For that first minute before I opened my eyes, I was back in my bed in Swickley, the comforter pulled up around my neck. I could almost feel Fuller at the end of the bed, tucked to the left of my feet. My alarm clock on the nightstand beside my head. For that one minute, I was able to forget.
It was the sound of the train horn that finally jolted me out of it. Somewhere, just a short distance away, it blared once, then twice, cutting the still silence of the morning.
“Pssst.” When I opened my eyes, Kipps’s hand was on my shoulder. “We have to get up. We should get out of here.”
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Six.”
I groaned, and Kipps started laughing at me. He was still in his terry-cloth robe. There were creases across his forehead.
“Do you hear that?” I pointed into the air. “There’s a train. Somewhere close.”
Kipps leaned forward, straining to listen. It was like the train was purposefully quiet. Kipps just shrugged.
“Come on,” he said. He squeezed my shoulder again.
He climbed down the ladder first, and I was right behind him. I went into the bathroom and checked my clothes. The denim jacket was still a little damp, but my baby-doll dress and tee shirt were completely dry. The tee shirt had gone from white to this murky light green, though. I closed the door and started getting dressed, knowing there was nothing I could do about it now.
“Okay. Important question,” I called to Kipps through the door. I could hear him just outside, erasing all traces of us. The sink ran for a second, then stopped.
“Hit me.”
“If it’s 2037,” I finally said, pulling the tee shirt on, “how’d you know how to live in 1998? If it’s so different inside the set.”
“There’s all this training,” he said. “Before you’re even allowed in the set you have to learn all this stuff. Pop culture, movies, music. TV shows. The type of clothes everyone wore, the hairstyles. I got really into movie quotes. I thought that would be my thing. ‘YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!’ ‘Hasta la vista, baby…’ That way if I didn’t have anything else to say, or no one thought I was funny, I could use those lines. It only kind of worked.”
I stepped out of the bathroom, but the morning air gave me a chill. All the warmth from the stove was gone.
“Did you ever hear someone say ‘Talk to the hand’?” Kipps put his palm between us, blocking me out. “Or ‘Talk to the hand ‘cause the face ain’t listening’? I really wanted to use that one, and I managed to do it a bunch as an extra, but then as soon as I got the guest-star part, they told me to stop. Told me it was too much, that Patrick Kramer would never say that.”
“I’ve heard it, yeah,” I said. “Jen Klein used to say it sometimes, and a bunch of the kids in my lunch period last year.”
He disappeared into the bathroom to change. I heard the clinking of his belt buckle, his feet on the tile floor as he hopped into his jeans.
“I might try to start using it, if that’s okay.”
“Knock yourself out.”
“Well, I can’t right now. It would be out of context. Maybe even a little rude.”
He came out of the bathroom in his fleece, only it was turned inside out so only the lining was showing, making it look like it was all black. His hair stuck up in the back. He was really cute…and funny. If only the producers had let him be more him, less Patrick Kramer.
“I’m going to check if there’s anything in the storage up there, under the bed,” he said. “We could use some extra clothes. You especially.”
He pointed to my baby-doll dress, and the weird greenish tee shirt underneath. The hem of the skirt was caked with mud.
“I know, I know. I look like butt.”
“Never.” He smiled that smile, and I couldn’t help it, I smiled back. Then he climbed the ladder to the loft.
I held the lyric book up to the light. There wasn’t much else to decode. Just a few last pages. It took me twice as long as it normally would because the marks were much lighter than before. The paper had taken on a different texture as it dried, and it wasn’t easy to see each one—I had to hold it at just the right angle.
IM ALREDY OUT
CALL WHN SAFE
WLL COME FR U
Then there was a phone number in the front pages of the book, split in twos.
32 35 55 94 23
I immediately opened every cabinet and drawer, checking them again for a phone, but there wasn’t one. At some point the pen had fallen out of my bag so I just repeated the numbers in my head until they were a part of me. We’d call Sara once we were safe. Even if we couldn’t contact anyone else, we had one ally. She’d gotten us this far. Maybe she could take us a little further.
When Kipps came back down the ladder, he was wearing a baseball hat that said MICHELOB. A gray sweatshirt was slung over his shoulder, and he tossed it to me as soon as he got down.
“I found some things. You have that.”
I pulled it on and immediately warmed up. I didn’t even care that it was three sizes too big, with a peeling yellow logo on the front.
“Sara gave me a number to reach her at. We can try it when we get to the city. We have to at least try it, right?”
“Yeah, if she can help. How do you want to get there?”
I heard it again, far off at first. The train horn blared once, then twice. If we were talking or not listening for it, we would’ve missed it. Then it was gone.
“There’s a station nearby. Come on. Let’s go.”