disconnected. The police officer went back inside the car and started to drove away. The sound of his engine as he exited his parking spot distracted the tranquil night, waking our senses to make us realize that what we did was nothing but a mere act of buying time. We’re not done yet. In fact, we never started anything yet.As Philip withdrew his phone back inside his pants’ pocket, he made a one big gulp. I felt his Adam’s apple burned. His entire neck burned. He languidly crept his fingers onto my hands, making a throttled sound that could have meant something like a cry for help. “I—I can’t breathe,” he said chokingly as he patted my hands.I trudged a few steps backward, pulling him closer to me. My chest against his back. My chin touching his neck. I loosened the squeezing of my hands on his throat, and while feeling the heat of his intense inhalation, I ran off at the mouth. &ldqu
“Succeeded? How could you say that?”As she otiosely let go of my arm, Rabiya bowed her head down. She made a swipe on her cheeks and forced herself to stop crying. While the white light shone down to us as we remained standing on the center of the carpet in the seam of the seventeen other individuals, she held her breath and narrowed her eyes to me. She readied herself as what the quivering of her knees suggested. With trembling monotone, she said, “We’ve been outsmarted. The killer locked us up in this third floor and now there’s no way we could get out of this place. We managed to open the washroom, the gym, the art room, and the three other windows across the other side of the hallway. But that’s all we have done. The elevator doesn’t open, and so are the barriers back to the second floor and up to the fourth. What do we do now? We cannot just jump in a three-storey high building and expect to survive the impact, right
In a span of exactly twelve seconds, everyone managed to get out of the music room. Vhynz, Benedict, and Andrei began scraping the splatters on the door, while the girls were dashing to the end of the right hall with their phones’ torches on, together with Jieve and Chuck who were wearing layers of leather bags on their back. It had been the busiest minutes for all of us. Every step counted. Every second mattered. If it was really true that we only had fifteen to twenty minutes left to clear the crime scene, then our chances of making it on time would be not more than fifty percent. We already spent approximately five minutes for Travis’ orientation, and all we had left were at least twelve minutes of time, and a handful of prayers that hopefully—just hopefully—God would hear.Yuri and I separated from the rest of the group as we ran the opposite track on the left. The gym was the first room before the elevator, and it is where I was headin
YURII was spraying a lavender-scented air freshener in random directions when a phone call held superior and brought all of us on a time-freeze. It happened in an instant. One moment, we were busy, and one moment, we were dead. Not dead as in dead six feet below the ground, but dead as in checkmate.Yes. Checkmate. I knew nothing about chess, but I thought it was the closest thing that would best represent our situation. A King that’s trapped. A king that’s nowhere to go.Travis walked away from the lockers, and with rubbing hands, he stepped closer to the window. He took a peak outside. On his eyes, on the brown lenses of his mysteriously captivating eyes, reflected the blue and red lights of the police patrol car. He laid his fingertips on the window frames and whispered, “Come to me, Philip.”The son of the police then walked towards him, barefooted, while between the vastness of his palms st
PHILIP“Hello, Dad? Sorry I hung up. Could you please come here for a sec?” I said, as per Yuri’s advice.After whispering my request through the speaker, a slamming of the car door was then followed by the sound of lifted paper bags as I placed the phone back to my ear.“I’m on my way.”“Okay.” I sighed. I looked at Yuri, and then at Ashley, and then at the rest of the guys lining across the lockers—divided themselves into six with three on each side—leaving an opening between them to allow Geodie, Samantha, Cylvia, and Vhynz to pass through.I reopened the text message I received from Rabiya’s number and tried to look at it once more.“WE WILL BE SAFE. JUST LIE.”A part of me said I understand it, but a part of me was confused. What could this text message really mean?