“Just let me—Teri’s calling.” Her screen was buzzing and lighting up, and I let go of the phone just as Stevie tried to yank it away, and then everything went wrong, all at once.

The phone flew up, turning end over end in the air. Stevie grabbed for it, but her fingers closed around nothing, and as I watched, helpless, the phone hit the platform, bounced off, and then fell straight down, until it landed with a muted thud on the subway tracks.

Stevie and I looked at each other in horror. I set Brad down as I leaned forward to look. There was Ophelia, faceup next to a crumpled pack of cigarettes and a Skittles wrapper. This was Stevie’s phone and it was lying on a subway track. It was so awful, and so not what was supposed to be happening, that I couldn’t even get my head around it.

“Oh no,” I breathed.

“My phone,” Stevie said, her voice high and panicky. “I can’t—what are we supposed to do?”

I held out Brad’s leash to her and she took it. I leaned over more, looking down onto the subway tracks. It wasn’t that far, really—and weren’t track workers always jumping up and down and fixing things? They had to be, right?

“Kat,” Stevie said, her voice sharp, like she’d just read my mind. “Get back here.”

“But—” I started, just as I felt a whoosh of air and heard a rumbling sound. We both looked to the left. There were lights coming around the curve of the tunnel, and a moment later, a train was barreling down the track—but it looked like a maintenance train; it didn’t even stop. And now that it was moving fast enough to blow my hair back over my shoulders, I realized just how stupid and reckless it was to think I could hop down and back up again safely.

The train disappeared into the tunnel and I made myself lean forward to look, half-afraid of what I was going to see. There, on the tracks, were some shards of glass and metal—what was left of Stevie’s phone.

Ophelia was no longer synching. She had finally drowned.

“Oh my god,” I said, staring, stunned, at what was left of Stevie’s phone. “It wasn’t my fault—it was an accident. I can’t…”

“My phone,” Stevie said, her voice sounding strangled as she also stared down into the subway tracks. “My phone is in pieces—my purse is locked in an apartment we can’t get into.…”

“It’ll be okay,” I said, because I felt like someone should say this, even though I really didn’t think that it was going to be.