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The phone was old. Like, she'd had it a whole fifteen months, okay? But asking her dad for a new one had been totally fruitless and that ******** sucked. What did he want Keren to do, get down on her knees and beg? Because she was above that. She was so ******** above that, like you have no idea, but that did not get her a new phone.

So maybe, maybe, in an attempt to make everyone at school think she'd gotten a hot new accessory over winter hols (she'd been following some British girl on Tumblr lately and the slang was just so cool), Keren had gone and bedazzled the back of her smartphone. Like, that was a thing, right? A normal thing? That normal people did? Anyway, it looked totally awesome. Except now the dumb thing dropped calls like it was going out of style and texting? Forget about texting. Message send errors haunted her every waking minute.

It was with a heavy heart that she marched her sorry a** into Best Buy and laid her rhinestone-laden 2012's-fancy-Samsung on the counter and said, mournfully, to the boy behind the counter, "Signal's gone to s**t."

The real solution here was that her dad should have bought her a new phone, thought Keren. That would have avoided everything.

Keren shot him a deadpan look. It had occurred to her that the rhinestones were probably her problem, considering that there hadn't been anything wrong with her phone before, but by the time she realized that, the glue had long since set. "I tried," she drawled, trying to match the boy's tone. She wasn't about to let him make her seem stupid.

"This is Gorilla Glue," she sighed, leaning against the counter. "I guess I kind of overreacted to not getting a new phone for the holidays." She was still holding out hope, but the birthday-Hannukah combination laptop was not making it look likely. "So I wanted to make this one more special."

And ******** it up spectacularly.

At least her phone background was really cute homestuck fanart of grimdark Rose this week.

"What's the prognosis," she said seriously. "Is it terminal."

Keren frowned. This, obviously, was not a case. "Well, ********," she said eloquently, as the back of her phone popped off in his hand. Maybe he'd be able to replace the part, she thought, but then the phone was old and maybe it wouldn't be in-stock anymore... Stupid, stupid, stupid. "You can fix it, right? I swear to god or satan or bob or whoever, if you fix it, I will like, buy whatever stupid fancy expensive case you tell me to buy and call your manager and tell them how amazing you are and I'll go on Yelp and write a super-positive review of this location, I promise."

She stared down at the exposed innards of her phone, feeling like she was standing in an operating room. "This phone is my life," she said dismally, which here is code for completely over-dramatically. Her father had been clear: If it wasn't fixed, she could spend the next year using a flip phone from 2005. And she just couldn't do that. She refused.

"Let me see if I've got one in my massive bag of holding," Keren replied dryly. She made a show out of digging though her purse, but came up empty-handed - as she'd expected to. "Nope," she said. "Fresh out of chisels."

"I guess it's like, completely out of the question that you guys would have a replacement part, huh? Like, just put a new back on it?" There'd been two or three new versions of the phone since, but maybe the parts would be interchangeable. Or something. Keren thought of herself as tech savvy, but knowing how to use something and how to fix it were completely different issues.

Keren sighed and strongly resisted the urge to bang her forehead on the counter. "I ******** up," she said. "I ******** up so bad."