Everyone is Witness

13: XX

VIO

I know that you miserable fools missed my point-of-view chapter, so I'm gonna get right to it. And yes, I'm aware that this is me breaking the fourth wall. I'm not one of those numbnuts. Why do you care anyway?

I HAD said this before. I didn't know much about Damon. I didn't care about him, unless he's the subject of my article. Well, he had become the center of attention and intrigue, thanks to his mysterious death and the commotion during his memorial.

Now I had to pretend to care about him. I had to talk to people who knew about him. I had to pick up the pieces of the puzzle and put them together to see the whole picture of one Damon Dominic. I had never written more than three articles about the same topic. I usually wrote one then moved on to the next.

Even after his death, Damon managed to give someone who's completely unacquainted with him an added responsibility. What an asshole.

One thing that I liked (and hated at the same time) about my job as a campus journalist was the amount of leg work that I had to put in every article. For normal news coverage, my only routine was to visit a certain office and request for an interview which would usually last for an hour. Then that's it. Straightforward and boring, but quick. However, for investigative work, it would require more than my usual effort.

For my Damon article, imagine how much I dreaded the thought of communicating with a lot of people. I started with his classmates, then his instructors. I promised not to leave a stone unturned so being thorough was something that I expected.

"Damon is really a nice person. He didn't deserve what happened to him."

I squeezed my eyes shut for a second. That's the seventh time that I heard people describing him that way. Damon's kind. Damon's good. Damon's the best boy. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them would say Damon's the Messiah. Almost every classmate of him parroted the same set of adjectives. Couldn't they be more original?

More importantly, couldn't they be at least honest? The guy's already dead. He would be buried six feet under soon. He couldn't come after them anymore. Unless, of course, he turned into a ghost and started haunting everyone who spoke ill of him.

My fingers froze before I could type anything on my tablet. There's no use taking note of something that had been said over and over. This was just a complete waste of time.

"Were you at his memorial?" I pushed my spectacles up the bridge of my nose.

The female student named Tricia nodded. "Oo naman. Ni-require ang class namin na um-attend bilang respeto sa kanya. We also want to pay our last respects to him."

"Then you must have heard the same thing that everyone did," I reminded her. If she wasn't paying any attention, then she wouldn't know what I was talking about. "You heard what the heckler said. You watched the video played on the projector screen. Don't you think those comments contradict what you've just said to me? About him being a nice person?"