for half an hour, laila had been stomping around the festival grounds, suffering through the afternoon sun’s residence in a cloudless sky, searching for somewhere, anywhere, that would let her have one quality call with her grandmother. how had her efforts been rewarded by the universe? thirty minutes of crackling, chopped-up conversation and a screen full of pixellated earwax, which… fine, she didn’t want a screen full of high-definition earwax, but she had other things to do on her phone; look for local bites, look for future looks, look for strangers’ approval, so on, so forth. so, after settling in the shadow of a bar playing bowel-movement-boosting bass, she hovered a finger over the red icon–
“BE BOLD– HOOK UP WITH– PRODUCER MAN– ASK HIM–”
oh, god, had speaker always been that close to end call? she scrambled to actually end the call and silence the unsolicited career advice, but the damage had been done. and, as she learned after looking up from her phone, it had been done beside one of her tour mates.
she tapped them on the shoulder, face screwed up in an appropriate amalgamation of a wince and a smile. best-case scenario: they, along with everyone in a five-mile vicinity, had gone deaf at a recent show and thus heard nothing of grandma’s inability to update hooking up’s definition in her personal dictionary. worst-case scenario: she was about to find out. “excuse me, sorry, you wouldn’t happen to know where i could get a better signal? my family thinks they can’t convey excitement over text, i guess.”