Phone-y Findings

Spirit Week always gives students, particularly unsuspecting freshmen, a good scare. They think that it’s merely a week of dressing up and Boo!Gram anticipation, but they are completely in the dark about the much more nefarious nature of these long five days. They have yet to hear the rumors about the two entities that snatch phones like feral children hunting for eggs during Easter. This year, the competition is between an experienced Sr. Simon, a seasoned phone-snatching professional who continues building his repertoire of device-gravitating techniques, and Dr. Kim, a newbie, but still hungry for blood. However, unbeknownst to the students of Stuyvesant, the two don’t just snatch phones for sport—they feed off the batteries to power themselves. This competition isn’t just for fun. It’s for their own survival.

As per usual, Sr. Simon entered school during the middle of first period on Monday, but today he was wearing his “pajamas”—a blue-checkered dress shirt, black dress pants, and a pair of polished dress shoes. He asserted that he spent all of last night in that outfit, which isn’t a lie because Sr. Simon had never slept. Sr. Simon felt the need to review the past week’s security camera recordings on his old Macintosh computer that spat static with every use, begging to be thrown away. As he set up three separate pots of coffee on a stained wooden desk, Sr. Simon scrolled through the 1,000 security cameras set around the school. He had security cameras attached to the hands of every clock, the wooden poles of every American flag, the insides of every radiator—anywhere that students would stare at while searching for answers during their 150-question exams.

Dr. Kim, on the other hand, wore a very soft and cuddly-looking teddy bear outfit. Stay aware, though, as the jar of honey he held was for containing the severely scratched student IDs and iPhones (Androids, you’re spared) of unsuspecting students. Dr. Kim marched his way to the seventh-floor computers, where a student was stationed behind the large, obnoxious green pole. He zeroed in on a rectangular item sticking out of the student’s pocket, but Sr. Simon had his territory marked already and took the item out of the student’s pocket right in front of Dr. Kim. Sr. Simon held a cocky face, but he then turned to see that the rectangle in his hand was actually a TI-84+ CE calculator lit with graphed equations. Sr. Simon accepted defeat that day.

Waking up on Tuesday (hopefully not in the same pajamas they wore to school the day prior), excited couples and best friends dressed up for the new spirit theme: Twin Day. Greeted by the newfound dynamic duos—Dr. Kim paired up with Ms. Butler and Sr. Simon with Ms. Dunkel—many felt their Twin Day outfits weren’t up to par. While Dr. Kim and Ms. Butler arrived dressed as the Men in Black, Sr. Simon and Ms. Dunkel opted for the classic duo police officer uniform, forming a formidable alliance against the school’s most notorious criminals: students with iPhones. “Freeze! Put the phone in the pouch,” Simon shouted, pointing at a freshman on the half-floor whose only crime was checking the time. “You have the right to remain silent; your phone doesn’t have the right to remain in your possession,” Ms. Dunkel added, reaching for the device. Meanwhile, on the sixth floor, students could predict to find Dr. Kim teaching his English class or lurking around the escalator. Today, his lurking proved to be successful—confiscating a phone from an unsuspecting sophomore trying to submit their Foundations of Literature homework before the period started. “That’s an iPhone 18,” Ms. Butler warned. “The most dangerous of all. I’ve heard its battery lasts longer than the time it takes me to return an essay,” Kim affirmed. 

Following the underwhelming events of the first two days, Sr. Simon and Dr. Kim entered the building early on Wednesday. For Dress As Your Type Day, Sr. Simon dressed up as the prize he would spend his entire life hunting: the iPhone. At the bottom of his stealthy form sat two perfectly patented round corners, a bezel thinner than his patience, and a large, bright screen. When he looked at himself in the mirror that morning, he had to fight his urge to shout, “In your pouch!” Dr. Kim, eager to fulfill his new duties, chose a different path. Eager to impress the man he desired to please, Dr. Kim dressed as his type: a mid-height, bald, goateed Assistant Principal of Safety and Security with a dress shirt and tie. Like a four-year-old’s eyes before macaroni-and-cheese, they patrolled the halls, grabbing phones and IDs from despicable criminals and careless freshmen alike. “I thought I’d be safe in the Hudson Staircase—but he ran so quickly, I didn’t know what to do,” said careless freshman Kaes Zernike. At the end of the hunt, both glided home to their nests, depositing their prized collections in the office of Mr. Moran. “And now, I gotta spend six hours cataloguing all 61 of these violations on the computer. Now before you all come yelling at me about your rights, it’s the job I gotta do,” said Simon in an off-the-record interview. He spoke from his chair, arms struggling to find space on a desk covered in phones. The proceeds of the hunt were stacked eight-high on every surface not taken up by ungraded tests. On his walls were commendations from colleagues: “Nobody finds them like you do!” read one. Poems heralding his unmatched hunting prowess lined his cabinets: “In every hall his footsteps softly fall / He walks the floors and listens through it all / No phone or pair of headphones can escape / He finds them fast, no trick can change your fate.” Eager to live up to Simon’s legacy, novice Dr. Kim added a tally board to the wall of his office. The current total—132—by some miracle, nearly matched his competition.

