The Boy In My Head

3

As I near home, I start testing my new tech right away. Dad said this one would have a farther range, so I give a few commands as I get closer to the front gate around our property. The gate springs open much sooner than I anticipated, and I smile at how cool that is. I test the same thing on our front door and get the same result. "How'd it go?" my mom asks when I walk in the door. She's already waiting for me in the foyer, and she's holding out a tray of cookies. "It went . . . fine," I tell her as I grab a cookie from her tray. They're warm and delicious.

I try to imagine my mom with flour on her face and dough on her hands the way people used to cook in the olden days. Dad tells me about that all the time. But I've never even seen flour, so I don't really know how to picture it. Dad says people used to "bake from scratch." Now all the food delivered to our door is pre-packaged and everything. We could order cookies that are already cooked, but Mom likes to bake, so she only orders the frozen dough. I think Mom would be a great cook given the right ingredients, but I honestly can't even see her spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread. That's what they used to do back in the olden days. It sounds like a tasty treat to me. "That's good to hear," my mom says. We both head toward the kitchen together, me in the lead. She walks a bit slower than I do because of her minor limp, which is the result of a broken leg. I was young at the time but still remember the day vividly. It was the day after I got my first implant, and she was playing with me in the living room when the phone rang. She went upstairs to talk in private and came running back a few minutes later, only to trip on the top step and break her leg on the way down. I don't like to talk about it much because it was pretty traumatic for me since I was young, alone with her, and completely clueless on how to help. My mother's voice pulls me from the memory. "I mean, I didn't expect anything to go wrong. It never does. But I just want to make sure it went alright." My mom already received her beta upgrade. I wonder briefly if she experienced something odd, too, but I know she would have said something if she did. "Yeah, Mom. Things went fine like always." "Rachel!" my mom exclaims in alarm. I whirl around to face her. "What?" "What happened to your arms?" She points to my elbows. "Oh," I say, cradling the scrape on my right elbow. "I fell off my bike. The music app scared me," I admit shyly. My mom laughs out loud. "It scared me the first time, too." It's Saturday, so I don't have school. I quickly scan the screen on the door of the refrigerator with my eyes to see what we have. There's one column that shows what we have in the fridge and another that lists what we're out of and is coming in our grocery shipment on Sunday. Dad used to tell me about how people actually had to go to the grocery store and shop for themselves. 
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Hiya. Thanks for reading up to this point. I know, the story isn't up to date here but, I promise, I'll update twice or thrice every week. Tuesdays and Fridays. Hit those brownie stars for me please. They keep me motivated.