Also, the signal was cutting in and out. I checked my phone and I had all the bars; it must have been his phone that was losing service. His signal faltering, not mine.
“You’re breaking up,” I said loudly.
“. . . sister put you up to this . . . don’t . . . can’t . . . how dare she . . .” is what I heard and then I heard only quiet with the occasional chirping, which wasn’t my phone but the bugs and the birds in the night.
I ended the call; it didn’t ring back. And I felt relieved, as if my phone sensed that I didn’t want to talk to my dad and made it so. It wasn’t even my choice, let alone my fault.
My phone must have sensed even more than that—like how I wouldn’t want to hear his messages or read any of his texts—because right before my eyes I watched the count of missed messages spool down from 43 to 30 to 11 to 8 to 0.
The last thing I saw before the message light stopped blinking was a view of what was right in front of me in the street: the traffic sign for the old turnpike. The weird squiggle on the sign’s face showed me how the road was about to curve, but I didn’t see the curve itself, because all light cut out.
A voice sounded out in the darkness. “Hello?”
“Hello?” I took a few steps toward it. “Is someone out there?”
No cars had come down the road in either direction since I’d started walking. I’d walked as far as the edge of town, that sign we’d sped past, without realizing.
“Hello?”
I was hearing things, had to be. Though it sure did sound like someone was out there. It didn’t sound like a hooting owl; it was human.
It seemed like the voice had been thrown from the patch of darkness I’d been walking into, darker now the more I got into it. The only light I had on me was my phone, and it still worked enough to allow its light to show my way. The road a foot or so ahead of me became visible, given a pale blue halo from the cell phone’s weak glow. I followed the double yellow line, gone sallow green in the light, and took a few more steps forward.
Then something lunged right for me.
My first thought was a car, but there were no headlights. Then I assumed it had to be an animal, something big that would maul me and leave me flayed on the road. A bear, as it was upright and moving fast. But then I heard it say hello again, in English, and I realized the thing was as human as I was, that it was a person, probably a murderer or a rapist, or both. I was about to regret every decision that had brought me to this moment. Only too late did I think how maybe I should turn tail and run.
But the murderer knew me by name. It also had a cell phone and was aiming an orange-tinted light straight at my face.
“Chloe!”
“L-London?” She was blue in my light, and I was golden in hers.
If I didn’t physically feel her arms around me as she hugged me, I would have been sure she was an apparition, come back to haunt me on this vacant road. Then again, in the car she’d been about to bite my hand off—and now she was embracing me as if it hadn’t happened. Had time wound back on itself and brought us both together to start over? Did she forget what she’d said about my sister? Were we friends again? Was she back, alive?
“I thought you were a ghost!” she was saying. “I thought, That’s it, I’ve gone certifiable, I’m like totally seeing ghosts now. You scared the pants off me, Chloe! I almost peed right here in the road!”
I had to ask: “What are you doing in the middle of the road anyway?”
She was shaking her head in the blue halo, her tired eyes enormous, the circles under them deeper and darker than ever. Her bleached hair caught my light and had gone the color of the ocean. “I really don’t know what happened or how I got here or what. I totally blacked out again.”