To my mother, Sophie Quest, who showed me how to imagine
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The sun is just up in the desert, the mesa red against the violet sky, as I watch my mother use the Glare. Mom huddles between the coop and the supply shed with her right hand raised to her ear, her shoulders hunched like she’s holding a live grenade. She doesn’t know I’m awake and spying on her from the window, but she hides the Glare-box with her body, just in case.
I’m not fooled. I’ve seen her break her own rules before.
The first time it happened, I was fourteen. It was a morning like this—barely dawn, still cool. When I saw those tense shoulders and the flash of metal in Mom’s hand, tears of rage pressed hard and hot against my eyes. For a second I was so angry I wanted to scream, I can see you! It’s going to get inside you, too!
A few days later, while Mom was out helping a goat deliver a kid, I went through the purse she only uses on our trips to town. Under a false bottom I found a smooth clamshell of metal. I pried it open just long enough to glimpse the flicker of Glare inside, then clapped it shut. Later, I wasn’t sure if I’d felt a humming vibration or just imagined it.
In those days, I still half believed the energy in that metal chunk could get inside me and make me hurt myself. It had happened to the girl in the story I grew up hearing: a girl who had so many screens, too many screens. The screens were full of Glare, and the Glare wormed its way inside the girl’s head and possessed her. When she realized what was happening, she put drain cleaner in her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see the screens anymore. But it was too late. As the EMTs carried the girl away on a stretcher, with the red lights flashing and her mom tight-faced and her little brother sobbing, the girl screamed at the top of her lungs, “I can still see it! I can still see!”
The facts of this story are true. It happened to my babysitter when I was six years old in San Rafael, California; Mom wasn’t the first one to tell it to me. But I know now nothing’s so simple, and it’s how we interpret those facts that matters.
Now I give Mom’s Glare-box its proper name—cell phone. I know she’s probably just talking to Dad, telling him stuff about my trip she doesn’t want me to hear. That’s why she didn’t use the phone in the kitchen with its sticky black cord.
And the tears that blind me today are tears of tenderness, because tomorrow I’m going back to the world of Glare, the world where I was born, and I’m not afraid.
Mom doesn’t let me clear the dinner dishes. She pours us both more watery iced tea and sits down opposite me in the sweltering desert evening, under the motionless ceiling fan that needs a new motor. “Hedda,” she says, “I know you’re going to be testing the boundaries at your dad’s.”
Think fast. Is she threatening to cancel my trip? My hands start shaking under the table. Flies tap the window where the scorching sun swells it amber, their drone drilling its way into my brain.
She can’t keep me here. Not when I’m so close to getting away.
I’ve been carefully monitoring Mom’s moods ever since I started plotting my escape from this ranch—ever since the call came from Australia. Mom’s childhood best friend in Melbourne had been diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer. She has no family, and Mom started talking about flying out there for a few months to take care of her.
It took me nearly two weeks to persuade her to let me stay with Dad in California. First Mom wanted me to come with her. Then she suggested sending me to New Genesis, a place run by her friends in Nevada where people wear white robes, obey rules set by a Council of Elders, and don’t use electricity or running water, so she could be sure I wouldn’t look at Glare-screens. I let her know that was an over-my-dead-body scenario.
Because yes, okay, maybe I am testing the boundaries. My plan is to get Dad to let me attend school in San Rafael, then use that as leverage to convince Mom I should go to school here. And if she still says no… well, that’s when I’ll tell Dad I want to live with him. Or threaten to run away.
There’s only so long you can live twenty miles from everyone and everything before you get left behind.
“If you know exactly what I’m planning to do on this trip,” I tell Mom, keeping my voice level, “then you must also know you can trust me not to take it too far. I’m not a little kid anymore.”
“I hope I can trust you.”
The stress she puts on “hope” makes me tense. “What makes you think you can’t?”
Trust me not to stare, she means. Trust me not to get addicted like those girls I see at Walmart who are so busy on their Glare-boxes that they barely raise their eyes long enough to check out. When I was little, every time we went to town, Mom used her body to shield me from anyone who was smoking or using the Glare. Nowadays she seems to realize a single accidental inhale won’t turn me into a two-pack-a-day addict, but she hasn’t gotten any less paranoid about screens.
“Let’s not get into the blame game again, Hedda,” Mom says. And then she reaches under the table and brings out her secret cell phone and plunks it on the worn oilcloth between us.
I stare at the phone, blood pounding in my temples. Should I look surprised? Betrayed? Is she trying to trick me into admitting I touched it?
“I know,” I say because it’s too late to pretend I’m the girl she wants me to be, the girl who wouldn’t have gone looking for that phone.
“I know you know.” She looks straight at me, her eyes enormous and indigo in a strong light, just like mine. “And you’ve probably guessed I have it for emergencies, in case we break down on the way to Phoenix to see your dad.”
For the past decade, I’ve seen Dad exactly once a year when he buys me a fancy dinner in Phoenix on my birthday. He has a cell phone, too, of course—probably a dozen of them—but he’s not allowed to use it in front of me, not even to show me a picture of my half brother, whom I’ve never met.
“So we both know you don’t follow your own rules,” I say. “What’s your point?”
Mom opens the phone. I wince—can’t help it—but the screen is dinkier and duller than I remember. It’s nothing compared to the brand-new phone that belongs to Shannon, a girl I see sometimes at the county fair. Hers is perfectly smooth and flat, with a screen that lights up in colors that remind me of hard candy or the costume jewelry at the dollar store.
“It’s just an old flip phone. Touch it if you want.” Mom pushes the phone across the oilcloth to me.
I shake my head automatically. I may not be scared of her “flip phone,” but I’m not going to get myself in trouble now. “No thanks. I can do without the Glare just fine.”
Mom keeps staring at me. We look alike—wiry bodies, unruly black hair, intense eyes—and we have matching tempers, too. Today she’s holding hers back, and not just because we’re separating tomorrow for the first time in ten years. She wants something from me.
“We both know you’ve had your fill of looking at screens,” she says. “I’ve seen you with that girl at the fair, the one in the ridiculously short shorts, staring straight at her phone.”