Escape From Norriswood

CHAPTER TEN

Rosalyn sat on the same rock she had sat on the first time she and Tara had come to this place, and stared at the image of Tara and Terry. Her feet dug into the ground, and she was sure there was some kind of vibration running through her, a vibration that jimmied her knee up and down. She felt like throwing the phone, launching it into the fire pit she'd used to fight the chill of frost every weekend night for an entire fall, and burn the thing.

Tara's hand vibrated then, and for a second she was convinced her body really had been emitting some kind of pulse. She looked down and realized that someone was calling Terry's phone. She flipped it over, and looked at the screen: Tara.

She clicked the tip of her index finger into the oval button on the top right of the phone, and cut the call. I'm lost, she thought. Three days and nights on the road, and I'm finally lost. I'm lost and I've lost it.

She swiped her thumb across the phone screen, and entered the main icon screen of the phone. She tapped on the green phone icon, and the familiar face of the phone pad opened.

Her back was knotted, the muscle beneath her shoulder blades worn and tight, like a fist. It ached, and she flexed her shoulders backwards, rotating them, deliberating on making the call.

She tapped in the number of her parent's house, the number they used in Norriswood, the real Norriswood, she thought, and waited. As the dial tone rang, she tapped the speaker icon, and the volume of the dial tone amped up.

She held the phone in front of her, just below her mouth, as it rang, and rang. Then, there was the click of the voicemail cutting in, and the recorded voice of the operator, "we're sorry your call" – she clicked the phone off.

The silence fell around her then, the disturbance the sound of the phone ringing vanished. She could smell the earth, the muck, the mud. Could sense the beetles, ants, worms inching along and beneath and between the rocks, and the leaves. She felt the place weigh in on her, and yet the thought that it couldn't be the same meeting place in the woods her body told her it was, that it couldn't be the same place she'd spent her evenings with Tara that last fall of high school, when the hallways buzzed with talk about who was taking who to the prom. And those evenings the following fall, when Tara was off to University, off meeting Bobby, and Rosalyn was snared in Norriswood, alone.

Rosalyn wondered if this fantasy town would evaporate, disappear, if she could just fall asleep, and wake up again. Disappear like a migraine, a cold, and again Rosalyn wondered if she had been taken ill, something about those 10 hour days on the highway, staring at the flickering yellow line, the heat cutting patterns into the horizon, the black asphalt blurring and wavering. If something about that had damaged her skull.

Just a little rest, she thought. She closed her eyes; when she opened them again, Terry's phone was vibrating. There, on the ground by the fire pit. She picked it up, and saw her parent's number lighting up the screen in big block, white digits.

"Hello?" Rosalyn said.

"Hi, who is this?" Her mother. Her mother on the phone, and she didn't recognize her voice -- had she been gone that long?

"Mom?"

"Sorry, you must have the wrong –"

"Wait," Rosalyn said. "This is Rosalyn. Mom I'm so sorry I ran away, I –" She coughed, and felt the air run out of her lungs.

"Whoever this is I suggest you never call my house again. Who is this?"

Her head shook back and forth. She heard her mother hand the phone to someone else, the scruff and muffle coming through the line as the phone changed hands.