Free House of Steel by Raen Smith

him
without reason, but she couldn’t stop herself.
    “It came on pretty fast, and I didn’t know
that I was your personal meteorologist. Didn’t Dad call you?”
    “Of course, he did and of course, my phone
didn’t have reception so I didn’t get his message until after I was in the ditch,” she said, looking down at her
phone that was plugged into Mark’s charger. Her mind rushed to
Theron’s last message on the morning he left her. She hadn’t heard
from him in over twenty-four hours. Gunnar had known about Theron
and the night they had spent together.
    “Well, you better call Mom and Dad. I
figured I would let you –” Mark started before he paused, looking
at her.
    “Right after I send a message to a friend.”
She stopped, returning his gaze. “Okay, I’ll call her.” She moved
the screen away from Theron’s message and onto her contacts screen,
scrolling through to find her mother’s smiling face, flush with
color and rich brown hair. A healthy Ann Jones.
    “A friend?”
    “Yeah, June, from my department. Co-worker.
Friend,” she lied, but not about June being her friend. She
actually considered June a friend so she might be able to pass
through Mark’s scrutiny.
    “You have a friend?”
    “Yeah. I actually have two, believe it or
not.”
    “Yeah, you were never that good at making
friends, were you?” Mark teased as he sat straight, both hands on
the wheel. Mark had always been a real sucker for following the
rules. There was no way she could tell him about Gunnar. Not after
she didn’t call the police.
    “Not really,” Delaney said while looking out
the passenger side window. “You know I prefer it that way.” James
Anderson’s face surfaced in her thoughts as she stared at the white
landscape suffocating the fields to her right. James was one of her
only friends growing up. They had met during a lunch break in the
first week of high school, not in the cafeteria of the school where
the rest of the four hundred some students sat, but in the back of
the school library, next to the stuffed shelves of classic
literature. She had just pulled John Irving’s The World
According to Garp and was idly paging through it, crouched near
the bottom shelf. She hadn’t heard him come up from behind her;
instead, she had spotted a shadowed movement in the wall of windows
ahead of her. Her body had quickly turned and jolted up as he had
leaned forward to look over her shoulder at the book.
    “He dies at the end,” he had said, looking
straight into her blue eyes. “So now you know.”
    “Thanks for sparing me the pleasure of the
book,” she had replied, looking back at the boy with his shaggy,
brown hair that hung low near his brown eyes. The ends, bleached
with the remnants of the summer sun, curled with a youthful touch.
His smooth, olive skin lay stark against his bright white,
uniformed shirt. Her heart had fluttered in adolescent excitement
despite her complete annoyance with his sabotaging statement.
    “Anytime, Delaney. You know, the library is
a bore,” he had said, turning to go with two books tucked securely
beneath his arm. He had disappeared in the shelves before she could
reply. They would meet again the next day, in the library, in a
different row of books. This time, Delaney had come up on James,
blurting that Lenny would accidentally kill the puppies. He dropped
Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men back on the shelf. They had
spent every lunch hour together for the next four years in the
library at Xavier Academy.
    Delaney snapped back to the truck at the
sound of her brother’s voice. “My sister, the lone wolf,” Mark
said, staring back at the road ahead.
    “All right, get off it. I’m going to call
Mom and Dad. I’m sure they’re wondering where the hell we are,” she
said as she looked down at a smiling, older version of herself on
her phone. She clicked call.
    “How long until Dad tells me to get rid of
the Civic?” she asked Mark while waiting for her mom to pick up