Brooklyn resident Alex Barry has been sitting in terse silence, staring at the three dots on her phone, after receiving one innocuous text followed by another that read, “Also.”
“Whatever she texts next is either going to be super juicy or absolutely devastating,” Barry told reporters. “Otherwise why would she have needed to interject it into our day-long discourse about how the dog on TikTok who learned to communicate with buttons has become too smart?”
Barry was unable to hit send on her text saying that the dog “should’ve never been forced to develop such heightened self-awareness” – having been frozen in place waiting for the obvious bomb drop that’s coming her way.
“You never know what’s going to come after an ‘also’ text,” she said. “Either she’s going to deliver me some hot gossip, regale me with an embarrassing anecdote, or tell me that something sinister is going on with that TikTok dog.”
Barry told reporters that past “also” texts from her friends have led to such things as: finding out her ex-boyfriend had been cheating on her for over a year, hearing about how her friend’s dog had disappeared under mysterious circumstances, leaving behind just a note that read, “your day of reckoning is coming,” and being asked if she was free to grab coffee later.
“It’s always a roll of the dice!” she said. “But that’s what’s exciting about it. Like, did my friend find out someone we went to high school with is getting divorced, or am I about to learn the reason the ASPCA just told everyone to stay inside their houses for the next 48 hours?”
She continued, saying, “Okay, if I’m being honest, whatever follows an ‘also’ text is usually bad news. But I’m just trying to stay optimistic and put off preparing for the obvious dog revolution that’s brewing.”
At press time, Barry finally received a follow-up text from her friend, explaining how she was just on the dog’s TikTok live and it had “developed class consciousness” and was “rallying other dogs around its cause to overthrow the humans.” She then followed up those texts with “also” and a picture of six dogs gathered on her back porch wielding steak knives.
