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


The faded image of the unknown girl, also seventeen, same as Lucy, hung on her bedroom wall next to the door. It was an inside joke amongst Lucy and her friends, each of them having one of their own, random photos they found at a garage sale that they thought were “so adorable”. 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. Ever. 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 ever found to leave her room.


The girl in the photo on the wall watched with grave concern. From her unique vantage point, she saw Lucy spending all her waking hours alone, staring at a little box of light that she kept dutifully at her side, allowing it to dictate her mood and leaving no room for quiet time or private moments. She hid behind a carefully manufactured image made available to the whole world to evaluate and assess, her entire self-worth and esteem submitted for approval or rejection.


The girl in the photo on her wall wanted desperately to help. She hoped her blinking would trigger some sort of reaction from Lucy, some sense of intrigue to pull her into the real world and out of her make-believe, virtual world. 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 taking her to the library, or maybe even to the family where the photo came from, to develop some genuine curiosity about things, some wonder, some imagination, some ambition.


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! It wasn’t true, of course, but with that idea thrown out there like a grenade, how would their 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. She had been blocked! 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 believed her, some who wouldn’t believe her, others 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 into a deep sleep.


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 localized storm, knocking the power out selectively in Lucy’s neighborhood and her neighborhood alone. She always charged her phone overnight, yet with each new ding ding ding of relentless notifications, the battery indicator on her phone dwindled down down down to ten, five, four, three, two, one, and finally, to zero, leaving her with a dead phone due to the power outage.


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 Lucy patted her pillow to invite her in this time. She bounded up onto the bed and the two of them snuggled together.


For that moment, the self-imposed cares, burdens, and pressures of her online world were absent. She laid there smiling, breathing free and easy as she allowed herself to bask in the unfamiliar peace, experiencing the world for what it really was around her for the first time in a long time.


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