“Dude,” says Chris at GreenGirl—this time visibly annoyed, no longer laid-back and friendly—“you’ve got to get yourself a phone.”

They needed to contact him to change shifts and tried Emily, who didn’t answer, and Chris didn’t bother leaving a voice mail, not knowing if Zack would get the message in time.

But Zack can’t convince himself to get a new phone. Even holding Emily’s in his hands for a moment brings everything back.

Everyone forgave him at first for not having one, knowing what had happened. Knowing the trouble, the pain, the terror his last one had caused. Everyone cut him some slack, although Emily and his friends and family have found it increasingly ridiculous.

But over the months, it has become something else too. Zack has gotten used to being without a phone. Without texts, without a connection to Instagram and Snapchat and social media. It was a tether, that phone. Being without one was weird and eccentric but it was gradually more liberating too.

That’s not how Emily saw it. Or, she saw more to it. She was patient with him at first but in the time they’d been living together, she was starting to pick up on something else, something subtler, that his lack of a phone was really about.

“So you start working at least but you still won’t get a phone. It’s like at some level you want to keep away from adult responsibility somehow. Okay, I’ll get a job but I won’t have a phone. As long as it’s something, right, Zack? Not having a phone is your latest way to avoid growing up.”

And finally, simple exasperation. “Zack, I’m tired of being your secretary, a messenger between you and the real world. Get yourself a new phone or get yourself a new girlfriend.”

Not meaning it, Zack senses, but sure as hell thinking it at least. The sentiment is clear.

He’s plenty smart, plenty educated, capable of doing anything really, but he doesn’t do anything. Doesn’t know what he wants. Doesn’t even have a sense of where to generally focus. He resists doing anything. He can feel it in himself.

Is he lazy? No, he’s full of energy; he’s ready to give all his considerable energy to something. But he doesn’t know what. Someone suggests something—grad school, a training program, an in at a corporation through a friend’s dad, a spot at a tech start-up through a friend’s brother—and it just feels so far away somehow. He doesn’t feel any connection to it. It doesn’t feel like him.

Emily has started calling him Pete—as in Peter Pan. Asking him if there’s anywhere he’ll be flying today. Gonna see any of the Lost Boys from GreenGirl on his days off?

“Need a new phone.”

Zack holds out the old one.