“Hmm,” Helena said.
I didn’t like the sound of that. That was her something is happening hmm.
I had to distract her. And everyone else. “I thought about getting fresh with the Dairy Queens!”
It worked.
“Wow,” Paul said. “That’s… I don’t know what that is.”
“Are you sure you can handle it?” Vince asked me. “Seems like it’d be a lot of work. I mean, there’s, like, ten of them.”
Helena dabbed her eyes. “I remember when you were just a little boy and girl. I’m so proud of who you’ve become.”
“I want nothing to do with this,” Darren announced to no one in particular.
“You should probably just go home and get some sleep,” Larry said, ma
king me drink more water. “You can think about group activities when you’re feeling better.”
“Or never,” Matty said. “That seems like it would be such an unnecessary mess.”
“Why are you scowling?” Robert asked Jeremy. “You used to get that same look on your face when you were a kid and your mother wanted you to share your toys.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jeremy said, pouting as he crossed his arms.
“The others do the same thing,” Charlie said to Robert. “Even though they’re not children anymore. It’s cute, most of the time.”
“Oh hey,” Nana said. “What’s this? Is it a game? I don’t have games on my phone ever since that whole Words With Friends debacle. How was I to know I was playing against a thirteen-year-old? It’s not my fault he couldn’t bring it and I made him cry. How do I play? Do I need to make it go to egg-streme?”
Time slowed down around me as Nana lowered her thumb toward the screen.
I rose in slow motion as Jeremy began to lunge toward the phone.
Larry squawked in surprise as I bumped into him.
Which meant, of course, that I hit the water bottle from his hand right as Nana pushed the slider all the way to the right.
There was a beat of time, an infinitesimal moment where nothing happened.
And then it went egg-streme.
Three things happened almost simultaneously.
My knees buckled as the egg exploded in my butt, the vibrations so intense I thought I was going to swallow my tongue,
and
the water bottle flipped through the air, water spilling out and splashing onto Nana and my phone,
and
Jeremy knocked the phone from Nana’s hand, and it fell to the floor with an audible crack as the wet screen broke, the waving egg disappearing into a black error message.
It should have ended everything. My phone was broken. It should have stopped.
But it didn’t.
The egg kept vibrating.