She smiled. “Just put your phone away. For me. For yourself. For humanity.”
I did not. In fact, I turned back to the screen, defiant, just as it sounded.Chirp!
It was our StuCo group chat.SPECULATOR STARTS NOW!someone had posted, with a link below.
I clicked it and the boxes arranged themselves. There was Hannah in her bedroom. Nalini by a lamp. Jorge with aJ, George with aG. Finally, to the far right, Colin appeared. He was perched on a deck chair, or part of one. A girl was beside him.
My first thought was, surprisingly, not shock or hurt. It was that she looked like me.
Dark, wavy hair to her shoulders. Green eyes. She wore a white top, a thin yellow beaded necklace loose around her neck, and was smiling at Colin.
It was one thing to be removed, snipped cleanly from the bigger whole. This was worse. As if there really was nothing special about me, my borders and edges identical to any number of others. All this time I’d thought of that place, if nothing else, as mine. Until I saw someone else in it.
They were still on the screen when I threw my phone into the water. The light was visible for just a moment, floating. Then it sank down and disappeared.
“She just hooked it.” Lana snapped her fingers. “Boom! Right in. All I said was to put it away.”
“You threw your phone in the lake?” Ben asked. We’d come in—Lana chuckling, me already remorseful—to find him sitting at the porch table next to the printer, the manual open in his lap.
“Boyfriend popped up on a group chat with another girl,” she said.
“Already?”
I just looked at him.
“You and Ben can twin now,” Lana told me, pulling out a chair and plopping into it. “The only way to reach him is stepping outside and screaming his name.”
“Not true,” Ben replied, flipping pages. “There’s also the landline at the Egg.”
“When it’s open.”
“Or,” he countered, “you can always call Clark, who lives and works with me.”
“Like I’d want to dothat.” The printer suddenly sputtered, a row of lights coming on. Lana eyed it. “What’s the problem there?”
“Not connecting for some reason,” he replied, turning to my mom’s laptop, which was at his elbow. When he hit the space bar, an error message popped up.
Oh my God. What had I beenthinking? Just because I was mad at Colin did not mean I wanted to be technologically stranded. Now I’d have to explain to my dad, whose plan I was on. Maybe I could just say I just dropped it?
As I turned toward my room, already thinking, I heard Ben say, “So. You going home tonight?”
Lana didn’t answer. Turning back, I saw her pulling the computer over to squint at the screen. “This queue is insane,” she said instead. “How long has she been trying to print?”
“Long enough for me to have to do it for her earlier at Home Office,” he replied.
I heard keys clicking as I went into my room and sat down on the bed. Suddenly, I just felt so tired, as if the sum total of the day—not to mention the aftermath of the drinking—was hitting me all at once. It wasn’t even nine yet.
I’d just stretched out as someone began to come up the drive.
“Did you hear—” Ben stopped himself. “Is that a car?”
There was some frenzied whispering and a couple of clanks, followed by the scraping of chairs. A moment later, the door banged shut. The exit was so fast, I had to wonder how many times they’d done it.
Then I heard my mom’s voice.
“… on her schedule,” she was saying. “No, not at the moment. But I can easily get there if she has an opening.”
She went into Juvie and it was quiet except for a sudden, growing whirring. A beat later, I recognized it: the steady beat of paper printing.
