I Stopped Talking and They All Regretted It Chapter 03

I Stopped Talking and They All Regretted It Chapter 03

The blue trail was quieter than I expected.

Twenty minutes in, I hadn’t spotted a single soul.

I pulled up the camp group chat. Nobody was sharing a location, nobody was talking about where to meet.

I typed out a message.

“Hey Blue Team, did you all go invisible on me at once?”

Message failed to send. Same old red exclamation mark.

So I ended up chatting with a fir tree instead.

“Hi there. Which way to the campsite?”

The tree had nothing to say.

“Not bad. You’re already more polite than Theodore. At least you didn’t tell me I have issues.”

Rain started coming down. The old trail near the coast turned slicker by the minute, and I hugged tree trunks for balance, inching forward. Rounding a collapsed warning fence, the ground gave way under my feet. Icy mud water poured straight down my collar. I tumbled down the slope and slammed hard into a slab of concrete. The pain blacked out my vision for a second.

It took forever before I could even reach my own left leg.

My shin was wedged between two chunks of broken rock, stuck fast.

The phone screen had partially cracked, but at least there was signal.

I called Theodore first.

It rang three times, then got hung up on.

The second call dropped straight to voicemail.

I fired off a text right away.

[I think I took the wrong trail. My leg’s stuck. Can you get a coach out here to grab me?]

Red exclamation mark.

I tried Mom next.

No answer there either.

Finally, I pulled up Charlotte’s profile.

This time, the message actually went through.

[Charlotte, did you give me the wrong route card by accident? I fell into some old structure.]

[Tell Coach Hayes, would you? Reply if you see this.]

Three little dots popped up right away. She was typing.

That perked me right up.

As long as somebody was answering, there was still hope.

A few seconds later, she wrote back:

[Are you done acting yet?]

Before I could type a word back, a red exclamation mark showed up next to my own messages too.

She’d blocked me.

I sat there frozen for a few seconds.

Then I opened my contacts and started dialing, one after the next.

Campers, coaches, the nurse, the driver, the gate guard.

Thirty-seven calls, all told. Not one single answer.

They’d really committed to this thing.

Wouldn’t spare me so much as a period at the end of a sentence.

Rainwater streamed down the slope, slowly climbing over the tops of my shoes.

I held the phone up high and recorded a video for Mom.

“Mom, I swear I’m not lying. Look, my leg’s wedged between these rocks.”

“Just have someone come pull me out. I promise I’ll go right back to behaving once I’m free.”

After sending the video, I checked the clock in the corner.

Fifty-one hours left on the countdown.

I should be able to ride it out.

My third foster family had once locked me in the basement storage room, and I’d survived two days down there too.

Back then, I’d banged on the door nonstop.

Until my foster father, sick of the racket, shoved the cabinet blocking it even further forward.

That’s the day I learned.

When you’re begging for help, keep your voice down.

Too loud, and you just make people more annoyed with you.

Meanwhile, the red team had already made it to the open campsite.

Coach Hayes frowned midway through the headcount.

“Are we missing somebody?”

Charlotte was busy snapping photos, not even looking up.

“Emma said she wasn’t feeling well and went back to the bus early.”

Someone nearby spoke up before they could stop themselves.

“But I could’ve sworn I saw her heading toward the old blue trail—”

Theodore shot him a look cold enough to freeze water.

“No discussing her during the isolation. She’s an expert at pulling vanishing acts to get attention. Anybody who responds to her just makes it worse next time.”

The kid clammed right up.

At six that evening, the group headed back down to the parking area.

The driver, Cooper, ran a headcount.

“We’re short one.”

Coach Hayes looked over at Charlotte.

Charlotte’s expression didn’t so much as twitch.

“Emma caught a different program van back to Seattle early. She knows so many people, switching rides last-minute isn’t exactly out of character for her.”

Everyone found that perfectly reasonable.

I was Emma, after all.

Drop me in the middle of the Sahara and I’d probably come out of it best friends with a camel.

Cooper still felt uneasy, though, and gave me a call.

The ringtone went off just as I was using my shoelace to splint my hurt leg.

My hands shook with excitement.

But the second I picked up, someone yanked the phone right out of the driver’s hand.

Theodore’s voice came through the receiver.

“Nobody is allowed to take her calls.”

The line went dead a second later.

I stared at the black screen, too stunned to move for a good while.

So they’d known all along that I’d been calling.

Nobody had just wanted to pick up.