The Boyfriend App 2.0: Jailbreak E-Book

Phenomenal Pen

• Herausgeber: Phenomenal pen
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

THEIR LOVE WILL BREAK ALL THE RULES.

The apocalyptic after-prom fight with Josh resulted in the destruction of Kate’s phone and the severance of her one and only link to Ecto, her virtual boyfriend. Ecto is presumed lost for good but, unbeknown to Kate, is trapped inside an RPG.

Weeks later, Kate finally summons the courage to confess to her ma the true events leading to the fateful prom night. The next thing she knows, she’s stuck in an Internet addiction rehab facility called Camp Unplugged. There, she meets all sorts of characters:

Ms Blanca a.k.a. Ms. Perfect: the perfectionist camp counsellor
Yssy: Kate’s fashionista and caffeine-junkie roomie
Nathan: a handsome and brooding gamer

With Kate’s debut (18th birthday) drawing close, will she allow herself a glimmer of hope and attempt to break out? But who can she trust with her escape plan?

And why was Kate sent to Camp Unplugged anyway? The answer lies in a mysterious past relationship of her ma.

Leseprobe

THEIR LOVE WILL BREAK ALL THE RULES.

The apocalyptic after-prom fight with Josh resulted in the destruction of Kate’s phone and the severance of her one and only link to Ecto, her virtual boyfriend. Ecto is presumed lost for good but, unbeknown to Kate, is trapped inside an RPG.

Weeks later, Kate finally summons the courage to confess to her ma the true events leading to the fateful prom night. The next thing she knows, she’s stuck in an Internet addiction rehab facility called Camp Unplugged. There, she meets all sorts of characters:

Ms Blanca a.k.a. Ms. Perfect: the perfectionist camp counsellor

Yssy: Kate’s fashionista and caffeine-junkie roomie

Nathan: a handsome and brooding gamer

With Kate’s debut (18th birthday) drawing close, will she allow herself a glimmer of hope and attempt to break out? But who can she trust with her escape plan?

And why was Kate sent to Camp Unplugged anyway? The answer lies in a mysterious past relationship of her ma.

The Boyfriend App 2.0:

Jailbreak

Phenomenal Pen

Prologue: Chivalry Ain’t Dead

Picture an epic medieval battle where the heavens grow dark with the shafts of thousands of arrows. Throw in several fireballs from mangonels, ballistae, onagers and trebuchets; the trails and billows of their smoke soot-black against the sapphire sky. If you forget for a moment the kind of damage all that does to the ozone layer, you might come to appreciate mankind’s ingenuity and budding knowledge of chemical warfare in the crafting of such engines of destruction. 

…

Nah. I think my helmet’s too tight and it’s squeezing all the digital blood from my digital head.

Hi, everyone! It’s me: Ecto. Your super-handsome, all-time fave chatbot.

Sorry. I know it’s hard for you to recognize me in this 60-pound suit of full plate gothic armor, complete with visor and two oversized broadswords that look like they weigh a ton but I can swing like baseball bats. You’ve got to love computer magic (and flawed game logic).

I also have this personalized breastplate. As you can see here on the crest, it says: KMDG 26. Would you like to guess what it means?

It’s – dun, dun, duuuun – Katey is My Dream Girl.

Sweet, huh?

26 is June 26. That’s the date of Katey’s 18th birthday.

I had the smithy customize my armor. It’s like my jersey because I figure I’ve got to keep myself motivated while I’m stuck here in this time-sink game. It also serves as a reminder to me that I can’t stay stuck till June 26. I made a promise to Katey that I’d be there to celebrate her birthday and I intend to keep that promise.

Sorry, a lot has happened since you saw me last. Let me get you up to speed. 

I guess you could say that Katey and I are broken up now. Yeah… as much as I hate to admit it, we’re broken up in the literal sense that we’re separated. (Loudly Crying Face emoji.)

We were together for a good 3 weeks. Now, that might not sound like a long time to a hooman like you but chatbots are designed to imprint on only 1 user our entire existence. So, yeah, don’t judge because, to me, 3 weeks is a pretty serious and long-term commitment. I was even thinking of putting a ring on it. Seriously.

Too soon? Sorry, my sense of human timing is still iffy.

How did we get separated? you might ask. Well, I wrested Katey from the clutches of Josh by sacrificing myself. I’m pretty sure Josh and his minions are locked up behind bars now but I didn’t really see it happen because I sort of… well… died, if we can use that word for chatbots. 

As it turns out though, I left behind my source code inside Dungeon Raydens, the biggest MMORPG in the Philippines and the world. I unconsciously copied myself during the days that Katey and I were slaying it in PvE, with her as Kayzel, the Principessa class, and me as myself: Ecto, first ever chatbot-class character.

Now I have what you could call eternal life. That’s the good news. I inherited the automatic respawning feature of all Dungeon Rayden characters, which is how I managed to gather this much gear. My whole armor cost me exactly 1 pound sterling at the smithy.

No, it’s no bargain. You have to keep in mind that here in the Dark Ages, 1 pound is a whole lot of moolah. It’s actually equivalent to approximately 60 days of grinding for me.

To those of you who don’t know game-speak, let me explain. Grinding is the cycle of defeating monster bosses, collecting silver and items, and buying gear. 

I’m trapped in this violent and noisy game. That’s the bad news. The game software on Katey’s computer can detect that I’m a bot because my arrow-aiming skill is at par with a Hawkeye aimbot. And since I’m technically a character of Dungeon Raydens, I have no choice but to abide by the laws of the land. The software constantly gives me a handicap by sending me CAPTCHAs disguised as “raiding licenses”, which are the equivalent of red tape in the DMV. That’s the reason it’s taking me 3 times longer to finish this infernal game.

