by Karen Rivers
Nat was considering whether or not Mika—her last year’s BFF—was missing her today, if this was her first day back, too, and if she had already mostly forgotten about Nat, when her eye was caught by a glint.
The glint was the sun reflecting off a cell phone.
The phone was just lying there: It was half on the sidewalk, half hanging over the edge above the sewer grate. It was also perilously close to dropping into the sewer. Obviously, Nat had to take two steps to the right, to bend over, and to pick it up.
So she did.
The phone was pleasantly warm from the sun. She pressed it to her cheek.
Nat’s dad never wanted her to have a phone. “Who are you going to call?” he’d always say. “I don’t have a phone.” He tapped his temple. “Yep yep.” He’d read something once that said phones caused brain tumors, and even after Nat pointed out that phones have speakers and you don’t have to hold them next to your ear like people did back in the 1990s, he still refused to consider it.
“Yep yep” could have meant almost anything when her dad said it, but in this case Nat knew it meant “nope nope,” in the same way that, to other people, “yeah no” means no and “no yeah” means yes.
“Yep yep” was Nat’s dad’s first—and most famous—thing.
He said it a lot: In the press. In his life. Sometimes even in his sleep.
Now other people said it, too, when they were mimicking him.
Sometimes even when they weren’t.
Famous people always have a thing. Her dad had a whole bunch. Nat couldn’t even think of what they all were, but she knew when she saw them: the “yep yep,” the Eyebrow Raise, the Table Slap, the Huge Laugh, the Save-the-World sayings that sounded like mantras. Everything about XAN GALLAGHER was larger than life, all-caps, but mostly only when he was being XAN GALLAGHER.
When he was being Nat’s dad, he was just Nat’s dad.
But some things snuck in.
Like the “yep yep.”
And the eyebrow.
XAN GALLAGHER’s Oscar-winning movie, the movie that changed him from being an action star to being a Real Movie Star, was called Tumbleweed. It came out the winter before Nat was born. In the movie, her dad played a man with only one eye who walked, ran, rode, and belly-crawled from one side of America to the other to save his sweet angel daughter from a kidnapper. It took place in olden times. There were storms, and there were bears that he fought off with his bare hands. His movie daughter had extremely long blond hair, coughed up blood inexplicably, and had skin as pale as chalk. She was played by twins who were named Kate and Cait in real life, which was pretty much the dumbest thing Nat had ever heard, and she’d heard a lot of dumb things. Spelling a name differently does not make it a different name!
Even though Tumbleweed was ancient in movie terms, XAN GALLAGHER managed to stay famous and on the covers of magazines and was frequently featured on gossipy websites. Since she was born, he hadn’t done any huge movies like Tumbleweed. He only filmed things in the summertime, and a lot of them were animated movies where he just had to do the voice. This year, he hadn’t done anything.
But the paparazzi never went away.
They never stopped.
It got so bad in New York, which is where they were before San Francisco, that frequently the long lens of a camera would poke out from behind a display in Whole Foods, and a couple of days later, Nat’s own wide-eyed, startled image would show up on the Internet or on the front cover of one of those crummy newspapers in the checkout line. Her friends at school would show her the pictures.
Friends. Ha.
Her frenemies.
In the photos, her dad was never wide-eyed or startled. His eyes were always half shut, as though the effort of opening eyes all the way was the work of people who were not as famous as he was.
“Cellular phones are brain fryers. And I like your brain,” Nat’s dad had continued the last time they’d had this conversation, one which they liked to repeat with slightly different versions of the same script each time. “I like your brain too much to radiate it like popcorn in the microwave.”
They also did not have a microwave.
“But Dad—” she’d started, and he’d held up his gigantic hand.
“No way,” he’d said. “Never. Over my dead body.”
“Don’t be weird, Dad,” she’d said. “Everyone has a phone. And no one says stuff like ‘over my dead body’ anymore. It makes you sound old-timey.”
“I say it,” he’d said, and raised his left eyebrow all the way up to the top of his forehead.
