The Glass Wristband
A free C1-level English story for language learners, readable online in English, with an option to listen via the free Storyteller app.
A student mortified when her school's mood-reading wristband publicly flashes "anxious" during a presentation discovers the classmate she was hiding from was reading the exact same word.
The wristbands had been the assistant principal's idea, pitched at an assembly as a way of building "visible empathy" across the school. Each one displayed a single word on its translucent face — calm, focused, anxious, low — generated from heart rate and skin conductivity, updated every few minutes for anyone nearby to read. Nobody had asked the students whether they wanted their nervous system published to the hallway. Leyla had worn hers for six days before it betrayed her properly.
It happened during her history presentation, in front of thirty people and, more specifically, in front of Finn. He sat two seats from the front, and she had spent most of the semester trying not to visibly care about him. Halfway through her second slide, her band's display flickered from focused to anxious in block letters bright enough to read from the back row. She kept talking. She did not, could not, stop the word from sitting there on her wrist the whole time, announcing exactly what her voice was working so hard to hide.
What she assumed, walking back to her seat afterward, was that everyone had seen it and drawn the obvious, mortifying conclusion. Either public speaking undid her, which was true — or worse, something about the room itself, about a particular seat in it, had something to do with the spike. She spent the rest of the class rehearsing ways to avoid Finn at lunch.
She never got the chance to. He found her at her locker instead, holding up his own wrist without being asked. "Mine did the same thing during your slide about the railway strikes," he said. "Anxious, right when you started talking. I have genuinely no idea why my body thought that moment needed adrenaline."
Leyla stared at his wristband, still faintly lit, and then at him, trying to work out whether this was an admission or just an awkward joke that happened to land somewhere true. Not until he added, a little too fast, "I don't actually think it was the railway strikes," did she understand it was the former.
Had the wristbands only ever displayed her own nervous system, she would probably have spent the rest of the year hating hers. Instead, standing at her locker while the two devices sat there quietly, honestly, disagreeing with neither of them about what they'd measured, she found the whole mortifying experiment a little easier to forgive.
"So we're both broken," she said, "at the exact same moment."
"Statistically interesting," Finn said, "is one way to put it."
She left her band on for the rest of the day, for once not particularly minding what it might say next.
