Wishful Thinking

Read Wishful Thinking for Free Online

Book: Read Wishful Thinking for Free Online
Authors: Kamy Wicoff
pumpkin-spice latte. Rather than immediately taking the elevator down, however, Jennifer walked to the stairwell. She was going to get coffee, but she needed to make a pit stop first. She was headed to her secret bathroom.
    The secret bathroom was on the eighteenth floor. Two months ago, the tenant—a private company that did something in insurance—had filed bankruptcy and departed ignominiously, vacating the entire floor’s office space in less than a week. Jennifer still remembered watching as its employees glumly filled elevator after elevator, boxes and picture frames in hand. The first time she and Tim decided to walk down and see what it looked like, both of them found the vast, empty space depressing. But then Jennifer discovered something. While the offices on the eighteenth floor had been padlocked and papered over with threatening signs from creditors, the women’s bathroom had been left wide open and, better yet, relatively well kept. It had only taken a few goings-over with cleaning supplies brought from home for Jennifer, who hated to use the NYCHA bathrooms, where a private moment could turn into a chatty meet-and-greet and her colleagues routinely engaged in cross-stall conversation, to turn the secret bathroom into a sanctuary. Only Tim, who had been with her when she found it, and who she felt should know her whereabouts in the event of an emergency, knew of its existence.
    And so, at 3:54 p.m., Jennifer was in the secret bathroom, doing her business. She was idly scrolling through
New York Times
articles on her phone when, noting that 4:00 p.m. was approaching, she decided to take a second look at her Wishful Thinking appointment.
    It was easy to spot, in what she was coming to recognize as the app’s trademark midnight blue:
Guitar Recital, West End School for Music and Art, 55 Bethune Street, Tuesday, September 22,4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
As before, it seemed to float above the screen like a mist, utterly distinct from the solid, color-coded calendar entries she was so used to seeing there: orange for work, green for home, baby blue for the boys’ school schedules, and on and on. As she turned her phone this way and that, the Wishful Thinking entry, Jennifer thought, was
shimmering
—that was the only word to describe it. Trying to understand how this effect was achieved, she brought her face closer and closer to the screen, eventually drawing so close her nose was practically touching its surface, when suddenly an earsplitting
PING!
nearly sent her down the plumbing.
    In a jam in every way, Jennifer did not even attempt to get off the toilet. To her surprise, in fact, she found that she was shaking. Surely she didn’t believe there was something to this craziness—that the app, after all, might be real. Taking a deep breath, she willed herself to look back down at her phone. And then she laughed. It was not a teleport or a wrinkle in time or even a message from Wishful Thinking that had caused her to startle like that. It was a plain old text message from Vinita. Ten years ago, text messages had seemed like magic. Now the familiar green thought bubble was as reassuring to her as buckwheat pancakes.
    Hey J,
the text began,
got your email. Will def call later. Do NOT stress about recital. Yoga chick spent an hour this AM shitting out excess kale. xoxox, V.
The text was punctuated by a very funny-looking emoticon of a tiny pink creature break-dancing, from a Japanese app Vinita was currently obsessed with.
    Jennifer was typing
yes call later
when out rang another
PING!
This time she didn’t flinch. But this time her whole screen went midnight blue.
    She froze. Slowly retracting her thumbs from text position, she cradled the phone in both hands. Then she watched, transfixed, as the gleaming white wand appeared. Ithovered a moment on the screen and then, with the subtlest flick, freed itself of the constraints of two dimensions and rose out of her screen to hover above it in midair. Jennifer, suit

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