Nat had laughed, because she couldn’t help it, not because not having a phone was funny in any way. It wasn’t funny.
It was embarrassing, not to mention inconvenient. Her dad conducted all of his business using email on a Toshiba laptop that weighed about twenty pounds. He took photos for Instagram with an actual camera. He had a Hotmail account from the Dark Ages. As often as not, his manager had to appear in person at the door of the Airstream, clutching contracts or a script and wearing the exhausted expression of someone who has had to fly across the country when a phone call and an email would have been just fine.
A microwave would also have been pretty handy, too, not that they ever had any leftovers. Nat’s dad was a big believer in eating everything on your plate, everything in the fridge, everything in the whole farmers’ market. He’d probably eat the entire world if he could, as long as the entire world did not have any carcinogenic additives.
Nat thought about her dad’s potential reaction while she inspected the found phone.
He wouldn’t let her have it.
He would definitely make her return it.
Which she should do. It was the right thing to do.
But . . .
But.
But the phone was silver, but a lot of the silver was chipped off, like it was just a coating over plastic and not real metal. It looked like a toy, but Nat knew that it wasn’t. It had too much heft. The display was lit up with the time (8:17 a.m.) and an icon that indicated it was sunny, which she thought was dumb. It was obviously sunny. Why would you need your phone to tell you it was sunny? The closest store to where she was standing was not open yet, so she couldn’t place the phone on the counter and ask them to put it in their lost and found. She hesitated in front of the CLOSED sign, thinking she should maybe put it through the mail slot. Instead, she turned the phone off and slipped it into the pocket of her blazer. It felt reassuringly heavy, weighing down the left side of her jacket by just the right amount.
It felt like it belonged there.
All day, through the “New kids check in at the office!” part and the “This is your locker!” part and the “First day assembly!” part, Nat kept feeling for the phone. She felt safer knowing that it was there. She felt connected, even though she knew literally nobody’s phone number and had no one to call. But if anything went wrong, she could call 911. That phone could save a life!
Nothing went wrong.
The school was pretty and pleasant and smelled better and less schooly than most schools. She even had her eye on two or three girls who might turn out to be her new BFF. (The first day was for scouting. She’d learned not to make any real moves until day two.)
By the time the school day ended, she’d almost forgotten that the phone wasn’t just part of her blazer, a familiar weight, like an old friend. She made one stop on the way home, which was to buy a charger that fit the phone. It was a hard thing to rationalize, so she made herself not think about it. She didn’t make eye contact with the clerk, and after she paid, she slipped it into her other pocket without looking at it either.
Who am I? she wondered. What am I doing?
When she got home and hung up her blazer in the tiny Airstream closet, she didn’t even take the phone out. She left the charger in its package. If she didn’t pl
ug it in, it wasn’t intentional. It was all still just a misunderstanding. A mistake.
She definitely didn’t tell her dad about it.
The next day when she went to school, it was still in her pocket.
She thought she might just carry it around for one more day, or until she didn’t feel like calling 911 might be a possibility. It couldn’t hurt. She would give it back eventually to the dum-dum who owned it, who needed to be told by the screen what the weather was doing.
On the second day of school, everyone was nice and everything was fine. But no one was too friendly to her. They weren’t unfriendly either. But she felt uneasy, like she didn’t quite fit. Then the gym teacher shouted at her because her socks were the wrong color, which was embarrassing. She’d never been to a school before that required you to change your socks for gym class. She had to do a plank for three full minutes as punishment.
By the end of the day, there was only one person who seemed like a good candidate for friendship, and that was the other girl in gym class who had also worn the wrong socks. That girl ate alone at lunch, in the corner, reading a book and laughing out loud to herself. When Ms. H had forced them to plank, the girl had made eye contact with Nat a few times, and the last time, she had crossed her eyes, and Nat had collapsed from her plank, in a fit of giggles. It was close enough to a connection to count.
