I can already see what the inscription on my gravestone would be:

R.I.P.

Santiago Bondoc

AUG 25, 2004 – FEB 9, 2024

HE WAS A DEVOTED SON

The bit about "devoted son" is a euphemism for mama's boy. A vandal would probably spray-paint over it: "HE WAS A LOSER" in big, red block letters.

But you know what? Right now I don't care. That's the furthest thing from my mind.

Right now I'm on top of the world. Literally. I'm sitting atop a climbing wall. You know the artificial wall that simulates a rock face inside climbing gyms and sports centers? Yes, that. But the one I'm perched on is outdoors because, this weekend until Valentine's Day, my university is holding a fair on its parade grounds.

The time is just a little past 6:00 a.m. and dawn is still just a yellow shimmer on the eastern horizon. Of course nobody's here in the fairgrounds except me. As you can imagine, I'm breaking so many rules by being here. First, solo climbing is a big no-no. Second, climbing without a rope or harness for protection is cray. Third and last, climbing all the way to and sitting on the top is suicidal.

But since unaliving myself is the exact reason why I snuck into a holey section of the fair's polyester fencing, I don't care. I didn't even mind the tricky climb and now the dizzying height, which is definitely a first for a coward like me. It would've been much easier to enter my college building and do the deed from the rooftop but – something I hadn't anticipated – the gates were still locked when I checked.

From up here, gazing out at the dim, basin-shaped parade grounds, I feel truly at peace. There are booths, bazaar tents, a concert stage, a Ferris wheel, a 20-foot skydancer and giant vertical signs floated by balloons. Everything's open-air except for the concert stage, which is covered by a big canopy top to protect all the expensive audio equipment that will soon be installed there. Since the gates of the week-long school fair open in the evening, everything's deserted and the only sign of movement comes from the bobbing balloons and the tirelessly cavorting skydancer.

Yep. I'm at peace with myself, the world and my fated place in it. As the dew-fresh, crisp early-morning air runs through my hair, all my troubles seem so remote and insignificant and the world looks like an unopened gift box full of hope. I'm almost tempted to pick up the camera constantly hanging around my neck. The camera's a secondhand DSLR that I got as work equipment from my gig with the school paper.

I'm a photojournalist for the school paper so I'm well-acquainted with the seedy underbelly of the academe. And no, I'm not trying to sound all tough-guy as though I was in some hardboiled noir fiction or something. If you've seen a certain list of dares circulating on social media these days, I was the undercover whistleblower behind it. As per my editor's instructions, I had infiltrated an elitist school org in the College of Business Administration (my college). I had to sign an NDA and everything but fuck that.

The list goes something like this:

DARE GAMES

Deadline: February 28, 6 PM

1. [PHOTO] Shave your head to look like the parted Red Sea and place a Lego Minifigure Person in the middle of the shaved area.

2. [VIDEO] Rub someone off in your committee until they get hard (boner should be seen).

3. [VIDEO] Finish a whole bottle of 700ml Gin Bilog. Afterwards, the players who drank must walk 5 steps straight forward.

4. [PHOTO] Lick the pavement. Tongue must visibly touch the pavement in the photo.

5. [VIDEO] Touch (whole palm) a random stranger's bald head and continue walking with your hand on their head for 10 seconds.

6. [VIDEO] Lick whipped cream off someone else's armpit.

7. [VIDEO] Take a bite out of a bar of soap and chew it for 5 seconds.

8. [VIDEO] French-kiss 2 other pledges (with consent).

9. [PHOTO] Hug your grandmother/ mother from behind then grab her boobs.

10. [VIDEO] Buy a cake then sit on it. Have another player eat it off your ass. Show clean ass after.

There's more. A whole lot more.

I have to say, the worst that I actually took was the General Anesthesia Dare. It might sound like a fairly easy one to others but not to me. I'd rather know and consent to whatever dehumanizing torture the seniors cook up than be completely at their mercy while I'm unconscious. But each to their own, I guess.

