Free Rooms by Lauren Oliver Page A

through the water, the sting of chlorine, the high sun and the vivid grass, and dim, watery sounds of her mother calling to them to be careful.
    She had been furious when they first moved to Coral River, midautumn, after the leaves had already gone down, when the whole place was nothing but grays and browns, mud and smear. She’d hated it: the colorlessness. The sky crowded by trees. The trees themselves, huddling in their long shadows, letting off the smell of death—so different from the improbable-looking palm tree with its perky crown of leaves, a practical-joke tree, like something designed specifically to make people smile.
    The trees in Coral River didn’t make people smile.
    And the wind and the fingers of cold that reached past the window frames and thumbed up through the floorboards, the bubbling and hiss of the radiators and the banging of the rusty pipes—all of it was strange and ugly and old.
    Then one night, her father had shaken her awake—it must have been two, three in the morning—his face so close she could feel the tickle of his beard, so close his smile was like a half-moon. “Wake up, Min,” he said. “You gotta see this.”
    He had picked her up even though she was already too big, just so her bare feet would not touch the cold floor, and he’d carried her downstairs and into his study. He’d held her at the window, where the cold came through the glass and lodged straight into her heart, like a razorblade.
    “Look,” he whispered. “Snow.”
    She had never seen snow before, except in TV shows and movies. It had looked to her like the stars were flaking out of the sky. It had looked like thousands of fireflies in the moonlight; like breathlessness, like time stopping, like the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
    Then, she had loved him.
    It was unfair that people could pretend to be one thing when they were really something else. That they would get you on their side and then do nothing but fail, and fail, and fail again. People should come with warnings, like cigarette packs: involvement would kill you over time.
    When the phone rang, she jumped; she’d forgotten there was a house phone, and for one confused moment she thought she was hearing an alarm.
    “Are you going to get that?” Trenton said, watching her, and making no attempt to get up.
    It took her a minute to locate the working phone since there were a dozen telephones from different eras crowded on a shelf next to the desk. Finally, on the fourth ring, she found it. It was only when she went to pick up the phone that she realized her hands were shaking.
    “Walker,” she said past the tightness in her chest.
    There was no response. Minna thought at first the line was dead, but then she heard a rustle, the unmistakable sound of someone breathing. She was suddenly on high alert. Instinctively, she angled her back to Trenton, clutching the receiver. Outside the window, the yellow coneflowers were waving in the grass.
    “Hello?” she said. And again: “Hello?”
    “Who is it?” Trenton said, from the floor.
    Nothing but the sound of breathing. Minna felt the up-and-down roll of nausea. It had been here, on this spot, that her father had held her all those years ago and shown her the snow, which fell like a secret between them. Now he was dead and she was getting old.
    “Hello?” she repeated one more time. The wave of nausea had brought with it a sudden crystallization of anger. And she knew. Knew it was a woman on the phone—knew it was that woman. Adrienne.
    “Who is it?” Trenton said again.
    Minna ignored him. She gripped the phone so tightly her knuckles ached.
    “Listen,” she said, and swallowed, wishing her throat weren’t so dry. “Listen,” she tried again. “Don’t call here anymore.”
    “Who is it?” Trenton grunted a little, sitting up.
    “He’s dead,” Minna said. Was it her imagination, or did the woman suck in a breath? She wished she could tunnel down the wires and watch the words