Free Those That Wake by Jesse Karp Page B

from her, impossible to grasp. She had literally lost her roots, and for the first time was truly, utterly alone. And alone she had never been, even at her worst moments. It had robbed her even of the parents in her mind, against whom she always measured her actions and ideas. She felt afloat, a drowning person with nothing to grab hold of.
    Nothing?
    She pulled her cell from her pocket with stiff fingers and began to key Rachel's number, when she saw that her cell screen was an inert gray. She jabbed at it, keyed to switch to the secondary battery, slapped the thing hard against her knee, all to no effect.
    "Oh, come
on,
" she breathed out in a harsh whisper. She looked around at all the other cells in all the other hands and realized in a flash of sour insight how helpless she felt without her cell, her immediate connection to other people, to the Internet, the world. And she felt the panic; it didn't have its fangs in yet, but it was sniffing around with the sense that it might soon have a meal here.
    She breathed deeply and shut her eyes, but when she did, she felt as if she could hear sounds and voices from her dream still, just beneath the hum of the train's motion. So she abandoned her calming breaths and opened her eyes.
    Thirty-five interminable minutes later, the Stony Brook station rolled into view. She practically leaped from the train and got to her car in the lot only to realize that with her cell dead, she couldn't activate the damned cellock. She could break in—she would certainly have been happy to break something—but without the cell, the car wouldn't start either. She called from a paycell for a cab to pick her up and used twenty-five of the two hundred dollars to get herself to the front door of Linus P. Talbot High School. The majority of days over the last four years had found her passing through this doorway at least twice, though now what might have been comfortingly familiar was instead loaded with stomach twisting tension.
    Having begun this unbelievably shitty odyssey so early, she had made it here during the second-to-last period. Rachel would be in Advanced Bio, Cheryl in gym, and Ari, ex-boyfriend and all-around scumbag, whom she would barely even consider speaking to in this dire situation, would be either in Statistics, or out at the track field cutting Statistics. Surely if there was ever a situation that called for disrupting a class, this was it. But whatever was happening, Laura was still a product of her upbringing, her social structures, and so rather than cause a stir in a class, she walked directly to the administrative office.
    The woman behind the desk looked up and fixed her eyes on Laura. Laura knew she was a mess from a sleepless night and spewing every imaginable fluid out of her face back at the hotel. But if that elicited an extra measure of sympathy, then so be it. She wouldn't turn it down just now.
    "Mrs. Greene," Laura said, smiling shakily at the woman behind the desk.
    Mrs. Greene nodded in response as Laura came up to the counter.
    "I'm sorry, Mrs. Greene," she said. "I'm having kind of an emergency at home, and I really,
really
need to speak to Rachel Parker. She's in Advanced Bio right now. Could you possibly call her down to the office?"
    But a sick feeling had already settled in Laura's stomach. She had not shown up for classes this morning, and no excuse had been phoned in by her parents. The first words out of Mrs. Greene's mouth when Laura entered the office should have been a demand for an explanation.
    "I'm sorry for your trouble at home, sweetie," Mrs. Greene said in a measured display of both concern and suspicion. "But who are you, exactly?"
    "Mrs. Greene," Laura repeated, still trying to smile, though her voice was beginning to fray at the edges, "it's Laura." Mrs. Greene remained blank. "Laura Westlake. We just strung up all the balloons for the PTA potluck in the gymnasium two weeks ago."
    "I'm sorry. I don't recognize you," Mrs. Greene said, "and I