A/N:
I recently read a phenomenal book about the multiverse and was inspired to write this.
Prologue:
A blue box popped up on my phone's screen in front of me.
Screen time up 26% this week for a total of 15 hours daily
I chucked my phone to the other side of the bed in repulsion. Even I know 15 hours a day bad.
Fifteen hours a day? Staring at pictures of people I don't know on Instagram and watching stupid dances on tik tok? Pathetic.
I rolled over on my floral sheets, propping myself out of bed and made my way downstairs. I needed to interact with real people. The actual characters in my actual life. But the only real people in close proximity where that of my family and seemed otherwise busy and in their own little worlds.
My mother had her back to me and was shoeless, but still in the rest of her 70s librarian style work clothes. She was standing in front of a frying pan and humming a Weezer song that Alexa was playing softly in the background. My older brother, Alex, sat in front of the TV, aggressively playing some video game. His gangly arms were hunched over his legs as he manspread, taking up most of the couch. But my younger sister, Anna, was no where to be found.
"Basement," clipped Alex when I asked about her whereabouts, his eyes still glued on the TV in front of him.
Maybe she'll interact with me, I thought. Anna was usually good for some one on one time, but when I found her in a small nook surrounded by pastel pillows, she was in her own world too, her face between the pages of a very large book. I craned my head to glimpse the coved.
"Twilight?!" fell from my mouth, and I was immediately judging her.
She glanced up at me, perturbed.
"It's having a resurgence, Kim. It's good. Leave me alone." She brushed her thick black wavy strands out of her eyes as she spoke to me.
A snicker spread on my face. Anna was always a big reader, but she usually preferred plays about dead people in small towns or novels about little girls in gardens a couple hundred years. She was the intellectual one. The academic one. And now she was into Twilight?! Anna continued to defend her book selection, my smile an invitation to her defense argument.
"It's good. The characters are so real and so present in their lives. It's suspenseful. Have you even read it?"
"Parts of a few books. Maybe in middle school. I just didn't think teen supernatural love drama was your speed." My grin deepened, juxtaposing my smarty pants sister with YA dribble. "So, are you team Edward or Jacob?" My voices ticked up a bit, adopting that teasing sisterly tone.
Anna rolled her eyes as me. "Neither. I am much more interested in some of the side characters. Leah, the female wolf, she is fascinating and there are some characters the author hardly mentioned that seem so intriguing. There is actually one with your name..."
"Oh right. There is a Kim in those books," I recalled. There wasn't often Kim's in books or movies... except of course the most famous Kim of all, but it's not like I could relate to that Kim. I was just an average, regular girl with average looks and an average personality. One of the other ones. The extras, the room fillers. Not the main character, except for in my own very unexciting story. Nothing special, but perhaps very special to someone if you looked long enough. Or so I told myself between Instagram scrolls.
"But she gets, what? One line? Maybe two? And it's not even her words, right? It's just other people talking about her in passing? She's some random werewolf's girlfriend who pines over him all day?"
"Well, I think there may be more..."
I headed up the stairs and didn't bother to listen further. My respect for Anna was now lost.Twilight?! Really?
I shook my head, but as I reached the first floor I nearly smacked into my mom who was waiting for me at the top of the steps. She pushed strands of her dark Bob behind her ears.
"Can you run over to the corner store and get chicken stock? I need more for dinner."
I nodded as she folded some cash in my hand. I grabbed my phone, because clearly face to face interaction was a thing of the past. Hello to regularly spending 15 hours a day on my phone.
As I walked outside into the Tampa heat I scrolled through Instagram. Random cat memes. Makeup tutorials. A few "friends" posting about amazing times they seemed to be having. My fingers slid up and down the screen as I crossed the road. But I was not focused on the road. I could have been anywhere. I did head some noise, an engine revving maybe? But it might have been from the reel I was watching, but then in a snap, thick wind pressed against my face and wheels screeched, people shouted, a loud jolt and jerk and my phone flew from my hand and my body snapped like a rubber band and slammed on to the hard black street.
