Page 5 of No Place Left to Hide

Now

No Caller ID calls nine more times on the drive home, each call ratcheting up my blood pressure and pushing me closer and closer to the stroke I’m apparently destined to have. I pull into the driveway a little too fast and jerk the Subaru to a stop just shy of the garage door, rattling the contents of my incredibly messy backseat. I lunge over the center console to reach the phone.

The second it’s in my hands, I toggle it back to airplane mode, and the home screen mocks me with the daily tally of harassment.

3:34 p.m.

No Caller ID

38 Missed Calls

I swear again, grab my bag, and race up the front steps to get inside as fast as humanly possible. Only after I’ve locked the knob and the deadbolt do I sag against the back of the door and take a breath. Slowlythe feeling of eyes on the back of my head recedes as the silence of the house settles around me.

I hope whoever’s doing this gets super herpes.

Or someone steals their identity.

Or burns down their house. Literally anything to force their attention off me and onto something else, because I can’t for the life of me figure out how to make them stop. I changed my number, and they found the new one right away. I spent hours researching how to track a blocked caller, and it’s impossible. I called my cell phone company and tried to get it blocked from the carrier’s end, but they said they can’t prevent a blocked call because the number is hiddenfromthe carrier too. And so, they persist.

It was foolish of me to let my guard down today. I should have been alert. Focused. This is a big day for me, and No Caller ID loves to ruin my good days. And my bad days. All my days, really.

If I had been thinking, I wouldn’t have taken my phone off airplane mode at all. I would have buried it in the bottom of my bag and not set eyes on it again until after the admissions results came in. Instead, I left the door open for this asshole to add stress to an already overwhelming day.

The newspaper headline flashes in my mind again, and I grit my teeth.

All of this started when the investigation finished. The city, the police, the media, the kids at school—everyone’s accepted that what happened in September was an awful accident. But No Caller ID doesn’t agree. I got my first call the day the special investigation report was made public, and they haven’t left me alone for one single day since.

It has to be someone at school because that’s where the majority of the harassment happens. They’ve never done anything at my house—though that may have more to do with my father than anything else.Nobody wants to piss off the next Polk County circuit judge, or give him a reason to ask favors of his law enforcement connections after his house is vandalized.

Most annoying of all, I can’t seem to keep my number private. There are too many people on the dance team and student government who need it for one reason or another, and despite my best efforts, it keeps getting out.

I don’t know how to make the calls stop, except to cut all ties with this whole fucking town—apart from my parents. Nobody can pass my number around Waldorf if I never see any of them again.

Yale is my way out.

Oh shit. Yale.

I check the time on my phone.

3:38 p.m.

The decision drops in twenty-two minutes. A fresh wave of anxiety hits and I start down the hall just as someone rings the bell and pounds on the door. A half-strangled shriek escapes my throat and I almost trip backward.

“Brooke?” Jena yells through the door. “Are you okay?”

Thank god. Also,shit.

“Yeah, gimme a second!” I scramble down the hallway to my room. I drop my bag onto my office chair, hang up my coat behind the door, and quickly erase all the blocked calls from my phone before I stuff it under my pillow. I kick off my heels and run back to the front door.

I pause, my hand on the lock, and take a breath. Goodwins are always composed. Everything is going great. My life is great. No Caller ID is a temporary problem that I’m twenty-two minutes from escaping.

Hopefully.

I open the door and Jena’s standing on the front steps, swiping on her phone. She looks up at me with long perfect lashes, and smiles.

Jena Howton is annoyingly pretty. Even in her Waldorf uniform—black heels, gray tennis skirt, white long-sleeved polo with the royal blue Waldorf logo on the upper right—she looks glamorous. And she knows it. She’s a few inches taller than me, with flawless Black skin and fresh ombre burgundy braids that reach her elbows. A gold septum piercing, which she’s absolutely not allowed to wear at Waldorf, hangs from her nose. She usually keeps the ring in a pouch in her car and puts it back in the second she frees herself from Waldorf and theirannoyingly oppressive views on piercings. She did a persuasive paper on it for English 11 last year, and it was well graded, but not well listened to. The rules remain.

She hip bumps me as she comes into the house, and I lock the door behind her—as quietly as possible so she doesn’t ask any questions.

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