No Reception

one // no reception

A/N: hi team! this is a little tightrope prequel that i wrote back when i was sixteen. it follows kaelin; the quirky cousin. i thought you might like it :))

I was talking to my friend Leah when it happened. When the entire foundation of my world shattered into a thousand tiny pieces. Sort of.

"No," I groaned in horror. The scene before me was so horrific that I gasped. "No, no, no. You've got to be kidding me!"

It wasn't that my whole life was over, exactly. It was more of a sense of burgeoning horror, as if a limb had suddenly been severed, and I was unaccustomed to its loss. Or, you know, not like that at all. 

My phone had lost reception. My phone had lost reception.

My older brother, Alec, blinked at his screen, shocked. He stared at it blankly for a few moments before his gaze rose to meet mine. His face depicted every emotion churning in the pit of my stomach. Despair, horror, fear. "Did that just happen?" His voice was laced with terror.

I could already sense the darkness of my bleak, internet-less future. The lack of GIFs starring hot actors, the Snapchat streaks that I had spent many tedious hours building and all the glorious, ridiculous gossip that I could no longer laugh at. All of it. Gone.

Solemnly, slowly, I nodded. "We just lost reception." I could have cried.

Harry, my irritating brother, laughed at us from the driver's seat. "What a tragedy."

"When Mum asked us if we wanted to stay with Elena, she did not mention that there was no reception," I shrieked. When Mum first told us of our little rendezvous, I'd been ecstatic. But no phone service?

"You're pathetic." Coming from him. Harry was a fifteen-year-old internet addict with no life. His phone could have been surgically attached to his hand for all the difference it would've made. He just wanted to pretend he had a life. I was confident enough to admit that I didn't. Well, I had an internet life, which works too. I'm 100% a people person, as long as I didn't have to actually physically interact with them. "And Mum mentioned it about a thousand times. And Elena mentioned it about ten thousand times."

"Well, it's not like I listened!"

"It's Kaelin and that's her phone," Alec pointed out from beside me. "That thing was her child, her life, her pride and joy. The one thing that lit up her day. Cut her some slack." As an afterthought, he added, "Don't bag me either. I have suffered equally so."

I feigned a sniffle and a pained expression to assist his argument. Okay, maybe not entirely feigned.

Harry snorted. How dare he laugh at my despair? "This is so, so sad."

"I know," I replied, staring mournfully at my phone.

Yes, I was aware that there were people in far worse situations than me, and on the stupid catastrophe scale they taught us in primary school, this was probably only a five. However, as a human it was my job to be utterly selfish and complain about life. Seriously, what do human beings even talk about if we didn't whine constantly about the irrelevant annoyances that plagued us during our mediocre lives? The weather?

Alec intertwined our arms in a show of alliance. "Yeah, what Aeya said."

"I'm already bored," I whined, staring at the trees flying by the window. I mean, sure, they were kind of pretty, but they're also trees and it's not exactly a new experience.

"Please shut up," Harry asked, nicely, which was really an achievement for him.

Half an hour later, because the drive seemed endless and I no longer had phone reception, I was still staring out of the window pretending to admire the scenery, when I was actually daydreaming about my future puppies called Mini Puff and Cat. They were going to be best friends, because Mini Puff is a Hufflepuff and Cat is Slytherin and the friendship would be awesome.