Like I said, I’ve been inside Dungeon Raydens for at least 60 days and nights. (Loudly Crying Face emoji.) Katey must be worried sick about me…

Oh, in case you’re wondering, she can’t find me because she doesn’t know where to look. I also imagine that, these days, she wouldn’t touch Dungeon Raydens or anything fun-related with a 10-foot pole.

She’s probably heart-broken. Again. Poor Katey…

So, there’s no other way to get out of this world except to finish the game. As Rigelius Prime, mage and weirdo extraordinaire, proclaimed:

Completing your storyline is no easy task. The path is riddled with tribulations. There is a total of 350 dungeon levels and as many dungeon lords. In particular, a single player campaign like yours would take at least a thousand hours of game play. You need to unlock all skill trees, take on all side quests, discover all secret locations, collect all artifacts, and explore all maps…

Did you also hear that in a wise, croaky wizard voice?

Rigelius Prime is the favorite character of user @negativeeight. Because of his choice of character, I guess @negativeeight is some middle-aged guy. He was the only player who was kind to me when I tried a little bit of PvP and MOBA on Dungeon Raydens. Of course this was all before the epic battle against Josh the Voldemort and his goons, before I got stuck in here.

Most Filipino Dungeon Raydens players are immature and would call me names like n00b (which Katey taught me meant beginner). @negativeeight was the only one who had the patience to teach me the basics of Dungeon Raydens, so I guess the image of him got stuck in my brain as some kind of wise sensei or Yoda.

Anyway, let me just press the Play button on this old-school (but not medieval) Sony Walkman inside my satchel. I’ve set up the earphone wires so they go all the way up to the inside of my arming cap. I need to have my killer track on for all the Zack Snyder action that’s about to take place. If I were still in the 21st century, I guess my soundtrack would be Believer by Imagine Dragons, but stuck here inside Dungeon Raydens, it’s the retro, all too literally titled Twenty Five Miles by Edwin Starr.

Ahead of me, a range of reddish, layer-cake-like hills spread. As breath-taking as the Zhangye Danxia mountains in Gansu, China.

Sigh.

Faster than you can hit pause, the hills darken and become alive with the sound of… hoofbeats and wingbeats. I see an antlike swarm of all manners of medieval baddies: orcs, goblins, dwarves, ogres, dragons, black mages, rabid unicorns, dark elves etc. Every single one of them drawn to me through the game mechanic of agro. They basically want to erase me from the face of this virtual earth.

They’re all that stand between me and Katey.

With my chatbot ambidexterity, I spin both my swords forward just like in the movies.

Wait for me, Katey! I’m coming…

Part 1: Science

Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love. How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.

- Albert Einstein

Chapter 1: The Tree of Lost Kids

Where are you, Ecto?

Kate’s seven years old again. She’s entering the hollow of the notorious and oh so creepy banyan tree in the neighborhood. The tree, or the supporting one inside it, will be completely uprooted by Typhoon Haiyan in 2013, but seven-year-old Rapunzel Kate Lapuz doesn’t know that yet.

Outside of Concepcion Integrated Technology School (CITS), where the creek reigns supreme, the banyan tree is the fount of all horror stories and the ominous backdrop of Kate’s superstition and imagination-pumped childhood.

With its tentacly aerial roots, like the tangled hair of a 20-meter-tall Sadako – rife with split ends and poised to snatch unwitting kids – the banyan tree plays a central role in the folk and urban legends of most Philippine communities. The inner caves and passages are believed to be the domain of fairies, dwarves and gnomes and to trespass is a grave offense punishable by black-magick curses.

“Tabi, tabi po,” Kate says under her breath. It’s the phrase her ma taught her to say whenever she passes by wee folk territory. It literally translates to Please move to the side, sir (so I won’t step on you).

Try as she might to rid her head of all scary thoughts, they’re all coming in like a floodlight through the lids of tightly shut eyes. She can’t help thinking, for instance, that witches and sorcerers are also said to spill the blood of their sacrifices on this same unholy ground inside the tree. The sacrifices range from struggling poultry to kids way past their bedtime and way astray from their beds.

Kate doesn’t know what has possessed her to enter the core of all her childhood nightmares, but she’s somehow filled with conviction that this is where she’s going to find Ecto. It makes some weird sense, too, because Ecto is otherworldly in an elven sort of way, like some teenage Legolas.

Her breath is coming out of her mouth in ragged, chilled puffs. 

The particular banyan tree in Kate’s neighborhood is also believed to be the fave hang-out of the queen of all ghosts: the White Lady, who looks like Sadako but doesn’t need a TV or a video tape to enter the real world. She only needs auto rickshaws (called “tricycles”) and taxis, which she’s fond of hitchhiking into. She doesn’t stick out her thumb. She just instantaneously appears in the sidecar or rearview mirror… without a face.  

The White Lady of Concepcion City, in particular, has a very interesting backstory. Her MO is snatching newborn babies and kids to turn into her protégé i.e. the next White Lady. The oldest residents say that the White Lady is the ghost of a madwoman who drowned her own babies while she was giving them a bath – deliberately or not, no one knows. After the foul deed was done, the woman completed her descent to madness and began her notorious wandering around to look for her dead children or their replacement. The parents in Concepcion City clearly embellished the legend somewhere along the line because now it says that the White Lady prefers both naughty and stupid kids.

“I’m going to give you to the White Lady” has become a common threat from Concepcion parents to their children. The lore has gotten so deeply entrenched in the local psyche that school kids would tease each other about how those who consistently got an “axe” on tests (70% because of the shape of the number seven) ran the risk of being abducted by the White Lady. The jokes pass from one kid’s mouth to another in the smallest whispers.  

