Always on Your Side (NaNoWriMo 2019)

13.

I plug the phone into my charger and wait a ridiculously long time for it to light up and buzz to life.

His lock screen is a picture of us as children. It was from Mom and Adam's wedding reception. Brendon was ring-bearer and I was a flower girl. Brendon was wearing a suit with an orange tie. I was wearing a white dress white with a few layers of tulle over it. Fake orange butterflies were trapped beneath the top layer.

I destroyed that dress after the wedding. Not out of malice towards the dress, which I had felt but suppressed, but because I wanted the butterflies. With scissors, I freed them from the net of lace that entrapped them so they would be free to play with me and the rest of my toys. My mom had been furious when she saw, despite having promised me I would never have to wear the dress again after the wedding. "It doesn't matter if weren't going to wear it again! Your new Auntie Jane made that dress for you!"

Mom took the butterflies away and kept them in a Ziplock bag next to my dress for a while, hoping to eventually repair the damage. But she was no seamstress and soon gave up. The ruined dress was donated to a starving child in a third world country and the butterflies thrown into the trash. As a punishment, I wasn't allowed to keep them.

"You did the right thing," Brendon told me as I stared at the backyard trash can forlornly. "Butterflies are meant to live in the wild. Maybe they can find their way home now."

In the picture, Brendon and I are on the dance floor, in the modest multi-purpose room of the community center where Adam's church also met, illuminated by the camera flash and disco lights. We're "dancing" in the way young kids dance, like "Ring Around the Rosies" but faster, spinning as hard as we can until it's difficult to stay up.

It's a good memory. Mom was happy. Adam was fun. Brendon and I danced, then spent the rest of the reception in the outdoor courtyard where the wedding ceremony had taken place, trying to catch the real butterflies they had released after Mom and Adam's first kiss. After the wedding, we all went on a "new family honeymoon" - a week-long cruise from San Francisco to Mexico. The cruise provided childcare so Mom and Adam could spend all the "quality time" together they wanted without leaving Brendon and I to miss out on the fun. It was an optimistic time. An end to all the life-ruining changes we were afraid the divorce would bring, an assurance that everything would be okay again.

I type the code from the greeting card and the phone unlocks. The background image is a different picture of him and me, this one from his high school graduation. I can't look at that one too hard, because now I'm crying, but I don't need to look at it. It was recent enough for me to hold the memory in my head. He'd looked so happy, so proud. So full of endless potential - he had his college admission, he was off to take on the world and he was ready.

That light in his eye must have disappeared at some point. Why didn't? Why didn't I do something?

I cry by myself for a good ten minutes before I touch the phone again. There's no need to rush, right? I have the rest of my life to go through this phone. And when I do, I won't have anything left of him. Just memories. At least this scavenger hunt thing makes me feel like there's still a little bit of him left in the world.

When I'm ready, I look at Brendon's apps. Everything looks pretty simple. Email, notes, calculator, Google translate. There's SweeTunes, a music app. I open the "games" folder to find three apps. One is called Cave Explorer, one is labeled "bootleg," and a third is Chatter.

I recognize the name "Chatter" immediately. It was a website we used to go on when we were kids. We first heard of it one summer when we went to this museum in San Francisco. It was an artificial intelligence designed to learn how to talk. Kind of like Cleverbot, I guess, but this was before Cleverbot's time. There was a computer set up in the museum for you to type something for Chatter to respond to, and a wall installation explaining that you could download Chatter's software online for your own computer for only $4.99. Brendon and I taught it our inside jokes. We asked for the software for Christmas, but we didn't get it - Mom and Adam were both very suspicious of anything you could download from the internet.