Read Online Wishful Thinking by Kamy Wicoff - Free Book Online Page B

pulling away to search her face. “You’re scaring me. What happened?” Jennifer shook her head and took a deep breath,stopping her tears. Vinita locked the door with one hand while using her other to find Jennifer’s wrist and check her pulse. “Do you want me to give you something to calm you down?” Vinita asked.
    “No,” Jennifer said. Having been sucked up by her smartphone earlier that afternoon, she thought it seemed inadvisable—at least until Vinita had checked her out—to add even the most anodyne of mood-altering medications to the mix. “I’m sorry I’m scaring you. But can you give me a quick checkup? You know, vital signs and all that? Then I’ll tell you everything.”
    Vinita motioned to Jennifer to get onto the examining table. There was a loud crinkle as Jennifer’s butt hit the Elmo-printed paper. The two of them then sat in silence as Vinita did one of the things she did best: examining a nervous and emotionally fragile patient. She palpated. She peered. She listened, looked, and measured. She pulled back.
    “Your eyes are a bit dilated,” she pronounced. “And you have this look—it’s funny, because you don’t have a fever, but you have the look of someone with a high temp, a little glittery and feverish in the eyes. And you’re flushed. And you have a little vomit on your sleeve. You threw up?”
    Jennifer nodded, looking at her sleeve and making a face.
    “Since you still haven’t told me what’s going on, I might be missing something. But in my professional opinion, physically, anyway … you’re absolutely fine.”
    “Thank God,” Jennifer said. “Now let me tell you what happened.”
    And so she did. The missing phone. The mysterious envelope. The app, and Jennifer’s certainty that it was a gimmick to exploit pathetic mothers on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Booking an appointment anyway and getting sucked into the tunnel of blue light. Landing in the supply closet. The recital, the return trip to the office, and whathappened then. Vinita listened with her head cocked back slightly. She looked deeply concerned, which sent a fresh wave of panic over Jennifer.
    “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Jennifer asked. “That maybe I was exposed to something? Radioactivity, maybe? What would it be? I have no idea how it works. …”
    Vinita didn’t reply. “Can you show it to me?” she finally asked quietly. “The app?”
    Jennifer took out her phone and woke it up. She launched her calendar, but Wishful Thinking did not appear. She went to CREATE AN EVENT , but when she scrolled down the list of available calendars, there was no sign of Wishful Thinking there, either. She did a double take. She looked again. There was her home calendar. There were the boys’ school calendars. There was her work calendar. But the Wishful Thinking calendar, and the entry for the guitar recital?
    Gone.
    There was nothing on her phone, in fact, even approaching midnight blue.
    “What the … ?” Frantically, she scrolled through every screen. She turned it off and on. She shook it like a Polaroid picture. It was no good. The app had disappeared—
poof
—for real.
    Out of options, Jennifer looked at Vinita, who had waited patiently through her search, even as her intercom was buzzing with constant requests for her attention.
    “I don’t understand,” Jennifer managed, as a sickening fear took hold of her. Images and sensations flooded through her: the sound of Julien’s guitar, the feel of Owen’s hand on her shoulder, Jack’s chocolaty kisses. “It was real.”
    “I’m sure it seemed very real,” Vinita said carefully. “But extreme stress can bring on all kinds of mental symptoms—”
    “No!” Jennifer cut her off.
“No.”
Reaching over to her righthand, she ripped off the Band-Aid she’d applied before the staff meeting with a yank and pointed at the messy scrape. “I cut my hand,” she said. “Scraped some skin off when I was reaching for my phone in