Page 11 of We All Live Here
“No, Lila. I tell you everything.”
Not everything, she wants to say, but now is not the time.
“Okay. I’ll try her phone.”
She calls Celie, and Celie does not pick up. After the fourth time she sends her a text:
Celie, where are you? Please tell me you’re okay.
It is four long minutes before Celie responds. Four minutes in which Lila’s leg jiggles anxiously under the desk, four minutes in which every possible scenario has traveled through her body, sending her heart and nerve endings into overdrive:
Just needed some me-time. I’m fine.
There is a nanosecond of relief as Lila blinks at the message. But then panic is abruptly replaced by blind fury. Me-time?Me-time?Since when did a teenager need me-time? She takes a breath before she types again:
You should be at school. They called wanting to know where you are.
Can’t you tell them I’m at the dentist or something?
Where are you? You need to come home. Now.
She watches the three little dots pulse on the screen, and disappear. She stares at her phone.NOW, Celie.She sees the dots pulse again and then there is nothing.
•••
In Lila’s wholechildhood she had threatened to disappear only once. She had been eight or nine, and there had been some sort of altercation—she can’t remember now what it was about. Her motherhad never been the type to worry about messy rooms (“It’s all creation! Even mess!”) and she hadn’t been rigorous with rules, so Lila’s memory is a blank. But she does remember packing a child’s rucksack and announcing rather grandly to her mother that she was leaving. Her mother had been gardening at the time, her knees on a little padded cushion thing that her own mother had embroidered. She had turned, one gloved hand above her brow, squinting into the sun. “You’re leaving? As in for good?”
Lila, furious, had nodded.
Francesca had looked down at the soil, thinking. “Okay,” she said. “You’ll need some food, then.” She peeled off her gloves and stood, then shepherded Lila through to the kitchen, where she started to rifle through cupboards. “You’ll need some biscuits, I think…Maybe some fruit?”
Lila had held open her rucksack while her mother bustled around the kitchen.
“I think maybe a plate too. Because it’s hard to eat if you don’t have a plate. What about a couple of paper ones from that picnic we had? Then they won’t be as heavy.”
Lila remembered the vague sense of disorientation she had felt as this progressed, the way her fury had dissipated, her mother’s practical enthusiasm, as if Lila had just suggested an entirely understandable adventure.
“I know!” Francesca announced, just as she was zipping up the rucksack, and Lila was starting to feel very unsure about what to do next. “Monster Munch! They weigh nothing, and you always love those. You don’t want that rucksack to get too heavy.”
Pickled onion Monster Munch were Lila’s favorite food. She nodded, as Francesca searched the cupboards, opening and closing the doors. “Oh, bum. We don’t seem to have any. Shall we go and get some from the corner shop?”
Lila can never remember what happened to the rest of her running-away plan. She does remember her mother walking to the shop with her, the heat bouncing off the pavement, then allowing her to choose several packets of Monster Munch, and announcing that actually she was going to have a packet too. They walked back slowly, eating the puffy crisps, talking about the fat tabby cat with one eye at number eighty-one, Francesca’s favorite episode ofDoctor Who, and whether they should paint the front door red. Lila realizes now that not only had her mother diverted her, but she had done it in a way that gave Lila an easy way to back out.How did my mother always know exactly the right thing to do?she wonders. And then:Can you still buy pickled onion Monster Munch?
She sees Celie before Celie sees her. She is in the pedestrian triangle of the shopping area, where empty takeaway cartons catch on the breeze and a few desultory plastic tables and chairs try to mimic some kind of café culture. Celie is sitting on the wall of a raised flowerbed and her head is dipped as she stares at her phone. There is not much Lila finds to thank Dan for any more, but his text message reminding her that they had Find My Phone on Lila’s mobile elicited a heartfeltThank God.
“Celie?” She sits beside her and touches her arm.
The girl jumps and flushes slightly at her arrival. There is a moment of vague confusion, then Lila sees Celie recall the Find My Phone and Lila wonders how long it will be before her daughter deletes it. “What’s going on?” She is out of anger now. Just desperately worried.
“I don’t want to talk.”
Lila gazes at her daughter, at her long black hair, so unlike Lila’s own. She wishes she smiled as much as she used to—those huge beams of light that once shone from her face. These days, Celie is a near-silent thing, holed up in her room or endlessly locked into her phone, somewhere unreachable by her now unreliable, inadequate parents. “Okay.”
She sits a yard away from Celie on the wall, and tries to think how best to handle this. What would her mother have done? Several hoursgo by in her head until she fumbles for the only question she can think of. “Are you okay?”
Celie’s voice emerges from somewhere near her chest, swallowed by the curtains of hair. “I’m fine.”
“Do you want to tell me why you’ve been bunking off?”
