Page 60 of Come Find Me
Joe whips his head from Kennedy to Isaac. “Is this the nine-one-one call? She made it at one-eighteena.m.”
Isaac presses a button, to start replaying the message. But we’ve already heard it once. Kennedy is moving back, like she can’t possibly sit through it once more. I reach an arm for her, but she doesn’t notice me there.“One-oh-three a.m.,”the recording tells us again, at the end.
Fifteen minutes before the call to 911. We all turn to look at Kennedy, but she’s gone.
“Dammit,” Joe mumbles under his breath. And then he takes off after her, and it’s suddenly just me and this dude in the room. I hear her words again. So familiar. I close my eyes, and I see my brother, as I saw him in the fever dream, standing across the room, moving his mouth:Help us. Please.
“Play it again,” I say.
No.
That’s the only thought in my head.No.
That cannot be all that’s out there. Nothing but my echo, reflecting back.
Standing outside Elliot’s window that night, I peered into the shadow house. And then I ran. Soaking wet, under the storm, I took shelter in the shed.
And that’s all this is: my shout into the abyss, when I hid in the shed, when I tried to get help, when I had no phone but saw the microphone. I knew Elliot had added an antenna to the shed over the summer, when he was out here working. I hoped it would work like a radio transmitter, like those things truck drivers use. That someone would pick up the signal and call for help.
A shout into the abyss, and no one answered.Is anyone there?
The answer is the same as it’s always been: No.
—
I’ve run clear across campus. I have no idea where I am. The trees cover the ground in overlapping shadows. I want to sink into the earth.
And then I’m back, with the smell of dirt and dust, inside the shed with the computers running over the top, the wires trailing under the ground, my back pressed against the wall while I’m sitting under the desk, shouting those words.Help us. Please.
I said them to myself even after I stopped broadcasting. I said them over and over, in case anyone, anywhere, was listening.
—
Joe has called me four times in the minutes it has taken me to sprint across the campus. I look around me, but it’s only more of the same. The ground curving away, in every direction, at the horizon.
There’s no place to go. The earth is finite, I can’t escape my existence here. Or the things I did, and the things I didn’t do.
Eventually, I stand, brushing the grass from my shorts, and I circle back. There’s nowhere else to go. Run forever, and the earth curves back around.
On and on it goes. The same thing over and over.
I head back to the parking lot and see a shape waiting for me there. When I get closer, I see it’s not Joe, but Nolan. He pushes off his car, standing there, looking at me like he doesn’t recognize me.
I stop in my tracks, halfway across the lot. “I didn’t know,” I say. “I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“I know,” he says.
He opens his mouth to say more, but we’re cut off by a booming voice in the distance.
“Kennedy!” It’s Joe, jogging down the path from the other direction.
I turn back to Nolan. “You should go,” I tell him.
“No, I want—”
“Please, Nolan.” Because I don’t want him to hear this, the things Joe is about to ask me. I don’t want him to know what really happened that night.
—
