LITMIR.BIZ

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      I had no idea whether it was too late to go check out my phone, but I needed to call someone. My mom. Leah. Emma. Someone.

      I ran to the cell phone office. It was eight forty-five. I glanced out the doors. Dark already.

      “Hi, I want to check out my phone, please.” I handed him the checkout card I’d been given on my first day.

      He handed me my phone. “Fifteen minutes.”

      “Okay.”

      I turned it on and darted out the side door into the courtyard. It was freaking cold, and my Florida-based wardrobe only made it colder. I called Home the second it turned on.

      No answer. My desperation was starting to make my hairs stand on end. I needed someone to tell me that I was right.

      But I had a bunch of voice mails.

      The first one was from my mom:

      “Hey, sweetie, I miss you already! I know you’re going to have a fantastic time at Manderley. You really are. It’s such a good school, you’re going to get into a fabulous college, and oh, you’re going to have so much fun. You’re going to make so many friends there. Oh, gotta go, I think I’m getting pulled over. Call me sometime soon. Love you!”

      She sounded so sure that I would do well here. I made sure not to delete the message and listened to the second one. It was from Leah, my best friend. The first few seconds was just a bunch of screaming, talking and laughing. Then finally:

      “… give me the phone, Michael! Jeez! Okay, finally! It’s all of us here—” she was interrupted by a bunch of people yelling their hellos into the phone “—and we just miss you so much! The senior cookout was at the A-Street Pier this year, and it’s so freaking awesome! Rita’s is giving out free desserts, and Mango Mangos is catering—I know you love their French fries and we just—Shut up! I’m trying to leave a message!” More laughing, and then my friend Emma took over the phone.

      “Hey! Oh, my gosh, we miss you so much, seriously, it is not the same without you. Plus I don’t think the guys know who to lust after now that you’re gone—”

      The phone exchanged hands again. My throat was tight, and there were chills going up and down my back. “It’s totally true—” I recognized Jake’s voice “—you were the hottest thing to ever happen to SAHS.”

      “Anyway,” Leah said, taking the phone back, “we miss you, and you would have loved this cookout it’s so much fun. Not as much as if you were here though. Call me back! Or write to me on Facebook or something—jeez—I can’t believe I haven’t heard from you yet! Must be too busy with all your—Stop it! Okay, love you, bye!”

      More laughing until they got the call to end. There was one more voice mail from home, left only an hour ago. It started with barking I recognized. Then I heard the small barely-familiar-with-a-phone voice of my little sister Lily.

      “That was Jasper saying hello. He misses you lots, I can tell, and he’s always sleeping in your bed! I think he’s really sad every time someone comes to the door because it’s not you. You have to come home soon so you can pet him and hug him, because he’s really sad and missing you. He got a new collar and leash! I lost the other ones … but that’s okay, because these are pink! Daddy let me pick them out, and Mommy thought it was silly because Jasper is a boy, but I think they look good with his black fur. He’s really cute. Also another doggie moved in next door and Jasper is always talking to it. It’s making Mommy irritated though, she says, because now they’re always barking. But I said it’s cute because it’s like 101 Dalmatians and they’re doing the twilight bark. You know, when all the dogs talk before they go inside for bed? Anyway, Daddy is doing that thing with his finger that means ‘wrap it up’ so I have to go. Oh—wait, here’s Daddy, he wants to talk, too. Bye!”

      My eyes were burning now. “I just walked in, I’m not sure how long she’s been talking or if it cut her off.” I heard Lily in the background saying she had just called me. “Anyway, we miss you and can’t wait until you come home. Love you, talk to you soon.”

      And that was it. I used to hear every one of those voices every day, and took them completely for granted. I couldn’t even mentally utter the old saying about “knowing what you’ve got.” I just missed them, even after this short period of time. I was so incredibly nostalgic for a life I knew I’d never, ever have again. But at this moment, I wanted nothing more than to give up on this stupid place and go back home. I looked at the weather app on my phone. It had been eighty-three degrees back home. The next two days were sunny, and the third had thunderstorms. I loved thunderstorms.

      As for Manderley, the weather was anticipated to be overall gloomy, with a temperature of sixty the next day, with cold rains and a low of forty-three. Cold rains are really, really different than warm thunderstorms.

      I tried home once more. When there was no answer, I left my own voice mail. “Hey, everyone, um …” Here it was. My opportunity. If I told my parents I hated it, they would let me come home. I could be home in forty-eight hours, sitting in the living room with my mom. She’d listen to my woes sympathetically and without judgment. I could be back at my high school in time for Homecoming. “I miss you all so, so much. I—It’s …”

      If I left, everyone would know why. If people talked about me, they’d say, Remember that new girl? No, not Becca, the short one with the stupid freckles.

      Becca left here, alive or not, and left behind a legacy. I wasn’t as good as her, only because she was so … whatever she was. If I walked out now, I’d be telling everyone they were right. If I left now, I’d be a coward who runs scared from the ghost of a girl who haunts the halls.

      “Manderley is amazing. I can’t wait until you can see it in person. The classes are pretty hard, but not worse than I thought they’d be. Love you all. Lily, give Jasper a paw-shake and a hug for me, okay?” I briefly envisioned how good it would feel just to scratch his ears and give him a squeeze. “Love you. Miss you. I have to go turn my phone back in now. I still love it by the way, thanks so much for getting it for me.” I was rambling. “Okay, bye now.”

      I texted each of my friends, giving them a brief and respectively varied miss you, wish I was home, xoxo, and then turned the phone off. It felt like saying goodbye to my visitors and returning to my jail cell.

      The only way I could think of to extend the visit would be to go to the library, to the one computer equipped with the ability to do anything but look up journal articles and other scholarly things, and log on to Facebook for the first time since I’d left home.

      I really shouldn’t have. It was just more of the same torturous happiness from my old life. My friends wrote to say they missed me. It was really flattering and nice, but it just hurt. It hadn’t been long since I’d left, but it felt like it had been so much longer. Leah wrote, Already forgotten about us, huh? Ugh! Fine, go make your new friends … what do I care? Haha, just kidding. Miss you, come visit!

      I looked at the pictures from the cookout, and everything else my friends had been up to lately. It was like digging into my own flesh to find a bullet. I couldn’t even get through the whole album of all of my friends wearing sweatshirts with shorts and flip-flops, still sporting sunburns at the cookout. Leah had tagged me in one picture as an extra marshmallow on a stick and her and Emma pouting.

      I glanced at the other albums, of them just two days before, swimming in Lucy’s aunt’s pool in the afternoon and then in the hot tub at night.

      Then I thought of something. I hesitantly typed her name into the search box. And then there she was.

      Rebecca Normandy. Her profile was restricted so that I couldn’t see anything but her profile pictures and the comments on her wall. It was really kind of disturbing. She’d been missing for almost five months, and there were still comments from the past few days, from people whose names I didn’t recognize.

      Miss you, beautiful.

      I

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