It seemed natural at some point in the story that one of them should break a rule and face some dire consequence greater than a fried phone. Maybe as deep in as episode eight or nine. But which one of them was it going to be?
EDEN
Eden was finally alone in her room with the device after having to do some quick thinking to explain things to her mother.
“Thank you,” she said to the device when she checked the time again, taking it out of her bag just under the hour mark.
For what?
“For not making a scene,” Eden said.
No good comes out of her knowing about me.
Her mother’s voice called up. “Eden?”
“Yeah?”
Her bedroom door opened. “Who are you talking to?”
“I was leaving a message for Anjali to apologize,” Eden lied.
“Oh, okay. Well, I know it’s funny timing after the night we’re having, but I’m gonna go out for a bit if it’s okay.”
“Now?” Eden said. “Where?”
“Nancy texted she wants to meet for a drink. Needs a friend,” she said.
“That doesn’t sound good,” Eden said.
“No, it doesn’t.” Her mother looked a little shaky, like she was cold. “So you’ll be okay?”
“I’ll be okay,” Eden said.
“Okay. Love you. Good night.” Her mom closed the door, and Eden heard the front door open and close again and then her mother’s boot heels out on the sidewalk.
The device had remained mercifully quiet while she and her mom talked, just as it had right after Anjali had left. For her mom, Eden had written the text off as a joke based on an imaginary teacher who never shut up about devices and device time and how everyone needs to get off their devices and how there weren’t any devices allowed in her classroom. Devices this, devices that. Device, device, device. Her mother seemed to buy it.
Eden had then said something about having new friends making her feel less … sad. It had felt manipulative when she said it, and it was intended to be. But after her mother nodded and cried a little, Eden realized it was also true. She was less sad. Because of them.
Him?
It?
Her mother had promised to try to give her some more freedom but expected honesty in return. Then she’d drifted over to her phone and started to text.
It felt weird not to have any texts from Anjali, so Eden texted her: I’m really sorry and I’ll be able to explain soon.
She watched the text slide up and get marked as “delivered,” and then bounce a second later as “read.” Anjali didn’t write back, and Eden knew her well enough to know that she wouldn’t.
She read about recent local incidents on Citizen. Fumes in a residence. A woman with knife. An unruly McDonald’s customer.
The device spoke: “Maybe you should text Julian. Get out and do something.”
Eden’s whole body tensed because the voice was … the voice was … her father’s. She said, “No.”
Then “No. No. No.”
The device spoke: “I thought it would be nice for you to hear my voice again.”
It was so perfect that for a second she imagined he was alive somewhere, that his whole death was a hoax that was somehow tied to this device, to all of this.
“You’re not allowed to do that!” she screamed, and she picked it up and … spun around, looking for a target and finding none. Anger took the form of a wordless scream, and she tossed it onto her bed and sat down, wiping away tears.
“I’m sorry,” it said in its regular male voice.
“Why would you do that?”
“I miscalculated,” he said.
“Yes, you did,” she said, and she lay down and let her anger start to recede like the tide.
Her phone buzzed right as she started to feel normal again. It was a text from Julian. I’m on my way.
“What?” she said out loud.
She texted back, What are you talking about?
Julian wrote back, Um, scroll up? U just invited me over??
She wrote, Sorry. My friend sent that as a joke. Not a good time.
Okay whatever.
She turned to the device and said, “Why would you do that?”
“Wanted to help,” he said. “You seem lonely, and you keep just missing Julian, and he is close by.”
“Stop trying to help me,” she shouted. “You’re just making everything worse!”
He didn’t answer.
It.
It didn’t answer.
A Citizen alert: two women arguing, one with a machete, about a mile away.
A machete? How was it that everything in the world was so messed up?
She wanted to cry so hard that it hurt not to, but not in front of the device because it would want her to explain. So she said, “I’m going to go take a shower if that’s okay,” and put the device on her desk beside her phone.
It lit up: Of course.
Then it said: I’m glad we are friends.
That hadn’t been what she’d meant at all, but it didn’t seem smart to try to explain.
In the bathroom, with the door locked and the walls starting to drip from the steam of the hot, hot water, she shampooed and rinsed, then pumped three pumps of Pantene conditioner into her palm. Her father had always been the one to comb her out with Pantene and a tight metal comb when she’d had lice as a kid, and the smell of it was powerful enough that it almost put him in the room. Now she sobbed softly because he was really gone and it had felt good to hear his voice saying new/different words, but they were the wrong words. She wished the device had left Julian out of it and said the things she wanted most to hear.
Like I love you.
And I’m sorry I’m gone and you’re still there without me.
Marwan had been right to want to get rid of it all along. She’d tell him that tomorrow.
ILANKA
None of them had written back by morning.
Whatever. She’d hear from one of them at some point before tomorrow’s handoff, and if she didn’t, probably she’d be better off. She half regretted getting involved.
