You can say that again, Rolling Stones, thinks Sam. You can definitely say that again.
She checks her phone. She has seventy-two unanswered texts, most of them from members of her former household. Her de facto family. Herex–de facto family. Nothing from Evil Alice, of course, but messages from Scooter, from Nathan, from Cece and Kylie and Boom Boom. She deletes all of them without reading them. Every single one. Even Boom Boom’s, and Boom Boom is always good for a laugh.
But she’s still holding the phone, and the hand holding it itches—or maybe it actually hurts. Isn’t there some Bible saying about cutting off the hand that offends you? Truly, she doesn’t know much about the Bible. She was raised a devout atheist. She’s not going to cut off herhand. Obviously. But she might just...
She might just toss her phone into the ocean. Like Lorde, in that “Solar Power” song! Before she can reconsider, this is exactly what she’s doing. The instant she lets it go she realizes this is a terrible decision environmentally, and she thinks about the seals or piping plovers or other sea life that might be ruined by her rashness and her ignorance, so she wades out and retrieves the phone, soaking her jeans up to the knees in the process. Maybeshe’ll just throw it in the trash. No, she can’t do that. That’s also bad for the environment. She inspects the phone. It’s sufficiently ruined. No amount of time sitting in rice is going to get this thing working again. Okay, maybe that’s fine. Goodbye, TikTok. Goodbye to the past nine months of her life. Goodbye, Tucker, and especially, goodbye, Evil Alice. Goodbye, everything.
She wipes the phone on her thigh and sticks it in her back pocket. Before she leaves she scans the beach for her young friend and sees her sitting in a miniature version of her mother’s beach chair, legs crossed at the ankles. She’s eating a sandwich. Lucky girl. Sam is hungry.
“Returning?” chirps the young woman, a few years older than Sam, who works at the counter of the rental place.Darcy, her name tag says. She’s got a face full of makeup and her hair is done up in a twist and secured with a massive claw clip. She’s wearing business casual clothes, the kind you’d get at Marshalls or T.J. Maxx, a white button-up blouse and high-waisted trousers. Darcy probably went to college, or maybe she didn’t, but either way, look, now she has a perfectly respectable job where she comes in at nine and leaves at five and nobody scrutinizes her content or tells her she’s too famous or not famous enough or her numbers are terrible and she might want to consider a new collab but could she please take care of that yesterday because it’s already sort of late.
(Maybe Sam’s mother was right—maybe Sam should have gone to college, like her brother, Henry, who is studying philosophy at Middlebury.)
“Returning,” says Sam. “Under the name Tink Macalester.” Tink rented the car for her. Tink had been happy to see Sam go; Tink wasn’t liking the “energy in the house.”
“All right, Ms. Macalester!” Darcy taps away on her keyboard, glancing up at Sam every few strokes. Sam wonders if Darcyrecognizes her. “Let me just enter your return into the system, and then you can be on your way. Have you removed all your possessions from the vehicle?”
“Yup.” Her luggage is outside: one super-oversize duffel, three smaller bags, a backpack. If Sam left anything else in the apartment Tink promised to ship it to Narragansett, but Sam’s faith in that promise is slim.
Darcy prints off a bunch of paperwork, taps the edges to line up the pages, staples the corner, and hands it to Sam with a smile. “Have agreatday, Ms. Macalester. Thank you for driving with us, and we hope to see you again in the future.” Sam looks behind Darcy and to both sides, but there’s nobody else in the place. She supposes Darcy is employing the royalwe.
It occurs to Sam as she exits the office and studies her luggage that without her phone she doesn’t have a way to contact an Uber or a Lyft to get home. You can’t exactly hail a cab in this part of Rhode Island, the way you can in New York City. She can’t call Henry, who is staying in Vermont this summer and living off campus with his girlfriend, Ava. (“Why?”Sam asked him once. “Why’d you pickphilosophyto study? So you can sit around andthink?” “Why not?” Henry had answered. And that, Sam imagines, is an example of a philosophical conversation. No, thank you to that.)
She doesn’t know the phone numbers of any of her high school friends. Nobody memorizes phone numbers! And even if she did she’s not in touch with them right now. They used to drop her DMs but she didn’t always have time to answer them—she’d been inundated for a while there, and the pressure to keep up was monumental. At some point her high school friends had given up, resentful.
She sighs and pushes the glass door of the shop back open. Darcy looks up from her computer, more surprised than delighted.
“Hi,” says Sam. “I’m back again! I—uh. I lost my phone.” Darcy looks skeptically at Sam; she probably saw the outline of the phone in her back pocket when she exited. “I mean, I didn’t lose it. I have it right here. Obviously. But it got wet, and it’s not working, so I can’t call for a ride. I was wondering if I could use your phone? Just real quick.”
Darcy narrows her eyes and glances behind her, where three desks sit in a neat triangle, each with a phone on top. “We’re not supposed to let people back here...”
“Please? I’ll be so quick. It will just be a sec. You can watch me the whole time, I’m not going to do anything shady.”
“Okay.” Darcy sighs. “But besuperquick. If my manager comes in and you’re back here, I’m totally screwed.” She points to one of the desks. “That one’s mine.”
“Thanks,” says Sam. She ducks behind the counter and hurries to the phone. She tries to turn her back to Darcy as she picks up the receiver and dials, because she’s worried that the call will blow her cover and she doesn’t want Darcy to listen in.
She knows only one phone number by heart, because she’s known it her whole life. The phone rings once, then twice, a third time. She can picture the room where it’s ringing: a kitchen in a three-bedroom Cape not far from here, the stove with the back-right burner that doesn’t work, the freezer that doesn’t make its own ice, the canisters of flour and sugar on the counter. The round table with four chairs where Sam ate every meal of her childhood, except for the two separate times she was gone as a kid. Then for the past nine months, gone again.
On the fourth ring, an answer.
“It’s me,” whispers Sam, curving her back away from Darcy. “I need a ride. I’m at the Enterprise in North Kingston. Can you come pick me up?”
Ten minutes later Sam’s mom’s Subaru pulls up to the curb,and Amy Trevino lowers the window. Her face is like a crossword of emotions: down, five letters,H-A-P-P-Y.Across, nine letters,P-E-R-P-L-E-X-E-D.Down again, using theD, W-O-R-R-I-E-D.
Don’t cry, Sam reminds herself. Do. Not. Cry. You’re fine! You’re so, so fine. This is your mom, and here she is in her car, and you’re going to get in and go home and regroup and everything is going to befine,because everything is okay, and nobody died.
(Is this the new barometer of success? Nobody died?)
“Honey!” says Sam’s mom. “Why didn’t you tell us you were coming home? I would have prepared things for you! Your dad’s going to be so happy to see you.”
Sam gets in the passenger seat; her mom reaches across the emergency brake and opens her arms to her, and Sam leans into the arms, and she cries, and she cries, and she cries.
June
Sam
Sam makes it two and a half more days without her cell phone. She has her laptop, and she can use that to check her texts, an activity she tries to limit to a few zillion times per day. There’s nothing from Tucker. Not. One. Single. Message. Maybe he’s tried calling her. Not that she wants him to. In fact, she expressly asked himnotto call her, and she’s hoping he actually listened to her.Isshe hoping? Of course. A little. Not really.
