The gray flip-phone vibrated next to him on the bed. Obsolete even then, Kyle preferred to be awoken by its stiff, mechanical rattle rather than endure one of the ten digital ringtones programmed into it. He had fallen asleep watching late-night talk shows and when he awoke, the TV at the foot of his bed was blaring an infomercial with a man and a woman selling some sort of food processor. The product was apparently new, but the quality of the video made it look like it had been filmed on a home video camera fifteen years earlier. He hoped that the presenters’ loud banter about the glorified blender they were hocking would keep him awake.

The idea had first come to him two days earlier when he drove Tina back to her parents’ house for spring break and she complained about how early her bus to the airport was leaving. He could remember her exact words because that moment had been one of the few on the ride not tainted by awkward silence:

“I can’t stand waking up before eight, but I can probably sleep on the bus ride and the flight.”

She was volunteering with an environmental club in the Florida Everglades. He forgot what exactly she was doing, but he remembered how useless he felt when she asked what he had planned for the week and he said nothing.

As the infomercial switched to testimonials from customers whose lives had been changed by the product, Kyle checked the time on his phone again.

3:34 AM.

Tina said the bus left at 4:00 AM. He thought about that one night he had slept in her dorm room. The next morning, it had been a struggle to wake her to get breakfast in the dining hall, even though it was after 10:00 AM. He imagined the other club members pleading with her in the same way, so he waited and kept the infomercial on, but the bright images of chopped vegetables and liquefied fruit had a hypnotic effect and after a few minutes he closed his eyes.

They only opened after the live studio audience loudly applauded something the presenter had said. He checked the time.

3:51.

If she were not awake by now, he thought, then she was missing her bus.

randomly woke up and saw the time. thought about how miserable you must be right now! hahaha

He typed on his phone’s tiny keys. Three letters per each number. He read it over once before he hit send.

Anticipating a wait before she replied, he rested the phone back on his chest, confident that the vibrations would wake him up if he fell back asleep. He never did, but his head dropped to his chest a few times, giving him the sensation of falling off a tree branch, before he felt the phone vibrate.

so weird! i am miserable! Kelsey had to drag me out of bed. really hope I can sleep on the bus and the plane. hahaha

She then wrote:

you should get back to sleep. no one should ever get up this early voluntarily

Kyle read each text twice before he wrote back.

i will! good night or morning or whatever it is! LOL

Kyle smiled and put the phone back next to him. He kept the TV on, but he turned the volume down and lay on his stomach. He liked hearing the soft indecipherable words coming from the speakers, it reminded him of the hum of crickets in the summer.

The next day whenever Kyle felt that familiar vibration and took out his phone, he looked down hoping that he would see Tina’s name. He knew that she didn’t have any reasons to text him, but he wanted her to find one. A reason different from the artificial one he had created the night before. A funny story from the flight. A picture of the beach. An inside joke that he knew they didn’t share. But the only messages he did get were from a high school friend who talked him into going with him to get his taxes done.

When he returned home, Kyle went straight to his room and turned on the computer to see if Tina had posted anything about the trip on her profile. There weren’t any updates about what a great time she was having. Instead, the page was covered in messages:

I’m so sorry to hear about your loss.

You and your family are in our thoughts.

If you need anything, we’re here for you.

Tina please call me when you can.

Kyle scrolled down and saw the messages starting earlier that afternoon. There were at least 40 of them. It wasn’t clear what had happened until he came across one message:

Your dad meant so much to our family. He was here for us when your uncle died. We don’t know what we’ll do without him.

Kyle read it a few times to make sure he understood what it meant.

Tina’s father hadn’t been home when he drove her there three days earlier. All that he knew about him was a story Tina had told about how in high school he didn’t want to drive her to a friend’s house in Roxbury because he thought the neighborhood wasn’t safe. A story she told the night they first met after he confessed how dangerous he had thought Mill City was before he moved there.

He wanted to add something to the ever-growing condolence book on Tina’s profile, but the thought of it made him feel like a wedding crasher sneaking his way into her grief, intruding into a part of her life where he shouldn’t yet tread. Those people posting messages for her must have had a close personal relationship with Tina or her father or someone in her family. They had found out about his death in some way other than creeping on her profile. Tina had a life that existed far beyond the brief glimpses he had seen in the short time they had known each other.

He thought about all the messages that he couldn’t see from people who existed in that part of her life—texts, emails, phone calls. If he didn’t get in touch with her, there were plenty of others who would. Others who could be that proverbial shoulder. Others who had something to offer her. Others who knew the right words to say. It was that thought more than any of the others that drove his decision to send her a message.

