You Must Fall In Love

Chapter Twenty-Nine

"I got you a phone," chirped Jen, swinging her shopping bag like someone who very rarely went shopping. "Hope you enjoy being reconnected to the modern world!"

Christine blinked at her, still trying her best not to look red-eyed. If Jen realized she'd been crying, there wouldn't be an end to it for at least two days.

"You got me a phone," she repeated. It was the second thing she had repeated in the last five minutes, but she felt like it was the only appropriate answer.

"Well, technically," said Jen, "your mom got you a phone. I asked her if I could grab a replacement, you know, as an emergency sort of thing, and she was like, 'Of course I have to pay, Jennifer,' and then she asked me to get the cheapest one available. So there you are."

She proffered the white cardboard box with the vaguely phone-shaped chunk of plastic on its front, looking very proud of herself.

"Right," said Christine, peeling the box open with some difficulty. "How much did this cost?"

"Not telling," said Jen sweetly. "By the way, what happened to the bed?"

Christine looked down and realized that she was sitting on a mattress with no bedsheets, no blanket, four ruined columns and a canopy that looked like a deflated red souffle.

"Nothing happened to the bed," she said. "I didn't do anything."

"If you say so," said Jen. "I bet Rob and August did, though."

Christine froze, then started to busy herself with removing the phone as a distracting maneuver. It really was a vaguely phone-shaped chunk of plastic, and it seemed reluctant to leave its cocoon and actually be tested.

"They came in here and had a fight," she said. "Does this sort of thing happen often?"

"Fight?" blinked Jen, before hopping up and down in excitement. "I was just kidding! Where, where? Why?"

Christine turned the box over and shook the chunk onto her lap. It had a screen, at least, and a few buttons. Maybe that would be enough to run a functioning version of Android.

When was the last time she'd had a phone with actual buttons on the bottom?

"Why are you so excited?" she groused. "You've never been in a fight in your life."

"Well, neither have you," said Jen, "but you don't see me complaining about it. It's a research thing. See, I've always wanted to get some good live field-notes on those two, but they never show anything interesting in front of me. I can't believe you saw them going at it!"

The way Jen said it made her sound like some fame-addled fangirl, high on the fumes of her favorite K-pop star. Christine considered, not for the first time, that there was something rather wrong with Jen's head.

"I could barely see anything," she said, trying and failing to make some sense out of the insipid manual, which looked like it had been written in Chinese and English at the same time and by the same person. "Rob threw August into the ceiling, and then they both landed on the bed. That was it."

"Really? No transformations? No dramatic declarations of power? No spells?"

"No!" said Christine, already annoyed by the mention of spells. "God, you're such a nerd!"

"I am what I am," said Jen, without any hint of shame. "Popeye said that."

"I thought he was a yam."

"Maybe. I can't recall."

The fact that Jen could say it so confidently made Christine feel like she had spent the last ten years cultivating exactly the wrong friend, and that her efforts might have been better spent finding a boyfriend, or at least a normal person.