The thing you need to understand about me and screens is Kip.
Kellan's father was not a bad man. I've had to say that so many times, to so many people, that it has worn smooth like a stone in a pocket, but it's true. He was funny and he was handsome and he could fix anything with an engine, and when the kids were small he would lie on the living room floor and let them climb on him like he was a piece of playground equipment. And then, slowly, over about three years, he went into his phone and didn't come out. But what I knew was a blue light. I would wake up at two in the morning and his side of the bed would be empty, and I'd find him on the couch in the dark with his face lit up from underneath like a kid telling a ghost story, and he'd say, "Can't sleep," and I'd say, "Come to bed," and he'd say, "In a minute." For three years it was in a minute. Kellan was ten when it started and thirteen when Kip left, and Kellan was the one who'd come down the stairs in the mornings and find his dad asleep on the couch with the phone on his chest, still lit, and stand there looking at him.
So I know what you'll say. I know what my sister said. You're seeing Kip in that boy. Yes. I was. I'd look at Kellan at the kitchen table with that ruined phone propped on the sugar bowl, with his long jaw and his half-closed eyes and his thumb moving, and I'd see a man on a couch in the dark. I was so afraid of it that I couldn't see anything else.
There was a night in September I haven't told you about.
It was the Sunday after school started. I was off. I'd been off since Friday and I was almost human, and I'd made a real dinner, chicken thighs and rice, and I'd tried to talk to him at the table, and he'd answered in single words while his phone sat face down by his plate and buzzed against the wood every few minutes, and on the third or fourth buzz I said, "Who on earth is texting you this much on a Sunday night?" and he said, "Nobody," and turned it over, and Juni, across the table, put her fork down. She put it down very precisely, the way you'd set something on a shelf.
At ten o'clock I knocked on his door and opened it without waiting and he was sitting up in bed with the phone in his hand, and I held out my palm.
"Give it."
"What? Why?"
"Because it's a school night and you've got a C-minus in chemistry and I'm not doing this anymore. You can have it back in the morning."
I have never seen a person go so white so fast. He actually pulled the phone against his chest. "Mom, no. No — Mom, I need it."
"You don't need it to sleep."
"I do. I — I use it for an alarm."