Disconnection by Erin Samiloglu Page A

wasn’t.
    When she came home that night, the phone was waiting for her at her front door, sans the newspaper. Sela, stunned, quickly tossed the phone into the “shrubby.” The next morning, it was waiting for her again. She picked it up and trotted to the sidewalk, where a group of children were playing jump rope. She gave them the phone and told them to have fun. She found the phone in her car three hours later. Her frustrated scream frightened a nest of squirrels out of their home in the nearby pine trees. Sela set the phone on the pavement and proceeded to roll over it several times with the wheels of her car. When she was sure it was squished to smithereens, she drove off.
    That night she went to bed certain that Chloe Applegate was out of her life forever. In her sleep she dreamed of women with no faces. In the early morning, a bursting bladder had her busting for the bathroom. When she switched on the light, the cell phone switched on, too, its green screen glowing where it rested on the bathroom counter near the sink. Sela sat on the toilet, relieving herself, watching the phone brighten, hearing its musical ring.
    I know that tune, I know that tune
.
    What to do with you, phone? I know that tune
.
    The phone was here to stay, Sela decided. She could rip it into a thousand pieces and ship it to Afghanistan and it would
still
come back to her. Resistance, as the saying went, was futile.
    The next several days Sela spent in solitude. She ignored all phone calls save for the ones she received from Chloe, and that was only because Chloe could not be ignored. When the phone started ringing, it never stopped. All Sela heard over and over was that tune, that strange but familiar refrain, the one that drove her nuts with unknowing, and crazy with remembrance.
    Chloe never had good news. Always she was cold, and always she was vague about her afterlife and how she was able to contact Sela.
    Sela gave up trying to understand the “Chloe phone” phenomenon. She began to accept it like a case of poison ivy, a rash to the senses, a plague in her life that despaired her and frightened her, but would some day go away after it had finished its course.
    Exactly a week from the night when she had first found the cell phone, Sela walked out of Frank’s Diner at the end of an eight-hour shift and found Dean waiting for her.
    He, along with several others including Mandy, had left messages on Sela’s answering machine, messages that Sela never bothered to return. It wasn’t that Sela didn’t like Dean, or didn’t want a repeat of last week’s sex marathon. He seemed like a great guy. Sela just wasn’t sure he could handle her secret.
    She ignored him when he called her name. She trotted to her car and slammed the door. She heard the knock on the window as she started the engine.
    “Sela? It’s me. It’s Dean. Do you remember?”
    Sela sighed and rolled down the window. “Hi, Dean,” she said evenly. “Of course I remember you.”
    “Oh, yeah? I had thought you’d forgotten.” He stepped back. “I’ve tried calling you for days. You haven’t been home, you haven’t picked up. I’m on a first name basis with your answering machine.”
    “Yeah, I’ve had to work all week.”
    “Right.” He knew she was lying. Sela knew he knew. He reached out from behind his back. In his fist were a dozen early-blooming pink camellias. “In any case,” he began, “these are for you.”
    Sela held her breath
(No one’s ever given me flowers before!)
while Dean explained, “I picked them. I know it’s kind of gay, but you wouldn’t believe how they’re blooming on campus.” He handed the flowers to her.
    “They’re beautiful,” she said while inhaling their pleasant scent. “I don’t know what to say.”
    “Say ‘thank you.’”
    “Thank you.”
    “They reminded me of you.”
    Sela laughed nervously. “You don’t know me.”
    “Sure I do.” He smiled at her. Sela could not help but smile back at him. She had