I’m already gone.
35
When I arrive at my apartment, Annie is in the bathroom and her phone is on the kitchen counter. I set down my purse, put my own phone into the back pocket of my jeans, and snatch hers up like a greedy toddler with a jar of Nutella. Annie and I know each other’s passcodes, not just because we see each other enter them in all the time, but because we share the same one. It’s 10508. October 5, 2008. The day she and I met in the attic room of our group home.
After I enter the code, Annie’s home screen glows back at me accusingly. The backdrop photo is a picture of us a few years ago, our arms wrapped around each other’s necks and our faces tan from a trip we’d just taken to the Jersey shore. My heart gives a lurch.
The underarms of my shirt are drenched.
I open up her e-mail first, and do a quick scan of her sent folder, looking for any iterations with identifying markers of Justin in the address: JMcBride, McBride, Justin, JMB. Nothing comes up. I click over to her trash folder, thinking that perhaps she’s deleted all their correspondence but forgotten to empty the folder. The folder is empty.
The bathroom door creaks open and before I can put the phone down, Annie sees me.
“I didn’t hear you come back,” she says cautiously.
“I just did.” I take a few steps away from her phone, which I’ve put back on the counter. As if physically distancing myself from it somehow erases her seeing it in my hands a few seconds ago. Magic.
“What were you doing with my phone?” Annie tries on a smile, but her eyes don’t match her mouth.
“Nothing.” I might as well smear metaphorical Nutella all over my face. I am petulant.
“What’s going on?” Annie’s face takes on a look of concern, and she moves towards me, her hands outstretched as though she wants to pull me towards her. “Did something happen at work?”
Liar Liar Liar. That freight train is back, charging ahead.
“How long had you been messaging Justin?”
“What?” There’s a slight panic to Annie’s voice. “What are you talking about?” Her face is deathly pale.
“The police have messages between you and Justin. Talking about how he was frightened of me. How he wanted to break up with me so he could be with you.”
As I’m talking, the tension in Annie’s body seems to slacken just a little. She looks almost relieved. But then she starts talking again.
“That is fucking ridiculous! How could you even think that?”
I’m staring her down, reading her tells. She might be cursing, but Annie doesn’t look angry. Clammy skin and jittery hands tell me one thing. She’s scared.
Good.
“But what about the messages?”
“What messages? When did you talk to the police?”
I don’t answer, and Annie fills the void.
“Oh my God, they are playing you! The police are goddamn liars. I would never hurt you. You know that.” There are beads of sweat breaking out at the hairline on her forehead. She looks awful. “I didn’t even like him.”
I used to think all of that was true.
“But you and Justin were friends on Facebook,” I try, feeling more and more pathetic with each word coming out of my mouth.
Annie smiles, and this time it makes its way to her eyes as well. “Because of you, Morgan. He sent me a friend request, and I must have seen it before you saw his request.”
I so want to believe her, and the pulsing of blood in my ears is becoming softer the more that Annie assures me all of this is just a hoax. A ploy by the cops to try and distance us from each other in order to make us weaker.
Survive and thrive.
“I’m sorry,” I say, shame coming on strong and pungent like a cheap perfume. “I don’t know what’s happening.” I push some stray hairs behind my ear. I still have my coat and scarf on, but a shiver skims up my spine all the same.
Annie moves a little closer to me, but hesitates before she tries to touch me. “I think it might be time to get you some help.” Her voice is so, so quiet, and the tension in her vocal cords sings across the still air around us.
“What kind of help?” I don’t want to know. I’ve had enough of doctors for one lifetime.
“Maybe you need to talk to someone, you know? Maybe there’s some medicine that can help you.”
Annie is still holding her arms out, waiting for me to let her come closer, like I’m a cornered animal who might bite her.
“So you’ve never met him?” I ask, not sure exactly why I need this confirmation given everything else we’d just covered, but wanting it nonetheless.
“No, never. You know that.”
But, as she’s talking, I see Annie’s eyes involuntarily glance at her phone.
There’s something she’s not telling me.
I’m still closer to her phone than she is, and before she can grab it, I’ve taken it and run around my kitchen table, through my small living room, and into my bedroom. I don’t stop to close the door, I’m so desperate to see what Annie wants to hide from me.
I frantically put in the passcode and click onto the photos app.
Because, just like Ormoran and Miller said, our generation needs to document everything.
But before the pictures can come up, Annie is in my face, her mouth twisted into a contortion of anguish and something else.
Maybe resentment, I think, just as she makes a grab for the phone from my hand.
“Give it to me—let me explain!”
I shove her away, more convinced now than ever that my life is over.
A growing fury presses on my chest. My arms feel hollow, like they have no bones, but I manage to hold Annie back with my one hand as I scroll through her photos. Most of them are of her pieces of artwork—huge, sprawling canvases with bright slashes of color that dance across the white background—but there are others interspersed throughout with people, flowers, and food. I’m looking for one face in particular.
Annie scrambles against me, growing more desperate with each passing second. She’s screaming my name, begging me to give her the phone back. She’s shouting every four-letter word in the English language.
