As a general rule, I like sleeping. I’d be much happier if I was allowed to sleep in until at least noon. This is, admittedly, partially caused by my habit of staying up until two a.m. The point still stands though, the point being I’m not a morning person. I really don’t want to wake up today, but I have to. Not because it’s a school day. It might be, but I’m too drowsy to tell. It’s because my bed is feeling really hard. That might be why my neck feels so sore. Also, in more distressing news, I can hear fast, heavy breathing. Someone is in my room.
This thought gives me the adrenaline I need to sit up. I try to get out of bed. I can’t find my blanket or the edge of the bed, but I can move so I scramble to my feet and—“Oh thank goodness Rachel you’re awake! Are you okay?! I tried to wake you up, but you wouldn’t wake up, and I thought you might be in a coma, or dying, or something! I’m okay! Well, I’m uninjured, at least. Where are we?! When are we?! What happened?!”
I instantly calm down and open my eyes. It’s just Anna, my best friend. She’s kind of an anxious person. That’s okay though because I’m kind of reckless, so we even each other out. I blink a few times, trying to sort through all the questions, and look around. We are… definitely not in my room, though we are in a room, so that’s something.
The walls are painted a depressing dark gray color. Well, maybe not that dark, there’s only one dim light bulb and no windows so it might not be so bad, ordinarily. I can tell the floorboards I was lying on are of a nice quality since there isn’t a rug or any furniture whatsoever to cover it, though my neck still isn’t a big fan. The ceiling is… a ceiling, the one dim light bulb I mentioned in the middle of it. The door is painted black and otherwise normal. It has a doorknob and no lock that I can see. I have never been here before in my life. I take a few deep breaths, and Anna copies me. She calms down a little, but she’s fidgeting with the strings of her sweatshirt, so she’s still nervous.
“I’m okay Ans, I think my neck wants me dead, though. As for your other questions…”
I trail off, realizing in addition to not knowing where we are I still don’t know what day it is. I’m assuming it’s morning since we just woke up but really it could be any time at all. We’re even wearing our casual clothes so I can’t get any context clues from them and I definitely don’t know how we got here. I can’t phrase it like that, though. Anna would have a panic attack. Instead, I put on my most confident voice.
“I have no idea! This must be a mystery we can figure out together, an adventure if you will. We should check our phones for clues.”
Sometimes I have no idea what I’m talking about until I start talking and then I get competent. Anna sniffles a little and nods. After we look through our phones I plan on giving her a tight hug.
I reach into my jeans pocket, which thankfully still houses the thin rectangle with more technology than what sent humans to the moon. If anything will jog our concerningly empty memories it’ll be this. I turn my phone on and… it doesn’t work. I click the button again. I shake it. I shake it harder. Come on, work for once, please, I need you. I hit it. I hold down the button longer. I hit the volume buttons. Nothing. Not even a notification that it needs to be charged. Apparently, dropping small rectangles with more technology than what sent humans to the moon has consequences. Who’da thunk it.
“Okay, my phone isn’t working, the lazy little rectangle, but that’s okay, because we’ve still got yours,” I say to Anna, who’s staring at her screen.
She meets my eyes with an expression of terror. “Mine isn’t working either! What do you think happened to them?! Was there an electromagnetic pulse or something?! Why would that even happen to us?! We live in the middle of nowhere! Are we still in the middle of nowhere?! How long have we been gone?! What’s the last thing you can remember?! I don’t remember anything specific! You said your neck hurts, what about your head, maybe we got brain injuries! I don’t feel brain-injured, what does a brain injury even feel like?! Are we going crazy?!”
I… don’t really have a good answer for any of that. There’s something called Occam’s razor that says the most simple answer is usually the correct one, but I don’t know enough here to even know what the most simple answer is. I’m pretty sure I don’t have a brain injury. I think my head would hurt a lot if I did. I guess us being crazy makes sense but there isn’t much I can do about that. I decide I should focus on something else, like calming Anna down. She’s gone from pulling frantically on her sweatshirt strings to covering her eyes with her beanie.
I do my best to copy the voice people on TV use to talk to spooked horses.
“Hey now, look at. Look at me.” She peeks out from under her beanie. “I get that you’re scared, but I promise, it’s all gonna be alright. We’re gonna figure this out together, alright? You’re not alone here. I will not let anything bad happen to you. Remember all the snakes we’ve seen hiking? Remember how we dealt with that? Together. We dealt with that together. Now I hardly think a dingy, poorly lit room, with an oddly painted door, is scarier than a rattlesnake. If we don’t have our phones for help, we’ll just have to do things the old-fashioned way. We’ll get out of this room and explore. I’m sure we’ll find someone who will let us borrow a phone in no time, okay?”
I hold out my arms. She staggers toward me and melts into them. I hold onto her. Tight.
“What if we don’t find those people? What if we can’t find anyone? Or, or, what if we do find people, bad people?”
Yeah, what if?
“Then we’ll beat them up, I know jiu-jitsu, remember?” She makes a noise that’s half sob, half laugh.
“Taking two classes and then giving up doesn’t mean you know jiu-jitsu.”
She gives a shaky smile. I end the hug but keep holding her arms.
I grin. “Well then, Ms. Spoilsport, we’re both adept murderers of phones. And even if that was an electromagnetic pulse, which I don’t even think does anything to phones, then we will still destroy them with the power of friendship.”
She nods. “Of course. … I guess that means we should start exploring, huh?”
She probably doesn’t want to leave the relative safety of the empty room. Neither do I.
“Yep. Onward!” I strike a pose—body low, one leg forward, finger pointed at the door. She rolls her eyes, but snorts and opens it herself.