//------------------------------//
// Whoops 
// Story: Drawing Conclusions 
// by blue harvest 
//------------------------------//

	Hours later, I arrive in my bedroom, and I'm floating on air.

My face is full of smiles and my throat full of hum.  I do a twirl—like in all of those princess movies—and I trip and collapse over an office chair... which promptly reminds me why I should never emulate those princess movies.

But it doesn't deflate my balloon.  No ma'am.  Curie, it's good to be alive.

“Hi, Spike!” I say, tossing my backpack—mine—onto the starry bedsheets.  “Did you have a good day?”

“Arf,” Spike replies from the foot of the bed.  Smart aleck.

“Well I did.”  I slump down in the chair, spinning.  Glow-in-the-dark constellations blurring.  There's a sigh as I hug myself... and a deeper sigh as I hug myself tighter.  “Binary and cherry-flavored.  And don't you think the weather is just... agreeable?”

Spike scratches his ear, turns over, and yawns lazily into girlspace.

“And... I have a group math project to work on this Monday!”  I grin, kicking my shoes off.  Next go the thigh-highs.  “Isn't that amazing?”  Another sigh.  I curl up in the chair, hugging myself.  “... … ...makes for a bland weekend, though.”  A blink.  “I wonder if it'll be a good Saturday for stargazing...”

With a smile, I slide the chair over to the bed, reaching into my backpack's side pocket for my phone.  Comet Burp, my personally programmed astronomy app should do the trick.

But as soon as I pick my phone up, it weighs a ton against my wrist.  “Wh-whoah...!”  I fumble to catch the bulky thing.  “Huh?  Wh-what happened?  Did a gravity singularity spontaneously materialize inside my smart phone's circuitry?”

I hold the thing up to my spectacles.

“No... it's just a different phone.”  I chuckle.  Seconds pass—as it takes the adrenalized synapses to reach my brain, and then I go pale.  “Wait...”

I look at the phone in my grasp.  I turn it over.  The back of the cover has an emblazoned solar motif... reds and oranges and yellow.

Whoops.

I blink.

I bite my lower lip.

I shouldn't...

I know I shouldn't...

Heart pounding...

...I swipe my finger across the screen.

Of course there's no security key.  Silly pony.  But there isn't any time to meditate on that... because I suddenly find myself staring at a digitally lit background.  It's a vertical crop of a photo... capturing the bottom hem of a pleated school uniform skirt, right above a pair of thigh-highs, mary janes, and a loose pair of black-rimmed glasses.

“What the heck are you looking at?” Spike asks, looking over my lap.

“Oh!”  I nearly drop the phone, juggle it, then clutch it to my chest.  “N-nothing!”

“Yeah, well...”  The dog yawns again.  “...for nothing, the artist did a pretty rushed job Photoshopping the skin to look lavender.”

“Huh?”  I look at the phone's background again, my eyes traveling along the dainty, colored thighs.  I feel a pulsating fire as it burns its way up my neck and shoulders.

Oh Aasimovs...