Lola's House Test

I'm a good boy.

One of my officemates requested if he could sleep over at our house in Baclaran last weekend because (1) he was playing in a badminton tournament at Manila on one day and (2) needs to be at Timberland Heights in Rizal for a trailrun at 6 am the following day. His normal place of residence is either Batangas or Sta Rosa -- both too far and a great waste of 'rest' time.

After getting the necessary paalams from my parents, ate and my dwendes, I agreed that he could sleep over.

I was wondering at that time if my lola would make her presence felt to my colleague when he sleeps. You see, lola has this habit of letting it be known whether or not that she is in favor of our sleepover guests being the friends of her apos. And she lets it be known when our guests are sleeping.

What lola does, if she disapproves of your sleepover guest, is that she visits the hosting apo in his dream and reprimands him for bringing the unfavored guest to HER house (our Baclaran house used to belong to lola). On top of that, she grabs the sleeping guest by the ankles and suppossedly pulls them off the bed.

Among our sleepover guests over the years so far, lola has pulled the ankles and tugged the blankets of five of our visitors. A couple of them actually screamed in the middle of the night (and waking up the whole household). They have reason to scream, because only a few of us can see lola. She's been dead since 1942.

The descriptions of lola's scare tactics are consistent: something tugs the blankets, then a clammy feeling at the ankles, followed by a sensation of someone holding your ankles and pulling you off the bed. Some slept through it, only to find themselves halfway off the bed when they wake up (nobody can provide an explanation how they ended up like that). The two people who screamed got scared at the 'clammy feeling' stage. Who wouldn't, specially if the airconditioning in all our rooms are perfectly okay?

But anyway, lola's been a good judge of character. Ma would give us warnings on our choice of friends everytime lola does her thing. The persons she pulled off the bed -- they wasted their lives eventually, pulling down a lot of their friends with them.

So when my colleague slept over at our house in Baclaran, all my siblings were excited to know the following day whether or not lola visited me in my dreams and if my colleague had an encounter with her.

(Un)fortunately, nothing extraordinary transpired. Both of us even got a good night's sleep. (Actually, we were dead tired from a badminton tournament that day).

I guess lola judged that my colleague was a good guy and that I'm still a good boy.