Hey Tina. I saw your profile. I just wanted to check if you were all right.

He wrote in complete, grammatical sentences. He thought that made his words somehow more appropriate and serious. Over the next few hours, after he touched the tiny green button and waited for her reply, he read those sentences back to himself dozens of times. The more he did, the more he regretted them. Of course she wasn’t all right.

Kyle couldn’t blame her if she didn’t respond. She was under no obligation, but he still waited as if she were. He did his best not to dwell on it. He tried to study for a test he had the day after spring break ended. He put on the TV. He even spent some time talking to his parents, but no matter what he did, every few minutes, he was opening his phone hoping to see Tina’s name. Eventually, he silenced it and hid it in the back of a drawer in the bathroom, where he resolved not to look at it for at least an hour. He felt like an ascetic monk, cloistering himself away from worldly temptations. When he did finally indulge himself and check it, as if by the magic of his willpower, she had responded.

my dad died in a car accident today. im waiting for a plane back to Boston now.

She ended her message with a frowning face icon.

The words were hard to read and he knew they must have harder to type. It seemed almost profane for them to appear on a small screen in even smaller letters. News like this should only be shared in person or on the pages of a newspaper obituary or in a handwritten letter. Who was he to force her to do that? He had nothing to offer her. No comfort. No support. All that he had done was force her to repeat a reality that she probably hadn’t even fully accepted or understood, just so he could feel like he was somehow part of the Tsunami flooding her world, as he sat safely at a higher elevation.

He wondered if these were sentences that she had been sending to everyone who checked on her. Copy and pasted from message to message to quickly deal with those who were pushing their way into her private pain. If that were the case, at least she wouldn’t need to directly confront that pain with each message. Just take one cut and distribute it to the world. That would also mean that her words were not meant only for him. He would probably do the same. He remembered his frustration during his senior year of high school when he spent a week volunteering in Arizona and his mom would send at least three messages every day checking on him.

Even if the message was boilerplate, he didn’t want his response to be something easily forgotten or lost in the shuffle of condolences, offers, and questions she would be receiving. He tried to craft the right words, carefully running through them in his head and sometimes on the screen, only to be quickly deleted as too melodramatic, or too familiar, or too cliché. He ended up just sending the first unmemorable words he had thought of.

Oh no. I’m so sorry.

And then.

If you want to talk to anyone, you can always call me.

Her response came quickly this time.

yeah sure. ill try to call you when i get home tonight if youre still awake.

It was nearly 11 PM when Tina texted him to ask if she could call. Kyle replied yes right away.

The phone rang only once before he answered it.

“Hey,” Kyle said.

“Hey,” she said back.

There was silence for a moment as Kyle tried to remember what he planned to say. Thinking of words in real time was much harder than contemplating what to type.

“I’m really sorry. I wish there was something I could do. I can’t even imagine what you’re going through.”

Kyle wondered how many times she had heard that.

“I know. It’s really just nice to have someone to talk to.”

Kyle was glad Tina couldn’t see him smile after she said that.

“So you’re already back home?”

“Yeah, I got back a few hours ago. My uncle had frequent flyer miles and he booked me a ticket back to Boston pretty soon after my mom told me what happened.”

“Well that’s good at least.” Kyle cringed as soon as those words left his mouth, but if Tina realized how stupid a thing to say that was, Kyle couldn’t know.

They spoke for a while about unimportant things. What their mutual friends were doing for spring break. Classes. Memories from earlier in the semester. Kyle was glad they avoided talking about what he had thought that they would be talking about, but eventually the conversation turned to how Tina had found out about her dad.

“I was at the grocery store with some of the other member of the club. I got a call from my mom and she couldn’t say anything, but I could hear her crying. Finally, I heard her say ‘your father.’ Then my older brother took the phone and said that dad had been in a car accident on his way to work and was dead. I was walking down the aisle behind some other girls on the team, but I stopped. I don’t know how to describe it. I felt like my feet were melted into the floor.”

He wondered if this was the first time she was telling the story. It didn’t sound like she was crying, but he felt tears in his own eyes as he listened to her.

“Did any of the girls notice?”

“Eventually Kelsey came looking for me after they all turned down another aisle. I didn’t say anything at first, but she could tell something was wrong. I told her I needed to go back to the hotel. I said that I didn’t want to go alone.”

