I kept scrolling. My thumb wouldn't stop. The phone stuttered and froze and came back, stuttered and came back, and I kept going up, through the summer, through the long hot nights of July when I'd come home at six-thirty to find them both asleep, him on the couch with the TV on low and his phone on his chest, and I'd stood over him and thought about his father. Through May, through the end of the school year, when his grades had started to slide and I'd sat him down and said, What's going on with you, and he'd said, Nothing, I'm just tired, and I'd said, Then go to bed at a decent hour. Through April. All the way back to a night in the second week of April, a Tuesday, which was the first message in the thread, at 3:20 in the morning, from her.
i put it on ur phone so u can hear. dont tell mom ok. she will quit.
I put the phone down on the counter, face up, and Juni kept her thumb on the plug, and I said, without turning around, "What happened on the sixth?"
Nobody answered.
"Kellan. The sixth. When she was low for two and a half hours. What happened?"
"It died," he said.
I turned around. He'd finally looked up. His face was very white and his eyes were wet and he was not crying, and I could see what it was costing him not to.
"It said thirty-one percent," he said. "When I went to sleep. It said thirty-one and it was plugged in, I had the sock on it, I checked it. I always check it. And it just died sometime. I don't know when. I didn't hear anything. I was asleep." He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and then took them away. "I didn't hear anything, Mom."
"I woke up by myself," Juni said. "Sort of. I don't really remember it good. I was on the floor by my bed and I was all wet, like I'd been in the bath, and I had a juice in my hand but I couldn't get the straw out of the plastic. My fingers didn't work. I kept trying and it kept being wrong. And I tried to text him." She swiped, and showed me. There it was, near the bottom of the thread, at 4:36 AM, in the gray bubbles that meant not delivered: kel. kel. kell. im lwo. cant open. Then nothing. "So I went," she said. "I went down the hall. I think I crawled. My knees had carpet marks on them. I went in his room and his phone was black and I shook him. I shook him a lot."
"She was saying stuff that didn't make sense," Kellan said. "She was crying. She kept saying the juice was broken." He swallowed. "I did two juices and the honey. Like they showed us. I didn't do the spray because she could still swallow. I almost did it. I had it out of the drawer. I was holding it. I didn't know if I should."
"Why didn't you call me?" I said. "Why didn't you call nine-one-one, why didn't you —"
"I didn't have a phone!" It came out of him in a shout, the first time he'd raised his voice, and it rang off the cabinets. "My phone was dead! Hers was in her room! I wasn't going to leave her and go find it! And you can't call you anyway, Mom, you're in a locker. You're in locker one-fourteen. I've called. I called you in May when she went to forty-nine and it just rang and rang and went to voicemail. I left a message. You never even said anything about it. You never listened to it."