told him she hadn’t seen her mom since Friday morning and that nobody else would pay attention to how often she left the apartment, but he still didn’t think it was safe. Becca wasn’t sure she blamed him—after all, how did she know for sure one of her neighbors wasn’t watching her out the window, noting down every time she made the trip to the playground?
Maybe she should finish her homework, then.
No, she had finished it all yesterday. It hadn’t worked as well as her too-brief times with Jake to block out the image of Anna’s death, but it had helped enough that she had done it all at once, losing herself in the tedium for as long as possible.
Becca reached for her phone again. With her hand hovering over it, she stopped. Was there even any point? Even if she did get in touch with these people, what would she be able to do for them?
The phone rang.
Becca nearly fell out of her chair.
Heart pounding, she looked at the display. Heather again. Was this the fifth time Heather had called today, or the sixth? And that wasn’t counting the texts – at least five times as many, all asking her to pick up the phone, to call her back, to meet her somewhere so they could talk. Becca pushed the phone away. She hadn’t talked to Heather since their conversation at the playground that night. As far as she was concerned, their friendship was over.
She crumpled and flattened the piece of paper in her hand, like she had done so many times over the past two days. She needed to quit putting this off. This was what she wanted, after all.
The phone stopped ringing.
She picked it up again and—quickly, before she could talk herself out of it again—started dialing.
When she hit the last digit, she stopped.
This was what she wanted. What she needed. She couldn’t keep going the way she had been, and this was her only way out.
So why couldn’t she make the call?
Someone knocked at her door. Becca jerked and dropped the phone.
“Becca? Are you in there?” Her mom.
“I thought you were still at work.” Becca hurriedly cleared the number from her phone. She shoved the phone into her pocket and the slip of paper into her desk drawer. Her mom hadn’t even made it home to sleep since the morning Anna had died. Becca hadn’t expected to see her at all today, let alone in the middle of the afternoon.
“Public Relations took a bunch of prisoners off our hands this morning, so things have finally calmed down a little. I may even get to sleep in my own bed tonight.”
Why had she hidden the phone? Her mom wouldn’t be able to tell what she had been doing with it. Logically, she knew that. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that even with the phone and paper hidden away, her mom would see right through her.
Since telling her mom to go away wasn’t an option, she sat back and waited for her to come in. At least this gave her one more excuse for putting off the call.
Her mom eased the door open. “Is this a good time to talk?”
“Actually, I was trying to get some homework done.” She put her hands on her keyboard and tried to look studious.
“I won’t take up too much of your time.” Her mom walked into the room, closing the door gently behind her, and sat down on the bed. “We need to talk about Anna. We should have talked before now. I shouldn’t have left you afterwards the way I did, and I’m sorry. I came back as soon as I could. I’ve been trying to get home all weekend, but I could barely get a bathroom break.”
At the mention of Anna, the loop started playing again behind Becca’s eyes. She would have thought that after seeing it so many times, the impact would have faded. It hadn’t. She flinched as the gun went off again—the hundredth time? The thousandth?
“Are you doing all right?” Her mom sounded so calm about it. As if what had happened was no more serious than a bad dream.
Becca kept her eyes on the keyboard as she answered. “I watched one of my friends die. What do you think?”
“I’m sorry you had to see that. But you need to understand what’s going to happen if you keep going the way you have been.” She patted the bed next to her. “Come sit with me.”
Becca looked at the space on the bed next to her mom. She wanted to get out of her chair, sit beside her, cry on her shoulder. In the old days, that was what she would have done.
She shook her head. “I’d rather stay here.”
The old days were gone.
But her mom still looked like her mom. Why couldn’t she look different, now that Becca knew what she really was?
“I don’t want you to blame yourself for Anna’s death,” said her mom. “She would have been executed whether or not you were there. But I do want you to think about what happened to her. If you keep saying the kinds of things you’ve been saying, you’re going to end up right there in one of those cells—” Her voice broke.
That crack in her calm was worse than hearing her talk about Anna’s death like it was nothing. Becca didn’t want to hear her mom’s grief at the thought of losing her. She wanted her mom to sound just as cold about Becca’s potential execution as she did about Anna’s, so Becca would have one more reason to hate her.
Becca stared out the window so she wouldn’t have to look at her mom. Outside, two Enforcers strode through the parking lot. Were they coming home, or on their way to drag away some anonymous dissident destined to die like Anna in one of those tiny rooms?
Becca tried to match her mom’s tone, tried to sound like Anna’s death didn’t matter. Like she didn’t see it every time she closed her eyes and sometimes when they were open. “Could we talk about this some other time?”
Her mom’s voice grew sharper. “No. We need to talk about this. We’ve put it off too long as it is. I never should have let things get this far.”
She wanted, needed, to tell her mom everything. How she couldn’t get rid of the images. How she sometimes saw not Anna, but Jake, dying in that room… and sometimes she saw herself in Anna’s place. How she wished she could go back and undo that conversation where she had lied about Anna, where she had condemned Anna to death.
How much it had scared her to see her mom looking down at Anna’s body with blank eyes, and to know that to her this was just a day like any other day.
Deep down, some part of her was still convinced her mom could make it all go away.
“There’s nothing to talk about.” The Enforcers outside had disappeared from view. “I shouldn’t have said those things the other day. I don’t even know what I was thinking.” But even as she said it, she knew there was no point. That excuse had worked on Heather, but it wouldn’t work on her mom.
Her mom reached out and grabbed the arm of Becca’s chair. She spun the chair around to face her. “That’s not enough this time. I explained the confessions to you; I thought that was the end of this. I thought…” Her voice trailed off. Were those tears glinting at the corners of her eyes? Becca couldn’t remember ever seeing her mom cry.
Becca started to speak—but she didn’t have anything to say. She had no way to convince her mom she wasn’t a dissident. The damage had been done.
“I know things haven’t been the same between us lately,” said her mom. “But I still know you. You’re still Becca. I spend every day with dissidents; I know what they’re like. You’re not one of them.”
And what made Becca so different? The fact that her mom didn’t want her to die? Becca held back the angry words, said nothing, tried to keep her face blank. Was this what their relationship was going to be for the rest of her life?
Why was she still upset at the thought of losing her closeness with her mom? She knew what her mom was like now.
Her mom stretched her arm across the gap and took Becca’s hand. The familiar roughness of her skin reminded Becca of all the other times she’d felt that hand around hers, all the times her mom had comforted her when she felt like the world was ending. She needed that now, needed her mom’s soothing voice and sensible
