Part 45: James

Hannah didn’t come online at all Sunday. James knew this because he spent the whole day alternating between sitting at the computer waiting for her, not sitting at the computer waiting for her, and pretending he wasn’t on the computer when he really kept darting over to it every few minutes to check it. He watched the pot; it didn’t boil. He looked away from the pot; it didn’t boil. He looked places that weren’t at the pot but weren’t away from it either, where the pot was in his peripheral vision, or the background of what he was really looking at, but at no point did any boiling occur.

His whole family felt his presence as he went from room to room, changing the energy of each one, though he said nothing. Becca was particularly sensitive to it, since she didn’t have any language to describe what James was doing. She didn’t know what it meant to “be a teenager” the way her parents did, although it was a phrase she would happily parrot on the phone with Ashley (an only child) later that evening.

James wasn’t worried about Hannah necessarily. In the light of day, the idea of Hannah being someone you had to worry about seemed ridiculous. That would be like worrying that the sun wasn’t going to rise in the morning or that the world economy was going to collapse when everyone realized simultaneously that money is only real because we say it is. Sure, it was possible that something would go wrong, but it was so unlikely that it wasn’t worth thinking about.

He was worried about Hannah’s mom, though, and what she might have done or could still do. What if she took away Hannah’s computer? She had said her mom was mad about her being online last night, and you never knew with drunk people, they were so impulsive and irrational.

And he was also worried about Courtney Collins. Messaging her last night had been a mistake. Really, it had been Victoria’s fault. He had done it to make Victoria feel better, and get her off his back. But Courtney might not realize that there were times when you needed to keep your mouth shut. She was still too young for that. (She was older than James, technically, but only literally. Hannah always said age didn’t matter, maturity did.)

But if he messaged her again to tell her not to tell anyone, that could just remind her that she had something to tell people; nothing could make Courtney Collins more excited about spreading a rumor than finding out that it was a secret rumor.

He could only hope that she was too dumb to realize the significance of what she had been asked last night.

It was a dull day: a day punctuated by meals.

Somewhere between lunch and dinner, Victoria took those lines about the “selfish little boy” out of her profile, which just confirmed that they had been about him. She replaced them with the word “ijusthopeeverythingsok” in the same tiny text.

She also kept putting up progressively more blatant away messages throughout the afternoon and evening. First it was “feeling sick to my stomach :/” and “wish i knew what was going on…..” After dinner, it had changed to “it just sucks when u miss your best friend and u cant talk to anyone about it bc the only person u want to talk to is her..."

God, she was almost as bad as Courtney Collins. And worse, her away messages might remind Coutney Collins about the whole Hannah situation. But James didn’t message her, either. They weren’t really friends. Last night had been a fluke, an emergency, like when you’re on an elevator and you hear a strange sound and suddenly you become a team with the strangers on the elevator, united against the sound.

Just one more night to get through and then everything would go back to normal.