Four

The only place Chloe could get service for miles was directly under the telephone poles about a hundred feet from her house. Her house was located smack dab in the middle of that bubble of nonservice that covered most of the town. So whenever Chloe wanted to make a phone call, she had to drag her sorry ass down the street in the freezing December air.

Recently--which was to say, in the last two days--Chloe had been dragging her sorry ass down the street a bit more frequently than usual. The thing was that usually, when Elena got into these moods of hers, turning off her phone and not showing up for school, the only thing Chloe could do was ignore it, and hope she snapped out of it soon. It some ways, it was nearly a relief when Elena went all MIA like that: sometimes Elena could be a very tiring person to be around.



But Chloe was dying to tell Elena about this whole thing with Chris Mathis asking about her. He hadn't stopped, either. And so maybe Chris Mathis was a tiny bit of a nerd, but nerd was in nowadays, Chloe had read somewhere. Besides, it wasn't like he was Mike Finnegan, or anything, who kept looking out curiously at Chloe standing near the base of his driveway. Mike Finnegan was the captain of the science league. Chris Mathis was just cute.

And so Chloe had been calling Elena religiously every two hours or so, leaving messages like, "Oh geez, E, you'll never guess. Chris was asking about you again, today! You know, Chris Mathis. Anyway, he's been helping me with my math, which is super sweet of him--you know he's super sweet, don't you?--because he noticed you weren't there and you usually help me with my math. And I know that kind of makes it sound like he's into me, but if you listened to him asking about you all the time, you can tell that he totally isn't. So call me back, you know, as soon as you get this message. Hope you aren't sick. Miss you, E. Later."

And yeah, Elena was going to flip a shit when she saw that she had like fifteen messages from Chloe, but it wasn't like Chloe hadn't put up with any annoying stuff from E. Aside from the moodiness thing, of course, there was always that thing where she obsessively checked her watch every two minutes during class. And the thing where, whenever she was staying over Chloe's house, she left the shampoo open, and then water got inside and made the shampoo all gross.

So, yeah, E was just going to have to get over the fifteen messages.

This time, however, the magic sixteenth call, the phone didn't bounce directly to voicemail. This was it. Elena always did snap out of these little phases of hers, and then pretended like nothing had been wrong, like she hadn't been holed up in her room with nothing but an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel for three days. On the fourth ring, someone picked up.

"Hello?"

"Oh E, you'll never guess!" Chloe chirped excitedly into the phone. Mike was looking at her out the window again. Apparently he didn't know about the service bubble.

On the other end of the phone, Elena cleared her throat. That didn't sound like E at all. "Um," she said tentatively, "this is Madelyn. Maddie? Elena's sister?" She sounded uncomfortable, like she wasn't at all certain of this fact.

Absently, Chloe wondered why Elena's sister was picking up her phone. Elena, in addition to being moody and shampoo-ruining, was typically very territorial about her stuff. She didn't let people touch her things. But worries such as these didn't usually bother Chloe more than abstractly. "Hey, Maddie," she chirped cheerfully. "Can you put your sister on the phone? Tell her it's Chloe."

Maddie cleared her throat uncomfortably and Chloe became certain, in that moment, that Elena wouldn't come to the phone. God, but she was irritating sometimes. "Yeah, Chloe, here's the thing." She paused awkwardly, uncertainly. "I don't really know where Elena is right now. My parents are freaking out 'cause she went out Sunday night and never came home."