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“So are you guys, like, a couple?” Allie asked.
“Me and Rosemary?”
“Yeah.”
He shrugged.
“Yeah? That your final answer?”
Kal willed Rosemary to emerge from the kitchen.
She didn’t.
“I don’t know,” he told Allie. “It’s been a crazy few days.”
“Fine, don’t tell me, ponyboy. I’ll figure it out on my own. I have ways.” The laptop plinged, and she yanked the cord out of the USB slot. “Okay, her phone’s back up to speed. She’s not going to want to keep this back home, but as long as she’s here, she’s got a working cell with all her pictures and contacts and crap on it. You want her digits?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll text them to you. Hang on, let me put you in her contacts. What’s your number?”
Kal gave it to her, watched her tap his name and number into Rosemary’s new phone and send off her number to his text messages app with a little whoop noise.
The phone he’d lost in Nepal had been a temporary one he’d picked up in-country. The number he gave Allie was for the phone waiting for him back at home, the one he’d abandoned to gather up messages that he could del
ete with a swipe of his index finger without listening. Missed deadlines, missed appointments, missed opportunities, failure.
Rosemary came out of the kitchen in a rush, both hands pushing the hair off her forehead like maybe her hair had been trying to do something bad to her and she needed to get it under control. She plopped down beside Kal on the couch, releasing a cloud of airplane aromatherapy. “I suppose you heard every word of that.”
“Some of it.”
She sighed. “I apologize if it was awkward.”
“No worries.”
He wanted to say more, or touch her, something, but there were too many people, and she felt impossibly far away.
Allie closed the lid of Rosemary’s laptop, stacked the cellphone on top, and passed both over Kal’s body to Rosemary. “So this is your new phone, with all your stuff on it. The number will only work in the States.”
“What about my old number?” Rosemary asked.
“Trust me, you don’t want that number anymore. I’ve never been in an avalanche, but I was a runaway bride, and I feel like there’s some similarity in terms of the amount of shit that starts falling out of the sky right afterward—like, pianos and anvils, you know? You can wear yourself out dodging those missiles, or you can stop answering your old phone number and give out this one to the people you want calling you. I already gave it to Kal.”
She twisted her explosion of hair into a knot on top of her head. It stayed there, velcroed together by its own texture.
“Now, okay, so, you’re gonna open up your email at some point and freak out, because everything looks different. I upgraded you to a new email client that does this thing where it sorts all your incoming messages into different folders on the basis of priority. You’ve got green, blue, yellow, orange, and red. Red’s the highest priority.”
“I appreciate your help, but I’m fine. I don’t require a system to handle my correspondence.”
Allie breezed right past this remark. “The rule for email is, no more than five messages at a time, for no more than an hour, and then you close that shit up. If you’re going to do the red ones, just take them one at a time with a break for coffee or a cigarette, whatever floats your boat. The colors go down in order of priority—”
The longer Allie high-speed discharged information at her, the paler and farther away Rosemary looked. All around her mouth, she’d turned white.
“—and if you have any questions, just call me, I put my number in your phone. The main thing is, you don’t need to worry about more than you’re ready to worry about. If other people start pressuring you, you can just think, ‘Not my problem today.’?”
Winston walked into the room from the kitchen, some of the starch gone from the crisp edges of his suit. “Rosemary?” he asked. “May I have a word?”
The white outline around Rosemary’s mouth turned faintly blue. Kal looked from her to Allie to Winston.
