Campus · Northbridge Ice
Don't Answer
Part 2 · the long cut · 10 min
My brother's phone had 41 unsent messages. All of them were to me.
I know the number because the drafts folder counts them for you, a little grey 41 in the corner like a score nobody posted. And I know they were to me because every single one had the same name at the top, the name I had spent eight years trying to get out of him.
He'd saved me as Favorite.
Not Maya. Not Sis. Not one of his jokes. Just Favorite, with a capital F, the way you'd write it on a trophy. He was right. It would have gone to my head.
Forty-one times he had opened a message to his favorite person, typed something, and decided I wasn't allowed to read it yet.
Declan didn't give it to me.
We'd gone back inside, because it was snowing hard enough to make standing on the curb feel like a dare of its own, and because I wasn't going to fall apart in front of a twenty-foot banner of his face. The guy asleep on his forearm had finally been poured into a cab. The jukebox had run out of quarters. It was just us and the hum of the beer cooler and the neon, pink or dark, pink or dark.
He sat on the stool at the end, the one with the split vinyl Theo always took, and I don't think he knew that. Then he set the phone down on the wood between us and slid his hand away from it, slowly, the way you back off from a dog you don't trust yet.
It had a charge. Somebody had kept it charged.
Up close the orange case was worse than I remembered, faded to the color of a traffic cone left out all summer, one of the rubber buttons chewed flat where he used to worry it with his thumbnail during movies. The starburst crack caught the neon every time the sign came back on. I had last seen that crack in the last photo anybody took of him, the one I've zoomed in on until it pixelates. It was eighteen inches from my hand now, and I wanted to pick it up so badly that I put both palms flat on the bar to keep them there.
“Passcode's your birthday.”
I didn't move.
“He thought that was funny.”
It was funny. It was the least secure thing a person could possibly do, and it was also the most Theo thing in the world, to lock his whole life behind the one number he knew I'd guess last because I'd never think I was that important.
“How long have you had it?”
“Read first.”
My thumbs were cold. I typed my birthday wrong the first time, and the phone buzzed at me like it was disappointed, and Declan didn't say anything, and I did it again, slower.
It opened on his lock screen and then his home screen, and I hadn't prepared for his wallpaper, which was the Harlow ice at six in the morning with nobody on it. I made myself not look at that. I went straight to messages. Straight to drafts. Straight to the top.
The newest one was from the night of the crash. The timestamp said 11:52 p.m. I know what time the call came the next morning. I did the math without meaning to. I always do the math.
It said: “Don't let Dec—”
And nothing else.
No period. No second line. Just the dash, like he'd been interrupted, or like he'd run out of road.
Theo forgot apostrophes in everything. Birthday cards. Group chats. The whiteboard on our fridge. He did not forget this one. Whatever he had been trying to tell me at 11:52 p.m. had mattered enough to spell right.
I looked up.
Declan was watching me the way you watch someone walk across ice you already fell through. Not surprised. Not curious. He didn't glance at the phone to see which one I was on, because he didn't need to. His jaw was set and his eyes were very steady and a little red at the rims, and I understood that he had read it a hundred times. Maybe more. Alone, somewhere, with the phone plugged into a wall and my birthday on his fingertips.
He had been waiting two years for me to read it too.
“Don't let Dec what?”
“I don't know.”
“You've had two years to guess.”
“I've guessed.”
He didn't say what. He held my eyes instead, long enough that it stopped being a stare-down and started being something else, something warmer and much worse, and I felt it in the back of my neck like a draft from a door someone had just opened.
I looked down first. I hated that I looked down first.
So I scrolled back. Past the dash, past that night, into the older ones.
I had braced for warnings. Watch out for him. He's not who you think. Instead I got a draft from a Tuesday in October that said: “dec eats cereal with a fork so the milk doesnt get on the spoon he is insane you would love him.” And one from February: “told him about the time you punched Brady Kowalski at the rink. he asked for details. he took notes.” And one that just said: “you would hate how good he is at parking.” And one from the week I got my wisdom teeth out, the week Theo drove me home and sat on the end of my bed doing homework and complaining that I was drooling: “he asked if you were ok. three times. i said shes fine shes a chipmunk. he didnt laugh. he didnt laugh at all.”
They weren't about Declan. They were about me.
What I was like. What I'd hate. What I'd pretend not to want. Theo had written it all down like field notes for someone he was preparing to hand me off to. “you will act like you dont care. you will care. dont be weird about it.”
He had been introducing us. For two years. In drafts. Just never pressing send.
The last draft before the crash, the one right before the dash, said: “ok. ill tell her myself. this weekend.”
I set the phone face down on the bar, because I couldn't look at it and look at Declan at the same time, and one of them had to answer for this.
“So why ‘Don't Answer’?”
He'd been leaning on his forearms. He straightened up. For the first time since he'd stood across the street in the snow, Declan Shaw looked away from me, down at the orange case and the cracked starburst in its corner.
“Because I told him I'd end up in love with you.”
The cooler hummed. The sign went pink, then dark.
“And he believed me.”
He said it plainly, like it was a line from a scouting report. Like it had already happened and he was just filing it. I thought of Theo in the passenger seat of some bus to some away game, hearing that, and laughing, and then not laughing. Deciding. Opening my contact. Typing a warning with an apostrophe in it.
“You don't know me.”
“I know you stir your coffee with the wrong end of the spoon.”
I hated him a little then. I also didn't want him to leave, and I hated that more.
Then my phone buzzed.
It was sitting next to Theo's, screen up, and for one stupid second I thought the two of them were talking to each other. Declan's eyes went to it before mine did. It wasn't him. His number sat in my contacts under Don't Answer now, and this wasn't that.
Unknown number. No name. No area code I recognized.
I didn't pick it up right away. I looked at the front window first, because that's what the last unknown number had taught me to do tonight. Pink, then dark. Pink, then dark. In the pink I could see the empty street and the plowed ridge along the curb and the streetlight Declan had stood under, nobody there now. In the dark I could only see us. Me behind the bar with my hands flat on the wood. Him on my brother's stool, gone completely still, the way he'd stood in the snow.
“Maya.”
He said it like a warning. Like a man who already had a guess.
Nobody calls me that. Professors, and my mother when she's angry, or when she's frightened and it comes out sounding like angry. He said it exactly the way she does the second way.
I turned the phone over.
The message said: “He's lying about the promise.”