Caller ID
Naomi Krupitsky Wernham
When the phone rings in my house, it sings a
multi-tonal jingle like a cell phone. I thought it was
funny when I set it that way, playing with the buttons
on the new family cordless and making my family listen
to all the options so many times our heads were
buzzing. Now it’s mostly just annoying, and I never
answer it because it doesn’t have caller ID and
answering to the dulcet tones of someone I don’t want
to talk to makes me feel how a criminal must when
caught in the blinding glare of one of those huge
police spotlights.
On a fall night almost exactly three years ago, that
jingle interrupted dinner with its plastic tone. This
was back when it was still amusing, and I jumped up
from the table to answer it. Fourteen year olds have
strange and mysterious superpowers when it comes to a
ringing telephone -- suddenly the world stopped around
me as my legs, fueled by the overpowering desire to
know who was on the other end of this beautiful,
hypnotizing song, propelled me out of my seat and
towards the phone, which was singing merrily in its
charging cradle, a holy grail just begging me to press
‘talk.’
I forced myself out of my reverie long enough to say
“Hello?” After all, there was the possibility that it
wasn’t for me, that some adult voice would exclaim how
much I was growing to sound like my mom and wasn’t I
just loving high school?! Or, god forbid, one of the
girls who had just begun to call for my little
brother, shrieking and giggling in nervous hysterical
laughter before hanging up.
“Hey!” It was my best friend. My heart sank. The
anticipatory hormonal jitters slithered quietly
through my body and lay dormant once again, giving way
to little stabs of regret. I wasn’t in a fight with
Laura, but being around her lately had become more
work than it was worth. I didn’t want to talk to her.
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“Hey!” I replied, falsely cheerful. Shit! Why did I
have to answer the phone?
“I’m right by your house. Can some of us come chill
for a while?”
“We’re right in the middle of dinner.” Also, I don’t
want to see you. “Can I call you back?”
“Well, I think we’re going up to Indian Rock!” It was
a Wednesday. Why the hell was she going to Indian Rock
at night? Why was she even on this side of town? “Can
you come out?” She was oblivious. “We’ll meet you on
the corner.” I sighed, resigned.
“Sure.” I put the phone back in its cradle, the holy
grail mirage being replaced by a flashing sign -
“Danger! Danger! Do Not Answer!”Bit late for that....
I glared at it and walked back into the kitchen to
explain to my mom that I was going to go hang out on
the street corner in the dark for a while. I looked
unhappy enough that she let me; she was used to this
sort of thing in relation to Laura.
*
Laura stood, long hair shining under a sallow yellow
street lamp, laughing at something one of her friends
had said. I didn’t know any of them except from
stories she had told me in recent months and quick
glimpses as they walked by in the park across from
school. She waved when she saw me; her friends ignored
me and stared stonily around; too cool for this girl
who ate dinner at home, all wondering what Laura was
doing with me. I had a sudden urge to tell them all
about her teddy bear collection. I resisted, instead
halfheartedly returning the hug she gave me.
She was enthusiastic; I was not. “Hey! How are you?”
I think I said some combination of the words “Fine”
and “Mhm.”
“Hey Laura... we gotta go, man,” came a husky voice
from under a hood next to her. One of the sullen
park-people had spoken.
I wasn’t going to criticize her. I just wasn’t. I
couldn’t mother her anymore, it wasn’t my
2
responsibility, I refused to let anything vaguely
nagging leave my lips. I would go back inside. I
would not try to stop her from embarking upon her
latest, probably-illegal-in-several
lips were sealed. “You aren’t really going to Indian
Rock right now, are you?” Oops. The words had come out
of my mouth at a sprint, too fast for me to realize
and pull them back in.
“Yeah!” Her bright response indicated clearly that
she had not heard the ten questions behind the one I
had asked.
Now that I had started, I couldn’t stop. The
anxieties toppled over and around one another on the
way out, eager to fill the air with well-meaning
concerns. “But what about your mom? And school? And
it’s dark and there aren’t really lights up there!”
Oh, shut UP! I wasn’t this annoying with anyone but
her; her complete lack of judgment in situations like
this always made me feel like I had to overcompensate
in the opposite direction --she was crazy and I became
quasi-anal-retentive.
It wasn’t without reason. Every time I looked at her,
images of the emergency room flashed before my eyes;
IV tubes dripping steadily into her arm where a needle
rested dormant, tucked smoothly under the skin. I saw
her hair spread, that long hair spread, fanning across
the pillow, the tearstained pillow, the salt stains
tracing desperation down her cheek. That plastic chair
I sat in for hours, hard plastic, staring at her
bitten nails, 23 Tylenol and she had puked in my
bathroom, her self-hatred flushing smooth down the
toilet, leaving her empty, washed out, but not clean.
I never got over that, worried over her like a mother
hen, clucking and cooing and nagging and watching her
with an anxious obsession, seeing her mood swoop up
and down, ready to catch her if she fell.
She never seemed to listen, though. Never seemed to
hear. “Don’t worry about it, it’s fine,” she said,
dismissive and cheerful all at once. Fine. Fine. Don’t
worry. I wouldn’t worry. I
3
wasn’t worried. I would leave. I would walk inside and
pretend none of this had happened. Let her fall off
Indian Rock if she wanted to.
“C’mon man, it’ll kick in soon,” said one of the
hooded figures.
“What will?” I could never stop myself.
“They’re on acid,” offered another hooded figure.
“Yeah, but I’m not even feeling it,” Laura chimed in.
