Jubilee July's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Jubilee sat on the bench outside the parlor with the ledger open on her knees. She had copied two more names since leaving the Gilder gate. Her phone lay face up on the wood beside her. The screen stayed dark. She had checked it after every name, and now she was checking it between letters. Twenty-two days left, and she was losing the morning to a slab of black glass. She picked up the phone and turned it over in her hand. The case was warm from her palm. No missed calls. No messages. She thought of the boarded house behind its wire-wrapped fence, the card lying on the stones inside the gate. Maybe no one had picked it up. Maybe someone had picked it up and thrown it out. Either way, sitting here would not change it. She set the ledger down and pulled a blank card from her satchel. She wrote the date, the time, and the maple tree across the front in her clearest hand. She wrote it the way she would have written it for any of them, a real invitation this time, not three vague lines. She slid it into an envelope and addressed it to the next name on her list. Then she made herself a rule. She would turn the phone face down. She would not flip it over again until she had finished the page. She finished the page. She copied seven more names, walked two of the cards to the post office, and bought stamps for the rest. When she came back to the bench, she let herself turn the phone over. One missed call. No voicemail. The number was not saved. The area code matched the boarded house. Her hand went cold around the case. She pressed call back before she could talk herself out of it. The line rang four times and went to a flat automated message. She did not leave one. She set the phone down and pressed her palms against her eyes. He had called. He had called and hung up, or she had missed him by minutes, and now the line on the other end was dead air. She did not know which was worse. She picked up her pen and wrote his initials in the ledger margin beside the date, so she would remember the hour later if it mattered. Then she closed the ledger and stood. Three friends still to find. She could not sit by the phone for the next twenty-two days waiting for a man who had already chosen, once, to hang up. She slung the satchel over her shoulder and started walking toward the next address on her list. The phone went into the inside pocket, screen against the lining, where she would feel it if it rang.