Towering - By Alex Flinn Page 0,2
to it. I dropped my duffel bag on the ground and ran inside the train, not even knowing why I was doing it. The bunny, frayed and more gray than white, was in the middle of the floor. I grabbed it and ran out, nearly slipping on the icy platform. The mother and daughter had already started to leave, though the little girl was struggling and bridging up the way toddlers do when they’re angry. I ran after them. “Here.” I shoved it into the girl’s hands.
If I’d expected a thank-you, I got none. I said, “Hey, do you know if there’s a pay phone?”
Maybe the woman didn’t hear me, but I thought she did. In any case, she shielded her daughter’s face with her hands and kept walking to the stairs. Nice. I could have been stuck on the train if the door had closed, stuck and bound for someplace even farther north and colder than Slakkill. At least the little girl had stopped crying.
I returned to my duffel bag and checked my phone. No bars. No surprise. Once we got out of the Catskills, reception had been patchy from a combination of too many mountains and trees, too few cell phone towers. The Adirondacks were worse. What kind of animals were these people? Occasionally, you could send a text, but I hadn’t because there was no one I wanted to text. They’d all forgotten me, my friends. Maybe I hoped they would. Anyway, now, there were no bars at all.
But cell phones were a necessity of life, especially when someone was supposed to pick you up at the train station at midnight in the middle of nowhere. I had a name, Celeste Greenwood, the mother of my mom’s childhood friend, and a phone number. Without a phone to call from, though, those facts were useless. Tomorrow’s commuters (if there even were any) would be greeted by the pathetic sight of my preserved, frozen body when they arrived the next morning.
I tried the number anyway. Sure enough, the phone flashed, “No service.”
The sound of the train’s wheels echoed in my head, the lights getting smaller in the distance as it sped away, blending with the way too many stars, which would have been pretty if they hadn’t been so lonely. There was nothing here, no lights or people, only darkness and stars and one train platform in the wilderness.
I shivered and looked for a pay phone.
“You Wyatt?” a voice asked.
I started. The guy—if it was a guy under all the layers of coats and scarves—had sneaked up on me, making me once again consider my mortality in this place. It was a campfire story waiting to happen. . . . And then, the claw-handed man grabbed the teenager and he was never heard from again.
I looked down at the stranger’s hands. No claws. “What?” I said. Then, I didn’t know why. My name was, in fact, Wyatt, a name that my mom, who’d been nineteen when I was born, had gotten from a soap opera. It was a Long Island name, a name that didn’t belong to me anymore, as I didn’t belong to Long Island anymore. “Yeah, I’m Wyatt.”
The guy was tall, taller than me, even though I was six feet. He moved his scarf down a bit so I could see his face enough to tell he was about my age, about seventeen. “I’m Josh. That all you have?” He pointed to the duffel and the backpack that held what were now all my worldly possessions.
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
“Don’t be sure. It gets cold here, much colder than Long Island.” He said “Long Island” with the same kind of scorn people in Long Island used to talk about “the sticks.”
As if on cue, I shivered again. “There’s always online shopping.” I cursed my teeth for chattering. I looked like a wuss.
“If Old Lady Greenwood even has the internet.” He gestured for me to follow him. The platform was slippery, and I had to step carefully, so for a minute, we didn’t talk.
“How old is she?” I finally asked.
Josh shrugged. “A hundred or so. I didn’t know she even knew anyone. We live up the road from her, and my mom makes me check on her sometimes. She says it’s to be neighborly, but really, I think it’s to make sure she hasn’t dropped dead. Around here, they might not notice for months.” He laughed.
I laughed too, even though I didn’t really think it was funny. A