Story code: ST-000996
Part 2: The Draft Started Telling on Him
By the time we ran the song again, I was doing the job, holding the blame, and listening to Dylan explain why none of it was his fault. He stood in our living room near the phone stand saying he could not figure out basic TikTok steps, but the draft on my screen kept filling up with tiny choices that only made sense if he knew exactly what he was touching. Mom stopped caring about excuses. Tia started naming details out loud. And the more Dylan tried to sound confused, the cleaner his hands looked whenever he forgot to perform it.
I set the smartphone back on the stand and checked the framing. Ring light centered. Floor space clear. Speaker ready. Tia counted us in with two fingers, and we got through another take without anyone clipping the ending.
The second the music stopped, Dylan reached for the phone first.
“No, wait,” he said. “Let me see if this one is usable before you mess with it.”
That line hung in the room for a second.
I passed him the phone because Mom was standing close enough to watch. Dylan looked down, thumb moving faster now, not poking around randomly the way he had earlier. He scrubbed the clip backward, replayed one section, pinched the trim point, then stopped like he had remembered we were all there.
He lifted his head. “I mean, I don’t know how to fix the sound if it’s off.”
Tia was still holding the charging cable. “You just found the trim before the preview even finished.”
“Anybody can do that,” he said.
“You said you couldn’t do any of it,” I said.
He handed the phone back to me immediately. “Because every time I touch it, you say I did it wrong.”
That became his line for the next few minutes. If he reached too fast for a button and someone noticed, he said I made him nervous. If he gave a specific note about the timing, he said he was only guessing. If Mom asked who changed the draft order, he said he was trying to help and got confused.
Meanwhile I kept proving the same thing over and over with my hands because the clip still had to get finished. I trimmed a dead second off the front of one take. I moved a cleaner take higher in the draft stack. I muted a cough that got picked up near the speaker. Every repair made the room run, and every repair also made me look like the person responsible when the draft was still not ready.
Mom noticed that part before she said anything else.
She stayed near the doorway, arms folded, eyes moving from my hands to Dylan’s face to the screen. “Why does the fixing keep ending up with you?”
Dylan answered before I could. “Because she won’t let anybody else do it.”
I held the phone flat so the draft tiles were visible. “You can do the next step, then.”
He laughed once through his nose and looked at the TV instead of me. “I already told you I don’t know the app like that.”
Tia spoke from the side chair this time, still calm. “You know enough to grab exact spots really fast.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“It means your hand isn’t searching,” she said.
Nobody raised their voice after that. The room actually got quieter. The speaker was still on low, the ring light hummed a little, and Mom came closer to the coffee table.
“Show me the takes,” she said.
I opened the draft fully and scrolled in order. She watched the short clips stack up: the one cut off too early, the one framed wrong, the usable take, the take with the clean ending, the one with the beginning trimmed from the wrong side, the newest one Dylan had just checked faster than he claimed he could.
“Who touched this one?” she asked, tapping the take with the bad trim.
“He did,” I said.
Dylan spread both hands. “By accident.”
Mom did not argue with him. She just pointed to another take. “And who pulled the sound back on this one?”
I answered, “I did.”
Tia added, “After he tapped the volume mix himself.”
Dylan shifted his weight and looked at Tia for the first time in a while. “You are making it sound deeper than it is.”
“I’m saying what happened in the room,” she said.
That was enough to stop the back-and-forth for a minute. Mom took the phone from me again, not to solve the edit herself, just to hold the proof object where nobody could keep snatching it back. She replayed the same two takes twice and watched the timestamps change at the bottom.
Then she handed the phone to me and looked at Dylan.
“If Jenna is the problem, we can check that simple enough,” she said.
He gave a short shrug, but it was tighter than the earlier ones. “Check what?”
Mom pointed to the open floor space, then to the phone stand, then to the draft on my screen. “Next round, nobody talks you through it. You record one take, trim it, and line it up yourself. Same song. Same phone. Same room.”
Dylan gave a dry little laugh and looked toward the couch like he expected the moment to pass. It did not. Tia moved the charging cable onto the table. I set the phone on the stand without opening another menu. Mom stayed where she could see both the screen and his hands.
Dylan had spent the whole night saying he could not manage one simple step unless I rescued the clip after him. Now the phone was waiting on the stand, the draft was open, and Mom had just turned his excuse into a plain test with no room for coaching. The only question left was what his hands were going to do when he had to touch everything himself.