Melissa just stares at me, her pencil suspended over the rough draft of her English paper. We’re in her parents’ den again, sitting on the couch. This time her mom made rice krispy treats, and they’re neatly arranged in a small pyramid on the coffee table in front of us.

“You’re lying,” she says, slowly sitting up straight.

I just shake my head. My heart is beating so fast it’s practically fluttering in my chest, and I feel like I’ve got a vise around my lungs. I know my face is beet red, and I think I might cry with sheer nerves any second now.

It took me three days to work up the courage to tell her. I threw up four times, and I’ve already been at her house for an hour before finally blurting out I’m sleeping with Wilder! while trying to answer her questions about passive sentence constructions.

“I’m not,” I say quietly, my voice shaking.

“He would never sleep with you,” she says, her voice sharper with every word, filled with disdain.

“Yes he would,” I say. “He did.”

“Why are you doing this?”

I swallow hard, forcing myself not to cry in front of her.

“I felt too guilty lying about it any longer, and I told him that he had to tell you or I would—”

“I mean, why are you lying?” she says, crossing her arms in front of herself. “There’s no way he’d sleep with you. He told me he loves me last week, and everyone knows that you have some weird thing for him which is why you’re always asking if he wants to study and stuff, and he only says yes because he feels so bad for you.”

I’m stunned, open-mouthed. My mind goes totally blank and I can’t think of anything to say while Melissa sits there with her perfect pink lips and her pretty blue eyes and looks at me like I’m some sort of circus sideshow.

“Is that what he said?” I whisper.

She rolls her eyes.

“Did you think everyone didn’t know?”

I can’t speak.

“Look, you have some weird thing for my boyfriend and I let it slide because you’ve been helping me with this English paper but you seriously have to stop, Imogen, it’s really weird and I think maybe one of these days you’re gonna make a flamethrower or something and come to school with it…”

I tune her out, because I suddenly remember something.

It was an accident. Most of the kids at Solaris High have smart phones by now, but I just got my first cell phone a couple of months ago, an older-model flip phone that my parents have reiterated a thousand times is only to be used for emergencies.

But it turns out that if you press some combination of the buttons on the side, it starts recording audio. I found that out a few weeks back when I accidentally recorded Wilder going down on me.

Meaning it’s mostly me, gasping and moaning and squeaking, trying and failing miserably not to make too much noise, but he’s on there too.

I pull my phone out. My hand is shaking, and Melissa stops talking when she realizes I’m doing something.

I hit play.

From my phone, Wilder laughs.

“No, it’s because I like the way you turn bright pink when I say stuff like I’m gonna lick your pussy until you come,” he says, his voice tinny and hushed, but obviously his.

My recorded voice joins his in a nervous giggle, and I have to put one hand over my mouth because I’m afraid I’ll throw up.

Melissa’s gone white, her mouth open.

“You made this up somehow,” she whispers, tears wobbling in her eyes.

I just shake my head, terrified of speaking.

“That’s not—” she stutters, tears falling prettily onto her cheeks. “He would never— You can’t—”

“I’m sorry,” I say, stumbling over even those simple words.

In a flash her eyes harden, and her jaw tightens. Before I know what’s happening she’s grabbed my phone, leapt off the couch, and run to the bathroom, the lock clicking seconds before I reach the door behind her.

“Melissa!” I hiss, rattling the knob.

“Go away,” she says, her voice dripping with tears.

“Give me my phone.”

“Go away.”

“Melissa, seriously,” I beg, trying to keep my voice down because the absolute last thing I want is for her parents to come see what’s going on.

No answer. It goes on like that for a couple of minutes, long enough for her to listen to the whole thing a few times.

Through the door I can just barely hear myself, and even though it was hot at the time — hot enough that I didn’t delete the recording, because honestly, I kind of liked it — right now it’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard. I crumple against the bathroom door, tears sliding down my face.

How could you be so stupid? I think, over and over again.

Who cares if she believed you? It’s true, what does it matter if Melissa knew or not?

I’ve got a bad, bad feeling that I might have just really fucked up.

Finally, the bathroom door opens. I look up at Melissa, ugly for once with puffy eyes and blotchy skin.

She drops my phone on the floor next to me.

“Get out,” she says, and ten seconds later I’m gone.

