On Wednesday she asks to borrow her mom’s Subaru after her mom’s back from teaching school to take herself to the AT&T store in South Kingston.
“Do you have insurance on your phone?” Amy wants to know.
Do I have insurance on my mental well-being? Sam thinks. “No,” she says. “I’m sad to say I think I opted out.”
“A new phone is going to cost you a fortune,” worries Amy. “Do you need money?”
“No, I have money, Mom. I was earning money all last year.”
“I still don’t understand that.”
“It’s complicated,” says Sam, even though it is, in fact, not all that complicated. She made money for doing a job; pretty straightforward. “But it’s fine. I have enough for a new phone. Promise.”
“You sure you don’t want to keep the same number?” asks the guy at the store, Shawn—nose ring, eyebrow ring, lip ring. “Most people keep the same number.”
“Different number,” says Sam. “I’m sure.”
Shawn unboxes the new phone with the precision and reverence of an art restorer unpacking an aged canvas. He tells Sam that her contacts will transfer automatically from the cloud. “Your photos too, if you had them backed up.” Sam shudders. She doesn’t want to think about photos. She says, “What about my apps? TikTok, Instagram, et cetera?”
“You may have to re-download them onto this baby.” He taps the new phone. “And in some cases they’ll ask for your username and password again.”
“And if I don’t want them?” Obviously Sam knows her way around a phone, but she just wants to make sure.
Shawn shrugs. “Then don’t download them. Nobody’s going to force you to be on social media if you don’t want to.” He grins.
Sam makes a noise halfway between the harrumpha grumpy old man would make when faced with a universal remote control and the hmmmof a pensive research librarian. Shawn is right. She doesn’t have to download anything she doesn’t want. It’s exactly that easy, and it’s also exactly that hard.
When she’s paying, and they’re both waiting for the printer to spit out the pages of the contract, she notices that Shawn is looking at her funny.
“What?” she says.
“You look familiar to me,” he says. He squints, and the piercing in his eyebrow wiggles. “Do I know you from somewhere?”
She snatches the pages, grabs the phone. “I just have one of those faces people think they know,” she says. “This happens to me like ten times a day.”
The first thing she does when her contacts finish downloadingfrom the cloud is call Henry. Ava answers. (Why is Ava answering Henry’s cell?)
“Sam?” Ava’s voice is deep and measured and very, very calm. “Henry’s in the shower. But I knew he wouldn’t want to miss a call from you so I thought I’d grab it.”
“Perfect,” says Sam insincerely. She doesn’t think people should answer each other’s cell phones except in cases of emergency, e.g., if the person is waiting to hear about an organ transplant or is on the wait list for an audience with the pope.
“He’s out of the shower!” says Ava. “Here he is.”
Henry comes on the line. “Sam? What’s up?”
“I need backup,” says Sam. “I’m home. And I need backup.”
“What kind of backup?”
“Just... I don’t feel equipped to be an only child right now. I need you, Henry.”
She can almost feel Henry smiling. “I can’t come home. I’m just beginning an eight-week immersive language program.”
“You’rewhat?”
“I’m learning Greek.”
“Henry!Why?”
