One More Time Read Free Page A

of them historicals, under that shelf, but that was where I kept my important stuff. I put a geode next to the book, a small one, barely more than two inches wide, that I’d held on to since the first boy I ever kissed had given it to me. Right before his dad had broken us apart, then moved him to the other side of the country. I’d been thirteen.
    A little jade elephant—a gift from my sister that she’d found in a shop in Thailand well before she met Dan and had the kids—was placed next to her picture. She’d traveled the world while I was getting my degree in design. I’d been jealous of her, but she was just as jealous of me when she went back to school after her travels, only to find out that she was the oldest person in her freshman class. And though some of the teachers liked her, none of the guys in her classes did.
    With my bookshelf done, I had one more box I could recycle in the morning. It was a long drive to the nearest dump that had a recycling center, close to half an hour, but I didn’t want to throw them away, and I couldn’t stand all the clutter. I’d had movers to help me with the big stuff, but I’d gone from an apartment to a huge house and most of my big stuff fit in one room. I’d been sleeping on the fold-out couch in the living room since my futon stopped flipping back up to a couch a few months back, and as I sat down on it and groaned, I realized I really didn’t want to do any more moving, ever. I hated it. Not only was I not fit enough to carry heavy boxes everywhere, but my back hurt from bending over for even a short amount of time. If I wasn’t careful with it, my doctor in LA had told me, I’d throw it out for sure. I needed to find a good chiropractor, and soon, before I wound up on the floor on my stomach, unable to move again like I had in LA.
    I was mostly done unpacking my kitchen when I heard something get knocked over by the garage, which I brushed off without thinking much about it. I really only heard it because I didn’t have on any music. Otherwise the house was completely silent except for me moving things around. I needed to get my TV hooked up right away to fix that. I couldn’t stand the quiet after living for so long in the city.
    But I heard the noise again, and after freezing and wondering where it came from, I walked over to the big windows across from my sofa bed to check if I could see anything outside. I couldn’t exactly see the garage, and even if I could, it was dark out and I didn’t have any outside lights. I had been used to sleeping by the light of an overhead streetlamp across from me that lit up the parking lot where impounded vehicles were taken. I shook my head as I realized, for the first time really, that moving here had not been my smartest idea ever. I didn’t even own a flashlight.
    I heard something coming from the garage again and dug my phone out of my pocket to call 911. I probably should have too, but I pulled out Trent’s card with his number on it, and suddenly I was dialing him while I crouched beside my window and hoped that whoever it was out there hadn’t seen me standing in my living room all alone with the lights on behind me.
    “Hello, this is Trent,” he answered on the third ring.
    “Trent!” I hissed into the phone as I covered it and my mouth with my hand to muffle the sound of my voice. “It’s Caleb—”
    “I know who you are. There aren’t that many people in this town that I can’t remember the voices of. What’s wrong?”
    I heard him getting up, and the sound of a bed squeaking, and I winced, hoping I hadn’t woken him up or interrupted something. It was only nine, but maybe he had to be up early. I wanted to hang up, to tell him I’d only been imagining something being by my garage, but then I thought back to every single horror movie that took place in a cabin in the woods where not one of those stupid kids ever called a cop at the first sign of something going wrong. Well, I had a cop on the