As you can imagine, I have trauma from the hazing. Worse, I have something akin to Stockholm syndrome. The thing you have to understand about frats and orgs in my university, they're a legit way for poor students like me to make connections; not just social but also economic and political. Most of the seniors are rich kids whose parents are business tycoons or government policymakers. Their reach is certainly long enough to pluck me out of the quicksand of poverty.

At one point, I actually believed I had a shot at changing my station in life, which is looking more and more fixed every semester that I spend in uni. The seniors of the Young Entrepreneurs really got to me with their effed-up mind games. I started to believe them, that I belonged, that I had found kindred spirits and they had welcomed me with open arms.

Nope. They just saw me as a plaything. Someone whose nose they can rub in my loserville origins. Typical.

Don't get me wrong. As a guy, I have nothing against the French-kissing and tonsil-tennis dare with pretty co-pledges. In fact, like any college sophomore, I'm desperate to get more of such action and if I ever met a Tzuyu lookalike, I probably wouldn't mind hours of snogging. But the thing is, one kiss can contain up to 20 million bacteria, not to mention there are canker sores in some fuckers' mouths.

Opps, sorry. The OCD part of me just did a crosstalk. How I have such a neurotic, hand-sanitizer and bleach-loving side is a long story. But I've still got plenty of time so let me get you up to speed.

First things first. Please allow me to introduce myself for the last time. I'm Thiago Bondoc. All my imaginary friends call me Theo. That's my mother's maiden name at the end of my name because she's a single mom. My dad walked out on us when I was just a couple of months old.

I had an older brother. Had. Past tense.

He died when he was ten and I six. But let's not dwell on that. I don't. I just want to explain to you how my brother's death led to my having an OCD streak. So bear with me with our Gen-Z micro attention span please.

Have you ever heard of spider derby? It's a cross between dog fighting and Pokémon battles, but instead of fighting in an underground pit, the contenders fight on a stick. And instead of collecting cute virtual pocket monsters, trainers collect eight-eyed and eight-legged freaks.

At least that's what I recall from my hazy memory of traditional street games in my country. These days, almost every game I know comes through a screen and the kids who play them are zombies with piles of bags under their eyes.

Time was Filipino kids were more active. We played more or less the same games as kids in other countries did: leapfrog, prisoner's base, kites, hopscotch, marbles, jump rope, hacky sack, spinning tops, duck on a rock, stilts, hide-and-seek... Now that I think of it, it prolly isn't just my country that has changed for the worse. The only saving grace of hailing from a developing country – and a rural village of said country at that – my peers and I were exposed to the temptations of the Internet and modern gadgets much later.

There was one game that was unique to Filipino kids though: spider derby. Like I said, we catch the arachnoid warriors and put them on opposite ends of a stick, usually broken off of a reed broom; basically the dried midrib of a coconut leaf. The trainers prod their fighters to crawl upside down and meet in the middle of the stick. The spiders size each other up and then grapple with their legs, so the longer the appendages the better. The winner is the one who manages to deliver a paralyzing bite to his opponent and web him up with the spinnerets on his butt. Or, if the opponent tries to dangle away on a strand of web, the winning spider cuts it and the opponent is injured on the fall.

Did I say "his"? That's not accurate because the best spider gladiators were in fact female. And don't worry, this sport was harmless because all the spider species found in my hometown were non-venomous. Now, I realize we might have been guilty of animal cruelty or something but I can prolly argue that we were operating in a gray area. I mean, I didn't write the rules that make dolphin-fishing illegal but allow any God-fearing housewife to empty a can of Baygon on a gentle creepy-crawly.

Besides, I was six years old. Sue me.

From all this you can infer that my bro didn't really die from playing the derby itself. No, it happened way before the game: the catching part. 

****

Hi! Thanks for reading my work. If you enjoyed this Prologue, please don't forget to vote or comment. 

Stay Phenomenal!