She starts to scratch at my hand and leaves a deep gash in my left arm that echoes the scratches that are still healing from the accident. I turn to look at what she’s done as the pain rips up my arm, and Annie takes the opportunity to wrap her arms around me in a bear hug and squeeze as hard as she can to try and get me to drop her phone.
I can’t let her get it, and so I try to twist my body around to push her up against the door or my dresser to knock her off me.
But we are too far from either of them. The only piece of furniture close enough for me to brace against is the mirror standing in the corner of my bedroom. The one I’d looked into Monday afternoon, less than a week ago, as Annie ran a bath for me, to survey the damage Justin had done.
I see us in the mirror. My best friend, my companion through the hellhole of navigating life as a child without anyone who wanted you or loved you, is straddled across my back, her arms slung around me and her face bright red as she struggles to topple me over. I barely recognize my own face.
We look like two people who have hated each other for a long time.
When I slam our two bodies into the mirror, the sound is catastrophic. The glass of the mirror shatters, and the frame’s cheap wood cracks under the pressure. It snaps like twigs under a Girl Scout’s feet, short and crisp. Annie’s arms go limp around me, and I struggle to first sit, then stand up.
Her phone is still in my hands. I scan through the pictures as quickly as I can, and find it all too easily now that I don’t have Annie trying to fight her phone away from me.
Dated almost two weeks ago, there is a picture of Annie and Justin together. Their arms are around each other, and both smile into the camera. There are a few familiar neon signs in the background that tell me the photo was taken up in Cleveland at the Flats, the strip of bars, shops, and
restaurants that Annie and I love to go to when I visit her.
There’s no static inside my head. Only silence.
Annie’s sprawled on the floor next to my broken mirror. There’s a cut on her forehead that’s begun to bleed, and a few scratches up and down her arms.
“Morgan,” she says, her voice a mixture of an accusation and a request.
I don’t answer her. I don’t grab a towel to staunch the blood coming from her forehead. I don’t try to pick her up and move her away from the debris of our fight.
Instead, I throw her phone down on the ground, the photo of her and Justin glaring from the screen, and I run.
From Annie. From my apartment. From my life.
And I hate myself for it.
36
I take off at a sprint, the adrenaline ripping through my body in large enough quantities that it shames the pain of my still healing ribs into silence. I don’t pay attention to where I’m heading. I just keep running until finally my lungs and legs give in, wobbling like wet noodles.
I stop and try to catch my breath in embarrassingly large and noisy gasps of air, but all I can see is Annie, bloody and broken on my bedroom floor. Nothing is getting into my lungs. They are the Fort Knox of pulmonary guilt.
I try to focus my gaze on the horizon, but it’s blocked by large trees still barren from the winter drought and a playground of primary-colored slides and swings. Little sips of breath find their way in as I recognize where I am: Wick Park.
The park is old, and not really used anymore. Most families have escaped to the suburbs, becoming Route 680 commuters who work in Youngstown, only to scurry back to their little three bedrooms in Boardman or Poland. Or Canfield.
There’s an elderly man walking a massive German Shepherd, whose muzzle is the salt and pepper of his owner’s gray beard. A woman with a long, rumpled coat slumps over on a bench, the red and orange of her hat the only thing keeping her from smudging into the drab surroundings. Otherwise, the park is deserted.
I watch the man bend down to give a loving scratch behind the dog’s ears, and something cracks inside me at the gentleness of it all. People love dogs.
My phone vibrates inside my back pocket and I freeze, wanting to fling it across the park. Wanting someone to just scratch me behind my ears and take care of me.
But neither is an option.
I walk further into the park, trying to steel myself, and when I finally do pull my phone out and look down, the notification must have disappeared from my screen when my thumb touched the home button, because I’m back on my home screen again. I stifle a scream that’s been rising in my throat since I woke up in the hospital a week ago.
I am on fire. Everything is burning and burning, and nothing makes sense.
I fumble with the notification menu, but my phone seems stuck.
A quick glance at the reception bars tells me that I am in a dead zone, so I walk a little further down the sidewalk, away from the older man and towards the playground. My phone captures another bar, and the notification appears.
“Find Your Friends has been updated.”
I dismiss the notification with an angry flick of my thumb, and start to pace the sidewalk. The man with the dog has disappeared, but the woman on the bench is still there, all shades of tweaker post bump: shoulders hunched, hands buried deep in her pockets, face hidden underneath her garish hat. All I can see peeking out is a droopy smile.
Annie. Justin. Ormoran and Miller.
There’s something tugging at the back of my mind, pleading me to pay attention to it, but I can’t get my thoughts to shimmer out of the smoke.
My phone vibrates in my hand.
Text from Justin: You can’t run away from me.
I take off in another directionless sprint, bound and determined to prove her wrong. To prove Annie wrong, because she’s the one who sent that message.
I’m certain now.
My feet pound down the sidewalk, taking me from the center of the park to the small parking lot at the edge, surrounded by a grouping of ancient elm trees. The lot itself only holds three parking spaces, and the blacktop is a roiling mess of potholes and crumbling gravel. A single car is parked there, dilapidated grey mixed with cauliflower patches of brown paint and rust. The Chevy insignia catches the low winter sun. The license plate reads L38 4G82.