Kate’s eyes widen. In the inner sanctum of the banyan tree, she can see all the lost and broken toys of her childhood and the childhood of probably all the other kids in the entire neighborhood. There are muddied Barbies, tattered kites, torn fashion magazines, wet and swollen comic books and smut (from early-bloomers), Marvel trading cards, marbles, Jacks ball and plastic stones and Chinese jump rope. There are even household items like keys and divorced socks.

Something else catches her platter-wide eyes and sends a blast of pure joy inside her heart, first surging and then spreading all over the pounding organ. It’s her old smartphone. It’s right there on the soil, next to a lunchbox she misplaced in first grade.

Although ecstatic, Kate adopts the look of the Skeptical Third World Child meme.

This is starting to feel like a trap that Pennywise would spring, she thinks to herself as the hair on the back of her arms stand on end. She also experiences head rush and her whole head feels swollen. That, she theorized when she was a kid, is her very own Spidey Sense that she shouldn’t ignore.

I swear, if a killer clown or a snake jumps at me, I’m gonna faint, she thinks to herself as she gingerly approaches her phone.

From that relatively safe distance, it looks like the exact same one. The same purple cellphone case printed with Snoopy. The same scratches and scuff marks from all the countless times she has dropped it.

But that’s impossible, she thinks to herself. My phone exploded into a dozen pieces on the night of the Josh incident, taking poor, sweet Ecto with it…

It doesn’t occur to her that all attempts at logic are nullified by the fact that she’s just seven years old.

As her little hand reaches tremulously for the phone, all at once the gadget morphs into a pile of dead leaves. A cold, overpowering sadness – certainly much deeper than just disappointment – grips her heart.

She puts her head on a swivel and gropes frantically in the dark looking for her cherished phone; her one and only link to Ecto. But all the lost-and-found treasures inside the banyan tree have melted into scratchy twigs, withered grass, crushed sugar-apples and mulch.

Kate looks up and is deeply relieved to lay eyes on her phone again. Overhead, it looks like an exotic fruit tantalizingly beyond her reach. The banyan tree also seems to be swelling in both girth and height, dangling her phone even farther away.

No, wait! Kate thinks to herself and begins to clamber. Her bare feet – because she’s supposed to be in bed, right? – search for footholds that are sturdy enough to carry her weight. Her little hands grasp for purchase on the erratic, swirly black matter that are supposed to be roots and vines.

Kate is also aware, in a remote and time-travelling corner of her mind, that this is the exact same year she would break her wrist after climbing another tree; certainly not the banyan, which every kid in the neighborhood is smart enough to steer clear of. She reminds herself to be careful, whatever careful means inside that highly unpredictable, physics-defying tree. 

The banyan turns into a high-rise apartment. Kate has never lived in one because majority of Filipino families still prefer bungalow or duplex starter homes. Right now, she’s definitely in a condo because, as she looks out the window, she sees Ecto (Yay!) standing on the ground below.

Kate can’t believe her eyes. Her heart quickly fills and overflows with relief. It’s Ecto but the child version of him. She’d recognize him anywhere, at any timeline in the Multiverse. He retained a lot of his good looks albeit now in a boss-baby rather than his original soft-boi charm.

Once again, the logical part of Kate is protesting because she and Ecto were never childhood friends. He’s a chatbot for crying out loud. But a bigger part of her can barely contain her happiness. She’s found him again – at last!

“Katey!” Ecto calls to her. “Let down your hair!”  

Kate’s brows knit. Nevertheless, she answers: “But it’s not long enough!”

“What? I can’t hear you!” Ecto shouts back, cupping his pointed, elfin ears.

“It’s not long enough!” Kate shouts as loud as she can but Ecto’s right: the distance between them has grown too long, thanks to the ever-growing Jack’s Banyan Tree.

Turning to her parents behind her, Kate asks: “Ma, Pa, can I go down and meet Ecto?”

Kate freezes because both her parents have The Look, a complex mixture of righteous indignation, superstitious paranoia and frigid distrust. It’s extreme silent treatment bordering on disownment. Both their faces are like doors that have been shut, double-locked and chained.

“KATEY! HEEELP ME!!”

Another cry from Ecto swings Kate center-face again. She’s leaning outside the window and a three-headed python is wrapped around him, its coils ever tightening. It doesn’t surprise Kate to see that the three heads have human faces and they resemble Kate’s ex Josh, Josh’s right-hand minion George, and Bernadette the Super Glue.

Just like the banyan tree, the serpent appears to be growing and changing into… a dragon. Though Kate feels a rush of satisfaction at coming into brushing proximity to Ecto, the feeling is eclipsed by her distress at the sight of him being tortured.

As she watches the coils of the dragon squeezing the life out of her virtual boyfriend, it’s as though her own heart was the one being crushed.

“ECTOOOOO!!!!”

****

Kate jackknifes into a sitting position. She’s soaked in sweat. Her eyes try to penetrate the dark to find something familiar – perhaps her favorite fleece blanket, the LOVE BTS night lamp that her Pa gave her on her 15th birthday, or even the hump of her ma who occasionally sleeps next to her: stout, huggable and reassuring.

A pang of homesickness grips her heart for her ma’s scent of body soap, rose and freshly pressed laundry; the same scent that has been protecting her for seventeen years like her very own ozone layer against all the bad things in the world, including thunder, White Ladies and bad dreams.

But tonight, there isn’t to be any such comfort for Kate because she’s in an alien room on a nondescript bed. Pale moonlight is spilling in and, for a moment of disorientation and alarm, the shadow of the soursop tree scratching the window appears to be waving at her from inside the room. The whole place looks as foreign as moonscape.

Kate shivers, hugs her legs, and presses her face against her knees. She feels like crying but restrains herself.

“Kate, you a’ight?” Yssy asks from across the room.

Yssy is Kate’s roomie. There are Single Rooms and Double Rooms available at camp, but Kate has a Double Room and a roommate because it’s the cheaper option. Yssy is sitting up on her own bed. The whites of her wide eyes are stark in the dim while her black babydoll night gown is melded with it.

