The sound of the door slam echoed through the hallway. A barrage of knocking on the far door proceeded almost instantaneously. Janine was choosing between the flared jeans or the khakis lying on the bed as she listened to her mother yell at Billy through his door across the hall. Thin walls. “You know better than to stay up that late playing games when you have a test today,” she said sternly, her voice hoarse.
“Three A.M.?” she continued, before muttering to herself on the way back to the kitchen, “You’d think the log would make him go to bed for Christ’s sake.” “I heard that!” Billy yelled. “Atleast I’m not doing drugs!”
Billy was in middle school and going through his games over homework phase. Even if he couldn’t get away with staying up, he didn’t care about the consequences. These little fights happened too often for Janine to give them any thought. Flared jeans it was.
Janine’s hoverbike ride to school was uneventful. Quick scrolls through what her friends were searching and reading on their devices on her own Holophone. Her math class friends were still doing practice problems, her mom was ordering groceries for delivery, and her class crush was looking at reviews for hiking boots. Uneventful, that is, until she picked up her friend Isabelle on the way. Isabelle was a junior, a year younger than Janine, so it felt like she always had the best gossip. “Did you hear,” she said, “that Danny tried to bypass the Clarity in order to buy a surprise gift for his girlfriend without her knowing, but the Clarity reported it, and he had to explain himself to the Reviewers last night?”