The girl’s name was Solly. She had purple hair with blue tips.
Nat could tell that Solly was someone who didn’t care about rules. She overheard the gym teacher telling the homeroom teacher that Solly was asked by the principal to dye her hair back to a “normal” color and Solly had suggested that the entire school dye their hair purple, since wearing a shirt, tie, and blazer was not “normal” but became “normal” when everyone did it. The gym teacher was laughing when she told the story.
“She makes a good point,” the homeroom teacher had conceded. “What kind of normal kid would wear a tie if they didn’t have to?”
Nat hated the color purple, but she liked Solly’s toughness, her ability to read and laugh alone in the cafeteria, her carefree take-it-or-leave-it vibe. Nat’s dad had once told her that you make friends with people who remind you of yourself or who have some quality that you’re missing, to balance you out. Solly had a lot of what Nat thought she was missing. Nat had very little, if any, ferocity. She preferred to disappear, rather than stand out. She was, she figured, Solly’s opposite in almost every way.
After school, Nat had looked all over for Solly but couldn’t find her anywhere. She was about to give up, when she spotted her purple hair. Solly was on the boys’ playground—the whole school was segregated like that, boys in one classroom, girls in another—leaning against the basketball hoop’s post. Solly was talking on the phone while a group of boys with loose, flapping ties tried to shoot baskets and shouted at her to move. Nat watched for a few minutes. Eventually the boys gave up and wandered off, jostling and pushing. Nat had never really understood how boys knew how to do that fake punch-playing. They looked like puppies tumbling over each other.
When Solly finally looked up and noticed Nat, she frowned. “What?” she said. “Can I help you?” She rolled her eyes.
The only thing for Nat to do was to take her own phone out of her pocket (Act natural! she told herself) and say, “Did you get a signal? I can never get a signal on this dumb thing.”
Solly looked suspicious. “Let me see,” she said. She took Nat’s not-her-phone and flipped it open. She pressed a few buttons. “My brother has a phone like this,” she said. “Why are you using a burner phone? Did you drop yours in the toilet?”
“I don’t know,” said Nat, truthfully. She made a note to herself to Google “burner phone” next time she was at the library. She hoped it was nothing bad. “I mean, I didn’t drop anything into the toilet. This is just my phone.” The lie felt like the truth once she’d said it out loud.
“It’s not very good,” said Solly. “You should get an iPhone.”
“OK,” said Nat.
“They’re expensive though. If you’re poor, you can’t afford it. That’s why my brother doesn’t have one.”
“I’m not poor,” said Nat. She stepped back. Maybe she didn’t want to be friends with this person, after all. Her words felt like jabs. Nat rubbed her arm.
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” said Solly. “People are poor. Sometimes. It’s all relative. We’re poor. I get a scholarship to this rich school. Mom bought me this phone when we weren’t poor for about six months. She sang a gross Christmas song that got popular three years ago.” Solly looked thoughtful, then added, “She thought it was so good, but it was popular because everyone couldn’t believe how seriously bad it was. It got a lot of radio play so that the announcers could make fun of it. She’s embarrassing. And she’s bad with money. The money was gone like that.” Solly snapped her fingers. “Are you calling your mom?”
Nat blinked. “Um,” she said.
She could have said, “I’m calling my dad.”
She could have said anything.
She could even have said, “I don’t have a mom.”
Instead Nat said, “Yeah. I am. Calling my mom. I have to call my mom and tell her how school went. Because it’s a new school. First day. And she isn’t here.” She rolled her eyes in a way that she hoped looked as cool as it had when Solly had done it, and not like she was having some kind of weird fit. “Mom just has to know everything. She’s away for work.” The word “mom” felt funny in her mouth. She ran her tongue over her teeth. “My mom,” she repeated.
“What kind of work does she do?” Solly asked.
“She’s a makeup artist,” Nat answered.
“Huh. Cooooool,” said Solly. She looked like she was trying not to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” said Nat.
