The only reason Steve and his daughter had escaped the tragedy was because the entire family had been at Janice’s deathbed, watching the person they depended on most in the world take her final breath. Steve blamed himself for that. He felt guilty that he still had his kids while a whole lot of other people had only empty rooms.
And yet he resented them that they thought it would’ve only been fair for him to lose a kid, too.
Across the gym something caught Steve’s eye. A glint, a wink. There in the bleachers, a kid was recording him with a brand new Tether. More Tethers glinted, all aimed at Steve. Even JJ was recording him, not to mention the local news.
“All I’m saying is The Phone Company obviously doesn’t care about this town. Kelli, you were there protesting what they did to our graveyard. In fact, a few of you were. Bonnie? Clive? Surely you understand where I’m coming from. They don’t care. They don’t—”
The gym doors burst open, and all the Tethers turned to see Deputy Bill standing there, looking a little winded.
“Hey, folks!” Bill shouted, putting on a smile and waving. A few phones waved back. “How we doing in here? Everyone all right?”
A woman, very excited to see a uniform, stood up and cried out, “Hey, you think Graham’s Tether called the cops, too?”
“Wow!”
“That’s amazing!”
* * *
The deputies had evacuated the gym and had guided everybody to the reassembly area in the end zone of the football field. They had quickly ascertained the gym was safe, and that no one there knew anything other than they’d gotten new phones.
“So this wasn’t a drill?” Steve asked.
“No,” Bill said, “I don’t know what this was.” He clapped Steve on the shoulder. “Why don’t you get your kid home? Drive safe, all right?”
They broke up, and Bill, casting his eyes down the driveway, went to Deputy Caruthers.
“You got this?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. I’m going to check something out.”
Bill walked down to where he’d seen the creepy red truck. “What the hell?” he said, walking the line of cars a few times.
He’d found the landscaping boulder and the white truck parked on the recently mowed shoulder of the driveway. Where the red pickup had been parked there was now the McCurdy’s station wagon.
What Bill didn’t understand was how anyone could have gotten in or out of that parking space, it was that tight.
* * *
On the drive, Steve and JJ sat in silence. They picked up Sarah from her after-school job at O’Donald’s, and after a brief squabble about who would sit in front, Sarah climbed in back.
“What is that?” she asked.
“A new Tether,” JJ said.
Sarah glared at her dad. “You bought him a Tether?”
“No, I did not.”
“I got it from school,” JJ explained. “Everyone got one. Even Dad.”
After staring for a second, Sarah said, “I want one.”
“You already have a cell phone,” Steve said.
“Yeah. From the eighties.”
“It’s not that old.”
“It isn’t fair, though. You get phones and I don’t?”
“I’m giving mine back,” Steve said.
“Then let me have it.”
“No, I don’t think so. It’s not my property anyway.”
“Whatever,” she said, crossing her arms and glowering out the window.
Steve didn’t know what to tell her. It wasn’t just his kids he had a hard time relating to, either. Not anymore.
Mary McPhail from Home Ec had once accused him of being a neo–Luddite. “You’re not going to come smash my Singer, are you?” she’d said. “It is basically an electronic loom.”
It had been a joke at the time, as most things were with Mary McPhail, but Steve wondered if that was part of why she’d cleared her throat at the assembly. He wondered if he’d been purposefully excluded from the decision to sign with PCo because of his stance.
JJ smirked. “Hey, Sarah, I texted you.”
“Screw you,” she said, and JJ laughed.
Steve gripped his steering wheel. He kept seeing JJ at the assembly, thrashing beneath the blinking lights. The new phone felt heavy and hot against his thigh. And he wanted nothing more than to tell his kids, whom he loved more than anything in the world, to shut the hell up.