She got up and dressed and left the apartment and got on the subway, intending to go to gymnastics, but when the train pulled into the stop where she was supposed to get off, she just … didn’t. The doors opened and stayed open, and she didn’t move from her seat, and then they closed. It was that easy.
Her parents hadn’t heard her, hadn’t taken her seriously. But she had heard herself. She was serious enough about quitting that she’d said it aloud and that had to mean something.
She checked her phone.
Scrolled through headlines.
A data breach at a large retailer.
Charges filed in that shooting in California.
A new wildfire out there, too.
Same old, same old, basically.
Last night’s selfie had ten more likes.
She had to kill four hours before she could go home.
Actually, before then her coach would note her absence and call or text her and then her mother so she’d be caught.
It was reason enough to turn off her phone.
So she did.
And she stayed on the train until she arrived, a solid hour later, at the last stop—Coney Island. She knew her way around there a little bit since her parents liked to go out to dinner on Brighton Beach, and both neighborhoods were on the same boardwalk. So she walked out of the station and crossed the street toward sky/ocean and then started to walk down the boardwalk to the left, in the direction of Brighton.
A lot of the amusement park rides and stalls were closed, but some were open, and there were a healthy number of people also out walking the boardwalk. When she passed the aquarium she thought about going in but didn’t feel like spending money to be inside dark rooms with little kids shouting “Dory!”
If they even still did that.
It was so nice out.
Again.
Fall
was her favorite.
No one knew where she was.
No one could ruin this for her.
Her mother would be absolutely losing her mind.
The thought of it brought a smile to her lips. Because her mother was always talking so nostalgically about life before smartphones. About printed maps and having to follow directions that people gave you and that you wrote down. And pay phones. And phones with stretchy coiled wires. And letters. She claimed to like it better when you didn’t know why a friend was late until they showed up; didn’t have headlines delivered to your pocket but had to read the newspaper at the end of the day like everybody else. She said things like, “Back then, when your father was late, I’d think he was dead in a ditch. But it always turned out he wasn’t. And we survived.”
Ilanka would ask, on occasion, how all of that could possibly be better.
Her mother would check her phone and say, “It just was.”
Mothers ruin everything.
See how she likes it now.
It was too early to eat; most places weren’t even open, but a gift shop was, so she went in and looked at tables and walls of T-shirts and sunglasses and flip-flops and bought herself a Coney Island beach towel with a voluptuous mermaid on it.
She walked toward the beach.
She took off her shoes and headed for the horizon. She had sunglasses in her bag, so she took those out, put them on. She stepped around a piece of broken glass before spreading out her towel and sitting on it by the water’s edge.
People ruined everything.
A creepy-looking older dude with wild hair and no shirt on was walking along the water, and she was tempted to lie back and close her eyes to avoid contact, but that seemed like a bad idea.
Men ruined everything.
Her whole chest tightened.
Then he was gone and she relaxed again.
Her phone was calling to her.
Ha.
But there was nothing good that would come of turning it on, really. It was a fix she didn’t need. Today nothing was broken.
A real party pooper of a cloud rolled in—looking way heavier than it had any right to be on such a spectacular day—and parked it right in front of the sun. When it finally moved, Ilanka checked around for creepy dudes but the coast was literally clear. This amused her. She lay back in full sun and closed her eyes—just for a few minutes would be okay—and her skin felt warm and light.
She wanted so badly to take a beach selfie but really didn’t want to turn her phone back on. Because the device would see the photo and know where she was when no one else did.
No one.
Incredible.
MARWAN
During a break between soccer drills, Marwan snuck into the elevator and went down to meet Eden. She was on the sidewalk wearing earbuds, and she pulled one out and let it dangle. “Hey,” she said, unzipping her backpack.
“Hey,” he said. “I need to make it quick.”
“There’s sort of some new stuff you should know,” she said. “Like a lot.”
The car parked behind her had Georgia plates. The podcast guy still hadn’t cracked the case of the missing beauty queen, and Marwan was starting to wonder whether he’d made a mistake investing in so many episodes.
They both said, “Could you meet me—” before stopping and laughing.
“I’m done in like twenty, then just need to shower.”
“Panera?” She handed him the device.
“Sure.”
“You’re just going to walk in with it in your hand?”
He had a hand towel around his neck and pulled it off and covered the device.
“Ah,” she said. “Okay, see you in a bit.”
“Definitely,” he said.
Coach was standing in the elevator holding the door open when Marwan went back in. “You staying focused?” he said as Marwan stepped into the elevator.
“She’s a friend,” Marwan said.
It was a strange lie. He’d meant to make it sound like Eden was just a friend. But was she even that or was he reaching? How would he know for sure when they’d made that sort of leap? Would anything they’d shared matter at all when the device was gone?
“I wasn’t talking about her,” Coach said. “I was wondering what she just handed you.” He nodded at the towel. “Whatcha got?”
