Chapter 1
Every morning feels like a copy of the last.
I wake up to the faint hum of my father boiling tea downstairs, the sky outside still wearing that sleepy grey-blue. My school shirt lies ironed but already wrinkled at the corners, no matter how carefully Mom folds it.
The first mission of the day begins: get to Dad’s phone without being noticed.
He leaves it charging by the TV every night. I don’t take it. I borrow it. For five minutes. Ten, if I’m lucky. I open Facebook, scroll through old meme pages and different posts. Sometimes I reply to pending messages from random people I barely know. Mostly, I just stare.
That screen... It feels like my world. Even when there’s nothing new, I check. Hope lives in the refresh button.
I don’t have my own phone. Never have.
I do own a Nokia 110, a basic keypad phone that somehow supports Facebook. It’s the kind of phone you’d expect to survive a fall from a building and still blink back to life. But my mom thinks of it like some disastrous being. During school months, she keeps it locked away in her cupboard like some forbidden gadget. I only get it during holidays.
So on normal days, I borrow time.Usually from Sujan, my classmate.
We’re not exactly best friends. He’s the kind of guy who’s always chewing gum, knows every football stat by heart, and never has homework. He doesn’t mind letting me use his phone after school — to log in, check Facebook, maybe listen to a trending song or two.
That day was no different. After school, I used his phone, replied to a meme comment, watched a post of a cat sneezing eight times in a row, and handed it back.
Only...I forgot to log out.
Later that night, while I was buried in a half-sleep haze, Sujan was clearly wide awake. And bored.
He opened Facebook — my Facebook — and did what every bored guy with nothing to do ends up doing: sending friend requests to random girls.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Like a game with no score.
Then came one that made him pause.
Samaira.
No profile picture. No mutual friends that mattered. No visible posts.
Just a blank profile and a name that somehow stood out. He tapped “Add Friend.” Smirked. And probably forgot about it two minutes later.
The next day, over lunch, he tossed it out like a joke.“Oh, by the way, I sent like five friend requests from your ID last night,” he said, sucking the last drop of juice from a pouch. “One of them didn’t even have a profile pic. Kinda mysterious, bro.”
I blinked. “Why would you do that?”
He shrugged. “Bored. Might turn into something, who knows?”
I didn’t say anything.
But after school, when Mom handed me back the Nokia 110 for a short while, I immediately logged into Facebook and checked “Sent Requests.”
There it was.
Samaira.No photo. No info. Just a name.
I didn’t send it.But it was sent.
And for reasons I couldn’t explain…I didn’t cancel it either.