Kyle did his best to imagine what it must have been like to have gone through something like this, but he couldn’t. Even with Tina explaining everything to him, it seemed unbelievable. He thought about how children lost their parents all the time, often expectantly. They must all have stories like this to tell. Kyle had just never heard one. That realization made him feel lucky and small at the same time. Tina kept talking, but the more she told him, he felt like the less he knew.

“I finally told Kelsey what had happened once we got back to the hotel. It was the first time the words left my mouth. ‘My dad died earlier today.’ I didn’t cry when I said it because it hadn’t sunk in yet. It just felt like I was reciting words that I’d memorized for a play or something. That’s when my uncle called and told me he had booked a flight for me to get—”

Tina was silenced midsentence. He looked down at his phone and saw the call timer blinking 14:36. The call had dropped. His parents’ house being in the middle of the woods combined with his outdated phone made this almost inevitable. He went down to the living room where the reception was better. Fortunately, his parents had finished watching a movie and were in their bedroom. After waiting for his phone to ring for three minutes, he called her.

“I’m really sorry,” he said again after she picked up. “I live in the fucking boondocks and the reception here is terrible.”

Tina laughed.

“I was going to say if you really didn’t want to talk to me, you could have just said so. You didn’t need to hang up.”

“No, I really do want to talk to you.” Kyle ignored the joke.

“I know, but I’m sure it’s a real downer listening to me talk about all of this. You should be enjoying your spring break.” Kyle hoped that he sounded as sincere as she did.

“No, it’s really not. Anyway, there’s not much to do around here. Earlier today I went with one of my friends when he did his taxes.”

“Oh man. Sounds like fun.”

They both laughed.

Neither of them spoke for almost a minute. Kyle held his breath as the tension increased. The only thing he could think of was to ask what time she got back from the airport, but before he could the call dropped again.

Kyle called her back without hesitation this time, even though it felt silly to call knowing that he had nothing to say. He walked outside to be sure he had better reception.

“Okay—now I believe you live in the boonies,” Tina said after she answered.

“Yeah, we just got dial-up internet last week.”

Tina laughed and Kyle felt like he could breathe again.

“I should let you go. It’s late.”

“Okay—yeah. You’re right. It was nice talking to you. You can’t even walk into a room here without seeing someone bawling.”

“That’ so awful. I can always be here for you. However I can.”

“Sure. Thanks. Good night.”

“Good night.”

Kyle waited until he saw the timer for the conversation on his phone stop before he shut it. It was cold outside. He wasn’t wearing a jacket or sweatshirt, but he lingered on the deck before he was ready to go back inside. After he walked back up to his room, he laid down on his sheets with his clothes still on and turned on the TV. The infomercial from the night before was on.

He spent the rest of the week going through that conversation in his mind. All the things he should have said. The fact that he didn’t even ask when they planned her father’s services. How he should have asked about her family. He hoped that she would call back at some point so that he could correct those errors, but he knew she wouldn’t. He instead spent the week reading through the condolence messages on her father’s online obituary and contemplated whether he should go to his wake. He didn’t.

Apparently, none of their mutual friends had surveilled Tina’s internet life quite the way Kyle had. When he returned to campus then next week, none of them knew about what had happened to her dad. It felt strange to be the one to tell them, like he was entering some forbidden area again.

He was surprised when he got a text from Tina inviting him to her dorm room. He didn’t expect her to be on campus. He had thought she would need more time with her family. When he went there and asked why she came back, she said that she couldn’t stand staying at her house any longer. He remembered what she had said on the phone about everyone constantly breaking into tears. He sat next to her on the bed with both of their back against the dorm room’s wall. It was no easier speaking in person than it had been a week earlier on the phone.

Eventually they laid down on her bed and watched a movie on her laptop, which Kyle balanced on his stomach. It was nice for a while, but the movie ended with a scene where one character’s father died in a hospital. Kyle had seen the movie before and he couldn’t believe he didn’t even think about that scene when he suggested that they watch it. It made Tina cry, which she tried to hide.

When it was over he said that he should go back to his room and get ready for bed. A few minutes after he got there, Tina asked him to come back and spend the night. She said she didn’t want to be alone. She was already in bed when he returned. He laid down next to her. Kyle had thought that he would just hold her, but eventually they started to kiss.

It stopped just as suddenly as it had started. Tina turned to face the wall without saying anything and Kyle put his arm around her. He laid still for a while and wondered if there was anything that he could say, but he wasn’t sure if she had fallen asleep. Her chest rose and fell so slowly. He hoped she had. Either way, it would be a while before he did. The room was too quiet.