Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

So he’d ditched. He did that more often lately. It wasn’t as bad as the day he’d actually come to school but then skipped all his classes anyway, hiding in the library or the unlocked maintenance rooms or other little interstices he managed to know about — exercising a sort of pointless, arcane freedom, and waiting for pushback, which he never seemed to get.

Things with Cutter had progressed quickly, in ways good and bad. Sometimes there would be afternoons spent in each other’s company — at some Starbucks, or on one of the benches in Carl Schurz Park watching the river traffic and the joggers and the checked-out nannies pushing strollers toward the playground, or even just in Sara’s apartment cracking each other up in front of daytime TV — that felt like love, or at any rate like ease. On the couch with their shoulders pressed into each other, they would laugh and eat leftover takeout and mock the clueless neediness of the Real Housewives or whatever other sad sacks were whoring out their dignity on reality TV, a genre of which they never tired. They made out a lot too. Which was great, but if she was honest with herself the major appeal of having him in her home with the TV on lay in the reduced risk of his acting out in some public way that might embarrass her, or endanger him, or both. She had already begun, for instance, finding excuses not to go into stores with him, because no matter what sort of store it was — a Duane Reade, a Starbucks, a Sephora — when they were back on the street he would pull out of his jacket something he had shoplifted for her. She started to understand why his other friends were always so careful to limit their exposure to him, to stay outside his bubble. She did not want him to get caught, of course, but she couldn’t think of anything else that would stop him; and he never got caught.

What was worse was how bad he tried to make her feel for stressing. He mocked her for her fear of getting into trouble, but then, when she insisted she wasn’t afraid of that — and she wasn’t, not really — he critiqued her even more sarcastically, saying she was like someone whose jail cell door had been opened but she was too scared, too guilty to walk through it. Jail cell? As was often the case, she could follow what he was saying only so far, but no further. He’d always seemed older than she was, and one day he’d let slip that in fact he was almost sixteen. He’d been left back, despite being the single smartest person she had ever met.

His provocations could turn casually mean. But she forgave him everything. She could feel herself committing that cardinal feminine sin, the one you saw on reality TV shows all the time: she thought she could save him.

She answered the kitchen-photo message with a plea to return to school the next day. He promised that he would, but then on Thursday there was still no sign of him. She missed half of first-period chem standing in the hall outside his homeroom waiting to see if he would show up. Glumly she went back to her own schedule, and then, out of nowhere — at ten in the morning, in Spanish class, at a moment when she wasn’t supposed to have her phone on but had forgotten to switch it off — she got a call. Mortified, she pulled the phone out of her bag and held it below the level of her desk, as if that would make any difference when it was blaring its ringtone; she started to shut it off, but then she recognized the phone number, even though she hadn’t seen or used it in many months now. It was still programmed into her contacts, though; above the number on the tiny screen was the word Home .

“Señorita Armstead?” the teacher said testily.

When lunch period came Sara ran into the corridor and turned her phone back on, but by the time she had two bars she’d decided not to return the call anyway, whoever it was from. The whole thing was too creepy. Like a horror movie: The call is coming from inside the house . Whoever it was hadn’t left a voice mail. She thought briefly, reflexively, about calling Cutter to get his take on it, but there was more than half a chance the call was from him in the first place — just using the time on his hands to prank her. They gave her only twenty-five minutes to eat anyway.

There were no missed calls when she checked her phone again outside school at the end of the afternoon. But then it rang while she still had it in her hand, almost as if someone was watching her. She was too freaked out to answer. She went home, did an acceptable percentage of her homework, and saw that Cutter had posted nine messages on her Facebook wall asking what she was doing; she called her mother at the office, ordered Mexican for dinner, and was sitting on the couch watching 16 and Pregnant when her cellphone rang again.

“What the fuck?” was the way she answered it, having decided it was probably Cutter, who had hacked the number just to show her how far inside her head he could get.

“Is that Sara?”

She had a profound moment of unbalance, like tipping a chair back too far. She looked at the incoming number again. “Daddy?” she said.

“Hi, honey. I’m sorry I called you this morning. I was just so excited to call that I actually forgot — well, I didn’t forget you went to school, obviously, but I guess I forgot what day it was.”

“Dad, where are you calling from?”

He laughed, a sound she hadn’t heard in a long time, though it wasn’t enough by itself to calm the furious beating of her heart, or the anger that her fear provoked. “Caller ID, eh?” he said. “Okay, maybe it was kind of a gratuitous touch, but I called the phone company and they still had our old number available. I’m calling you from our house. Our old house. I bought it.”

“What?” she said. “From who?”

“From your mother, technically.”

“How did she not tell me that?”

“I don’t think she knows. I kept it anonymous, because I figured she would never go for it otherwise. She told you the house was sold, though, right?”

“Yeah. She’s all pumped to have the money.”

“Well, good, that’s kind of what I was hoping. Anyway, here I am. I don’t know where our furniture is, but otherwise everything’s the same. What do you think?”

What did she think ? Even in moments of extreme weirdness like this, it was just easy to express herself to him. Much easier than talking to her mother.

“I think it sounds pretty messed up,” she said.

“Well, granted.”

“I mean, for one thing, I thought you were broke.”

“I wasn’t, it turned out. Though I kind of am now.”

“And then—” She closed her eyes, not because she was upset but just to try to get her thoughts in order. “Why would you want to go back there,” she asked him, “by yourself, when you made such a big display about wanting to get out when Mom and I were living there? You liked the house, it was just us you didn’t like?”

A lengthy pause on his end. “Good for you,” he said softly. “I’m not sure I know why, really. The short answer is, it’s my home. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a good way, because it’s kind of a mess right now, but I made it, and I feel like I should live in it. And it gets you and Mom some of the money you should have gotten in the first place, and it keeps somebody else from moving in and just painting over, papering over, what happened here. I have to live here because it reminds me every day of who I am.”

It was an event, this phone call, even apart from what was being discussed; she hadn’t heard the sound of her father’s voice in months. Texting had just seemed like the default way to communicate — it was the way she communicated with everyone, even Cutter — but she could see now that there was something else to it, some sort of insulation or remove, that maybe they’d both needed.