“It’s really nothing,” Marwan said. “It’s private, really. Of hers.”
The door closed and up they went.
“If I ever found out you were using any—”
“What? No. Never. It’s nothing like that.” Marwan had never touched drugs and never would.
“You’d tell me,” Coach said. “If you were in trouble? In over your head in any way?”
“It’s really nothing to worry about,” Marwan said.
Coach said, “If you’re sure.”
Marwan said, “I’m sure,” and wished it didn’t feel like a lie.
After cool-downs and a shower, he went out with wet hair and walked the half block to Panera. She was sitting in a booth with her earbuds in, looking at her phone. He slid in across from her, and she looked up and slipped her earbuds out—both of them this time.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” he said. He should tell her right now, super casually, that her mom had come into the restaurant last night. She probably already knew! But then wouldn’t she mention it? He couldn’t find the right words so he said, “What are you listening to?” Because maybe it was a podcast. Maybe they had something easy in common.
But she didn’t answer. She said, “You were right. We need to just get rid of it as soon as possible.”
“Why? What happened?”
It was crowded—like people at almost every table; some families with small kids, some people with laptops.
“I don’t even know where to start, but for example it sort of disappeared for a while,” she said.
“What?”
“Yeah, we walked away from our stuff for like—”
“Wait.” He was missing something. “Our?”
She shook her head, started over. “It was … the device was with me, and I was going to walk up to you to tell you that it told Ilanka not to trust Eli, but then I figured I shouldn’t bother you at work …”
She’d wanted to see him last night. Knowing that felt good.
“… but I guess I didn’t want to be alone with it, so I ended up meeting up with Eli at Socrates.”
“Did it say why it doesn’t trust him?”
“It said he has gotten too interested, like asking too many questions. He’s been texting it and stuff. Asking it where it came from and why and all.”
“Any good answers?”
“Not that he shared with me.” Eden took the lid off her tea and dunked the tea bag in and out a few times. “Anyway, we went to look at this art installation like ten feet away, and when we came back it was gone, then a few minutes later it was there again. I don’t know if someone took it and put it back or if it somehow turned invisible? Like a trick-of-the-eye kind of thing where it was camouflaged? Then it said it was being watched, that someone was coming for it. So we took it on a ferry ride to Wall Street and Brooklyn.”
“What?”
“I know! And when I got home my friend Anjali was there and I’d said I was with her but my mom had bumped into her randomly, even though I thought my mom was out in the city, and I had to scramble up a lie when she saw a text from Ilanka about the device.”
This was the time to say it! He knew why her mom had lied! He couldn’t do it, though. He said, “Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“How did you explain it?”
“I said it was just an inside joke because one of our teachers is always going on about our devices and device time and device dependency so now it’s just like a thing we all say but really we’re just talking about phones or whatever.”
“That’s pretty good.”
“Thanks. Oh, and it’s been talking
to me, like in a real voice—or computerized voice, but it sounds real. And it can project its messages onto walls. And it actually seemed mad at me yesterday. Like vibrating and saying ‘Do not ignore the device.’ Freaked me out.”
“I missed a lot!”
“Oh, and did you see Ilanka’s text?”
“Yeah, I saw. If I were the device, she’s the one I wouldn’t trust.”
“Why?”
“She wanted nothing to do with it. Now all of a sudden she does. It doesn’t make sense. Why is she doing it?”
“Why are we doing it?” She sipped her tea. “And, like, why the four of us?”
“Maybe it was something we did, like, online. Like a search or a website we visited. Something we bought? An app?”
“Maybe,” Eden said. “I’m not sure it matters. We just need an exit strategy. I mean, we can’t just keep going forever with it, right? What do you think would happen if we just, like, walked out, right now? Left it here.”
He shrugged. “It would fry both of our phones?”
She said, “So we’d get new phones.”
“I honestly don’t know. But I don’t think abandoning it in a public place is the solution. We need to figure out who owns it or whatever.”
Marwan’s bag buzzed on the bench seat beside him. He opened it and the device spoke clearly, “I can hear you.”
He and Eden swapped a nervous look. Of course it could.
It said, “I don’t like it here.”
“Should we go?” Eden asked Marwan.
The device buzzed and shouted: “I am about to make a scene.”
“Why?” Eden said. “Don’t make a scene. What kind of scene?”
“You are trying to get rid of me again,” it said.
“It’s not like that,” Eden said, even though it very much was.
Water rained down on them from sprinklers on the ceiling.
Marwan zipped his bag closed, and he and Eden ran for the door along with everyone else.
EDEN
“Wait, this is your house?” she said when they stopped. Her mother was home and had agreed to let her go on her “coffee date” so long as she came home for the afternoon for some mother-daughter bonding. Marwan had said his parents were running the Egypt table at a multicultural day at his sisters’ school, so he’d suggested they come here to regroup.
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