She was dimly aware that Jake’s dad was still sitting right next to them, but she didn’t care. She didn’t have to care about anything anymore.
Becca’s phone sat in front of her on her desk, next to her keyboard. She picked it up, stared at it for a moment, put it down again. She ran her fingers along the strip of paper in her hand, now soft and wrinkled from two days of this. She stared at the numbers until her eyes started to cross.
Jake had given her what she wanted. A way out of her helplessness, out of her restlessness. A way to do something. She should have called as soon as she had gotten home from the playground on Friday.
She picked up the phone again. Dialed the first digit.
Surveillance wasn’t listening to her calls. They wouldn’t waste their time listening in on someone who hadn’t done anything suspicious—and anyway, they wouldn’t dare put Raleigh Dalcourt’s daughter under surveillance.
Probably.
She put the phone down.
She needed Jake to be here. She needed to kiss him again, to drive the fears from her mind for a little while. There hadn’t been another kiss since she had watched Anna die two days ago. Whenever she went to check on him, she was careful to keep just the right amount of distance between them. She had to figure this out first. She didn’t know what it would mean if they kissed again, what the kisses the other day had meant. Maybe she was using him to forget everything that had gone wrong in her life. Maybe he was her own personal Prince Charming and they would go riding off into the sunset and live happily ever after, if Internal didn’t take them into that little room and shoot them in the head first.
Maybe she loved him.
She shook her head at the thought, even though there was no one to see her. If she were in love with him, things would be clearer. If she were in love with him, she wouldn’t wonder whether she saw him as a way to escape the memories or as her only remaining friend or as something else, something more. Or all of the above. How was she supposed to tell the difference? She needed Heather to help her talk this through, but that wasn’t exactly an option anymore.
Maybe she should go back to the playground and check on him. That would be easy. Simple. No matter what she felt or didn’t feel, she could go check on him.
Except she couldn’t, because she had already gone this morning, to bring food for him and his dad. He didn’t want her coming too often, or staying too long; he worried that someone would notice what she was doing. She had told him she hadn’t seen her mom since Friday morning and that nobody else would pay attention to how often she left the apartment, but he still didn’t think it was safe. Becca wasn’t sure she blamed him—after all, how did she know for sure one of her neighbors wasn’t watching her out the window, noting down every time she made the trip to the playground?
Maybe she should finish her homework, then.
No, she had finished it all yesterday. It hadn’t worked as well as her too-brief times with Jake to block out the image of Anna’s death, but it had helped enough that she had done it all at once, losing herself in the tedium for as long as possible.
Becca reached for her phone again. With her hand hovering over it, she stopped. Was there even any point? Even if she did get in touch with these people, what would she be able to do for them?
The phone rang.
Becca nearly fell out of her chair.
Heart pounding, she looked at the display. Heather again. Was this the fifth time Heather had called today, or the sixth? And that wasn’t counting the texts – at least five times as many, all asking her to pick up the phone, to call her back, to meet her somewhere so they could talk. Becca pushed the phone away. She hadn’t talked to Heather since their conversation at the playground that night. As far as she was concerned, their friendship was over.
She crumpled and flattened the piece of paper in her hand, like she had done so many times over the past two days. She needed to quit putting this off. This was what she wanted, after all.
The phone stopped ringing.
She picked it up again and—quickly, before she could talk herself out of it again—started dialing.
When she hit the last digit, she stopped.
This was what she wanted. What she needed. She couldn’t keep going the way she had been, and this was her only way out.
So why couldn’t she make the call?
Someone knocked at her door. Becca jerked and dropped the phone.
“Becca? Are you in there?” Her mom.
“I thought you were still at work.” Becca hurriedly cleared the number from her phone. She shoved the phone into her pocket and the slip of paper into her desk drawer. Her mom hadn’t even made it home to sleep since the morning Anna had died. Becca hadn’t expected to see her at all today, let alone in the middle of the afternoon.
“Public Relations took a bunch of prisoners off our hands this morning, so things have finally calmed down a little. I may even get to sleep in my own bed tonight.”
Why had she hidden the phone? Her mom wouldn’t be able to tell what she had been doing with it. Logically, she knew that. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that even with the phone and paper hidden away, her mom would see right through her.
Since telling her mom to go away wasn’t an option, she sat back and waited for her to come in. At least this gave her one more excuse for putting off the call.
Her mom eased the door open. “Is this a good time to talk?”
“Actually, I was trying to get some homework done.” She put her hands on her keyboard and tried to look studious.
“I won’t take up too much of your time.” Her mom walked into the room, closing the door gently behind her, and sat down on the bed. “We need to talk about Anna. We should have talked before now. I shouldn’t have left you afterwards the way I did, and I’m sorry. I came back as soon as I could. I’ve been trying to get home all weekend, but I could barely get a bathroom break.”
At the mention of Anna, the loop started playing again behind Becca’s eyes. She would have thought that after seeing it so many times, the impact would have faded. It hadn’t. She flinched as the gun went off again—the hundredth time? The thousandth?
“Are you doing all right?” Her mom sounded so calm about it. As if what had happened was no more serious than a bad dream.
Becca kept her eyes on the keyboard as she answered. “I watched one of my friends die. What do you think?”
“I’m sorry you had to see that. But you need to understand what’s going to happen if you keep going the way you have been.” She patted the bed next to her. “Come sit with me.”
Becca looked at the space on the bed next to her mom. She wanted to get out of her chair, sit beside her, cry on her shoulder. In the old days, that was what she would have done.
She shook her head. “I’d rather stay here.”
The old days were gone.
But her mom still looked like her mom. Why couldn’t she look different, now that Becca knew what she really was?
“I don’t want you to blame yourself for Anna’s death,” said her mom. “She would have been executed whether or not you were there. But I do want you to think about what happened to her. If you keep saying the kinds of things you’ve been saying, you’re going to end up right there in one of those cells—” Her voice broke.
That crack in her calm was worse than hearing her talk about Anna’s death like it was nothing. Becca didn’t want to hear her mom’s grief at the thought of losing her. She wanted her mom to sound just as cold about Becca’s potential execution as she did about Anna’s, so Becca would have one more reason to hate her.
Becca stared out the window so she wouldn’t have to look at her mom. Outside, two Enforcers strode through the parking lot. Were they coming home, or on their way to drag away some anonymous dissident destined to die like Anna in one of those tiny rooms?