The next twenty-four hours are a blur, as for once I give up my own will and just let people do things to me.

I let the trucker put us in his cab, turn the heat on full blast, and drive us through the rain to Black Mountain Junction.

I let the Black Mountain Junction volunteer fire department load us into their ambulance and drive us to McBride Mills, the nearest town with a hospital.

I let the hospital staff take off my clothes, layer me with heating pads, put an IV in my arm. I let them do whatever the hell they want as I answer their questions, lie still while they X-ray my ankle.

All I know is that I’m warm, I’m dry, and they’re giving me soup. Wilder’s somewhere too, and I make a half-hearted effort at telling the people whirling around us that he fell into a lake, that he was hypothermic for a while and they should check him out for that, but they don’t pay much attention to me.

Finally, I accept that they know what they’re doing and relax into the sweet, sweet arms of comfort.

I wake up the next morning groggy, almost like I’m hungover. I feel like I’ve slept for twelve hours and like it wasn’t enough, but the phone next to my bed is ringing and ringing, and I finally wake up enough to realize that I should answer it.

“Hello?” I ask

“Oh my God,” my mom’s voice says.

She bursts into tears.

“Hey Mom,” I say, still groggy. I sit up in the hospital bed, blinking, trying all at once to get a handle on where I am and what I’m doing here and how I even got here, not to mention how to comfort my mom who’s now out-and-out sobbing on the other end of the line.

“Uh, I’m fine, I’m in the hospital in…”

I try to think of the town name and fail.

“…I’m in the hospital somewhere, but I’m okay, don’t worry. Sorry.”

“I know,” my mom says between sobs. “No, sweetie, it’s not your fault, don’t apologize, I just—” She breaks into a fresh round of sobbing, and in the background, I hear my dad say something.

“I don’t know how to do that, Barry, I told you it never works for me and it always hangs up the pho—”

Suddenly all the background noise gets louder, cutting into my mom’s sentence. I raise my eyebrows at the opposite wall of my hospital room, not that listening to my parents try to figure out how to use their cell phone is anything new.

“Immers, honey, it’s your dad,” he says, his phone voice a little too loud.

“Hey, Dad,” I say. “Can you tell Mom that I’m gonna be fine, I promise?”

The revelation that the person with me was Wilder Flint can wait, because the only two people on this planet who hated him more than me were my parents.

“We’re in the Edmonton airport,” he booms.

I can practically see the two of them, standing somewhere and probably blocking foot traffic, my dad holding the phone about a foot in front of them, speaking very loudly and clearly.

They’re hippie types, kind of old school, and they never really took to technology.

“We’re trying to get a flight closer to where you are, so we can rent a car and come see you,” he says. “We originally booked a flight with AirCanada, but it was one of those flights that’s actually operated by their regional jet service and it got canceled because there weren’t enough people on the flight, only you know how these airlines are and if they tell you why it was really canceled they’ve gotta refund your ticket and pay for your meals so they’re claiming it’s a weather issue but you know I can watch the weather channel too and there’s nothing but blue sky between here and McBride Mills, those greedy corporate bastards…”

I close my eyes, lean back against the pillows, and let my dad rail on about corporate greed for a while, occasionally punctuated by my mom telling me how glad she is that I’m okay. My dad’s got a habit of ranting on about whatever’s in front of him at the time when he gets stressed or upset — something my therapist pointed out — so when he moves on to checked baggage fees and having to pay more for the same seats he’d have gotten for a better deal thirty years ago, I just smile and nod at the phone.

I’m pretty sure I know what he’s actually stressed and upset about.

“Okay, Barry, that’s enough,” my mom finally says once my dad’s gone on for a while. “We’ve gotta go talk to the airline and see what they can do—”

“Got half a mind to rent a car right here and just drive to the hospital.”

“We can’t drive, there are mountains, Barry,” my mom says, suddenly the reasonable one.

“Might have to if we want to see our daughter before the dawn of the next millennium.”

“Sweetie, we’re so glad you’re safe and sound and all right,” my mom says, her voice tearing up again. “We’ll be there as soon as we can get there, okay?”

I swallow the lump in my throat, because I feel absolutely awful. It didn’t even occur to me, the whole time I was out there, that my parents were probably looking for me like crazy.

“Okay, Mom,” I say. “Thanks.”