* * *
They approached the future site of the PCo store. JJ noticed that, across the street, Mountain View Church had changed its sign:
CRACKED ROCK WELCOMES PCO
JJ posted a picture of it on Follow and wrote a caption before punching post:
CHAPTER 8
That night at the Disneys’, all the other girls wanted to do was play on their phones. Apparently, their parents, known as the three Debbies, had pre-ordered new Tethers for them.
It was lame.
“Smoke?” Sarah suggested. She was bored of this stupid, perfect house, and the stupid, perfect girls all lined up in a perfect row on the bed, their feet in the air, stupid phones chiming.
Erica Tracy, the girl in the pajama shorts, chortled and glanced at Sarah, then snickered at Anastasia and the rest of the girls. Anastasia didn’t look up from her Tether but smirked knowingly. She still wore her socks, which reminded Sarah of something the other girls didn’t know.
Anastasia hated feet.
Especially her own.
This had always been the problem with Anastasia. She had always been the new girl. By the time her parents had moved back to Cracked Rock, Anastasia had missed everything. She didn’t know who’d lived in her house last, and what had happened to their kids. She didn’t even seem to know other people had deeper things to worry about than their feet.
It was annoying.
Anastasia and her friends never responded to Sarah’s question about the smoke, too busy texting each other and leaving her out. Sarah wasn’t stupid. She saw what they were up to.
“I’m taking the cigarettes then, bye.” She picked up a fresh pack of Montclairs from Anastasia’s purse and sneaked outside through the laundry room door downstairs.
At the back entrance to the garage, Sarah stood on a little sidewalk bordered by the property fence and a gurgling creek. Lights off, it was pitch-black.
This was the end of the subdivision. If you looked one way, there was a street, a landscaped sidewalk. Look the other way, though, and there was nothing but dark woods.
Jaime Vedder had sneaked through these very trees. Sarah had heard, before That Day, some hunter had found maimed animals in the acreage out there; a little burial ground. Apparently among the rotted corpses there was a dead cat with a name tag. Whiskers.
Sarah shivered in her hoodie and lit a cigarette. Her smoke looked like ghosts.
Sarah often fought the urge to throw her old clamshell phone. She had to type with the numpad, sometimes punching a digit up to four times to enter the right letter. She hated it. Yet she took the time to type in Anastasia’s entire name, rather than her nickname “Ana,” because it sounded condescending.
Sarah frowned.
Sarah took a drag and held it, thinking. At times like this she wished she had her own car like other girls her age. None of her friends understood that her dad couldn’t afford it (or so he claimed), but just one more year at her job and she’d have enough saved.
Blowing smoke, Sarah clapped her phone shut and stuffed it in the pocket of her hoodie. Screw them. If Anastasia wanted to be a bitch about it, Sarah would gladly call her dad and go home. She didn’t know why she’d come anyway, after Anastasia had gotten her arrested. They’d teased her about it, earlier, her “friends.” The Debbie daughters.
&
nbsp; “So,” Anastasia had said, “how come he didn’t throw you in prison? What’d you have to do?”
Sarah made a face somewhere between you’re stupid and don’t make me vomit. “It’s jail, and he’s like my uncle, you perv.”
“A sexy, sexy uncle,” Erica Tracy had said, and the girls had all laughed. They were so stupid.
Sarah’s phone buzzed in her pocket.
It buzzed again.
“Ugh.” She reached into her hoodie.
Sarah’s heart leapt.
Oh, shit.
The door burst open beside her, and she jumped, dropping the cigarette, nearly dropping her phone.
“What the hell?” Anastasia said.
Sarah, calming down, lifted her foot off the crushed Montclair. “I hadn’t even smoked half,” she said.
Anastasia shot a look back over her shoulder. “Give them to me, quick.”
“Why?” Sarah asked, shoving the pack at her.
The door burst open again, and both girls nearly screamed. Mrs. Disney emerged, looking down at her new Tether before snapping her head up to the girls.
“Anastasia,” she hissed, snatching the cigarettes from her daughter.
