Empire Games Series, Book 1(76)
“Your grandfather’s here,” River told her when the idle big-sis/little-brother chat began to bore him. “Wanna talk to him?”
“Yeah. Hi, Gramps.”
“Hello, Rita. Are you well?” he asked gravely.
“I’m fine, work’s fine,” she said happily. “I can’t talk about it, though.” “Talk” was their prearranged code word: it meant everything was indeed fine. “Discuss,” in contrast, meant “Send help,” and “mention” was not to be mentioned save in extremis. “That book you lent me was weird. Are there any others like it?”
They chatted about trivia for another five minutes, until Kurt tired. “Why don’t you look up your old school friends, see if anyone lives nearby?” he asked. “I’m tired; I need my nap.”
“Yes, Gramps, I’ll do that,” she said, and hung up. Hearing Mom and Dad and River and Gramps’s voices had given her a brief boost, but the chill of isolation began to descend again. Rita could feel alone in the middle of a crowded party; being stuck in a hotel room in the middle of nowhere with a bugged phone and monitored Internet feed was beyond lonely.
Catch up on friends indeed. She hit Facebook, skidding across the frozen river of all the lifelines she’d crossed. Do I know anyone who lives in Allentown? she wondered. A quick search later, the answer came back: to her surprise, she did have a friend in Philly. And it was Angela, of all people. Or rather, Angie: she’d suddenly acquired a serious hate on her name … when? When she was fifteen?
Rita hadn’t seen Angie since they’d been in the Girl Scouts in Massachusetts, a decade ago. They hadn’t been very close at first, but they’d done a couple of the special summer camps the parents of girls in Wolf Troop sent them to, the ones with the language courses and orienteering and the other stuff. Then teenage kicks and tentative self-discovery happened and for a year they’d been inseparable. Not to mention fizzing bundles of anxiety at the possibility that one of their schoolmates might see them together and realize what they were to each other. This was back during the second Rumsfeld administration, when Congress was busy defending marriage from girls like them. It had fizzled out tearfully when Angie’s folks had stayed in Boston and Rita’s moved to Phoenix, but Angie herself had enlisted and then somehow ended up here … and she was on chat.
Rita procrastinated for almost a quarter of an hour. There were idiotic arguments to chip in on, after all, and five things she really needed to know about vaping that would totally change her life, and sundry clickbait to distract from the burning question, How will she remember me? Angie’s face had sat frozen in her FB feed for years, unlooked at—Rita couldn’t bear to think of herself as a stalker; it was undignified and creepy—but also undeleted. And Angie didn’t update her wall very often, anyway. Like Rita, she clutched a thick veil of privacy tight around her online life.
But here she was, online for chat—and nearby, not thousands of miles away.
Finally, Rita ran out of excuses. This is stupid, she told herself. She’ll have found herself a cute blonde, settled down, and forgotten me. Or—
Somehow, while she was spinning her gears, her fingers began to move without her conscious volition.
> Hi, Angie?
>> Rita? Been ages! Sup, Sis?
> I’m in Allentown. Work. Weekend. Bored.
>> Work!?! Permanent?
> Temp
>> Wanna meet up?
> Love to. When/where is good?
>> Lemme get back 2 U. Free 2 nite?
Feeling unaccountably hot and prickly, Rita stared at her phone for a minute. Angie seemed enthusiastic. Come to think of it, when had she last followed her? Angie lived so far away there hadn’t seemed to be much point. She looked at Angie’s profile status—single again—and bit her lip before replying.
> Y
>> Hot! Share Ur location & I’ll be round at 8
> Y
>> L8R:-)
Oh my God, Rita thought dizzily. She hoped Angie wouldn’t get the wrong idea. It had, after all, been a very long time.
PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020
Rita had gotten close with Angie when they were both in tenth grade, gawky teens trying to figure out what interested them in life. They were both going through that phase of working out whether to try and scrape together the money to study, or to get a job right away: not to mention whether they were interested in boys or, or not. Rita: not so much, although, shy and introspective, she’d been unsure how her parents would cope if they found out. (A misplaced fear, as she subsequently learned.) Angie: back then she’d been a strawberry blonde with a bob and a smile, as devoutly Lutheran as her parents. Grandpa Kurt and Angie’s parents shared a history back in the GDR that the girls were supposed to ignore, and for the most part they successfully did. When they’d first spent time together at summer camp Rita had pegged her for a boy-chaser who’d be married by twenty and pregnant by twenty-one. Then Rita had learned just how wrong first impressions could be, in a good way.
Angie’s eyes were still blue and twinkled like the iridescent sheen on her nose stud and eyebrow rings, but her hair was cuprous green streaked with blue, and she walked with a swagger. Rita managed not to gape when she saw her across the hotel lobby. “Angela?” she called, momentarily forgetting. So much for the demure girl she remembered from high school days. On the other hand, Rita had been far from the only one who’d been kept in the closet for fear of bullying in the coldly repressive climate of the early 2010s. Times had changed, and in any case the whole wide world was not a high school diner: and Angie had blossomed.