By: Benjamin  He

It had been three days since Celia’s mother had bought the new VibeConnect telephone. Celia wasn’t sure what to make of it.

It was a nice telephone, for sure, even if it was a traditional landline one. It was draped in shiny red, like its surface had been polished a dozen times over. Its keypad was painted in a nice cream color, which popped out against the red. The words “VibeConnect” were scrawled in black on the handset.

Celia wasn’t suspicious about the telephone itself necessarily, more about its rise to fame. It seemed to have become a sensation overnight. Commercials for the VibeConnect appeared everywhere: on billboards, in bus stops, on all major search engines and the minor search engines. Every single influencer seemed to be endorsing it. It was the front page of Home Appliance Weekly three issues in a row. The VibeConnect even reached the top five of the most purchased products in America. Of all time.

Besides its meteoric rise to fame, though, Celia couldn’t find anything wrong with it. It worked fine. It didn’t contain a tracking chip or anything, as far as she could tell, anyway. She had checked (she had taken it apart with a screwdriver, then reassembled it before her parents got home). It was just a popular telephone.

That didn’t mean Celia trusted it though. She was still suspicious, even if her parents fawned over it all the time. She was pretty sure they preferred not to leave the same room it was in.

Anyway, Celia thought that today was a good enough day to get her parents away from the VibeConnect. Her parents had offered to take her to the park for the weekend. It was a sunny Saturday, she had finished all her homework the day before, and a day at the park seemed nice enough.

So, she grabbed her jacket and left with her parents.

A half-hour later, Kenny, Byron, and Addison showed up at Celia’s front door.

“Are we absolutely sure we want to do this?” Byron asked, shuffling nervously.

“It’ll be fine,” said Addison. “All we need to do is just ‘borrow’ Celia’s notes. I’m not repeating freshman year again.”

Kenny walked up to the door and pushed at it. The door slid open. “Well, it ain’t locked,” Kenny said, his voice carrying a slight western tang. “C’mon.”
The trio stepped into the foyer. Byron opened his mouth. “I still don’t think that-”

“Shut up,” Addison interrupted. “Help me look.”

Kenny pointed to something in the room corner. “Hey, they’ve got a VibeConnect!”

Byron’s eyes lit up. “Oh, yeah! I know a ton about those! The VibeConnect receiver is actually made from a special type of p-”

“Are you gonna help or do I need to do this myself?” Addison snapped.

Byron hung his head and followed behind her. Kenny however, looked the other way at the VibeConnect. It looked so very nice.

So very nice.

A few minutes later, when Addison had failed to find anything downstairs, she dragged Byron to the second floor. Byron wasn’t feeling great about this. First, he had been dragged into breaking and entering, even if the door was unlocked, and then he had been cut off from listing domestic appliance facts, and now he was ransacking a home. So, the moment Addison went into the first room, Byron bailed.

He went downstairs. Kenny was still there too. Although, he didn’t seem to be moving. And he was lying on the floor with a rather nasty looking purple rash on the side of his head. But surely he was fine. Byron was too busy looking at the VibeConnect and thinking that it was looking very polished.

Byron knew a whole list of facts that he had memorized off a menagerie of different sites, but now his mind was devoid of trivia as he stared at the telephone. The telephone…

Addison was fuming. Both Kenny and Byron had disappeared, and while she had found the English notes she wanted, this kind of behavior was unacceptable. She stormed downstairs. Where were those two?

Well, she didn’t find either of them but what she did find was a lovely-looking telephone.

An hour later, Celia came back with her parents. While she was there, all her parents did was strike up conversations with other parents about the VibeConnect. Couldn’t they at least talk about death or taxes or Morgan Freeman?

She walked into the living room. Huh. Well, that’s weird. Her English notes were just laying on the floor. As she reached down to pick them up, she heard the VibeConnect ring. Celia felt a sudden urge to pick up.

Celia walked over. She took hold of the receiver and raised it to her ear.

“Hello?”