You skip dinner and head straight for your room.

Your mind is racing too fast for you to even consider eating. Walking past the kitchen in a daze, you think you hear your mother ask you something dinner-related; you manage to babble something about not feeling well, and heading upstairs to rest. You feel like your vision has constricted into a tunnel, and you hear your heartbeat thumping in your ears. You roll your sleeve up to look at the quite-possibly-amazing device on your upper arm, and another surprise awaits you: the soothing, glowing light emanating from it is no longer crimson. It's now a cool shade of green, tinged with blue -- almost teal. It's still soothing, though, and in any case, a light changing colors isn't really something to worry about when confronted with the bigger, more shocking possibility before you.

This is crazy, some skeptical, rational part of your brain says. There's no such thing as a machine that controls peoples' thoughts.

Then how do you explain what just happened? you reply to Skepty.

Simple, Skepty replies. Coincidence. Maybe she just decided she's had enough of trying to control your life!

You raise an eyebrow, despite the fact that you're holding an internal conversation with yourself. You do this sort of thing. You're a weird, weird young man.

That really doesn't sound like Laura, you say. But that rational part of you has managed to calm you down. Maybe it's true. Maybe the armband is just an armband, and your sister has had a change of heart. Maybe you were just getting so excited about the possibilities of such a device that you let yourself jump to wild, hopeful conclusions.

Yeah, that's probably it, you think, and let out a little derisive snort that you would let yourself be so gullible.

You spend the next few hours studying up for an algebra test you have tomorrow. You're pretty good at quadratic equations, but when you take tests you tend to race through them, and end up making really stupid arithmetic mistakes that cost you the problem, despite your knowing the principles down pat. Finally, you change into your flannels again, climb under the covers, and start to drift off to sleep...

And then your eyes snap awake as you remember the bacon and eggs this morning.