Willow shook her head decisively. "That would take too long. I'd rather spend the time shopping. Maybe we could go back to the theater and see the movie together this time. You'd love it."
"All right," Jenna replied. She generated a new sentence, keeping Willow as the target.
"The excited woman watches her girlfriend use her phone." Nothing to work with there, she thought. She generated a new one.
"The 21-year-old has straight blonde hair that's 15 inches long." Still nothing. Wait, maybe she could have changed the sentence before that to say "pierced" instead of "excited." Shaking her head, she refreshed the app again.
"The woman standing in Jenna's bedroom is thinking about why she cannot use the needle."
"What's this one?" Jenna lifted her eyebrow. She looked at Willow. The blonde was gazing idly at the pincushion Jenna kept on her dresser near the makeup. "It says you're thinking about needles."
Willow regained her focus and looked at her girlfriend, wide-eyed. "It told you that? I was just imagining using one of your sewing needles to pierce my ears. I wasn't actually going to do it, though!"
Jenna nodded. She tried not to dwell on how the app could read their minds as well as everything else it did. She moved to generate a new sentence, but her thumb brushed other parts of the screen while doing so, changing the Regenerate button into the Confirm button without her noticing.
The existing sentence stayed on the screen as a confirmation message popped up. "Hmm," she mumbled in puzzlement.
"What?" her friend asked. "What does app say?"
"It didn't regenerate the sentence. It thinks I changed something." Jenna examined the message carefully.
It read "needle to [NULL] successfully changed."
"But there's no word I replaced it with," she said, more to herself than to Willow. She could see, however, that the sentence itself no longer had the word "needle" in it.
"It's not broken, is it?" Willow sounded worried. "Last thing we need is app glitching on us." As she spoke, she had an increasingly confused look on her face.
Jenna peered at Willow. "Say that again?"
"Um...," she swallowed. "Last thing... LAST thing... Th... Thhhh...! Thhhbbbppt!" She squeezed her tongue between her lips so hard she blew a raspberry.
Jenna burst out laughing. "¡Dios mío! You can't say it!"
"I know!" she cried in frustration. "I suddenly got feeling that I don't know how to write or say... t... t-word, and when I spoke, I really couldn't!"
Jenna re-read the sentence on her phone out loud. "'The woman standing in Jenna's bedroom is thinking about why she cannot use the.' I must have accidentally backspaced 'needle' and that turned 'the' into a noun. And that must also be why you felt it just now, 'cuz it says you were thinking about it."
"How do we reverse it?"
"I don't think we can. There's no Undo button."
"It's kind of an important word!" Willow said, starting to panic.
"Calm down. We'll keep generating a new sentence until we figure it out. English is a versatile language." She would know, as she was raised to speak both English and Spanish, and was more comfortable with English... though she didn't admit that to her parents.