The girl in the photo on her wall blinked. Again. But Lucy Benedict didn’t notice. She never noticed.


The faded image of the melancholy girl hung on her bedroom wall. The photo was an inside joke amongst Lucy and her friends, each of them having a similar picture from a collection they discovered together at a garage sale and found "soo cute". They facetiously referred to them as their spirit sisters and gave each of them a name, Lucy calling hers Samantha.


No, Lucy did not notice the blinking girl, because her world extended no further than the palm of her hand. Her phone, to be exact, which she never kept out of arm’s reach.


At this moment, Lucy was absorbed in an impassioned video chat with her friend, Laura. They were both furious. Seems Laura’s boyfriend, Jake, had been unfaithful to her, caught cheating at a party by a mutual friend who posted a video of the incident on her social media story. The two-timer attempted to downplay the incident; when that didn’t work, he revealed on his own story some embarrassing personal information about Laura that she had shared with him in confidence. His attempt at deflection would not work, they determined.


The two of them vowed revenge. He would pay for it. This was war!


Following their talk, Lucy spent the rest of the afternoon mindlessly looking through her feed, an endless string of videos, texts, images, and other digital distractions. In the midst of her scrolling, her black lab, Oreo, came in and jumped up on the bed, wagging her tail playfully. Lucy was annoyed with her, as usual, and shooed her away, closing the door behind her without taking her eyes off the screen. She took a few select pictures of herself, posing in ways that she felt most flattered her appearance, then edited them with filters to improve her look and hide her crooked nose. She uploaded them and updated her status to #sobored.


She left the room in search of a snack, her phone hanging precariously from her back pocket. It was one of the few reasons she found to take her eyes off the screen.


The girl in the photo on the wall was terribly worried. From her unique vantage point, she saw Lucy spending most of her time staring at a little box of light that she kept always at her side, a taskmaster that dictated her mood. She left no room for private moments or down time, choosing instead to invest herself into a carefully manufactured image that she attended to obsessively, making her life available to the whole world to evaluate and assess, her self-worth and esteem submitted for approval or rejection.


The girl in the photo on her wall wanted desperately to help. She hoped that Lucy would notice her blinking, and that this would create a sense of intrigue to pull her into the real world and out of the virtual one. Maybe the mystery of who the blinking girl was would compel her on a quest to find out the truth about her, Samantha thought. Perhaps Lucy would visit the library to research the odd occurrence, or maybe even feel driven to learn more about the girl in the photo.


A ploy to help her develop some genuine curiosity about something - anything - apart from her online compulsion.


Returning shortly, Lucy rushed back into her room, slamming the door behind her.


“That little b****!” she shouted, phone to her eyeballs and face turning red as a tomato.


In a sudden turn of events, she was now the target of an online smear campaign. Turns out that the girl who tempted Jake away from Laura had posted a video claiming that Lucy had her own tryst with Jake, at the New Year’s party last year. Ridiculous! She proclaimed her innocence in a passionate video post, refuting the allegation vociferously. It wasn’t true, she insisted, but with the idea thrown out there now like a grenade, how would her friends and everyone else know what to believe? Who to believe?


How could she prove something she hadn’t done?


Laura! She needed to talk to Laura. Dialing her up, her heart sank – one ring and straight to voicemail. Seriously, Laura was going to believe that little tramp rather than her best friend? She sent her a text instead, hoping to reach her that way - PLEASE CALL ME!, she wrote. Laura replied quickly with a biting text – SORRY, JAKE ISN’T HERE RIGHT NOW. PLEASE LEAVE A MESSAGE, followed by a middle finger emoji.


Laura screamed. Then wailed. Then sobbed inconsolably into her pillow.


Meanwhile, a torrent of notifications lit up her phone, one after the other - some who sided with her, some who refused to believe her and calling her a traitor, and even some who made sexual advances. Her artificially contrived world was crumbling apart. She felt betrayed and alone. Emotionally spent, she passed out for the night.


The girl in the photo on her wall wept. Heartbroken. She had to do something. An intervention of some sort. An awakening. But how?


A rather curious electrical storm moved in overnight - not predicted in any of the weather models, dumbfounding the meteorologists - a storm localized to Lucy's neighborhood, knocking the power out selectively in her home and her home alone. Since she always charged her phone overnight, each new ding ding ding of relentless notifications caused the battery indicator to dwindle down down down to ten, five, four, three, two, one, and finally, to zero, leaving her unknowingly with a dead phone.


Lucy awakened in the morning, not to the usual phone alarm she set - a particularly obnoxious trumpet fanfare - but to the sound of robins and yellowthroats singing outside her window. She found their songs to be particularly beautiful. A light breeze blew the curtain in and out ever so softly over her nightstand as the morning sun shone in. Oreo peeked longingly into her room - used to being turned away - but this morning, Lucy patted her pillow to invite her in. She bounded up onto the bed and the two of them snuggled together.


For that moment, her phone was forgotten, and the self-imposed cares, burdens, and pressures of her online world were absent. Lucy laid there smiling, breathing free and easy as she allowed herself to bask in a welcome peace which she had not felt in a long time.


And the girl in the photo on her wall smiled back at her.