Or maybe something awful. Maybe this was the kind of call where the person on the other end was hesitating because they have to tell you bad news. Like someone close to you has just been hurt or even died. I knew what that kind of call was like. That kind of call makes you hold onto the phone as if it was a lifeline, the only thing to keep from falling a long, long way into a deep, deep chasm. But hard as you hold onto it, a part of you is already falling and will never stop falling. I’m sorry is how the person on the other end of the line begins the conversation in that sort of call. Then they say there’s been an accident. And from there on in, it never gets better again.

It wasn’t that kind of call. Whoever was on the other end didn’t say anything, good or bad. They just hung up.

But as soon as I put the phone down and started to walk away from it, it rang again.

“Hello. Hello? HELLO?” The third time I said it, a lot louder than I’d meant to, I was starting to feel both disgusted and dumb.

But I didn’t hang up. By now I just knew what it had to mean. This was one of those dumb telemarketing calls that everyone gets. Any second now I’d hear someone mispronounce Aunt Lyssa’s name and then ask for a donation or try to sell us something we don’t need.

But there was no sales pitch. Just more silence. The kind of silence that told me someone really was there on the other end. I couldn’t hear that person breathing, but I could hear him in another way. I heard him with the sixth sense my dad’s side of the family believes in so strongly. Intuition is what Aunt Lyssa calls it, although I think it’s more than that. It’s a kind of knowing. It told me there was someone on the other end of the line, listening just as intently to me. And this is when I really should have hung up. But I didn’t.

Maybe it was one of my friends playing a dumb joke. Or some bored kid just dialing numbers at random for a goof.

My friend Brittany and I used to do that sort of thing on Internet chat rooms. Her persona was Ingrid, a twenty-one-year-old Swedish model. Me, I only added on five years when I identified myself as Natasha, a mysterious eighteen-year-old Gypsy ballerina from Transylvania.