Joe scrolled more, unable to look away.

An image, location-tagged in London, of a tall woman in a halter top that revealed her thin shoulders and her pointy collarbones. She looked like a fashion model, and she wore an adoring smile. She’s a gamer, too. I think I’m in love, was the comment. This one actually did have four-digit likes.

Feeling a fresh wave of unease, Joe swiped his thumb sharply on the screen and caused the posts to fly by. A great multitude passed before his eyes before finally it came to rest on a random one. Eddie sat on a beach of glistening sand. The water nearby was a shimmering blue-green, with giant, gravity-defying rock outcroppings protruding from the crystal depths. A group of bikini-clad women were near him, with just enough of them grinning into the camera to remove any question whether or not he was with them. Tailand… love the beaches here, was the annoyingly short and concise comment that didn’t even bother to acknowledge who his companions were.

“He can’t even spell Thailand,” Joe muttered. “How the hell is he smart enough to…”

Steve came and delivered his next drink. Joe actually tucked the phone away for a moment, as though not to reveal how intently he’d been looking into it. Steve of course didn’t notice, nor care, and he was gone again in a flash. Joe took his drink and sipped deeply from it. Then his phone leapt back into his hand again, almost like it was a magic trick. He kept scrolling through Eddie’s feed.

Joe landed squarely on another random post, one that caught his eye right away.

This one had much fewer likes than the others. In the photo, Eddie held a red glass ball in his hand, and from within it glowed a piercing scarlet hue. Two crimson snakes of light grew from the orb’s surface, and they hung in the air, glowing—to Joe it looked like a trick a photographer could do, where they painted with light in the air over a long exposure time. The comment was who believes in magic? Unlike the others, the replies on this post were confused, like what is this, Eddie? And how did you do that?

Immediately Joe felt chills go through him. His hand went straight into his pocket, where he felt to make sure his glass ball was still there. He felt the smooth glass surface and he exhaled slowly. A drop of sweat fell down his back.

An Alice in Chains song now raged in the background. It seemed the music had switched to a Nineties stream. If anything it matched his current state a bit too well.

Joe sipped from his drink, and pleaded for himself to calm down. That wouldn’t happen if he kept staring into his phone. He had to put the damn thing away. That was when he felt a buzz inside of his pocket, and unthinkingly his free hand reached down to retrieve his phone, and then he dumbly realized that he was already holding it.

Something else was buzzing inside of his pocket.

With bewilderment, he retrieved the glass ball, and confirmed that it was the source of the buzzing. And not just buzzing—within the glass he saw the azure colors become cloudy and start to swirl. With the grunge blaring in the background, Joe stared into it, his brow furrowing wildly. He felt himself swaying woozily, like a boxer at the end of a fight, and he wondered if he already did take drugs. He couldn’t remember doing so, but that didn’t mean anything necessarily.

The blue depths within the glass ball continued to swirl. Joe’s disbelief ratcheted up multiple times over as within the glass orb the blue color vanished in an instant, and in its place he saw Eddie Morrow looking back at him. The sight struck him like an ice cold bucket of water hitting his face. Joe realized it wasn’t drugs after all—he actually had to be dreaming. That was the only answer. He tried to remember when he’d fallen asleep, but he couldn’t.

Within the glass, Eddie wore a smug grin, as though holding back a laugh. There was weird distortion in the view, appearing at times like a fisheye lens, which added to the strangeness of what he saw. Despite everything Joe couldn’t help but notice Eddie’s transformation yet again—the awkward kid from high school was long gone, and in his place was an adult, with a sharply-focused expression, and a charismatic gaze.