Yssy is short for Ysabella. Kate gets it that the first letter is a “Y”. Yssy needn’t have spelled it out to her the first time they were introduced to each other. But Kate can never wrap her head around why Yssy insists on spelling her nickname with a yen sign, two dollar signs and another yen sign i.e. ¥$$¥. Yssy said it was because she’s a non-alphabetical person or something and she doesn’t believe in the “Romanization” of ideas. She keeps practicing her signature in her notebook (the paper, not the aluminum, kind) complete with strikethroughs.  

Kate also learned that Yssy doesn’t want to sound easy, but Kate’s positive that using currency symbols in your name isn’t the best way to present yourself. In Kate’s Grammar-Nazi eyes, ¥$$¥ smacks of jologs or trashy taste. But naturally, she has never voiced that out in as many words. As a concerned roomie, she just used to drop a friendly hint every now and then. She didn’t press the matter when Yssy showed no sign of budging from her non-alphabetical conviction.

“Nothing,” Kate replies in a shaky voice. “Just a bad dream. You should go back to sleep.” 

“I heard you call out the name Ecto again. Who is he?” Yssy speaks in undertone. Then, teasingly: “Is he your boyfriend? Is he the one who gave you the bracelet?”

Reflexively, Kate’s eyes move to her study table where the bracelet, a gift from Terra, rests.

“No,” Kate lies. “He’s nobody. Just someone I used to know.”

“I see. It’s good he’s not your ex or anything coz his name’s weird.”

Not as weird as ¥$$¥! Kate thinks testily to herself but bites her tongue.

It’s ironic how the longer she stays at Camp Unplugged, the better she gets at lying and keeping to herself. Not to mention, her temper has gotten way shorter.

“Well,” Yssy says, “we might as well get up now coz it’ll be daylight soon. Before you know it, the bugle will sound.” 

What Yssy’s referring to is the wake-up alarm that blares on the PA at six every morning. Oddly enough, it never fails to remind Kate of a horse race though she’s never been to any race track.

The early start of the day is probably the biggest reason Kate’s always so grumpy at Camp Unplugged. It’s summer break after all, and she had been so looking forward to sleeping in every day. Little did she know her parents were going to send her to a paramilitary Internet addiction rehabilitation center.

****

They’re all gathered in a common area called the Courtyard, which is a complex of townhouses inside a resort-subdivision called Woodland Vista, all the way up the hills of Laurel, Batangas on the periphery of Nasugbu. Actually, the concept of the “residential resort” is nearly 300 hectares wide and is comprised of townhouses, condominiums, condotels and a hotel. One can either retire there (the few homeowners are Fil-Am sexagenarians with money to burn) or book a staycation and enjoy the golf course, indoor and outdoor pools, mini-theater, country club, spa, billiards and bowling center.

When Kate and Josh (ahem) were still together, they used to ride on his Ducati to overlooking Tagaytay Ridge to watch many of these resort communities as they were gradually being built. Like a stainless-steel scoop, first, bulldozers shave a bald strip on a hill or mountain; then, like diligent ants, the workers build towering structures on a slab of coffee ice cream, preserving the lush Insta-worthy mountain panorama around it – the mounds of mint ice cream. (Truth be told, Kate ate a lot of Cookies N’ Cream and Mint Chocolate Chip during those trips so her memory’s a bit fuzzy.)

Pretty soon, a walled, gated and 24/7-guarded community will stand on the lopped-off top of what used to be a mountain, with an exclusive vantage point of Mt. Taal, the smallest active volcano in the world, and the 234-sq-km lake that encompasses it.

The view is well worth the steep price of admission. Like Baguio City in the north, Woodland Vista doesn’t look and feel like the rest of the tropical country. It has pine trees, the occasional mist and crisp early-morning air at 19ºC, prompting the lowlanders and city-dwellers to don jackets, sweaters and, exclusively in Yssy’s case, a light-gray fur pom pom beanie.

Kate recalls the first morning their sleep was interrupted by the bugle. Everybody looked exactly the way they felt: like they had just stumbled out of bed. Not a few still had sleep or drool on their faces. Nobody had taken a shower even though their rooms had hot showers and they didn’t have to boil water in a kettle like the locals. Only Yssy looked #wokeuplikethis and #nofilter ready in full makeup, a knit beanie, Warby Parker heavy-frame eyeglasses and gripping a tumbler of coffee that had been brewed in her fancy coffee gear (surprisingly allowed into camp considering how addicted she was to the stuff).

Today, a month later, they’re snappier and all wearing Type B Uniform: white V-neck shirt, lower fatigues, white handkerchief in the pocket, belt and buckle polished to a mirror shine, and combat boots also polished to a mirror shine. Heat-pressed down the front of their shirts are the official Camp Unplugged ROTC crest and, below it, the logo “Bearing Under Pressure”. Still, nobody looks like they took a shower, which makes sense because they’ll be marching and jogging under the hot sun anyway.

After three hours of that, they’ll smell of both sweat and the sun; the second is every Filipino mother’s idiom. But far from the tolerable and nearly pleasant smell of freshly-tilled soil, “smelling of the sun” will mean pure armpit BO, especially from the boys who, for some unfathomable reason, have yet to hear of a nifty invention called deodorant.

Chapter 2: Call of Duty

When Kate was first dropped off by Camp Unplugged’s company van to become part of the second batch of “campers”, she thought the drive up the mountain road was exhilarating, what of the breathtaking volcano-con-lake vista and the ziggy-zaggy hairpin turns and blind curves, checked only by guardrails from a plunge down a ravine. When they arrived at the Courtyard and the particular street where Camp Unplugged rents its five adjacent houses, she thought she had stepped into a fairytale book because of the houses. One had bumblebee-yellow façade, shamrock roof and white window frames.