I started yelling before I had even processed the
word. “Acid? Acid??” I was asking as much to better my
own comprehension as to demand an explanation. “ACID?”
I might have kept going forever, until my throat ran
dry and all I had left was the anger and shock, eyes
like knives and my sharp-angled and furious mouth,
incredulous, still mouthing the word over and over
again.
Finally, I had gotten to her. “Yeah.” she said, and
for once the tone of her voice didn’t shoot up at the
end, wasn’t a high-pitched, cheerful question. It was
defiant, almost; questioning what I was gonna do about
it.
A whole novel-length rant rose in my throat,
shrieking brain damage and overdoses and you’re only
fourteen and what the fuck is wrong, what the fuck is
wrong with you, how could you ever do something like
this? It boiled at the back of my mouth, bitter and
burning. I lost track of where my anger ended and she
began; her humanity had been drowned in my rabid
confusion. My fury was an entity unto itself,
billowing around us, almost tangible, and I was
sweating in the fall night air, on the verge of both
shouting and sobbing, and the whole world was her and
I, her and I standing, staring, waiting.
But I turned around. I turned around slowly, her
defiant face branded into my mind’s eye. all I saw as
my bare feet mechanically made their way over the
cool, rough sidewalk. She didn’t call after me. When I
reached my doorway, I had the presence of mind to
arrange my face into an expression that didn’t say, “I
think I just lost my best friend and I can’t exactly
function right
4
now.” Dinner was quiet that night; my somber, wooden
face went unnoticed.
*
Four months later, I got an instant message from
Laura.
“Hi,” it said.
My fingers didn’t hesitate anymore; I had no problem
clicking on the upper left hand corner’s X and
watching the little box disappear, lost in some
convoluted reject corner of cyberspace’s symbolic
olive-branches.
I had been building a wall, and it had grown sturdy
in those months; I could see no solution save for
cutting her out of my life completely. It was easy,
this one-sidedness. There were no more
middle-of-the-night phone calls, no more stifled
worries and complaints when she showed up at my house
smelling like pot and tears. There was no more
covertly checking her wrists for new self-inflicted
lines that screamed with her confused pain and an
insatiable appetite for external validation, for love,
for attention. It was easy, and it was simple. I had,
quite frankly, turned myself off. I didn’t think about
the good times, because that would have given the
story two sides. I didn’t think about her at all,
refused to acknowledge her presence, wouldn’t explain
myself to her. I felt that her actions should be an
explanation in and of themselves. I assumed she would
understand that. Part of me, I guess, hoped she
wouldn’t understand --part of me hoped she would lie
awake, tormented by my inexplicable cold shoulder.
Insomnia had been a cruel taskmaster before The Night,
nudging me with icy fingers, keeping me from sleep by
encouraging obsessive over-analyzation. Now, I refused
its tauntings. I couldn’t afford to think, or I might
question myself. I couldn’t let the wall crumble. I
did my homework, went to bed early, robotically denied
the two-year friendship we had built.
The phone calls had stopped soon after The Night --I
assume my electronic voice,
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informing the caller cheerfully that they had reached
my cell phone and I would get back to them soon, began
to seem like a cruel lie. I assume it became easier to
stare at a computer; I assume it was not as torturous
to watch the unchanging screen as it was to hear me
promise to call back, when she knew I wouldn’t. So I
had begun to get instant messages --long, typo-ridden
outpourings of her regret for ‘whattever she ahd
done,’ promises that she missed me, speculation about
how I was. I stopped reading them after a while. They
made my facade hard to keep up. I’m not good at
staying mad at people, and even worse at holding my
tongue --the urge to respond, to explain how it was
all easier this way, to correct her assumptions about
my life, was almost overwhelming.
Over time, though, the instant messages grew more
hopeless. ‘Hi,’ she would say, a futile outpouring of
regret or sorrow, ‘Hi,’ and that was all, just to
remind me of her existence, ‘Hi,’ and over time she
lost hope that I was still the one who had held her
hair when self-loathing overwhelmed her desire to
live, the one whose shirts were stained with little
teardrop splashes, the one who had watched Grease with
her until the entire soundtrack could play, start to
finish, in our heads. I became cold in her eyes; a
gaze brushed aside in the hallways, an empty instant
message box awaiting a response that never came.
The box popped back up again, which hadn’t happened
in almost a month. Usually it was ‘Hi,’ and then
silent acceptance of the fact that I was not going to
respond. “I guess it’s over,” it said. Then, “Thank
you.” My hand stopped dead in its path towards the
computer mouse and close button. I crossed my arms,
sat back in the chair, and stared at the screen.
“Thank you from me, thank you from the people who love
me, thank you from the children I may or may not have.
Thank you.”
I read it all. Then I read it again. Then again. My
fingers hovered over the keyboard, a familiar urge
pressing them into the keys until a message -- the
first thing I had said to her in
6
months -- appeared on the screen. “I’m here if you
ever need it.”
So that was how it was going to be. I wouldn’t be her
friend, but I would be her cushion. I would offer to
stop life’s bullets for her, because I knew no other
way to interact. I would take care of her, if there
was nowhere else for her to go. I would watch her
surreptitiously, tracing who her friends were,
calculating if she looked healthy, but I could no
longer pretend that my job lay inside the boundaries
of a healthy friendship. I looked at the message I had
typed and sighed, wondering if I would ever regret it.
I pressed send.
*
We pass on the street sometimes. We look at each
other awkwardly, with the unnerved half-smiles of
someone spotting a bit of their past. We do not know
one another.