“Why would you do this, Frankie?” he asked. I heard another voice over the phone, an older woman, and she asked, “What’s going on?” and he said, “It’s Frankie, Mom.”

“Hang up,” she told him.

“I have to go,” he said, but I could still hear him breathing. I was trying so hard not to say it.

“Frankie,” he said, “are you still there?”

I hung up the phone.

I tossed it away from me, pulled my knees up to my chest, holding myself steady. You know what I was saying to myself, right? I was saying it. Again and again. I waited for the phone to ring, for Zeke to come find me, now that I’d found him. But the phone was so quiet. The house was so quiet.

I held on to myself, my eyes closed. I saw the poster in my mind, those hands reaching out. I didn’t know who the hands belonged to. Were they mine? I hoped not. I rocked and rocked. I prayed that my mom would not come check on me. I had no idea if anything else in the world still existed. My room went back to the way it was, my dumb posters and dirty laundry, candy wrappers everywhere, and I was a teenager, the summer heat making everything wavy, just before I met Zeke for the first time. And I let myself live in that temporary space, before anything had happened. And it felt so good, and I wondered why I’d stayed alive, why I ever left that moment. I fell asleep, and when I woke up, at four in the morning, I checked my phone. I was back in the real world. Zeke was gone again.

But I’d found him. He couldn’t disappear. I had his number. I had the address. I just had to dial the number again. I could call forever, hitting redial, over and over and over, until I pulled him back into the world that we’d made together. I wondered what he was doing right now, what he must have been thinking. He lived with his mom, maybe. Or she lived with him. I wasn’t sure.

He had no idea about Mazzy Brower, or the article, or that I had admitted to making the poster. He only knew that the girl from the summer when he maybe had ruined his entire life had called him out of the blue. I knew it was a surprise to him. It had to be. I had been the one trying to find him, had prepared myself for it, and when I heard his voice, I lost my mind. I hoped he was okay. I hoped he knew I wasn’t trying to hurt him, but how in the world would he know that? Maybe he needed to be very afraid of me.