Ride or Cry

My screen shattered at 10:47 PM on a Tuesday. One clumsy elbow drop onto the **iPhone** 12 Pro Max—RIP to my digital life—and suddenly I was staring at spiderweb cracks instead of my carefully curated feed. The absolute worst timing, too. Emily's party was in full swing, and I could practically feel the FOMO eating me alive from the inside out.

"You're being dramatic," my brother scoffed from his bed, where he was definitely NOT supposed to be since he'd supposedly gone to sleep two hours ago. "It's just a phone."

"Easy for you to say," I shot back, trying to angle the shattered screen toward the ceiling light. "You don't understand. My whole social existence is in here. It's literally my lifeline."

"That's actual **bull** and you know it," he said, sitting up. "Remember when you went to that lake party last summer and spent the entire time stressing about getting your phone wet? You missed everything. Actual Taylor stood there like three feet away from you, and you were too busy casing the joint for potential drowning hazards for your electronics to even say hey."

I froze. Taylor. The whole situation had been a masterclass in awkward teenage paralysis. The **water** had sparkled like diamonds under fairy lights, people were laughing and cannonballing and living their best lives, and I'd been hovering near the snack table, clutching my phone like it was the last life vest on a sinking ship.

"Okay, valid," I admitted. "But what am I supposed to do now? I can't just show up to school tomorrow disconnected from reality. People will think I died or something."

"Or," he suggested, "you could actually talk to people. Like, with your mouth. Remember how that works?"

I groaned. "My social battery is literally at 2%. This is torture."

"You're so dramatic," he said, but he was smiling now. "Hey, you know that old **cable** TV in the basement that Dad never got rid of? We could hook up the gaming system and actually do something fun. You know, like ancient civilizations used to."

I looked at my shattered screen one last time, then at my grinning brother. Maybe he had a point. Maybe my whole digital existence had become a cage of its own making. "Fine," I said. "But you're going down in Mario Kart."

"Bring it," he said, tossing me a controller. "Welcome back to the real world, little bro. It's actually pretty chill out here."