TACOMA, WA—Area high school student Josh Fairbanks, 16, confirmed Thursday that the vague, creepy one-word text message he just received from his mother could conceivably be interpreted in a nearly infinite variety of ways. “The last time we texted was yesterday, and the conversation definitely ended with ‘Bye,’ so she has to be referring to something new—but we just talked when she dropped me off at school,” a confused Fairbanks said of the brief message sent to his iPhone, which simply read “soon.” “I know she was going to the grocery store, so she could have started typing, gotten distracted, and accidentally hit ‘send’ before she could finish her thought. But if that were the case, it seems like the text would be a little longer or start with some other word. Or that she would have texted again and said ‘Sorry, I hit send by mistake.’” At press time, Fairbanks was mentally cataloguing every possible event in his own life, his mother’s life, or in existence altogether that may or may not be occurring in a timeframe definable as “soon.”

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