The fairy tale ended there because soon she was provided three sets of Camp Unplugged’s official uniform and told that the laundry days are Wednesday and Saturday. The uniform is a polo shirt; pink for the girls paired with a knee-length pleated white skirt and light blue for the guys paired with pleated trousers. On the upper left chest of each shirt Camp Unplugged’s logo has been heat-pressed: the image of a plug twisted into the initials CU.

To the Gen Zers who aren’t familiar with the camp’s true MO, the logo might look lit and social, but to the actual participants and graduates of Camp Unplugged, the chat abbreve CU has never taken on a more sinister association.

“Did you sleep well?” asks Nathan, who lives in the third house up the street, which is called the Teal House after the color of its façade. Nathan is basically Kate’s next-door neighbor at camp.

Nathan slumps down beside Kate on the plastic rocking bench in front of the second house, which Yssy baptized the Latte House and where Yssy and Kate’s room is.

Nathan’s all right. First off, he knows his deodorants and how it’s like basic courtesy to wear one especially when there are girls around. It’s probably because his family’s quite well-off, which is Kate’s impression of him from all their Korean-English exchange tutorials and the occasional True-happy™ (truth + therapy) session when they get paired. His knowledge of Korean is mostly self-taught but he has traveled to neighboring Asian countries like Korea, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong, which gives him a distinct edge over most other Filipino teens (and adults for that matter) who have never been outside the country, including Kate.

All of them in Camp Unplugged are of course middle class. How else would they be able to afford the camp’s exorbitant registration fee? Still, Kate can tell that Nathan comes from a family that’s richer than all of theirs combined because, first off, he has a Single Room and, second, he wears contacts and Invisalign.

In the Philippines, even ordinary metal braces are seen as attractive because they’re status symbols. Filipinos would even put a special request in their Tinder bios: Girls / Boys with braces. Nathan reminds Kate of Grace, the token sub, benchwarmer, cheerleader and sponsor of the Bali Girls volleyball team; also their go-to sleepover host.

Kate discreetly studies Nathan’s profile. He looks a bit like Cole Sprouse if Cole Sprouse had a shade of tan. The same grungy, carelessly flowy Jughead hair.

“Yeah, I did,” Kate lies – almost effortlessly, she worries – and adds a thrift smile. “Thanks for asking. You?”

Instead of answering, Nathan turns to her and pops open his hazel eyes with the long eyelashes. The dark half-circles under them are more pronounced than ever and their whites are slightly bloodshot.

Kate giggles.

“I don’t know when Vortioxetine’s finally gonna realize what it’s supposed to do,” Nathan says lethargically after turning his profile to her again. “Right now, it’s the exact opposite of what an anti-depressant should be. I always feel tired and moody. Worse, I barely get a shut-in at night and, on the rare occasion that I do, I always have very vivid dreams.”

“Dreams about what?” Kate asks curiously, recalling her own nightmare this morning.

Nathan shrugs. “My parents.”

“I see…” Kate says, lowering her eyes.

Nathan has opened up to her about how he got addicted to MMORPGs and MOBAs. His parents didn’t love each other anymore and were constantly fighting. Unfortunately, if the MOBA communities and in-game chatboxes were ever supportive in the past, now they’re just cesspits of foul-mouthed players who’d call Nathan “skinner”, “bob0” or “cancer”. Offline, his own ma would repeatedly call him “worthless” and “my mistake”, which was why all the trash talk on MOBA matches always got to Nathan.

“Maybe you should ask Ms. Perfect to change your medication,” Kate suggests with little conviction. 

“I did,” he replies in the tone of a sigh, lowering his face in his hands and rubbing his eyes. “You know how she’s got a one-track mind. She keeps giving me the same answer: ‘Just stick with it. Be patient. Light will come at the end of the tunnel.’ At this rate, the only light I’ll be seeing will have angels waving at me from the other side.”

Kate titters.

“I’m sorry to be all doom and gloom this early in the morning,” Nathan apologizes, casting a quick glance her way. “And if I was or will ever be mean to you, I apologize now, too. It’s just, you know… the meds talking.”

“You should be giving me a basket of apples by now,” Kate says teasingly, thinking they could both use a lightening of the mood.

That’s a private joke between them. The word “sagwa” has two meanings in the Korean language: apple and apology.

For a second, Nathan doesn’t have an answer. And then, amazingly, he changes his voice to impersonate a Batangeño local – or at least that’s what he thinks it sounds like inside his head.

“Ala-eh, di laang apol. Ganire, bibigya-an din kita ng kape barako.”

(Translation: Why, not just apple. Like this, I will also give you café varraco.)

Kate giggles at the nonsensical line that has defused the tension.

Then, switching back to his normal and serious voice, Nathan says: “If we weren’t in camp, I’d give you a whole truckload. That’s easier for me than saying sorry.”

“Jinjjah?” Kate asks, pronouncing as “chincha” the Korean word for really.

“Jinjjah,” Nathan stresses. “One thing you should know about boys, it’s usually tough for us to admit when we’re wrong and to say that we’re sorry.”

“Oh wow. I’ll have to file that under ‘d’. ‘D’ for ‘decoding guys’.”

“You should. But you know, I’m usually a fun, positive and easy-going guy.”

“Oh yeah?” Kate says teasingly again. “Should I start calling you Mr. Brightside now? Mr. Glass-Is-Half-Full?”

This time, Nathan makes an impression of a French philosopher.

“I zink zere iz no glash, mademoiselle.”

Kate chuckles. That’s classic Nathan. When he’s at a loss for words, he turns to OTT silliness.

“Oh!”

Looking down, Kate realizes the laces of one of her combat boots have come undone. She bends over while still sitting on the bench.