“Nothing.” Solly squinted like the sun was in her eyes, which it wasn’t. It was behind her. “Is she in LA, then?”
“Yes,” said Nat, softly, relieved that her lie at least now had some distance between her and itself. “She’s working on a movie.” She imagined this distance to be like a calm, turquoise blue sea stretching between the boys’ playground and LA, where her imaginary mother was just then dabbing imaginary concealer on an imaginary movie star’s invisible pimple.
“You can try her again now that your phone works,” said Solly. There was something in her voice that was challenging. “Do it.”
Solly handed Nat’s phone back and tipped her face up, like she needed some warmth on her skin. She moved around to the other side of the pole so the sun was right on her face, and she closed her eyes. She looked like someone in a spotlight, glowy and surreal.
“OK,” said Nat. “Thanks.” She flipped the phone open. She thought about what to do. This was the last moment where she could fix this, where she could correct the misunderstanding. Or she could go with the lie and have to carry it around forever, or at least for the school year.
What if? she thought.
Nat took a deep breath and stared at the keypad on the stranger’s phone. Then she dialed. She hoped the phone worked. She crossed her fingers on the hand that Solly couldn’t see.
She dialed the area code for LA.
Then she added her favorite number, followed by her locker number, and her birthdate.
She didn’t have a lot of time to think about it.
“Why isn’t your mom’s number already in your phone?” said Solly. “What’s up with that?”
Nat shrugged. She held up her finger, like she was listening, which she was.
The phone was ringing.
“Hello?” chirped a woman’s voice.
“Hi . . . Mom,” Nat said, weakly. She wasn’t optimistic about how this would go, but she was in it now. “Um. It’s me. I’m at school. Well, on the playground. I’m with my new friend Solly.” She immediately regretted sayi
ng that. What if Solly thought that was weird? “My new friend Solly” sounded weird. They weren’t even friends yet. They just met! “Anyway, Dad said I had to call you.”
“Oh, honey.” The woman’s voice reminded Nat of a tiny bird. “I’m not your mom, you’ve dialed the wrong number.”
“No, I didn’t,” said Nat. She had to make this work. She spoke quickly and in a hushed voice. “It’s just a thing. Trust me. Please, Mom.”
“What kind of thing? Is this a prank call?” The lady didn’t sound mad, only slightly amused.
“Not quite,” said Nat. “I’m sure it sounds like that, but it isn’t like that. Thank you. It’s OK. I promise, it’s OK. Do you have time to talk for a minute?” Solly opened one eye and gave her a funny look. “Like, I know you’re busy at work.”
“I’m going to hang up,” said the lady. “I don’t know what’s happening.”
“It’s just . . . please don’t. Um, the boys’ playground and the girls’ playground here are different places. Everything is separated. It’s pretty weird.”
“Is this a cry for help? Have you been kidnapped?”
“Not exactly,” said Nat. “I mean, not at all. No! Definitely not. Not even close. I’m just calling because Dad said I should. You know how he is, Mom.”
“If this is an emergency, say ‘peanut butter sandwich,’” said the bird-voiced lady. She sounded quite happy now. “I can call the police for you. Tell me where you are?”
“It’s not like that,” said Nat. “MOM. You’re so funny! Yes, I had a good day! It was fine. But I hate gym. And I need new socks. Gym socks have to be white.”
“That sounds like a fancy place,” the lady said. “White socks!”
“What else? Well, my homeroom teacher’s name is Mr. Knox. He’s from Texas. He reminds me of Uncle Bill. Like, with the big hat? But he wasn’t wearing a hat. He just seemed like a person who probably would. His head just begs to be hatted.” The lying was getting out of control, although it was true there was a Mr. Knox. But Nat didn’t even have an Uncle Bill. She was a terrible person. Her mother probably was a liar, too, lying to everyone and saying that she’d never had a baby named Natalia Rose Baleine Gallagher. Liars sucked. Nat swallowed hard. “I miss you,” she added. She had lost sight of what was a lie and what was the truth now.