PANIC

7TH JULY 2023, FRIDAY.

“Have you logged in?”

“Are you in the queue?”

“How many devices are you using?”

That was all that lingered in everyone’s mind as they anxiously anticipated for the strike of noon.

Eyes scanned dimly lit classrooms, giving knowing glances, communicating across the cramped quarters of the class without a single word.

Stares fluttered to the clock at the front of the class, waiting for its hands to strike upon the hour. Students inspected their watches and frantically checked their internet connection, their mounds of school work lost in a labyrinth of cables and wires as they hastily plugged their laptop and phone to the exhausted outlets embedded in the walls.

Teachers came and went, their languid lessons lost to the wind, as the attention of the students remained drawn solely onto their screens, anxiously tapping their phones and reloading their pages.

Tensions were high.

As the drone of class came to a close, students flocked to each other’s tables, scanning their laptops and screaming at the top of their lungs. People crawled on the floor, jumped around, anything to allay their anxieties.

Pandemonium was unleashed onto the school and when the teachers came to class to see a pack of screaming children, they were horrified to know it was all for a Taylor Swift concert.

Timothy Renrui Hu Lagman

5.18