The Phone Girl

Adam stretched his long legs out in front of him as he slouched on the couch, beads of sweat forming along the hairline at his temples while he listened to the air conditioner struggle to push cool air into his apartment. He wore nothing but a pair of loose athletic shorts, slung low on his hips, his sprawled posture intended to allow as much heat as possible escape from the surface of his bare skin. When his phone’s notification alert dinged, he rolled his head to the side to stare at it for a moment before picking it up and checking his texts.

I had fun last night, followed by a wink and kiss emojis, from someone saved in his phone as Maggie.

He considered replying but, instead, tossed his phone back on the couch and spread his arms along the back, letting his head fall back to rest along the top edge. Adam barely remembered the girl putting her number into his phone, much less what the two of them might have done later in the evening, after the party ended, and the house regurgitated its extra occupants back onto the sidewalks and into the streets.

With a sigh, he gathered himself and shuffled to the kitchen for a glass of water. The bottle of ibuprofen in the cupboard responded with silent reproval when he shook it.

“Son of a bitch,” he said, and put the empty bottle back in the cupboard.

As he opened the refrigerator and bent to examine the contents of the shelves, Adam heard someone knock on the apartment’s door. Four measured thuds. He straightened with a frown, staring in the direction of his front door and wondering if the girl from last night had decided to turn up at his place, uninvited. With a roll of unease in his gut, Adam walked to the door and opened it, expecting to see a demure, vaguely-familiar girl.

Instead, a large box, wrapped in unmarked brown paper, sat directly in front of his door. Adam leaned out over the box and glanced first one way, then the other, down the hallway of the apartment, searching for whoever had left the package. When he saw no one, he looked down at the box and bent to pick it up, hoping it might be lighter than its size implied.

It was not.

The box was, in fact, heavy enough to warrant Adam squeezing past it to push it into his apartment from the hallway, his torso filming in sweat as he worked the box over the lip of the threshold then slid it across the hardwood floor to the kitchen.

As he moved it, Adam had the disconcerting feeling that he was pushing a crouched body in a box. Beneath the paper, the box felt like cardboard, and the object inside shifted with every shove, seeming to roll away from a center of gravity before righting itself just in time for Adam’s next push.

“If this is some kind of weird joke,” he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead and not bothering to finish his threat to the tepid air as he turned, pulling open a drawer and digging until he found a utility knife, its blade spotted with blooms of rust. As Adam tore the paper off to reveal the box, he realized the box’s surface was damp to the touch, but, despite that, no moisture had been absorbed by the paper wrapping.

Squatting close to the box to use the knife, he slit the packaging tape along the top seams before carefully pulling up one cardboard flap to peer inside. From the darkness, light reflected off the liquid surface of a pair of dark eyes.

Adam shouted and flung himself backward, his ass thudding on the floor a moment before his shoulder hit the lower cupboard door and brought his momentum to an abrupt halt.

“What the fuck,” he gasped, holding the utility knife out in front of himself like a priest might hold out a cross in the face of evil. One handed, he pushed himself up onto his feet and crept towards the box, holding his breath between inhalations and exhalations to listen for any sort of unusual noise. He heard nothing but the chugging of the overworked AC.

With a sudden quickness, Adam threw open the nearest flap, fear making his action both jerky and far stronger than needed. He expected the heaviness of the object inside to keep the box in place, but his movement sent the box spinning away from him as if it were empty. It skidded to a stop and tipped onto its side, the open top now facing Adam.

The box was empty.

For the first time the whole day, he felt cold, his skin stippling in fear. From the living room, his phone dinged, making Adam shift his attention for a moment, his eyes wide and breath hard. With a last look at the box, he ran for the living room and snatched up his phone, opening the new text message with trembling fingers.

Another text from Maggie: my sister wanted to see you again, followed by a ghost emoji.

As Adam was reading and rereading the text, trying to sift through layers of warped memories made even more vague by time, his phone’s screen darkened before it dinged, again, in his hand, and he nearly dropped it as another message sprang to bright life beneath the previous one.

You might not remember her.

Two more messages popped up, one right after the other.

Her name was Olivia.

You met at a party last year. She was a freshman.

Adam tried to remember the girl, but his mind just brought up the image of the dark haired girl from the previous night. Even that image felt blurred, more like an amalgamation of all the dark haired girls from all of the drunken nights over the past three years. Then his stomach twisted and he said, “The phone girl.”

She passed out. You recorded what you did to her. Put it online.

“I didn’t put it online,” he said, but he had sent it to a couple of friends. One of them uploaded it to a site, and they had teased Adam about becoming a porn star for the rest of the semester. It had blown over, eventually, without doing any real harm, he had thought.

Another message appeared: Olivia killed herself. I’m not going to tell you how. You’ll be able to figure it out on your own.

The laboring air conditioner rumbled then sputtered, chugged one last time, and went quiet. The sudden silence was like a weight, pressing in on his ear drums as, almost immediately, the summer heat began to seep into the apartment. He heard the drip of water from the faucet in the bathtub, a regular plip, plip, plip. It was very loud, though, as if the drops were falling into a half full tub of water.

A final message blinked into existence, the anchor at the end of a chain: Olivia is going to make sure that you never do that to another woman again.