Dad fumbles in the pocket of his sport coat. “I realize your mother can be… adamant, Hedda. But she does love you, and you’re sixteen. I told her I’d keep your tech exposure to a minimum. I even installed a landline so you can talk to her.”
My heart sinks—then does a roller coaster loop as I see what he’s holding out to me on his palm. A sleek sliver of metal—a Glare-box! No, a phone.
“But—”
“But this is for you.” He places the phone in my palm—smooth, heavy, alive. My pulse thumps so hard it’s a struggle to focus. “It’s strictly so I can find you if you go missing. I’ve set it to block all numbers but mine and Erika’s.”
I stare at the shiny dark screen, knowing from watching other people that one press of the single button will light it up. Control yourself. “You don’t want me to… use it?”
Dad’s face is serious, but there’s laughter in his voice. “Do you know how?”
I blush again. “No.”
“Hedda.” His smile creeps out now. “You’re acting like I’ve asked you to disable a bomb. All you have to do is carry this every time you leave the house. If we call you, you’ll see a flashing light. Press the button on the screen that says accept. And if you’re lost and need to get in touch—well, I’ll let Erika show you the rest. There’s a data plan, but you won’t need it.”
I’m holding a cell phone. I’ve seen how other people cradle theirs, like it’s their most precious possession. My mouth goes dry as I realize he’s trusting me with the Glare.
“Thank you,” I manage to say.
Dad touches my shoulder. His eyes are so different from Mom’s and mine, layered with green and gold like trees starting to turn. “This isn’t a license to break all your mom’s rules. But sooner or later you’ll need to make your own choices, won’t you?”
My fingers close around the phone, hard. “I want to go to college. That’s why I asked about school—because I want to be like you someday.”
“All these years,” Dad says in a low voice, “I’ve thought of you out there in the desert, Hedda. Leading such a different life from us, like an early settler on the wild frontier, wiry and strong and tanned and fearless. Sometimes I’ve wished Clint could have that life. Sometimes I’ve envied you.”
I let out my breath, afraid to break the spell. Not knowing how to explain that I don’t feel fearless or enviable today.
He bends to hug me. “Maybe I didn’t know you as well as I thought. Maybe we can do something about that now.”
The phone is caught between us, and I swear it hums in my palm. I don’t pull away.
When he’s gone again, though, I don’t know what to do next. The phone thrums almost imperceptibly with the power it carries. It wants to harvest signals from the air and connect, connect me, and I don’t know how to be connected. I want to be, but—
I hide it on a shelf in the walk-in closet under a pile of sheets and pillowcases. If it hums or flashes now, I won’t know. It can call to me all night—I don’t care.
Something’s moving in the closet.
The sound hovers on the edge of awareness, like tree branches rubbing in the wind. I sit upright in the pearly-blue Pacific dawn, staring at the half-open door. I woke several times in the middle of the night, thinking I heard the Glare-box ringing like our phone at home, but it wasn’t, of course.
I rise, the hardwood cold on my bare soles. The closet is dead still now. I lift the sheets to check the phone, but it’s a silent, shiny brick.
I kneel to explore the narrow crawl space at the back of the closet, where I find a shoehorn, vacuum cleaner hoses, and—something soft. A Raggedy Ann doll in a dirty-white pinafore.
Found you. For ten years she’s waited alone in the dark for me. I lift my abandoned doll into the light, remembering her soft weight, her heedless thread smile—and freeze. Her button eyes are gone, leaving only snips of thread.
A chill goes through me, and I almost drop her. Did I do that?
Maybe it was just wear and tear. Her face has a dark patch around the mouth where I used to feed her (or try to), and I certainly don’t remember cutting her eyes off. But the more I stare at her, the more I think I was trying to do to Raggedy Ann what the babysitter did to herself. To shield her from seeing something terrible.
I stow the phone in my backpack with a sweater and hoodie on top to muffle any sounds. Then I bring the backpack down to breakfast—which is lucky, because Erika asks for the phone to “show me the basics.”
When she presses the button at the base, I tingle all over, but I don’t look away. This is part of control. The screen is hard under my fingertips, yet it responds to my touch like something alive. Erika shows me how to enter a password. When I get it right, the screen blooms with all the colors of the rainbow. Tiny birds fly to roost, then turn into pictures like heraldic coats of arms.
Magic. It’s Christmas morning and Fourth of July fireworks rolled into one, and I’m shaking, staring, doing my best to concentrate as Erika shows me how to call her or Dad. It’s almost a relief to put the thing away again. Seeing someone else’s screen is one thing, but there’s something about touching my screen, giving it commands, that I could get too used to.
The dizziness doesn’t go away until Erika takes Clint and me to the downtown farmers market, where I breathe in straw and overripe berries and frying tortillas. I stop at a stand where a girl my age in a sundress is selling leafy greens, tapping on a phone.
I pick up a bunch of chard, admiring the red veins, and ask her about planting times and mulching methods. She answers me, the phone alive in her hand the whole time, and I want to ask how she manages to live in both worlds, but I don’t dare.
“Look at these,” I tell Erika, pointing to the speckled heirloom cherry tomatoes. “With those serranos, they’d make a great chili.”
She smiles in a sly way I haven’t seen before. “Are you offering to cook?”
“Could I?” Itching for chores to do, I grab a paper sack for the tomatoes. “I make it at home all the time.”
“I was kidding!” Erika swivels to keep an eye on Clint. “But if you actually want to, I won’t say no.”
After the market, we spend the afternoon at the beach. Clint complains when Erika makes him leave his Glare-box—a tablet, it’s actually called—in the car.
When he walks out into the surf, I follow at a distance, still trying to get used to this vast watery commotion I loved as a kid. It smells fishy. I pass a girl in a glossy peony-pink bikini and wonder how that would look on me. Or maybe the leopard print? No, something in between.
Clint walks backward toward me. “You won’t drown. I used to be scared, too.”
“I’m not scared.” His face closes up, and I change my tone. “Can you show me how to ride the waves like you do?”
Now he looks earnest, just like Dad. “Watch me.”
By four, we’re both salt-caked and sunbaked, and my brother has smiled at me once. He seems to have decided I’m not a blood-thirsty ogre, and that’s a start.
Back home, Clint actually skips up the steep steps from the sidewalk, humming under his breath. At the top he stops abruptly and says, “Hi, Mireya. Why are you here?”