ONE
The flowers are dead, I’m surrounded by orange, and a suitcase has been disemboweled in the search for a phone charger. Clothes are everywhere. I mean everywhere. Like, you wouldn’t know that underneath the scattered piles of my wardrobe is a white carpet kind of everywhere. But I have motive.
The Most Important Email of My Life (so far) could poof into my inbox at any moment before five p.m. EDT and my phone is currently lifeless.
It’s waiting for me now, for all I know.
Subject: READ BETWEEN THE LIES Cover reveal: You are NOT worthy.
Subject: We gave it to EW. Who are you?
Subject: If you think THAT’S a lot of Instagram followers …
With the toss of one last cardigan, I reveal … nothing. The suitcase is empty.
I blink. My charger isn’t here. There is literally nowhere else it could be.
I know it’s not in my purse.
I check my purse for a third time anyway.
It’s not even like I can borrow one. Deciding to be an Android in an iPhone family? Literally the worst decision ever right now. I’ve been offline for three hours and thirty-three minutes and I can think of approximately three hundred thirty-three things that could have happened in that time. My phone died its tragic death in Philadelphia mid–inbox refresh on hour ten of the twelve-hour trek from Charlotte, North Carolina, to my newest temporary home: Middleton, AKA Middle-of-Nowhere, Connecticut.
With no charger in sight, the only connection I have to anything within the realm of normal is impossible to reach. I’m stuck instead with no internet, dead flowers, an entirely unrecognizable Gramps, and orange walls.
I hate orange. After red, my rainbow skips straight to yellow.
But I chose this orange. Shortly after we arrived, I stepped into Aunt Liz’s childhood 1970s nightmare room and claimed it as mine. I know I’m going to regret this in the morning. But right now? I need this room. It’s the only place that still feels like my grandparents’ house. Every other room is remodeled and modern, all glass tables and new paint and uncomfortable cream-colored furniture. No more garden. No more pictures. No more books.
Grams would be horrified.
“Halle.”
I look up. Ollie is at the door, waving my charger in his hand.
“No clue how it got into my stuff,” he says.
Me either. But it doesn’t matter. It’s here.
“You’re my hero.”
I grab my phone off the floor and hold my hands out, expecting Ollie to toss the cord to me. He doesn’t. Instead, my fifteen-year-old brother leans back against the doorframe, allowing his light brown hair to fall into his eyes.
“Mom is two seconds away from cry number three. Dad’s having an allergic reaction to Scout. And Gramps is ranting about the rise of fascism. He straight-up looked at me and said, ‘Do you know what fascism is?’ Like, anyone with a pulse right now knows what fascism is. I didn’t say that, obviously.”
I take a step toward him and place my hand on his arm. “Ollie.”
He exhales. “This is hard for me, too, okay? I need you out there.”
“I spiraled,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“Everything looks so different,” Ollie says.
“I know.”
“Gramps and I have matching Nikes.”
“I know.”
“Maybe this was …” Ollie lets the thought trail off, incomplete.
A mistake. That’s how Ollie’s sentence ends. I know this because I’m wondering it too.
I twirl Grams’s hamsa necklace between my fingers. “It’s only been six months.”
Ollie nods. “We’ll check your email downstairs? Together?”
“Let’s go,” I say.
Ollie places my charger in my palm and I smile. Ollie knows all about my blog life. He knows how important this email is. He read the pitch I sent five times because he’s the best. He reads YA for me and I understand baseball stats for him. It’s just what we do.
I follow him down the stairs and through the living room to the kitchen, ignoring the pictureless walls and absent bookshelves. I fixate on the back of Ollie’s head and swallow the emotion that’s lodged in my throat because Grams would never take down the pictures.
All the pictures in my life live in folders on screens. At Grams’s and Gramps’s, the pictures lived on the walls. Photographs were everywhere—in the living room, on the kitchen walls, lining the staircase, in albums on the coffee table. Familiar faces. Foreign faces. Whenever we visited, we got a new story based on one of the pictures. One story per visit, that was Grams’s rule. So we had to think about, and fight for, which picture we wanted.
One day, we’d know all the stories. That’s what Grams said.
I wanted to stay in Grams’s house.
This isn’t Grams’s house.
“Found her,” Ollie says. “Lured by a phone charger.”
Dad sneezes. “Typical.”
I open my mouth to retort, but stop short at the sight of him. He’s holding Scout, Grams’s adorable maltipoo—who is definitely the source of his sudden-onset sneezing—and sitting at a glass table.
How does a person decorate cupcakes on a glass table? It’s not made for messes.
The kitchen used to be a shrine to baking, with two shelves on the wall next to the stove to display Grams’s fancy standing mixer and all her quality cupcake creation equipment. The kitchen table was solid wood, perfect for spreading out all the ingredients for a long afternoon of baking.
Now the table is glass. The shelves are gone.
Gramps is gone. I mean, I know the man sitting next to Dad is Gramps. I know this.
But he’s also not. Like, at all.
He’s skinnier. Messier, too. My Gramps was always short-haired and clean-shaven. This Gramps has a full beard and a short ponytail sticking out underneath his baseball hat. He’s wearing a graphic T-shirt and cargo shorts. And Ollie’s Nikes.
“Hi, Gramps,” I say, my voice soft.
Gramps nods. “Hal.”
His smile is forced, lips tight and no teeth, and I’m not sure how I’m supposed to react. I should probably hug him, right? A handshake would be weird, right? I mean, this is Gramps. My Gramps, who taught me everything I know about Johnny Cash and read picture books to me until I fell asleep on his lap. My Gramps, who always made sure to interject himself into the near-daily conversations I’d have with Grams, calls where we’d go on hour-long rants about the best books we’ve ever read, ever. Until the next best book we’ve ever read came along. Gramps would attempt to pivot the conversation toward narrative nonfiction and political memoirs. You ladies and your books, he’d say, giving up with a hearty laugh. Nothing ever put a bigger smile on my face from hundreds of miles away than his laugh. React, Halle. I’m the reason we’re here. I’m the one who’s been desperate to reconnect with Gramps in this post-Grams world. But now that I’m here, and he’s in front of me? Now that I’m about to move in with him? I don’t know what to say.
That’s the problem with words. In my head, words are magic. My thoughts are eloquent and fierce. On the page, words are music. In the clicks of my keyboard, in the scratches of pencil meeting paper. In the beauty of the eraser, of the backspace key. On the page, the words in my head sing and dance with the precision of diction and the intricacies of rhythm.