Static roars inside my head. Flames gobble up my insides.
I know this car.
It’s the same car that almost ran me over on Fifth Avenue.
I stop, pivot, and hurl myself away from the parking lot.
But someone grabs my shoulder, keeping me from twisting around, followed by a bright slice of pain to the back of my neck. The cool metal slams into the pressure point at the base of my skull. My boots scrabble in the gravel like I’m the star of my own after-school special.
Until they stop.
37
When I come to, my hands are tied behind me with the rope looped through the back of an old wicker chair. A wave of nausea washes over me as my concussed head mingles with the terror pricking at the back of my skull.
The seat of the chair has been punched through, and my legs and hips sag into the depression left by the faulty weaving. I know this type of chair. One of my foster homes had chairs like this.
One night I watched the mother of the house sit down forcefully for dinner, after having just yelled at me and the other kids there to “shut the fuck up,” only to hear the satisfying “plop” of her backside as it fell through the wicker weave of the seat.
Looking around the room I’m in, I work to suppress the supernova-sized ball of fear I feel, and instead get my bearings.
Survive and thrive.
A small hint of light seeps through the curtains, which comprise a brown burlap hung from an old drapery strip on one window and a sheet with a pattern that suggests India by way of Chinese mass production stapled to the top of a window frame. The air smells of rotting newspaper, mildew, and cigar smoke. I can make out a stack of rusted cans, with markings that look like they were used decades ago to varnish the floors. A quick survey of the floor shows that whatever was done didn’t last or wasn’t completed. Underneath the coating of dust, the floor was composed of jagged boards in desperate need of a sanding.
This house has good bones. The thought involuntarily crosses my mind, some TLC-watching version of myself invading my grim reality. Until the word bones sends another bolt of fear up my spine.
I try to move my legs, but they are also tied individually to the legs of my derelict chair. I look down to see if my phone is in my pocket, but my lap appears empty. Even if it was there, I don’t know how I’d actually get hold of it. When I struggle to try and shift my arms into a more comfortable position, a voice from behind me calls out.
“You might as well make yourself comfortable.”
The figure comes from around me. It’s the woman who bumped into me on the freeway overpass, and then later waited for me in the park. And she’s still wearing that fucking orange and red hat.
That’s what the bonfire in my head was trying to point out, back in the park.
I am so, so stupid.
Even in the dim light, the green of her eyes is vivid. Her hair runs in dark ringlets over her shoulders. When she pauses to pull the hat off and unceremoniously tosses it onto a stack of old newspapers, frizzy strands escape around her scalp in a corona of frayed ends. She’s wearing a large grey sweatshirt with what looks like oil stains strewn across the front, and her jeans fit loosely over her stringy frame. She offers me a smile as we come face-to-face, and her teeth have the yellowed tinge that comes from years of smoking.
Silently, she holds up my phone, the white and black of its zebra case facing me.
She leans closer to me, and whispers in my ear, “What is it, then?”
She’s asking for my passcode, of course. This woman wants to get into my phone. To do what, I’m not exactly sure yet.
Her breath tickles my ear, sickly sw
eet.
This is Annie’s partner, I realize, and for a moment I consider whether it was my quinoa salads that turned Annie against me. Maybe if I’d eaten more Little Debbie snacks. . .
“It’s a pattern, not a set of numbers,” I lie. “I can’t describe it—I’ll need my hands to do it.” I wriggle my arms behind me, making my point like some kinky mime. “I don’t think I can do it from behind and upside-down, though.”
“Pity,” the woman says. She makes for my hands, and a hot flash of adrenaline rips through me. That was easy.
“Oh, hang on.” She’s back in front of me, dangling the phone in front of my face again. It’s unlocked, the little orbs of my different apps glowing from the home screen. “I’m already in.” A Cheshire cat smile spreads across her sallow face. “I just wanted to see what you’d do.” She turns around and walks towards what looks, in the dim light, like the kitchen. “Liar,” she murmurs before disappearing through the opening into the other room.
Of course she knew my passcode. Annie had told her.
I pull at my ropes again, and feel a promising crackle come from the chair. Before I can do anything, though, she’s returned, holding a glass of water in one hand and my phone in the other.
“Find Your Friends,” she says, her eyes level on mine. A metal fist twists in my stomach. “Isn’t that such a sweet name?” She cocks an eyebrow at me. “Once Justin connected you to his phone, it was so easy to keep track of you.”
My mind races to make sense of what she is saying.
Justin. Annie. Justin and Annie.
“Although. . .” She leans in close again, and I grit my teeth in order to resist the urge to slam my forehead against hers. “We aren’t friends, are we?”
She goes on. “I just needed to make sure you weren’t connected with anyone else. Especially since Justin’s here with me.”
My heart lurches.
But then she reaches down and pulls his phone—red cover and “I Voted” sticker intact—out of the kangaroo pouch in the front of her sweatshirt. She strokes her fingers over the cover, tracing the edges of the sticker gently with her fingertips.
It Was Always You Page 19