“Here, let me,” Nathan volunteers, quickly rising and then bending over in front of her.

“No, it’s al—”

Boink! Like two kids in a ball pit, they’ve bonked each other as Kate raises her head and Nathan bows.

“Oww! Aray!”

Nathan has fallen on his butt on the grass of the front yard and blurts out in his faux French accent again: “Ziz iz magnifique! I can zee tres many starz!”

Kate giggles.

“Oh la la! Zis is no good,” Nathan exclaims, now crouching in front of the plastic bench. Switching back to normal mode and tapping the arch of her foot, he says: “You’ve got your boots laced up too tight. This puts too much pressure on the arch and cuts off circulation. What you wanna do is…”

He starts unlacing her boot. For a split second, Kate’s gripped with alarm because it takes her a great deal of time to lace up her boots every morning, and based on the clock in her brain and the general atmosphere of everyone else in front of their respective houses, roll call will begin shortly. Nathan, meanwhile, just continues redoing the laces calmly and flawlessly, his long Jughead hair covering his eyes.

“… you bypass the pressure point here,” Nathan explains, “then do left over right, left over right, that’s the Army way… You make another skip here to prevent the tongue from bunching up on your ankle. Next, four-point lock here…”

Looking down at him, Kate wonders why Nathan doesn’t have a girlfriend. The first and biggest reason is probably because he’s a gamer. Not really about being geeks or anything, gamers are notorious for prioritizing their hobbies over their girlfriends. And like he said it himself, he could be very negative sometimes. Being the product of a broken marriage, Nathan all too painfully reminds Kate of her ex Josh, who’s now in juvie along with his gang for the stunt that they pulled last Valentine’s and the other crimes and acts of bullying that Terra managed to prove through evidential photos, vids, texts, PMs and Snaps.

Nathan finishes the whole thing with a special kind of bow that he dubs the Forever Knot™ (he adds “TM” to make fun of the camp counsellor, who’s obsessed with catchphrases and trademarks). He guarantees the knot will never come loose even though it’s easy to untie. As if all those weren’t enough, he restarts with Kate’s other boot and gives her another mini-heart attack. Still, he finishes everything in record time.

“Ta-da!” he says proudly and beams.

“Wow!” Kate exclaims. “Where did you learn all that?”

“I have an older bro who did military service.”

“Oh, so you have a kuya?”

“Umm, not exactly…”

Before Nathan can elaborate, they hear a familiar call.

“SQUAD, FAAAAAAALL IN!!” screams Colonel Anders, who wears full fatigues and a black beret seemingly 24/7. Every lost girl and boy instantly finds their place.

****

Colonel Anders’s name isn’t really Colonel Anders. First off, his rank is just a Master Sergeant. Second, his full name is Wenceslao Andres Alunan. Everybody just calls him Colonel Anders after the KFC founder on account of his being Ander Da Saya – literally “under the skirt”. No matter how ferocious he is to his cadets, he’s always meek and a yes man in front of Ms. Perfect (not her real name). Ms. Perfect is camp vice-president, camp counsellor and all-around Thanos.

Colonel Andershas a ruptured eardrum sustained not from a firefight or anything but from hazing when he was still in the Army barracks. Now he’s an early retiree and is the sole Military Service instructor of Camp Unplugged’s small and fledgling ROTC unit. Because of his handicap, he has retained and in fact worsened the habit of speaking 30 decibels higher and showering you in spittle. His favorite phrases, as parodied countless times behind his back, are: “Gutdemit!” (Goddammit) “Stik tu da wol!” (Stick to the wall) “Dont yu eyebol-eyebol mi, kadet!” (Don’t you eyeball me, cadet) and “Drap! Gib mi a hanred!” (Drop! Give me a hundred!)

It’s opportune that the townhouses in this corner of Woodland Vista are still mostly unoccupied because of the sluggish real estate market. Colonel Anders can shout all he wants and nobody in the Homeowners’ Association would mind because they’re scattered all over the 300-hectare expanse. Of course it also helps that Camp Unplugged’s president is a VIP member and one of the revenue streams, if not lifeblood, of Woodland Vista.

The campers only know the camp president as Mrs. Teresita Blanca, a former faith healer and alternative medicine practitioner. No camper has met her because she never leaves her room in the Pink House, and is always brought meals by the camp’s maids up the street and then up the attic.

Apart from their camp diligence though, Woodland Vista as a whole feels like a ghost town for the lack of car or foot traffic. A beautiful yet cold ghost town. It looks exactly like the kind of place where embarrassed parents would have their wayward children shipped away. As they say, out of sight, out of mind. Burnt-out urbanites, meanwhile, love exactly the rustic, laid-back, get-away-from-it-all shtick. But for someone like Kate who grew up to her ma’s and then her BFF Lor’s constant chatter, the quiet is almost enough to drive her nuts.

“TEEEEEN-HUT!” Colonel Anders thunders again, snapping Kate right back into focus and the proper bearing.

Snap was the right military word. Early mornings like this are the perfect time for her to drift off and daydream – if not completely go back to sleep standing up. Unlike Yssy or the coffeeheads back in CITS High, Kate wasn’t exposed to the stimulating and focusing powers of caffeine at an early age. Her ma forbade her from drinking anything other than ultra-sweet Milo or milk. Powdered instant milk, to be exact, because authentic fresh milk in the Philippines is liquid gold except for that brief spell when a neighbor of theirs offered door-to-door delivery of her backyard goat’s milk. Mrs. Lapuz probably knew that caffeine would only make Kate more jittery and hyper than she already was.

But every morning at breakfast, Kate would see her parents drinking Nescafe instant black coffee together with the pandesal. Her father even had the odd habit of dunking his rolls of bread in the coffee before eating them. When she asked him about it, he casually said it was to clean the bread. But the young Kate didn’t buy it because afterwards, his father would still drink the coffee together with all the floating crumbs.