On the penultimate day of Spirit Week, Dr. Kim was well aware that the seniors were probably skipping school to do their college applications, the juniors were too seasoned in their phone hiding techniques, and the goody two-shoes freshmen were way too careful. So, he turned his attention to the unsuspecting yet cocky ones dressed in blue. Sophomores. The group that had somehow convinced themselves that they had the status of seniors without obtaining any of their upperclassmen survival skills. They had spent the entire week convinced they were smarter than the administration—way too cunning to get caught with their phones out. He stood near the cafeteria entrance, watching the parade of purple, green, blue, and yellow shirts stream past him. The students, for the most part, took Color Wars pretty seriously. But he wasn’t interested in their outfits—rather, their pockets. He followed a group of three boys dressed in blue out of the cafeteria and cornered them. All three heads snapped up at once when they recognized his presence. One immediately shoved his hands in his pants pocket. Dr. Kim glanced at the boy’s suspiciously rectangular-shaped pocket and smirked. “Y’all wouldn’t happen to have anything you’re not supposed to have out, right?” “No, never,” the boy answered so quickly he almost stumbled over his friend, who was practically shaking with fear at this point. “Take the phone out of your pocket,” Dr. Kim ordered. He decided to be direct, knowing that this phone would break the stalemate and give him a leg up on Sr. Simon. “There is no phone in my pocket,” the boy answered, raising both palms into the air, to which Dr. Kim answered, “Stop stalling, hand it over. Now.” The boy reluctantly inserted a hand into his pocket, slowly pulling out the glowing rectangle. Dr. Kim snatched it out of his hands and cackled evilly to himself.

It was the final day of Spirit Week, and thus, it was the final day for the deans to assert their dominance over one another. Sr. Simon’s hunger was unsatiated by the number of phones he had collected this week, but even more so by the fact that he had not yet soundly beaten Dr. Kim. The ambition of the green dean was unyielding. Today, they would determine the best phone snatcher once and for all. The two deans immediately began their phone-snatching spree, making significant headway against each other. On multiple occasions, the two exchanged glares as they crossed paths, which only fueled their competition. Eventually, both had amassed a sizable stack of personal communication devices, but they grew desperate. They began retracing their steps to search for more students committing the heinous sin of doomscrolling, but everyone’s phones were already taken. This manic scouring across Stuyvesant’s 10 floors was very energy-consuming, and it was very possible that one of them might run out of power if they weren’t able to snatch a phone before the end of the day. It had been a very draining week.

Finally, at 3:34 p.m., a bored senior whipped out their phone to check their messages right in front of Peter Stuyvesant’s portrait on the second floor. Big mistake. The two deans picked up on the small electric wave vibrations in the air and sprinted towards the poor senior. The senior dropped their phone from the pure horror of being around two deans and scurried away. Now it was just one lone phone between two tired, almost battery-drained enemies.

The two dived towards the phone, and both Sr. Simon and Dr. Kim grabbed onto its plastic pink case at the same time. Each dean yanked hard on the phone. The two struggled, but that only made themselves even more tired. Sr. Simon started to lose feeling in his legs; Dr. Kim saw his vision go blurry. Little by little, each of their limbs started locking up until they were both encased in rust. The clock struck 3:40.

As students began flooding towards the exit, many stopped to notice the intricately realistic sculpture in front of Peter Stuyvesant. Everyone oohed and aahed at the detailed likenesses of the two deans. The popping metal veins were life-like; they looked just like the ones that appeared when the deans even considered the thought of a student taking out their phones. Their expressions perfectly captured the stone-cold glare of when they spotted a student using their phone from over 200 feet away. Many students commented on how the centerpiece gave them the biggest scare since they saw their last SAT score. No one knew why such a statue showed up all of a sudden. No one, except for one Brian Moran, who happily polished the statue as the greatest phonesnatcher left standing.