Pulse

friends. She’d drawn Liz sitting in front of the rubble at the old mall, holding out her hand toward the open space, searching for someone to grab hold of. There was a tab at the top of the screen, and Faith tapped it. A photograph expanded on the screen, taking up most of the real estate in the top right corner. The photo was a mirror image of the drawing: Liz sitting on the bench, holding out her empty hand toward the camera, her eyes searching for something beyond what Faith could see. Faith’s eyes filled with tears, and her vision went blurry.
    You can’t be gone. I need you here, with me. What am I going to do without you?
    Faith knew it was morbid emotional suicide to look at the picture, knew it would hurt like hell to wallow in the pain she felt. But she couldn’t help herself. She was all alone in the world. She’d lost her only real friend.
    Flipping through digital pages with her finger, Faith arrived at a blank screen and picked up the stylus. What she really wanted, the thing she deeply wished for at that moment, was a pencil. During moments of deep sadness she sometimes found it comforting to use pre-Tablet instruments of expression. She thought she heard just that—a pencil—rolling toward her on the desk with that very distinct sound a rolling pencil makes, each of its six sides clanging as it went. The sound stopped as quickly as it had started, and she chalked it up to a mushy hangover head she still couldn’t shake.
    Sometimes, in her more nostalgic moments, Faith would covet the feeling of lead moving on paper. She knew it was extravagant and useless, because whenever she wrote on paper, it inevitably got lost or destroyed. It was a rare drawing or note that Faith had produced with a pencil that had not been misplaced or abandoned in one of her many moves. In the world in which she’d grown up, she had been taught from an early age that everything she needed was kept on her Tablet. Even if she lost the Tablet, it wouldn’t matter, because everything she had ever created was stored in the cloud. It never crossed her mind, in a serious way, to write or draw anything important on something as transient as a piece of actual paper. In any case, the urge to stay in bed was much stronger than the pull of a pencil so far away on the desk, so she never made it out from under the blanket.
    Faith began to draw on the screen with her stylus, slowly at first and then with a kind of furious, angry speed that produced a harsh but brilliant drawing. There was no doubting an artistic ability that blossomed most powerfully during times of grief. There had been a lot of grief lately, and her work had turned darker and more mature. It was sad, really, that the world had to turn so dark in order to bring out her true talent.
    When she was done, she tucked her Tablet under her pillow and closed her eyes, hoping to fall away into a dream so she could forget. Her body curled up into a ball as she turned on her side, pulling the covers up close to her face. But sleep wouldn’t come. She chewed on the nail next to her pinkie finger—a major failure, because she’d managed to leave it alone for a long time—and quickly ruined what had been a smooth curve against the tip of her ring finger.
    There was a sound from the desk across the room, almost silent, like it hadn’t wanted to be heard. The sound reminded her of something, but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was, perhaps because she hadn’t heard the sound very many times. Was she sleeping but didn’t know it? Faith bit down on her fingernail, peeling away a piece dangerously close to the skin. It hurt, but at least it was something other than the heavy weight in her chest, that distinct feeling of a broken heart nowhere near mending.
    “Hawk?” Faith whispered, but there was no answer. She lifted her head, expecting to see him, glad about the thought of it. She wasn’t close to him, not really, but at least he was a person she knew. She watched as a pencil and a white note card fell to the floor and landed on the soft carpet like they’d been suspended in midair and suddenly dropped all at once. The pencil hit first, bouncing once and then lying like a dead animal on the plush, gray carpet. The note card fluttered slightly, catching on the air beneath it, then shot down like an airplane crashing into the ground. It was blank, that much she could see as she blinked three or four times, making sure she was fully awake. It was at that moment