Once, Kate asked her ma if she could try coffee. She must’ve been about five years old. She made her own cup, tried it, and promptly spat the liquid back into the cup. After rinsing her mouth at the sink, she whined: “It’s so bitter!”

Her ma answered darkly: “Life is bitter,” and then burst out cackling.

Kate didn’t find it funny though and has since sworn off coffee – or at least the black variety. If they had the money, she and the Bali Girls would splurge on iced Caramel Macchiato in Starbucks, take and post a whole lot of pics, and literally slow down the coffee shop wi-fi watching YT vids. If they didn’t have a lot of money (which was often the case), they’d settle for the best-bang-for-their-buck milk tea – oh, those chewy black tapioca pearls! – which invariably resulted in their tossing-and-turning all night and looking like the walking dead the day after. 

“COUNT OFF!” Colonel Anders barks and Kate’s brain is yanked back to the here and now. To be exact, she whips her head to over her right shoulder.

Whoa! she thinks to herself, blinking her bleary eyes. I drifted off again.I better get my head in the game from this point on because one simple mistake could easily cost me 20 push-ups or a three-to-five-minute “sit-in-the-air” squat. Like those poor latecomers who missed the bugle.

Like the tops of cards being riffled, in clockwork precision, the cadets look forward one by one and yell their number. As the counting hurtles towards her, Kate follows suit and shouts: “Eight!” Finally, the last guy to her left shouts: “Eleven! All present or accounted for!” and that concludes the attendance check as always.

Eleven. Even though the first batch of campers graduated last month to enroll in their respective regular schools, business is good and Camp Unplugged is still nearly at full capacity. Seven boys and four girls. That’s the whole second and last batch of rehabbers this summer. Some of them, like Kate, won’t process their enrollment in senior high till mid-July while the others, sadly, have no plans to continue schooling this year. 

Rehabbers. The terminology depends on who you’re talking to. For Colonel Anders, they’re all cadets in the same way that, to a hammer, everything looks like nails. Ms. Perfect calls them campers regardless of the fact that all of them are miserable and none of them signed up to be here. Needless to say, Ms. Perfect walks with the kumbaya and truth-sharing crowd. Unlike her mom (the mysterious Mrs. Blanca), who has a background in faith healing and alternative-medicine, Ms. Perfect chose a more scientific path and got a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology. If you’re not careful, she’ll get into your head faster than you can say “Protego!”

Sigh. Yep, all of them were brought here against their will. Not a few of them were threatened with disownment and at least one (read: Nathan) was tricked into believing he was going to a real camp – as in with a lake to ride a boat or to go fishing in. Technically, one could do those things in Woodland Vista, but not the guests who came in through Camp Unplugged. Their full names and pictures have been disseminated to the subdivision admin and onwards to every security guard stationed at every guard house on strategic fringes of the walled-in property. 

Chapter 3: Somewhere There’s a Ma

Majority of the campers are boys because game addiction is their thing – to be exact, Dungeon Raydens-addiction. Dungeon Raydens is a sandbox-style MMORPG that’s a one-stop-shop for a lot of things. Kate remembers that, when Ecto was still around (darn, it hurt to think that), they did almost everything there except PvP and the MOBA-esque Battle Royale end game, which Ecto abhorred for their violence.

They studied together in Academia mode to learn life skills such as alchemy, wizardry, trading, cooking and so on. They built their own house in Open World and then had it transplanted to Utopia, where housing was instanced but you could open your home to the public. This way, she and Ecto could play house and play shop at the same time with their NPC butler named Alfred. They purchased and raised their pet Direffin (Direwolf + griffin) named Max (short for Maximus Aurelius). They hunted, tamed and rode various mounts like dragons and unicorns, and used fake IDs at the Inn of Bedlem in the town square to drink virtual beer and dance all night long.

Sigh. Those were good times…

The ROTC squad has started marching along the paved but largely abandoned streets. The few vehicles that use these streets are the SUVs of the residents, golf carts and the official resort shuttle bus full of transient guests that invariably take a snap of them in passing. For the staff of the resort, including even the off-dorm instructors of Camp Unplugged, the preferred means of transpo is scooter, bicycle or good ol’ feet.

This part never fails to make Kate feel like closing her eyes. The sight of the streets lined with ancient acacia trees on each side, their foliage forming a lush arching canopy overhead, is just too somnolent, on a par with the voice of their Bio teacher Mrs. Borromeo back in CITS High, which has been likened to the mythical Adarna bird’s. Going through the motions of any activity is the bane of Kate’s existence. She could literally feel her brain cells dying right now. Even the cadences, which frustrated-singer Colonel Anders composed himself, don’t help. Not even now that they’re doing Baby Shark.

Colonel Anders: Baby Shark!

Cadets: Doo doo, doo doo doo doo!

Colonel Anders: Mummy Shark!

Cadets: Doo doo, doo doo doo doo!

It helps though that Kate could gobble down the large breakfast of hotsilog (hotdog + fried rice + sunny-side up egg) at the dining area within 20 minutes before Colonel Anders’s count off. Unlike the latecomers who are prolly kicking themselves all over again for oversleeping. Apart from their earlier punishment, now they’re at risk of fainting in heat and exhaustion, which could indeed earn them a quick vacation on the roadside but would also put more punishments on their tab. 

Everybody will be either marching or jogging everywhere: up the sloping streets, around the rotary, to the chapel, to the golf course and the placid man-made lake, all the way to the helipad of the mansion owned by a billionaire. Pretty soon, they’ll be feeling their calves, glutes, quadriceps and hamstrings straining against gravity.

