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“Nope, me. How was tonight?”

I blinked awake. My mom was sitting on the side of my bed and my cat-clock said it was two AM. Perfect time for a mother-daughter chat.

“Okay?”

“Just okay?” The scent of cigarettes and beer wafted off of her like strong perfume.

I pushed myself up onto my elbows. “Parts were fun. I got to hang with Liam a little.”

“Good. I’m glad.” She leaned in, kissed my forehead, then stood. I heard one of her knees pop, and suddenly she seemed more frail than she’d been the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that one. I didn’t like this new knowledge I had of her, it made it harder to be angry and more frightening that someday she might leave me.

“Hey—Mom?” I called after her.

“Yeah?” She turned in the doorway.

“Can I go studying with some kids from history class tomorrow? At ten?”

“Sure. Get Allie breakfast before that though.”

“Will do. I—love you.” It’d been awhile since I’d said it, now I felt I needed too, just in case. We lived in Kansas. Tornados were a constant risk.

“I love you too. G’night sweetheart,” she said, then wandered down the hall.

I woke to something very small buzzing nearby. Like when a fly zips by your cheek—I jerked up, prepared to defend my ears and nostrils from assault, clapping my hands over anywhere a fly could land and lay eggs and initiate me into an urban legend.

But when I sat up in bed there was nothing—other than a vague recollection of almost being kissed, twice, plus a dead dog.

Then it buzzed again—my phone. I had it on silent, but it was still getting messages for me—I picked it up and ZB opened in my mind in all its multi-tentacled glory. Every photo my classmates had taken for the past twenty-four hours inundated me—plus a message tagged with my name.

Saw MizMarmelade almost make-out with Lefty last night.

And beside it, Emily’s nick and icon, a cartoon hand flipping the universe off.

Could she just not be a shit-stirrer? For even a day? I glowered at the message and saw it for what it was in Lightning Land—a shining line of code. It would be so easy to—I clenched my free fist, because the action seemed to require it, and just like that the offending message was gone.

I stroked my thumb across the screen to refresh ZB. Was it really gone, or just gone for me? The former, I hoped. I set my phone down and scrubbed at my face and?—

felt thebuzz-stingagain.

I grabbed my phone and found the same comment with a new timestamp and the addition of the word ‘slutty’.

Didn’t she have better things to do with her Saturday mornings? I deleted this one, too, and counted to sixty and?—

Saw slutty MzMarmelade almost let Lefty fingerbang her last night!

Okay. Clearly she wanted my attention—well now she fucking had it.

I sank into ZB, completely. Every second longer I took meant another classmate might see what she’d said, but I didn’t want to be fighting with Emily all day long—I wanted to cut her off at the source.

I found the thread of her nastygram to me and instead of cutting it off, I grabbed hold of it and pulled.

There was resistance—something internal to ZB fought me, like a tug-of-war—but then I felt it fall free and I spooled the message and everything else Emily’d put on ZB in the past day to me and then pulled, like I was yanking an extension cord out of a distant socket.

I heard-felt-saw thepopand then the light I held—Emily’s string of daily data—went dark.

I didn’t know if I’d deleted her ZB account or zapped her phone and truly I didn’t care. I counted to sixty, and when my phone didn’t get any new messages I hopped into the shower.

I got Allie breakfast and ate some myself. Allie wanted to know what I was up to and didn’t believe me that mom knew I was going—I could tell from the way she looked at me—but she wasn’t about to wake up mom to find out, not if it meant watching cartoons unsupervised all morning. I was pacing around the living room by 9:45 and went out to Darius’s car the second he drove up.