“Mrs. Disney, I’m so sorry—” Sarah began.
“Shut up,” Mrs. Disney said, her eyes fixed on Anastasia.
Sarah closed her mouth. She glanced again at Mrs. Disney’s Tether, which glowed in the dark. The image remained onscreen for a second longer before blinking out. Sarah got a good enough look this time, though.
She didn’t understand.
“Money missing from my purse, and these?” Mrs. Disney held up the Montclairs. “You had me half convinced it was your sister. Never again, Anastasia.” She waggled her phone, as if that explained something.
The Tether came back on, highlighting everyone’s faces from below. Mrs. Disney, who usually looked so young for forty, so blonde and flawless, looked ugly with harsh lines and bags beneath her eyes, pitted cheeks.
The look on Anastasia’s face . . . there were tears in her eyes. She’d known her mother was coming, and yet she’d taken the cigarettes from Sarah anyway. Why? To save her?
“Mrs. Disney, it’s my fault,” Sarah said.
Mrs. Disney wouldn’t look at her. “Sarah. Go back inside.”
“Please, it’s—”
“Now.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Sarah shared one last look with Anastasia and arched her eyebrows to apologize, then escaped, nearly crying too. She stood in the garage, in the dark, listening to the yelling for a second, flinching, thinking about what she’d seen on Mrs. Disney’s phone.
She didn’t understand it. Somehow Anastasia’s texts had shown up on her mother’s Tether. Sarah’s responses had shown up there as well. Almost as if Anastasia had accidentally included her mother in their private conversation—but more like Mrs. Disney’s phone had an app that allowed her to spy on her kids.
OMG, Sarah thought, realizing the ramifications. She and Anastasia had texted about stealing the cigarettes earlier. They’d texted about a lot of things. A lot of embarrassing things. About how Sarah had been arrested by Bill.
Had Mrs. Disney read everything?
“. . . bitch!” she heard Mrs. Disney say outside. Even though Sarah would’ve agreed with her minutes ago, it made her shrink back from the door. Sarah’s dad, Sarah’s mother, never would have called her that, ever.
She hurried back into the house, covering her face, not sure where she would go. She didn’t want to go back to the bedroom to those stupid, perfect girls, didn’t want to answer their stupid questions or let them see her crying.
So she went to the downstairs bathroom, where she wept quietly, not for herself or what her dad might find out—not entirely. Mostly she wept for her friend.
* * *
“Look!” Mini Mark shouted, clambering on his knees across his sleeping bag.
JJ, sitting in his own sleeping bag, set his phone facedown so his friend couldn’t see what he was doing. He looked over at Mark’s screen.
“What is it?” the Dick asked from his bed; he was messing around on his own Tether. “Another rip-off of Minecraft?”
“No,” Mini Mark said. He grimaced and added, “Well yeah, but look!”
Mark’s character levitated a mile above the world, which was a Lego-like recreation of their town. JJ could see the entire valley, from HMS to Marvin’s junkyard, everything made out of cubes—even villagers and trees.
“I named it Buttcrack Rock,” Mark said.
“Whoa. How long did it take you to build all that?”
“I didn’t! It was already there!”
“Whoa,” JJ said again. “Is that the old graveyard?”
“Yeah, check it out.”
Mini Mark flew down to the historic cemetery. “The shit spill kind of spread like water or lava or something, had the same kind of physics. I cleaned it all up, though. Using the bucket.”
“Senhor Pooper Scooper,” JJ said, and Mark laughed.
Indeed, Harcum Cemetery had been cleaned up, and the graves had been backfilled with cubes of dirt, then graded to make it flat like a construction site. In the center remained the concrete pad of the First Step.
“I tried digging through it,” Mark said, “but watch.” He struck at the Step with his wooden pickaxe. The tool disintegrated while the concrete pad remained. “See?”
“Try going underneath it,” JJ said.
Mark nodded and dug through the dirt beside the First Step.
