Page 3 of One of Our Own

I set my keys on the entryway table and crept into Hunter’s bedroom without taking my shoes off. I had to see him. It was only six thirty a.m., so I had another half hour before he got up, but I couldn’t wait.

My last call had shaken me to my core. The girl never called back. Each minute dragged while I waited for the switchboard to light up with a caller, or for my phone to ring, but neither did. Eventually, there was nothing else I could do except come home. Still, it felt wrong.

Phillip was livid I’d given her my personal cell phone number. It was the first rule of working at the center—do not give out your personal information. But what else was I supposed to do? I just reacted to this girl’s desperation. It wasn’t like kids never called in to the center: they did, all the time. But most of them were pranks. Sick jokes. They thought it was funny. More than once, I’d spent hours on a call with a teenager only to catch the sound of snickering in the background. Our training with teenagers was largely focused on deciphering the real calls from the fake ones early on so we didn’t waste our time.

I’ve only had two other real cases from young callers, and I was just as bothered by them. It felt like the level ofresponsibility skyrocketed when you were dealing with a child, especially being a parent myself. It was impossible to help other people’s children without thinking of your own, and if the roles were reversed, I’d want someone to do everything in their power to save my son.

It was my own family history that had brought me to the call center. My youngest sister died by suicide in college. She took her physics final and told her friends she’d meet them for lunch after she had a shower. Her roommate found her hanging in their closet an hour later. Our family was wrecked. Torn apart in ways we’ve never recovered from. You don’t get over something like that. We’d moved on, but only because the world kept moving. Not because we wanted it to.

There were so many hard things about that time, but for me, the worst part was the fact I’d had no idea she was even struggling—nobody had—and I clung to the fantasy that I would’ve been able to stop her from dying if she’d told me how she was feeling. As the oldest of four girls, I’d helped her with everything from learning to walk to riding a bike and every milestone in between. That’s what I did. I was her big sister. I could’ve helped her, and it didn’t matter how many times people said it wasn’t so—I still believed it was true, despite all the hours I’d spent in therapy. My therapist had been the one to suggest volunteering at the center. She said it might help heal that part of me. Maybe if I could help someone else, it’d lessen the pain over not having been able to help Holly. I’d balked at the idea at first because I had absolutely no training in mental health, but I’d been surprised to discover you didn’t need any. Not any more than the thirty-hour crisis counselor training they provided for the volunteer staff. That said, none of their initial trainings or the follow-up ones I’d done had prepared me for what I’d just heard.

Hunter stirred and I looked down at him. He was curled up on his side. His stuffed animals from childhood surrounded him. He still slept with them every night, even though he was seventeen. They were tucked away in a drawer underneath his bed each morning and brought back out every night. They’d probably go with him to college. I loved this about him. My sweet boy.

I leaned over and sniffed the top of his head, careful not to wake him. I’d been watching him sleep ever since he was born, and sometimes, on nights like tonight, he looked like the baby he was back then. Dark lashes resting on his rounded cheeks. Puckered pink lips. Smooth, shiny face. And just so peaceful.

My heart ached for him, but not just him. All the kids growing up in this generation. That poor girl tonight was wrecked because of some stupid video going around. There were so many cautionary tales out there about this generation’s social media use. Between knowing what their friends were doing any second of the day and a nude pic they’d sent to their crush, who didn’t keep it a secret, there were land mines everywhere. I never would’ve survived middle school. I didn’t know how they did it.

I wondered: Did Hunter know the girl that called tonight?

Did I?

It’s always possible I’ll get a call from someone I know, but most people didn’t give any identifying information, and I’d never recognized anyone just by the sound of their voice. Elaine swore she recognized her dentist once, but nobody believed her. There was a strict protocol for transferring a call if there was a personal connection, and I’d gotten Phillip on the line partially for that reason, but it all spiraled so quickly.

Buckley was one of only two private high schools in our small Wisconsin town. There were just over three hundred kids in the entire school, so everybody knew everyone else, and if some awfulvideo was circulating, she wasn’t exaggerating when she said that everyone would see it. Including Hunter.

I quickly grabbed his phone from the nightstand next to his bed and typed in the code before I changed my mind. He’d be furious if he caught me going through it, but I wasn’t interested in snooping into his personal life—I just wanted to find the video. If I could do that, then I could figure out who the caller was and let her parents know she was in trouble. I’d probably lose my job at the center, but at this point, I didn’t care. This was too important.

I knew Hunter and his friends loved Snapchat, so I went there first, but nothing made me feel older than that app. It made no sense to me, even when he first got it and tried explaining things. That’s probably why they all used it—because none of the adults understood how it worked. Then I remembered what Hunter had told me: everything deleted within twenty-four hours. I skimmed through his stuff, but from what I could tell, there was nothing there. Just countless goofy selfies and random pictures sent among him and his friends.

Next, I went through his recent texts, but they were mostly about homework and running. Hunter was captain of the cross-country team and an honor roll student, so his life was packed with practices, meets, and homework. Instagram proved pointless, too. He and his friends rarely posted anything. I wasn’t sure why they even had it. They were starting to look at Instagram like my generation looked at Facebook—old and outdated. It sounded like they spent most of their time on Snapchat and TikTok. His TikTok inbox was filled with stupid pranks and dance videos. There was nothing sinister.

I laid his phone back on the nightstand. He’d wake up with no notifications on his phone, and immediately suspect I’d been through it, but he was just going to have to deal with it. If he hadn’tgotten the video, maybe it hadn’t been shared as widely as the girl thought? Maybe it was never shared at all, and she was just getting carried away. Kids said all kinds of things.

Or maybe I was just too optimistic.

Where was she at this exact moment? Was she safe? What was she doing? I couldn’t shake her. I mean, what if I knew her parents? It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that I had met this girl. Hunter had lots of female friends, and they moved in and out of the house along with all of his male friends. The only difference between them and the boys was that the girls weren’t allowed to stay overnight. But this caller could’ve been in my living room. I might have ordered her pizza, asked her about her college plans or her prom dress.

My movement made Hunter stir again. He rolled over within seconds and slowly opened his eyes to look up at me.

“Mom? What’s wrong?” he said sleepily, like he wasn’t sure if he was awake or dreaming. Finding me sitting on his bed staring at him for no reason was definitely out of the ordinary.

I brushed the chestnut curls off his forehead. “Hi, honey. Sorry I woke you a few minutes early. Did you sleep well?”

He closed his eyes and murmured yes, rolling onto his stomach. I reached down and rubbed his shoulders like I used to when he was a baby. Actually, I’d rubbed his shoulders as he fell asleep until he was eleven years old, which was ridiculously old to keep it up, but he was my only child. I was never going to have another kid, so I held on to every stage for as long as possible.

I gave him a few more minutes before bombarding him with questions. “Sweetie, I want to ask you about something. Are you awake?” He grunted. He was probably afraid I was going to bring up his college essays again, since we were right in the thick of applications, and I’d been on him about them for weeks. “Is there any drama going on at school?”

“There’s always drama at school, Mom. That’s what you wanted to talk to me about at seven in the morning?” He laughed, pulling the covers around him.

“I was just wondering… if there’d been a video of a girl going around school?”

“A video of a girl? What do you mean?” His voice was muffled by his pillow.

“Just anything you can think of that got sent to a lot of people in the last couple of days.” I couldn’t have been more vague, but it was hard to ask him to help me find something when I didn’t know what I was looking for.

“Like, someone had a video go viral?”

“No, I mean, something being sent around at your school.”

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