“That doesn’t mean it’s gonna charge the thing,” Zeke told me. “But it might.”
“I hope it does,” I replied as I took out my wallet. “It’s gonna cost a lot of money. I bet these things are hard to find.”
All I had in my wallet was a ten-dollar bill and two fives.
“How much do I owe you?” I asked the girl with purple hair.
“Take it,” she said, waving my money away. “I feel sorry for you, carrying that antique around in broad daylight. Nobody else is gonna want the charger.”
“Hey, thanks!”
“No prob,” she said. “Come back when you’re ready to get a phone from this century.”
We went back to Zeke’s house so my mom wouldn’t see what we were doing. He plugged the charger into the wall outlet in his room and plugged my phone into the charger.
“It may not work,” Zeke said. “But at least it didn’t cost you anything.”
A little red light went on and the screen lit up, which I took to be a good sign. Zeke knows his way around cell phones. He said it might take hours for the phone to get a full charge, but in the meantime we should be able to use it. That is, if it worked.
“Let’s check the texts,” he said as he fumbled with the little rubber keypad. “Any old texts you sent or received should still be here.”
But they weren’t. He poked around, trying all kinds of stuff, but he couldn’t retrieve the texts from the previous night. They were gone.
“Maybe we can trace the source of the texts,” Zeke said. “If we can find out the number where they came from, it might help us find out who was sending them to you.”
He fiddled with the keypad, but again, nothing. The memory had been wiped clean. It was like the flip phone had never been used.
“It’s scrubbed,” Zeke said, “Nothin’ there.”
“Bummer.”
“Are you sure you’re not messed up in the head since the coma?” Zeke asked. “That stuff happens, y’know. You could be brain damaged, like all those football players who got multiple concussions. I’m serious.”
I felt myself getting angry at Zeke.
“So you don’t believe me,” I said sadly.
“Sure I believe you, man!” Zeke replied. “I just think that maybe you should talk to a shrink or somebody.”
“I’m fine,” I insisted, my voice going up a little. “I didn’t imagine it! I had a long text conversation on this phone with somebody. I’m not saying it was the real Houdini, but he knew everything about Houdini. That’s a fact.”
I caught Zeke smirking. He thought I was crazy. And I couldn’t blame him, really. The whole thing was crazy. You can’t communicate with dead people through a cell phone! I wasn’t even sure you could communicate with live people with this cell phone. Maybe Zeke was right. Maybe I was hallucinating.
Zeke wasn’t ready to give up just yet. He tried calling his own cell phone from my flip phone, but the call wouldn’t go through. He would have liked to try calling the flip phone from his cell phone, but neither of us knew the number.
“This thing is a piece of junk,” Zeke said, tossing the phone to me. “You might as well throw it away. Or bring it back to the cell phone store. Maybe they can recycle it for parts. But I doubt it. Maybe you should take it to an antique store. It might be worth something as a collectible.”
So that was that. That was the end of it. I went home.
“What did you do after school today?” my mom asked when I got home.
“I went over Zeke’s,” I told her.
“And what did you do there?”
“Nothin’,” I said.
After dinner I went upstairs and stuck the cell phone and charger back in my night-table drawer. I did my homework and watched a few YouTube videos on my laptop. I was just about to drop off to sleep, when…
Bzzzzz…bzzzzz…bzzzzz…
I was alert immediately. I lunged for the drawer and took out the phone. The screen was lit up. There was one word on the screen.…
“HARRY?”
I just stared at it for a long time. I didn’t know what to do.
“ARE YOU THERE?” it said on the screen.
“Who is this?” I tapped.
“IT’S ME. HOUDINI.”
LIFE IS SHORT. DEATH IS FOREVER
I half believed it. Who knows? Maybe it really was Houdini. Maybe he was texting me from the afterlife.
Oh, that’s just crazy. It couldn’t be. I don’t believe in that stuff.
I decided to humor him. That’s how detectives work, right? Maybe I could trap him and find out who he—or she—really is. But before I could send him another message…
“WHERE WERE YOU?” appeared on my little screen. I noticed for the first time that the person who was texting me always wrote in capital letters.
“I had to charge up the cell phone,” I tapped.
While I waited for a reply, I plugged the phone and charger into the wall outlet so the phone would get a full charge and not run out of juice in the middle of our text conversation, the way it did last time.
“WHAT IS A CELL PHONE?” came the reply.
“How are you communicating with me?” I tapped. “Are you using a computer?”
“A WHAT?”
“A computer,” I tapped. “It’s sort of like a smart calculator.”
“WHAT IS A CALCULATOR?”
Oh yeah. There were no cell phones, computers, or calculators in 1926, the year Houdini died. Television didn’t even exist yet back then. If he was pranking me, this guy was good.
“Never mind,” I tapped. “How are you communicating with me?”
“I CANNOT EXPLAIN,” was the reply. “I JUST AM.”
Well, that wasn’t very helpful.
“Let me ask you this question,” I tapped. “WHY are you communicating with me?”
“I WANT TO KNOW HOW THE WORLD HAS CHANGED
