“Oh, sorry,” I said. I’d never made it to Mom’s office and the computer. I was used to using my phone for email, and I wasn’t working on any school projects. I had barely made it out of my room at all—mostly on autopilot, to the kitchen and back again—until the fear of Jan seeing me this way knocked me out of my stupor.
“I even tried your home line,” Annika said. “Busy signal. All day.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I just tried it again before I came out here.”
“Huh. I’ll check it.” Maybe it had been knocked off the cradle. I hadn’t heard it ring since the accident, now that she mentioned it.
“So, listen, you want to come over tomorrow? I’m sentenced to family time today with Brett home from college for the weekend, but he’s going out tomorrow, so I should be free at least part of the day.”
“I can’t come over,” I said, shaking my head. “Maybe later next week but…not now.” Not when it took three days to leave the house. Not when I already felt the vastness, as my mom called it, of the open air. The feeling of all the things that could go wrong the farther I walked from my door.
“Sure. Later, then,” she said. This was another reason I thought we got along so well. We didn’t ask too many questions. I never asked why she kept changing schools, and she never asked why I lived behind bars and gates and wires.
I slid off the wall, back to my side of the property, an invisible tether—the promise of safe, and predictable. She stared at the weeds, squeezed her eyes shut, and dropped down after me. “Hey,” she said, hand on my arm. “You’re okay, right?”
I wasn’t sure if Annika knew about my mom, or what she suspected, but she must’ve known something. The leash I was kept on, the things I couldn’t do, the fact that we always went to her house instead of my own.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m okay.” The darkness over the edge, the grip of my fingers…
I felt an ache in the bruise on my shoulder, my elbows, and the line across my hands.
Annika shuddered and picked her feet up, one exaggerated step at a time, like there might really be snakes in the grass. I uncurled my hand, overwhelmed with the sudden impulse to show her the line across my fingers—that maybe she would understand—
“Annika?” A woman’s voice, from the other side of the wall.
Annika rolled her eyes. “Gotta run.” But before she climbed back over the wall, she pulled me toward her, squeezed me tight, the ribbons in her hair tickling my neck. “I’m glad you’re okay, Kelsey darling.” Then she air-kissed my cheek, which was something only Annika could get away with, before finding a foothold in the stone wall.
Back inside, Mom’s office door was closed, and Jan’s car was still parked just outside the front gate. They were probably having an official session. The box of my recovered items was still on the living room floor. I stepped around it and picked up the phone line—it had been left off the hook. I hung it up, picked it up again, heard a catch, a click, and then the dial tone. If it hadn’t been working before, at least it was now.
Just as I hung up, a shrill ring cut through the silent living room. I let it ring twice, until the number flashed on the caller ID. Something local that I didn’t recognize. And then I remembered that my cell had been out of commission, and I’d called home from Ryan’s phone, and, in an uncharacteristic surge of irrational hope, I thought maybe he was checking in, like he said he would. I held the phone to my ear. “Hello?”
But it was a woman. “Am I speaking with Kelsey Thomas?”
“Yes,” I said slowly, shifting the phone from shoulder to shoulder, my eyes on the closed door of the office.
“I’m Moira Little, and I was hoping to get a quote from you for a piece I’m writing for the Covington City Gazette.”
“Uh,” I said, “no comment.” That was a thing, right? Would that be printed in the paper? Ryan Baker, hero, rescues Kelsey Thomas, who has no comment. “Listen,” I added, keeping my voice low, “it’s just, I’m not supposed to do this.”
“Give quotes to reporters?”
Among other things. “Yes.” Ryan Baker, hero, rescues Kelsey Thomas, who is not supposed to give quotes to reporters. “No,” I said, “I mean, I’m just happy to be alive.”
Silence, and then, “There’s a slight discrepancy between the police report and your school paperwork. Are you the Kelsey Thomas born on September seventh or November seventh?”
It was a simple question—I’d turned seventeen last month, in September, and she probably only wanted my age for whatever she was writing. But my mother had taught me to guard my privacy. I heard her voice, an echo in my head: Careful. So I settled on a neutral answer, an answer this woman could presumably get anywhere. “I’m seventeen,” I mumbled.
“And will we be seeing you Monday?”
“Uh,” I said. Was she asking if I was going back to school? Or whether I was planning to show up at her office? I felt like I was missing half the conversation. “Maybe,” I said. That seemed like the safest answer. “Bye now.”
And I thought that possibly my mother had left the phone off the hook for a reason.
—
I went to my room and started the process of reconfiguring the new cell phone. As soon as I had it all set up, it started beeping, downloading a bunch of texts from the last few days. First, a string from Annika—Where are you? Omg, I heard. I’m home. Call me, doll—and an indication of a voice mail as well. Then a bunch of texts from an unknown number, and I felt my smile growing involuntarily as I read through the messages.
Hey, it’s Ryan. Checking in…
I didn’t see you at school. What’s going on?
Are you okay?
Hmm, okay, not much for texting, huh? Call me when you get this.
Okay, from the non-response, it has just occurred to me that you probably don’t have a new phone yet.
And now I feel like a stalker. Man, I wish I could delete those.
Oh God, please say something.
I heard Jan and my mother in the living room—session over, I assumed. I hoped Jan didn’t notice I was back from visiting Annika just yet.
Hey, I wrote. Phone acquired.
He wrote back almost immediately:
So, just pretend I didn’t send like half of those, okay? It was a weird few days…
Consider it done.
The phone rang in my hand, and my heart ended up in my stomach when I saw his number displayed. I answered quickly so nobody else would hear.
“Hi,” I said, trying to keep my voice low. But it came out all breathy, like I was trying to seduce him or something. I cleared my throat. Flopped back on my bed. Died.
“Hey,” he said. “So…you okay?”
“Sure. I guess so.” I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling, which my mother had painted pale blue when I was a baby, complete with white clouds.
“Are you coming back to school?” he asked.
“Yes. On Monday. Did I miss anything interesting?”
“Is that a joke? Are you making a joke, Kelsey Thomas? I didn’t know you were that funny.”
“Oh yeah. Math must be super-boring without me.” I put my hand over my eyes, my smile stretching to beyond-stupid levels. But that was the great thing about the phone—you could smile stupidly to yourself and not feel embarrassed by it.
Ryan was choosing not to speak at the moment, and I pushed myself up on my elbows, worried I’d said something wrong. This would not be a surprise.
“So,” he said, “what have you been up to the last few days while playing hooky?”
“Nothing,” I said. Embarrassingly nothing. And now there was nothing on the other end of the line. Say something, Kelsey. “I keep dreaming about it,” I said, then squeezed my eyes shut. Pitfall of the phone: you could say something stupid, with no possibility of deleting the statement.
I waited for Ryan to do the Hey, my mom’s calling, gotta run bit, but instead he said, “Me too.”
I sat up, balled my pillow in my lap. “I keep thinking about this story we read in English about a man about to be hung, who dreamed an entire escape in the moment he fell, never realizing he was still falling in slow motion, on the way to being dead.”