By the time I finished hanging out with Brian after the second day back at school, the porch lights were on at the Calloways’ house. I let myself in and kicked off my dirty shoes, listening for any sound of life. The TV was on in the living room, but no one was watching it. I'd already eaten dinner at Brian's house, so I bypassed the kitchen and made my way for the stairs, hearing the faint sounds of music as soon as I reached the top.
Lilah was in her room with the door cracked and when I caught sight of her, I stopped dead in my tracks. She was sitting in the center of her queen bed with her homework sprawled out in front of her. Her hair was damp and combed away from her face. She was wearing one of her dad’s giant Blackwater Baseball t-shirts, and laying directly beside her—and looking pretty happy about it—was Harvey.
I knocked gently on the door and pushed it open another few inches. She paused flipping through her textbook and glanced up.
“Hi,” I offered, lamely.
Connor thought she looked like a sexy vampire, but this was always the best version of Lilah. Just her.
“Hi,” she said, eyeing Harvey and then glancing up to me.
The dog didn’t even make a move to greet me. He was all too happy to stay right where he was. Traitor.
I patted my thigh. “Harvey, c’mon, you need dinner.”
He didn’t budge.
Lilah put a tentative hand on him. “Oh, um, I didn't know when you'd be home so I fed him. It was the same amount I saw you feed him this morning.”
I relaxed back against the doorframe.
“Sorry if that was wrong. I just didn't want him to be hungry,” she continued.
Four sentences. Practically a paragraph of text. She hadn't said that much to me since she’d moved away. She could feed my dog every day if it meant she'd start to let me in again.
“Thanks,” I said, offering her a smile so she'd know that I meant it.
Her brown eyes held my stare for another moment before she tapped her pencil's eraser on the page of her book.
“I better get back to work,” she said.
“Need help?” I asked, eyeing the calculus set she was working through.
“Oh.” She paused, as if confused by my question, and then her eyes met mine. “No, actually, I’m working ahead.”
I smiled. Of course she was working ahead. She wanted out of this town as soon as possible.
I tapped my hand on the door, then headed to my room to work on the cameras. The box beneath my bed was practically overflowing with them. I’d had plans to repair a bunch of them over winter break, but the move had gotten in the way.
I rifled through them, trying my best to create an organized system of triage. A few of them only needed minor work: replacement lenses or rangefinder adjustments. I unwrapped those cameras and lined them up on the small desk in the corner of the room.
Mrs. Calloway’s boxes were still stacked beside the desk, but I ignored them and pulled my toolbox from beneath the bed as well. It wasn’t the ideal storage space, but the room was too small to store them anywhere else. I’d learned that the first night when I’d left them at the foot of my bed and stubbed my toe on the heavy metal toolbox in the middle of the night.
Once my tools were organized in neat rows, I took a seat and started working. I’d tried to get Connor and Brian into repairing cameras with me. The payout had them interested, but neither one of them loved it the way I did. I think it was the randomness of it that got to them. Each camera was different and there was no simple formula to follow.
I finished up cleaning out an old Canon and then picked up my phone to call my dad. It wasn’t one of the numbers called often, so I scrolled through the contacts and hovered over the Ds. He hadn’t been home when I’d packed up my truck and left the house on Saturday. I’d figured he would have called by now, seeing as I hadn’t been home for the last four days, but there’d been nothing but radio silence.
I hit call, held my phone between my shoulder and ear, and kept working on the Canon. It rang a dozen or so times and then a generic voicemail kicked on. I hung up and tried the repair shop. No one answered there either, and when the answering machine picked up, it was too full to accept any new messages.
I threw my phone on my bed behind me and went back to work on the Canon. Five minutes later, it was too broken to fix. I’d lost control of the screwdriver and shattered the lens. I ripped out the wires and tore open the heart of the thing, stabbing away at it until it was nearly unrecognizable.
Chapter Twenty
Lilah