Battery Dead

Call her Charlene, call her Charlie, really anything but insane, because that's all her friends will call her these days. Ex-friends, because she is not insane. She is completely sane, and completely singled out by her phone.

Yes, evil cell phones are a thing. She would know. She has one.

She doesn't know if it's revenge for dropping it in the toilet (it was an accident, she swears) or maybe some sort of twenty first century kind of voodoo where her nemesis Charles, the OG Charlie, as he refers to himself, because at twelve days her senior, he has dibs on the name, has hacked into her stuff to make her feel like she is going crazy.

She's not going crazy.

When's the last time that she's slept? Like an actual, all the way through the night, deep, relaxing night of sleep. Every night her alarm goes off. She's gotten into the habit of triple checking to see if it is off before she plugs it in for the night. It's off. Heck, all the alarms have been deleted, save for the one at 8am, the one that gets her ready for her first class of the day.

She's lucky if she doesn't fall asleep during that class. It's English, and Mr. Jenkins is a stickler. They call him Mr. Jerkins, the one who will take your phone away and promise to delete your progress on Candy Crush. He hasn't figured out that you can redownload the game and get your progress back.

He also doesn't realize that the kids use it as a cover for all the explicit texts they're sending in between the pages of their copy of MacBeth.

Charlene doesn't text in class. In fact, her phone isn't even in sight. It's buried under her sack lunch in her bookbag, at her feet. 

Yet for some reason, it decides to start playing music in the middle of a lecture on symbolism. It's the Macarena. She had put the song on there when she had jockeyed her sixteenth birthday party and forgotten to take it off.

"Miss Charlene, your phone please." Mr. Jenkins knows that it's her, because it happened on Wednesday too. 

Her headphones have been plugged in all morning.

She digs out her phone, and even the teacher has to stop and check that the headphones are indeed plugged in, because still it plays.

The volume had been put on mute.

"You'll get this back at the end of class." He shoves it in his drawer. She almost tells him he can keep it. Better yet, she'll just sneak out at the end of class without it, and the curse can be transferred to him.

It's a great plan, except he catches her scurrying out the door and calls her back. Tells her that if this incident happens again she will get sent to the detention hall for the remainder of the day. He advises her to check for glitches on her phone.

"Excellent idea, sir."

As if she hasn't tried that already.

She bumps into OG Charlie in the hall and he snickers. "The eighties called. They want their song back."

"It was the nineties, you twit," she replies and pushes through the crowd. Her eyelids are sagging. Her body wants to collapse onto the bench by the nurse's office, but she can't be late for chemistry class. They're taking a test today. Multiple choice.

Her phone buzzes. She doesn't dare pick it up, but it keeps buzzing.

1. a

2. c

3. a

Every answer, buzz buzz, from an unknown number.

Her phone is supposed to be off. That's the rule. If your phone goes off during the test, you're suspected of cheating.

When your phone is giving you the answers, those suspicions become accusations.

"I didn't even look at my phone," she pleads, watching the teacher pull the cap off her red pen. There's a big fat zero on her test now. 

So much for getting valedictorian.

She throws her phone into her locker. It can stay there for all she cares, until the battery dies, and it suffers an unfortunate fall, crashing into a million pieces.

It doesn't crash into a million pieces.

That night, she doesn't charge it. It's sitting in the living room, wedged between two sofa cushions. Nobody should be able to find it there. And on the off chance an alarm does go off, she quadruple checked, the cushions should muffle it.

At one in the morning, the phone uses it's mere thirteen percent battery to sound the alarm again. She hears it upstairs, in her room, and has to pull herself out of bed to shut it off. 

She trips down the stairs. It feels like she has broken something. The alarm dies out, along with the phone, so she shuts her eyes and falls back to sleep. Her mother discovers her in the morning. She also discovers that she has a broken arm.

"Charlene, why didn't you call for help?"

"I did. You must not have heard me." 

"You should have called on your phone. You should always have it with you, in case you get hurt." If only her mother knew how the tables had been turned. She had spotted it when they'd relocated to the couch to inspect her arm. It'd been thrown into her purse without question.

It's ringing now.

But it's supposed to be dead.

The noise startles her mother, and suddenly their car is crashing into another. She's pretty sure she spaced out for a moment, because now there's sirens, and she is pretty sure more than just her arm is broken. 

"Are you okay?" She can hear the voice, but can't connect it to a face. Her eyes don't want to open. Willpower wins, and they open to find everything obliterated. 

Well, mostly everything. 

There sitting in the road is her phone. No cracks, not a dent on it. Battery dead, volume muted, waiting for one of the emergency vehicles to run it over.

Their tires squash it.

She's getting carried off to the ambulance, and right under the back tire, she sees the remnants of her screen light up. Its opened up her music player.

B-B-B-Baby, you just ain't seen nothin' yet

A boy walks up, and she recognizes that gait as that voodoo freak Charlie. He walks over to the EMT, points under the wheel.

"Charlene! Are you okay?"

"Sir, we need you to move out of the way."

"Call me, alright?" He points under the wheel where the phone is still wedged. "Make sure she gets that back so she can call me."

He smiles a devilish grin.

Here's something that you never gonna forget

B-B-B-Baby, you just ain't seen nothin' yet