Chapter 2: The First Night Outside

The call didn’t so much end as just fade out — four rings and then a kind of silence that wasn’t quite silence, an empty spot where his mom’s voice should’ve been. Eli stood on the porch a while longer with the phone still up to his ear, listening to that nothing like it might turn into words if he waited long enough. It didn’t. He lowered the phone slow, the way you’d set down something you didn’t expect to be so heavy, and looked at the screen. Call duration: eleven seconds. Eighteen years, and that’s what it came down to.

He walked. There wasn’t much else his body knew how to do with news like that, so it did the only thing it had — one foot in front of the other, down a sidewalk he’d walked a thousand times without ever once noticing what it actually looked like. The tree roots buckling up the concrete. The gray of it, flecked with little bits of something shiny that used to seem, when he was a kid, like a secret only slow walkers got to find. He wasn’t walking slow now. He was walking the way you walk when you’ve been handed a lie too big to make sense of, and your legs decide the only thing to do is put some distance between you and the table where it happened.

By the time the light started going thin and orange over the rooftops the way it always did that time of year, Eli found himself outside the bus station without much memory of deciding to go there. It was just where his feet had taken him — this low brick building with the flickering sign out front, smelling like diesel and old coffee, doors that never locked because nobody in this town figured there was much point.

Inside, the fluorescent lights buzzed the way they always did, washing everything out flat and white, making the vinyl on the benches look a little sick, a little green. Eli sat down. The bench creaked under him and the cold came up through the vinyl into the backs of his legs almost right away, a plain, unglamorous cold that didn’t care one bit what kind of day he’d had. He thought, in that strange clear way your head works sometimes when you’re in shock, that this might be the worst part of the whole thing — not the big betrayal, which at least had some size to it, but this. A cold bench that felt exactly the same whether you were bored or your whole life had just come apart.

He set his bag down between his feet and kept a hand on the strap. For a while he just watched people move through the place — a woman with two little kids asleep on her shoulders, a guy in a canvas coat reading a two-day-old newspaper like he didn’t want anybody talking to him, the ticket window sitting dark and empty behind its glass. A speaker crackled overhead and said something about a delayed bus from up north, gate four, stand clear of the yellow line. Eli listened to it the way you listen to a language you don’t speak — you catch the shape of it, none of the meaning.

He pulled out his wallet and counted his money—not because he thought the number had changed since he’d checked three days ago, but because counting gave him something to do. Some small way of feeling like he still had control over anything. Sixty-two dollars. The envelope his mom had pressed into his hand at the bottom of the stairs held forty more, folded so tight it had creased the bills. A hundred and two dollars total, and he sat there measuring it against a life he didn’t know how to plan for anymore. Maybe a week of groceries if he was careful. Two nights, tops, at the cheap motel out on the highway—the one with the buzzing sign he used to watch from the back seat of his dad’s car, thinking, that’s where other people’s lives happen, not mine. He ran the math a few times over, like doing it again might yield something different. It never did. Same small number, nowhere near big enough for the problem it was supposed to solve.