Dead Air by Michelle Schusterman (best books under 200 pages txt) 📕

“There.” My voice cracked a little as we hurried to the entrance. But my relief didn’t last long.

The mess hall extended in front of us, row after row of heavy-looking steel tables. Rusted, broken chairs were strewn in the aisles, legs bent or missing. A lone, battery-powered fluorescent lamp stood on the other side of the hall, surrounded by cables, bags, and other gear.

But the crew was nowhere to be seen.

“Perfect,” I muttered, stepping back when a rat scurried out from under a table and fled into the shadows. “Just perfect.”

Oscar groaned. “I just realized what that noise is,” he said angrily, heading down the aisle. “Aunt Lidia’s phone alarm. Again.”

I hurried to keep up with him. “For her pills?”

“Yeah.” We reached the lamp and began digging through bags, looking for Lidia’s phone. Oscar grabbed a backpack with more force than necessary, knocking over the lamp. I caught it, raising my eyebrows at him as I set it upright. “You okay?”

“No.” Furiously, Oscar dumped the contents of another bag on the table. “You’ve seen how awful she looks lately. She keeps forgetting her pills—it’s not like her. Jess is making us go home for a few weeks after this episode so she can rest.”

“Well, that’s a good thing, right?” I asked tentatively. “She needs to get better. And you’ll come back.”

“Yeah.” Oscar shoved aside a few folders and a walkie-talkie. “But if we go home, I’ll have to visit my dad. And if I visit my dad, I’ll have to tell him why I got expelled. And I—I just can’t. Ha.” Oscar slammed the bottle of pills on the table with a sort of savage triumph.

Glancing at him, I unzipped a small pocket on the outside of a dark green backpack. “Here’s her phone.” I swiped the alarm off. “No reception.”

Slowly, Oscar started stuffing everything back into the backpack. I took a deep breath.

“I know how you feel,” I said. “I can’t go back to Chelsea, either.”

“Because you’re mad at your mom for getting remarried?”

“No.” I squeezed Lidia’s phone. “Well, yes. But it’s not just that. When she went to Cincinnati, I figured she’d either come back like she did the first few times, or finally focus on her photography, like she kept saying she wanted. But now she’s marrying some guy, and he has a—a daughter, and . . .”

My throat tightened. Oscar quietly stacked the folders and slid them back into the backpack. I took a deep breath.

“The thing is . . .”

The Thing. I never said it out loud, not to Trish or Mark or Dad or Grandma. Because I knew how they’d respond.

Your mom loves you, Kat.

“She loves me,” I whispered. “But she doesn’t like me. Everything I do disappoints her.”

That’s not true.

“The first time she took off, I believed her when she said it was to give a real photography career a shot.”

And she changed her mind. She came back.

“But photography had nothing to do with it. The real reason she left is . . .”

Don’t say it!

But the Thing finally broke loose.

“. . . me.”

For a split second, I thought I saw a shadow flicker near the entrance. Not rat-size. Human-size.

“I used to think maybe she just never wanted kids at all,” I said, still gazing at the entrance. “She’s always trying to change how I dress, what I eat, everything. She’d hate my hair like this.” I touched the back of my head self-consciously. “But it’s not that she never wanted a daughter. It’s that I wasn’t the daughter she wanted. That’s why she kept leaving. And now she’s getting married again—and she’ll have a stepdaughter. Elena.” I closed my eyes. “Mom seems to like her just fine.”

For the first time ever, I saw the Thing clearly, face-to-face. It had my eyes and nose and mouth, my old, long braid hanging down its back. It wore a pretty sundress, no Crypt Keeper in sight. It preferred fashion magazines to horror movies, and shopping to paintball. The Thing was exactly what my mother wanted.

The opposite of me.

“I’m sorry.”

I blinked, startled. “What?”

“Sorry about your mom,” Oscar said again, staring at the walkie-talkie in his hands.

“Oh.” I let out a shaky laugh. “Sorry. That’s it? Aren’t you supposed to say, ‘That’s not true, she’s your mother and she loves you no matter what, blah blah blah’?”

Oscar lifted a shoulder. “Maybe you’re right, though. Maybe some parents just—”

Creeeak.

We both jumped, staring around the mess hall. I stepped away from the fluorescent lamp and tripped a little on a roll of cables. No movement, no sounds . . . but I had the overwhelming sensation someone was watching.

“We need to find Lidia,” I whispered.

Oscar stuffed the bottle of pills in his pocket before picking up the walkie-talkie. “Lidia?”

Nothing. Flipping the dial, he tried a few more times. “I don’t know which channel they’re using.”

“Keep trying while we look for them,” I said, itching to leave. The mess hall was creeping me out.

We crept toward the entrance, arms pressed together. I half-expected a pair of hands to shoot out from under every table and grab our ankles. But we reached the foyer safely.

“Back the way we came, or upstairs?” Oscar asked.

I studied the rickety staircase. “Not upstairs. Let’s try to find the courtyard.”

We hurried back down the dark corridor, both of us glancing over our shoulders every other second. Oscar kept flipping channels on the walkie-talkie, listening for the crew. Goose bumps broke out on my arms—the temperature in the hall was dropping. The Thing was right on my heels. I could sprint for hours and I’d never outrun it.

“Oscar?”

“Yeah?”

“Why can’t you tell your dad you got expelled for fighting?”

Oscar didn’t respond right away, and I wondered if I should’ve kept my mouth shut. Then he sighed.

“Because he’s going to ask why Mark and I got in a fight in the first place.”

I squeezed Lidia’s phone again, my eyes darting into each shadow-filled cell we passed. I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were being watched. “So, why did you?”

“Because . . .” Oscar hesitated. “He was my best friend, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, I . . .