“You need to craft a stronger pickaxe,” the Dick said, tapping his touchscreen.
Watching Mini Mark work, JJ thought about something his counselor had told him and he wanted to tell his friends. He hated when he had a juicy tidbit and couldn’t share it. But he didn’t want the guys to know he was seeing Mrs. Keeler. The Dick would make fun of him for anything, especially his weaknesses. It’s what guys did. JJ thought it was immature, but he did it too, because it was stupid and fun.
“I heard some of Mrs. Keeler’s family was buried there,” JJ said, keeping it vague.
“Oh yeah?” the Dick said. “Where’d you hear that?”
JJ held his eyes. “My dad.”
“Ah.”
“Hey, look.” Mini Mark had dug up some cubes of red clay. “I think I can bake it into bricks.”
“Cool,” JJ said, but then returned to the subject. “I guess it must be her great-great-great-grandmother or something.”
Mini Mark nodded at his screen. “She’s a Harcum, you know.”
“What?”
“Yep.”
“Huh. So then the ghost . . .”
“Yep. She’s related.”
“Huh.”
“Dude,” Mark said, “I just found bones!”
JJ looked and, indeed, beneath the Step, there were tons of fractured skulls disembodied from smashed skeletons—all in little cubes.
“Meanwhile I’m looking at your penis,” the Dick said, aiming his Tether at Mini Mark’s crotch. He had some sort of X-ray vision app he’d been fooling around with. He pressed a button and his Tether emitted a camera sound. “See?” he said, showing JJ and Mini Mark the picture he’d taken.
Mini Mark jumped up from the sleeping bags. “Hey! Delete that!”
“Nope.”
“Dick!”
“Yep.” The Dick’s real name was Richard Clement but no one called him that. And not just because Richard was another name for Dick.
Muttering obscenities, Mini Mark climbed inside his sleeping bag and continued to play his game, knees drawn up to hopefully shield himself from the Dick’s peeping eye.
Seeing that his friends were once again self-absorbed, not watching what everyone else was doing, JJ picked up his phone.
Earlier, under Games, he had found an app called Drones,
fact, no one JJ knew seemed to have the same apps. It was as if the programs were personalized.
Drones was a great game. Bloody. Realistic. JJ could choose his battle zone from a list of real wars happening all over the planet. He had seen one battle in Mali that sounded familiar, something he’d seen on Channel One maybe, so he’d picked it. He’d spent hours protecting a cell tower from rebels. Bullets into heads.
It was cool because death was permanent in the game. He never spawned as the same character. Men, women, black, white, and Asian: the game randomly generated new faces and body builds after every death. He wondered when he’d see a pattern, or any repetition. Every program had some pattern.
He’d give another gold star to the game’s arms specs, which were like triple X gun porn. The stats included everything right down to the weight, in grains, of the ammunition.
Probably paid to use ’em too, JJ thought, thinking of the Glock and the Heckler & Koch. He knew game developers sometimes licensed with weapons manufacturers for the right to use trademarked guns. That meant just by buying a game you were supporting gun manufacturers. Pure awesome.
Now he’d found an even cooler app, way cooler than any game. JJ had hidden it when Mini Mark came over to show him Buttcrack Rock. He didn’t want the guys commandeering his phone again for three hours, like they did when they discovered they couldn’t get their own copy of Drones.
JJ hadn’t downloaded the new app yet. He’d been reading the description when Mini Mark interrupted: The Enormous Television,
JJ read some of the reviews. Usually he would skip to the one-star opinions first to see what was wrong with the app, and to laugh at the obscene comments of internet trolls.
Out of thousands of reviews, there was only one negative comment for The Enormous Television, titled
When JJ pressed DOWNLOAD, a privacy agreement appeared. He pressed ACCEPT without reading it, but glimpsed something weird before it flashed off the screen. Something like,
The Phone Company Page 9
