Page 10

I SHOVED MYSELF back from the table, coffee sloshing. What the …

“Good morning.”

“No, no— no. ” I looked around wildly, rubbing at my ears. This had to be Mitch playing some sort of prank. “Mitch, where are you? Is this a joke? If it is, it’s a really bad one , even for you.”

“Not so loud, yeah?” the voice said with a wince. “I’ve been up all night trying to figure out how you’re in my head.”

“ Ha , you’re a bad liar. Where’s the speaker?” I rifled through a few cabinets before I heard footsteps, and turned around triumphantly—

Only to find Dad in the kitchen, pouring more coffee into his Stanley mug. He had on a tan baseball cap with a neck flap to keep the bugs away, his sunglasses pushed up over the brim. He was sweaty and covered in grass from mowing the lawn. My face fell when I saw him.

“Oh, it’s just you,” I said.

He screwed up the lid to his thermal cup, looking affronted. “Good morning to you, too, daughter. Who were you expecting?”

The voice in my head said, “You don’t remember last night, do you?”

I perked. “Do you hear that?” I asked Dad urgently.

He blinked. “Hear … what?”

“And I assume you don’t remember the sing-along last night on your way home, either?”

“I did not sing on the way home,” I hissed, and Dad frowned.

“I dunno, I was asleep when you came in. Are you talking to someone on your AirPod?” he added, motioning to his own ear. “Am I interrupting?”

Helplessly, I stared at him. “I … don’t know?”

Dad nodded. He looked around and found my mostly untouched coffee at the breakfast table, and walked it back over to me.

Then he pulled up one of my hands, placed the mug into it, and patted the back of my hand gently.

“I get it, you’re still used to West Coast time.

I’m going back out to trim the gnome bush. ”

Wordlessly, I watched him leave the kitchen and then looked down into my cup of coffee. I was either going crazy, or there really was an annoying voice in my head. I didn’t like either of those possibilities.

“You just said I had a nice voice,” he pointed out dryly.

My ears burned. “You heard that?”

“I think we can hear most of each other’s thoughts, actually.”

“I didn’t hear anything when I woke up.”

“Because I’d dozed off. I woke up a few minutes ago when you were saying how you hoped I was too handsome to have a ‘voice for radio.’” I could feel the quotation marks around my own quotation marks, and that made the blush around my ears crawl all the way across my cheeks.

“This—this isn’t real,” I said, though the conviction in my voice wavered. Because this was an elaborate prank, even for Mitch, because Dad couldn’t lie to save his life—and he certainly hadn’t lied to me about hearing the voice.

“Try it—think anything in your head. I’ll hear it.”

“I’m not going to talk to myself.”

“You already are. Just try it,” he repeated, “and I’ll tell you what song you sang on the way home last night.”

Incentive. Which always worked on me, sadly.

I chewed on my bottom lip. If I tried it and nothing happened, no one would know.

I didn’t have anything to lose—because this wasn’t going to work.

And I was simply going insane. “Fine.” I closed my eyes, and thought, I take back what I said—you don’t sound handsome at all.

The voice snorted. “Wow, really?”

My eyes flew open. A chill raced down my spine. “You don’t know what I thought.”

“You doubt I’m handsome!”

You don’t sound handsome.

“Same thing! I’m hurt, truly. And after I sang along with you last night on your way home—”

“So what was it?” I asked aloud, because thinking with a throbbing headache was hard. “What did I sing?” Because there was only one song I’d sing that drunk at night.

“Oh, no, you said I wasn’t handsome.”

“You told me to think anything!”

He gave it a thought. “That’s fair. I did. You sang ‘Wherever’ by Roman Fell.”

That was it. The only song I sang drunk.

I returned to the breakfast table and slid into the end seat. My coffee was lukewarm as I sipped it.

I had to be losing it. This last year had just been too much, and I’d snapped.

Either that or I had suddenly come into a strange superpower passed down from grandmother to grandchild that no one had warned me about.

Or an alien had impregnated me with telepathic squid babies.

Or I’d fallen off the stage last night and cracked my skull and this was just some long hallucination while my parents cried over my prone body in a hospital bed—

“You are incredibly dramatic when you’re spiraling.”

“I’m not dramatic,” I defended. “And I’m not spiraling.”

But oh, we both knew I was. Spiraling all the way down. I could hear myself and he could hear me, too.

“How are you not spiraling?” I asked.

“Up all night, remember? My panic and disbelief have been exhausted. I’ve come to terms with it.”

Well, that wasn’t very fair.

“Here, I think I should call you.”

That startled me out of my spiral. “Call me?”

“So you know that I’m a real person and you’re not infested with squid babies.”

I burrowed my head into my hands in mortification. He could hear that, too? “Oh my god.”

“You sound too pretty for that.”

Despite myself, I perked. “ Pretty? ”

“What’s your number?” he asked instead, dodging the answer like a Matrix slo-mo moment. He sounded like he’d asked that question one too many times in his life, so smooth it resembled a pickup line. It was almost impressive.

“No,” I said, pushing myself up from the table. I grabbed my parents’ landline, because there was no way in hell I was going to give a stranger my cell number. “I’ll call you.”

“Oh.” I could hear the frown in his voice. “Okay.”

“Do girls not call you?” I teased before I could stop myself, and he barked a laugh.

“They call me a lot of things,” he replied, and then stated his number.

I dialed it, and just before I pressed the call button, I hesitated. What if all of this was real? And he was actually—I don’t know—floating in a pool or something, drinking a mai tai, and I was here in my parents’ seaside cottage, and we were—

“Did you dial the right number?” he asked.

I hit call. My parents’ cordless phone was splotchy with white noise.

I waited for a phone somewhere to start ringing, telling me that he was upstairs in my brother’s room or in the guest bathroom or—or somewhere .

In my head, he had sounded so close, like his mouth was pressed against my ear, telling secrets to me and me alone.

The phone rang. Once, then again.

And again.

I knew this wasn’t real—I knew I was going crazy. I clenched my jaw, a moment away from hanging up, when suddenly someone picked up on the other end, and the same deep and gravelly voice answered, “So how do I sound in real life?”