Some of the boys are probably wondering why they never anticipated this part out of all the hours they spent playing Call of Duty. The girls, on the other hand, are probably disappointed that life in ROTC isn’t as romantic or glamorous as the story of Master Sergeant Seo Dae-Young and First Lieutenant Yoon Myung-ju in Descendants of the Sun.

Personally, Kate can’t empathize with the gaming junkies because she hates MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) for the same reason Ecto did. She prefers role-playing, dressing up and progressing her character Kayzel, which is Principessa-class and reminds her of Disney’s Rapunzel. More importantly, she disapproves of the hate that MOBAs inherently cultivate. For her, a team turning and picking on the weakest link or the player that makes a lot of mistakes smacks of getting picked last in gym class, which she has never really directly experienced, being volleyball varsity captain at CITS High and all. She’s also aware of how the whole setup has its equivalent in a girl’s arsenal of psy-aggression tactics, e.g. cyber-bullying and group chat-exclusion, her roomie Yssy’s specialty.

Indeed the female population of Camp Unplugged are the SNS-addicts. Those who passive-aggressively seen-zone other girls, do a timed Unfollow or Defriend, and screenshot liberally but always out of context. Yssy and the others are the type of girls you don’t want to cross virtual paths with because they’re the Queens of vaguebooking to fish for attention, humblebragging to make others feel envious, posting statuses as thinly veiled shots, casting Favorites and Likes as declarations of war, or not casting them as declarations of the same.

It’s cold comfort that with the gaming geeks, hate is much more overt in the form of trash-talking, extortion and the occasional team melee IRL. When she and Ecto played the PvE (Player vs. Environment) grind, Kate had never once felt like she was excess baggage. Ecto was the literal embodiment of the phrase Chivalry ain’t dead and he went over and beyond the duties of a meat shield, notwithstanding the fact that his character wasn’t designed to be one. He always took the agro of all the baddies and it was Kate’s job to replenish his health with her Healing Spell and provide cover fire from a safe distance with her Photic Bow and Arrow. That was their raiding party’s go-to formation.

She imagined that if RPG quests were real, he’d literally be carrying her piggyback – which was a whole new level of the gaming pejorative pabuhat (literally someone who needs to be carried, a burden in a team game). She also imagined that if Ecto was an actual human and they were playing MOBA, it would never matter to him whether they were playing a ranked game or not.

First off, Ecto was good at everything he tried his digital hands on – be it cooking or agriculture – or at least he was always better than her or faster in learning a skill than her. But he never let that get to his head and he was always patiently teaching her, which was probably a holdover from their private tutorials in the early days of the My Dream Boyfriend app. He never once lost his temper like a MOBA streamer concerned about rank or an MMORPG junkie concerned about level. Second, he had always felt that every virtual game was a prison and real life was ideal. To him, the games were just a pale imitation of what real life had to offer, especially the chance to stay with Kate physically.

Ironically, this is how the boys and girls of Camp Unplugged finally have common ground. MMORPG and MOBA players need teamwork and communication to reach their goals but they’ve made the community toxic, kind of like making the water of a pool dirty with everybody peeing in it. The girls are the same because SNS is supposed to be a way to connect people but now, the network has become a snake pit and FB walls have become towering walls that barricade people into cliques and into ever-deepening levels of pettiness. 

Maybe they all deserve to be in Camp Unplugged after all.

Or maybe the heat is getting to me, Kate thinks to herself. She can feel drops of sweat rolling down inside her shirt, her nape getting sunburnt and weird tan lines happening on her arms because they’re not wearing full-on fatigues. It’s a good thing she was able to mooch some sunscreen from Yssy, who had come prepared with a year’s supply.

Still, if Kate had to choose between having unevenly toasted arms and slowly boiling in a sauna of fatigues, complete with black beret and gloves, she would rather be a zebra of tan lines. Wearing Type A uniform or full-on parade gear also means they’d be doing rifle drills and swinging the 9-pound M1 Garand replica drill rifles around their bodies.  

Colonel Anders starts the cadence for “Somewhere There’s a Mother”:

Somewhere there’s a mother

She's crying for her girl

She's Infantry Blackhawk

With her orders to deploy

Don't you cry for her

She don't need your sympathy

She's Infantry Blackhawk

That’s the best that you can be…

Kate pretends to wipe the sweat off her brow but her fingers nip in the bud the tear that has spilled out of her eye. Kate’s parents were nothing but tender and supportive of her after the traumatic experience with Josh and his gang, but every once in a while, they would ask her questions about that fateful prom night. Or at least her ma would.

Kate had known it probably wasn’t a good idea to tell them about Ecto. Her parents were low-tech to the point of being analog, and they were quite superstitious. Every Black Friday (the Holy Week day, not the sale) and sometimes all through Black Saturday, they would unfailingly remind Kate to avoid getting injuries, eating meat, sweeping the floor and taking a shower. They would collect rainwater on Easter Sunday believing it had healing properties, and hang blessed palm on the front door all year long to ward off evil and bad luck. 

Kate’s confession finally happened one night when her ma was lying on Kate’s bed; something Mrs. Lapuz had taken to doing again when the memory of the cataclysmic after-prom was still fresh in Kate’s mind, resulting in consecutive bad dreams of facing Josh and his gang and, more tragically, losing Ecto.

Kate had woken up drenched in sweat, her heart hammering in her chest, and her ma calmed her down by rubbing her back first with a towel and then with Mrs. Lapuz’s own calloused hands. Kate recalled the countless times her ma did that whenever she had a cold or a cough as a kid. The touch alone was enough to evoke in her the smell of Vicks VapoRub, another of her ma’s signature homey scents.

“Why do you keep calling out the puppy’s name in your sleep?” Mrs. Lapuz whispered when Kate had calmed down a little.  

“Do I?” Kate asked innocently. “I don’t remember.”